Crown of Coral and Pearl Read online

  “Nor?” Sami pushed aside our curtain, as if I had summoned him with my thoughts.

  Zadie immediately found the strength to sit up and rearrange her tunic. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to make sure you’re all right, silly.” He sat down on the other side of her and took her free hand. “How are you?”

  “A little better. The pain is bad, but seeing you helps.”

  My eyes flicked down involuntarily. Somehow, in the past few months, I had gone from being the most important person in Zadie’s life to second place.

  He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “We’ll marry as soon as you have your strength back.”

  Zadie beamed. “Your parents agreed?”

  “I haven’t spoken to them yet.” He swallowed, clearly nervous. “The elders are speaking with them right now.”

  “Then I’m definitely not going?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t allowed in the room. But I heard Elder Nemea say you might not survive the journey, and it would be a...” He trailed off. I’d never seen him so uncomfortable.

  “A what?” Zadie asked.

  Sami sighed. “A disgrace to our people to send a girl with such terrible scars.”

  Her eyes filled with tears at his words, but she managed a smile. “None of that matters anymore, as long as I can be with you.”

  I may have fallen to second place in Zadie’s eyes, but she had just gone from being the most beautiful girl in Varenia—her identity for seventeen years—to being called a disgrace. I sent a prayer to Thalos that Sami’s parents would be kind and agree to their marriage. After all, her wounds had nothing to do with her ability to serve as his wife. As long as they didn’t bother Sami, why should anyone else care?

  Sami and I stood at the sound of Father’s voice below. He climbed through the trapdoor and helped Mother up after. Her face was pinched, unreadable. A moment later, Elder Nemea’s gnarled hand reached for Father’s, and he pulled her up as though her bones were hollow as a bird’s.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. Sami was still holding Zadie’s hand.

  Elder Nemea was the one to answer. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we have no choice. Zadie must go to Ilara, even if it kills her.”

  “No!” Zadie’s scream rang out amid our stunned silence.

  Sami’s gaze met mine. A wordless conversation passed between us, and in his brown eyes I finally saw the truth: that he loved Zadie as much as she loved him. If she left, neither of them would ever recover.

  Help us, he pleaded.

  So I answered in the only way I could.

  “No,” I echoed, my voice sounding far steadier than I felt. “Send me instead.”

  8

  Mother was the first to respond, with a cruel laugh. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She strode toward me and jammed a finger into my chest. “It’s what you wanted all along. Even the elders know you did this.”

  I pushed her hand away and turned to Father. “What is she talking about?”

  He let out a long, ragged sigh. “They believe this was your doing.”

  “What?” My voice was sharp with indignation, but inside I was riddled with guilt, like wormholes in coral. “That’s ridiculous. Zadie was there—she’ll tell them the truth!”

  “I will,” Zadie said behind me. “It was an accident, Father. A terrible accident, but nothing more. Nor would never even dream of hurting me!”

  Mother stooped down beside Zadie. “You don’t have to lie for her,” she crooned. “You’re still going to be a princess.”

  “Can’t they send Alys?” Sami asked.

  “They would, if they believed they had a choice,” Father said.

  I placed a hand on his arm. “What do you mean?”

  There were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was sallow, as if he’d aged ten years overnight. “Two generations ago, a chosen girl drowned a few days before she was supposed to leave for Ilara. The elders were forced to send a different girl in her place. When the prince discovered that he had received a girl of inferior quality, he punished our people by cutting off our water supply for a month. Dozens of Varenians died, mostly children.” Father swallowed hard. “The elders are afraid that if we send Alys, the Ilareans will say we deliberately deceived them.”

  I had known the Ilareans were harsh, but this seemed extreme even for them. “What happened to the girl they sent?”

  Father shook his head. “We don’t know. The prince married an Ilarean girl instead.”

  “And what do you think they’ll do with a girl who is severely injured?” I asked. “Sami heard Elder Nemea say that Zadie might not survive the journey.”

  “She may not survive, it’s true,” the elder said. “But the emissary has been here. He saw Zadie. If we send Alys now, he’ll think it a deliberate deception. At least he knows that Zadie was healthy before. The prince will have to understand that this was just an unfortunate accident.”

  “And if he’s still dissatisfied? What’s to stop him from cutting off our water supply, our food, our firewood?” I turned to Nemea. “Let me go in her place. She’s not strong enough.”

  “And what do you propose to do about your scar?” Mother asked, her voice full of derision. “The emissary saw it.”

  It. Not me. But she was right. Talin had studied me closely enough. I was sure he’d seen my scar.

  Nemea scratched at a mole on her chin, considering. “I may be able to create something to disguise it. Some kind of a stain. I told the rest of the council that Zadie is in no condition to travel, but perhaps they need to see her for themselves. Scar or no scar, I have to believe the prince would prefer a living girl to a dead one.”

  My mother shook her head. “The prince isn’t some fool buyer at the floating market. We can’t just swap out one bolt of cloth for an inferior one when he isn’t looking. If he discovers what we’ve done—”

  “This isn’t your decision,” Sami growled.

  I flinched, but it was at my mother’s words, not Sami’s. I’d long believed she saw me that way—as an imperfect version of Zadie—but she’d never said it out loud before.

  “Give me some time to work on the stain,” Nemea said. “And to try to convince the rest of the council. There were several who voted to banish Nor, and they might see this as the next best thing.” She looked at me. “Do you really believe you can pretend to be your sister?”

  I was too stunned at the mention of banishment to speak, but I managed a weak nod.

  “Good. Come to my house tonight. This conversation doesn’t leave here until we’ve decided.”

  She looked at Sami for a moment, as if she were about to ask him to take her home, but thought better of it. “I’ll borrow your boat, Samiel. You can fetch it later.”

  When Elder Nemea was gone, Father lowered his voice so that only I could hear him. “Your sister has spent the past seventeen years preparing for this and only just realized she lacked the courage to see it through. You have two days to prepare. Are you sure you can do this?”

  He knew. He knew it wasn’t an accident, but he also knew it wasn’t my fault. Had he argued on my behalf at the meeting? Had he at least tried to defend me to Mother? To the elders who wanted to banish me? In my lifetime, only two villagers had been banished—taken far out to sea in a small boat and abandoned with no oars—and their crimes had included attempted murder. Oh gods, did they think I’d tried to kill Zadie?

  “Father,” I said, hoping all of my questions could be conveyed in that one word.

  But he only squeezed my arm and turned me back toward Zadie and Sami. “Your father has not yet decided what he will do with you, Sami. The elders believe you should marry Alys, now that Nor’s honor is in question.”

  “I won’t,” Sami said as Zadie’s hand flew up to cover her open mouth.


  “Your mother agreed with them—” Father began.

  “Traitor,” Mother spat. “To think I called her sister.”

  Father went on, ignoring her. “But your father said we needed to deal with one crisis at a time. He wants to speak with you, Sami.”

  “And what about me?” Zadie asked.

  Mother sniffed. “What about you?”

  “Doesn’t anyone care what I have to say? Don’t the elders want to speak with me before they accuse my sister of being a liar or send me off to Ilara when I can’t even stand? Are they really so quick to forget my existence?”

  “Don’t you see?” Mother said. “Without your beauty, you are nothing. That’s all any of us are—bodies to cook food and bear children. You had everything, and you let your sister throw it all away. And now she will be a princess, and I will have to watch you wither into an old woman, spending the rest of your miserable life in my house. I thought I had made it clear how important this was. I thought you understood what was at stake. Now I can see you’ve learned nothing in the past seventeen years. And you shall pay dearly for it.”

  As Mother spoke, Zadie seemed to shrink in on herself, growing smaller with every word. I had always thought Mother’s ambitions were about vanity, about righting a wrong against her twenty years ago, but it was clear this meant far more to her than that.

  She had accused me of thinking I was too good for Varenia, but it was she who believed we had no value here beyond the symmetry of our faces or the curves of our bodies; that to be chosen to go to Ilara meant you were better than all that, better even than the men here. Was that why she despised me so much? Because she thought she saw something of herself in me?

  The very idea stung me. I was nothing like my mother. “It is you who have learned nothing,” I spat. “And you who has paid for it.”

  “Nor,” Father said, trying to pull me back.

  “You were never wronged, Mother. You think we are worthless if we’re not chosen. Why? What is the value in being sent off to a king who keeps us poor and isolated, in marrying a prince who can’t even be bothered to choose his own wife? All we talk about here is honor, but there is no honor in being beautiful, in having your fate decided because of a crooked tooth, or a bent nose, or a scar.”

  Zadie was sobbing loudly now. “Please don’t fight,” she said, but I ignored her. This had been building for years, and I couldn’t stop myself now any more than I could stop the tides.

  “You took two daughters who loved you and turned them into weapons to exact your revenge, never realizing that there was no enemy.”

  “Shut up,” Mother screamed. “You ignorant, foolish—”

  “Perhaps I am a weapon,” I continued, despite Father’s grip on my arm. “A blade honed on your bitterness. And perhaps I have come to stab you in the back.”

  She leaped at me, but Father flung me away just in time to catch her. I hit the floor hard but picked myself up quickly, ignoring the pain in my arms, yet unable to pretend my heart wasn’t broken.

  If Mother and the elders were so willing to believe this villainy of me, then let them. Zadie and Sami had each other now. I would go to Ilara, where none of the other villagers would have to see me again. And Father would forgive Mother, as he always did, for even he couldn’t see past the power of her beauty.

  * * *

  The hours passed slowly after that. Sami retreated for a time to speak with his father. Nemea returned once to tend to Zadie’s wounds, which she said were healing well under the circumstances, and Zadie slept for most of the afternoon. Mother, on the other hand, wailed and cursed me for hours, not caring who heard about her evil, traitorous daughter, while Father attempted to console her.

  I lay in the boat beneath our house, trying to shut out her words and instead focus on the sound of the water lapping against the pillars, on the way the tiny fish that lived beneath our houses nibbled at my fingers as I dangled them over the edge. It was cool here in the shade, and I tried to imagine what it would be like in the mountains, so far away from everything I’d ever known.

  Mother was devoted to the gods—not just Thalos, but Astrea, the goddess of beauty; Spiros, the god of weather; and others—but I believed in the spirits that lived in everything around me: the water, the birds, the air itself. It was all alive and beautiful and just as divine as any invisible god. There would undoubtedly be spirits in the mountains, too, but would they be the benevolent spirits I knew so well, like the fish and the birds? Or would they be fickle spirits, like the air and water, sustaining us while every now and then trying to kill us?

  I rolled onto my stomach and pulled out the torn fishing net and the knife I had used to free the dead jellyfish. I could take these up there now and tell Mother that this had all been Zadie’s doing, that she loved Sami and refused to go, and it was either help her or let her kill herself in the process. Perhaps Mother would have preferred that: a beautiful martyr rather than a victim who would die an old maid.

  And what would have become of our family then? Without Zadie to speak for me, I would certainly have been banished for killing my sister, which was tantamount to death; one could only survive so long in an empty boat without food and water. Surely one spinster daughter and one princess were better than a dead daughter and a banished one. For all we knew, Zadie might still be allowed to marry Sami after all, and Mother might yet have her governor’s wife and her princess.

  But Mother couldn’t see past her own failed plans right now, and it was tearing her apart. She had spent her entire life focused on a crown she’d never seen, on a kingdom she would never enter. She was like a beautiful house built on stilts, only the stilts were lies, and accepting the truth meant destroying the foundation of her existence. Accepting this new outcome would mean admitting that life could, in fact, go on.

  I heard her sobbing through the floorboards, Father murmuring comforting words. But what could he say to her now? Nothing could change what had already been done.

  As the sun sank below the horizon, I took up the oars and rowed to Elder Nemea’s house. I found her preparing a simple meal of dried fish and seaweed, with no fire to cook on. I looked around the one-room structure, expecting to see great-grandbabies playing in the corner, a granddaughter or two cleaning. Shouldn’t someone be taking care of a woman who had lived one and a quarter centuries?

  “Let me help you with that,” I said, taking the knife from her hands.

  “Thank you.” She dropped onto a stool, her joints popping as she settled. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Where are all her children and grandchildren to cook for her?’ But I prefer to live alone. Maybe when I’m 150, I’ll bring a great-grandchild or two in to help me.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I blurted. I hadn’t come here to defend myself, but I suddenly realized it was important to me that at least one person outside my family believed me.

  She ignored me and pointed to a bucket of water. “Bring me some, child.”

  I brought her the water and sat down on the stool next to her, forcing her to acknowledge me. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Perhaps you did, perhaps you didn’t. I won’t waste what little time I have left on things that have already happened. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters to me that people know I didn’t hurt my sister. I would do anything to protect her.” Hadn’t I proven that seven years ago? Varenian law said that every person had as much responsibility for a stranger as they did for family. To let someone die when you could save them would bring the worst kind of shame upon your family. This idea, this responsibility for each other, had been ingrained in me from birth, but it had nothing to do with my motivations for saving Zadie. I would always protect her, even if it meant tearing her from the steel clutches of Thalos himself.

  “She loves Governor Kristos’s boy, I’m told.”

  “Yes. And he loves her.”

  Nemea sighed
and reached for a piece of dried fish. “If only love were as important as people believe it to be.”

  I hadn’t slept or eaten since Zadie’s injury, and I no longer had any patience left to offer. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “My husband died fifty years ago from diving too deeply, too quickly. I loved him very much. But romantic love doesn’t last forever. Death will part us, if time or circumstance doesn’t.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t come here for a philosophy lesson. “Will the elders allow me to go to Ilara or not?”

  She leaned over and brought up a small narwhal horn jar in answer. “Here.”

  I opened the lid and looked down at the light brown ointment. It smelled foul, like bird guano. “What’s in it?”

  “It’s made from brown algae and...other things.” She dabbed a tiny amount of the stain onto her finger and touched it to my cheek. “There’s a mirror on the far wall.”

  Skeptically, I walked over to a large fly-stained mirror that must have come from an illegal trade or a shipwreck. I wiped away a bit of salt and stared at my reflection. I had never seen myself in anything other than Mother’s hand mirror.

  It was like looking at Zadie, but not. I started at the top. Sami was right; my eyes were a bit narrower. My nose was straight and even, almost exactly the same as Zadie’s, but perhaps her nostrils were a bit rounder. And my lips were full and pink, just like Zadie’s, though I thought the bow in her upper lip might be more pronounced.

  I gasped when I realized my eyes had drifted right past my scar.

  Nemea laughed as my fingers flew to my cheek. The stain came away immediately. I turned back to her. “It doesn’t stay?”

  “It should last for the better part of a day, but it takes a few minutes to set. And it will come off after a quarter of an hour in water. It’s the best I can do in such a short amount of time.”

  Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. “Why didn’t you give me this sooner?”

  Her ancient face appeared next to mine in the mirror. “To what end, child? Hiding our scars doesn’t mean they’re not there. Just as beauty cannot disguise who we really are beneath the surface.”