TWENTY ONE ❈ HEARTRENDER
ORDER OF THE LIVING & THE DEAD (CORPORALKI)
She’s been running for as long as she can remember, a girl born for leaving and a penchant for staying gone. For the better half of her young life, she was little more than a memory—wind-loved and sun-worshipped, a bramble rose that never truly took root, and she owes it to her family, to her people, for instilling within her the grace that allowed her to survive so long. They were a peaceful people, the Suli—a band of men and women who’d been spared the curse of desperately wanting to belong—and she was their blessing, their gift, the closest thing to a saint they’d ever had in their midst. Rebe, they called her: daughter—of the wind, of the earth, of their hearts. She and her brother were treasured among them where they might’ve been shunned—guarded where they might’ve been given up, and as such, they were spared from discovery and conscription into the Second Army, tucked into the back of a wagon when the hooded strangers came in search of their kind. It was there, pressed against her sibling beneath a pile of moth-eaten blankets, that she grew fearful of what she truly was—a weapon, elusive and dangerous and deadly enough for an Army to seek out. They were safe, the child of the sea and the girl who spoke the language of hearts, and for a time, she tried to let herself believe they always would be. But her days of hiding and hoping and praying to saints she wasn’t sure were listening were far from over that warm spring morning; they’d only just begun.
They were by the sea when the world came crashing down on their heads, and no amount of power—no twisting of heartstrings and no calling of tidal waves—could save them. What once sustained them had set them apart; Aarvas’s asking the tides to dance had captured the attention of a slaver moving into port, and Neysa’s moving to defend him with little more than her bare hands, outstretched and shaking, had sealed their fate. Life as they’d known it ended on a hot summer’s day, with no mourners to speak of but the whisper of the waves and the cries of a lone seagull, as is expected for two children with no home but each other; the girl she’d once been died on her knees with her head held high, her hands tied behind her back and her pinky finger entwined with her sibling’s, and the girl she became never spoke of her again—out of fear, out of respect, out of longing. Time moved not in days and minutes, but in dreams and memories—a braid of raven feathers falling down her mother’s back, the sway of prairie grasses in the warm light of dawn, the heaviness that came with leaving a place and the lightness that came with knowing there would always be another. A girl taught to interpret dreams found herself utterly lost when she could no longer distinguish between nightmares and waking, and for years, this was her life: a shadow of what it once was, a never-ending night under a sky devoid of the stars she’d known by name.
But hope has a funny way of finding its way through the cracks, and against all odds, the two Suli children found a friend in the city they’d come to loathe. The streets of Ketterdam had long been a hostile place for Grisha to roam, pockmarked as they were by the scars of gang rivalries and anti-Grisha sentiment as thick as smoke, but each year, as the leaves turned from green to gold to dust, they became a haven of anonymity, a home to every figment of lonely children’s imaginations and every poor fellow who longed to join them. But this particular autumn, they were an escape for a pair of Grisha indentures that had never been indentured at all, a sharp set of blades on which to cut their bonds. They ran in plain sight, two masked figures fleeing the crowds after the outbreak of a liquor-fueled riot, and robbed of the opportunity to do so when they’d been captured, and safely aboard a Ravkan trade ship Aarvas had volunteered to guide, they watched the one place they’d never been able to make a home of fade from view—but never, it seemed, from their memories. The nightmares they’d lived haunted her nightly even after they were once again on Ravkan soil, and they only worsened when she and her brother enlisted in the Second Army as both a penance and a price—shadowed figures strangling her in the dark, the bodies of innocents strewn about at her feet. In her dreams, she forgot how to tell the difference between a monster and a man.
In the months since she’s arrived at the Little Palace, she’s learned that sometimes, there isn’t one. Having escaped one noose only to entangle herself in another, she doubts she’ll ever outrun her ghosts, memories of the life she was forced to leave behind, but every sin has its recompense, and perhaps this is hers: to become, bit by bit, a woman she doesn’t recognize—a weapon in the hands of a king not unlike the masters she once served. She doesn’t remember what it feels like to be truly free, and as long as there are wars to win and empires to topple, perhaps she never will. All the more reason, she supposes, to soldier on. One day, she’ll reconcile the image of the war-torn girl in the mirror with the hopeful child she once was. One day, she’ll convince herself that everything she’s done has been just. But until then, she fights, half-blade and half-girl. When is a monster not a monster, you ask? Oh, when it’s given no other choice.
AARVAS RAI: Her father once told her that when they were young, a prick of her sibling’s finger would draw tears from her own eyes, a tether few understood and none dared to sever. She was made to protect them, body and soul—in this life and the next, and she’d sooner return herself to the chains they’ve been freed from than see them suffer. They are two halves of the same whole, the push and pull of the tide against the shore, and where one goes, the other will surely follow—through hell and back, into the thick of battle, home. Let this war take her pride, her morals, her hopes, her dreams—but saints save the one who tries to take them.
STASYA BELOV: They are gentle—a breeze where they might’ve been a twister, kind where they might’ve been cruel, and she finds solace in them, in their courageous sort of sweetness. She’s found something akin to a kindred spirit in the squaller, a soldier to call friend, and no stranger to shame herself, she’s offered her own weathered shoulders to share the burden of their storms. The world has made martyrs of them both, but she knows—perhaps better than anyone—that martyrs often come in pairs. In her smile lies a promise: you’ll never have to go it alone.
VALERIAN PETROV: She sees in him everything she desperately hopes to never become—a fanatic, a killer, a fire raging out of control. He wasn’t always this way—at least, that’s what she’s been told; it was the war that made him the inferno he is, and it will be the war that burns him for all he’s got, a candle melted down to the end of the wick. Never one to be a savior for anyone but her own flesh and blood, Neysa might be content to let him burn up in his own flames, had he not reached out and tried to drag her in with him. “Left your backbone in Kerch, did you?” He sneered once, voice haughty and words blistering. “Perhaps you should’ve left your heart, too.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for, this man of ash and fire; he mustn’t know what a death wish it is to tempt a woman who could burst his heart in his chest. But sometimes, as she watches him raze whole cities to the ground like a man in search of something he’ll never get back, she thinks, perhaps, he might.
NEYSA IS PORTRAYED BY NEELAM GILL & IS TAKEN BY MEL.
