As usual.
It had taken her a day and a half to get to the blistered land from the dust-wife’s home. In the back of her head, Marra had a notion that it should have taken longer. She’d never heard of the blistered land before and it shouldn’t have just been there, right there, practically on the doorstep.
Magic, maybe. Magic or worse. That a land like this existed at all. That the gods had destroyed it. That if you picked a direction and walked, holding the thought in your mind, you would come to it, no matter which way you went.
She did not like the thought. It meant that the blistered land might touch her own kingdom, that the gods that would punish starving people might someday reach out and touch her own. It was too close and too real and too hungry.
Marra pulled the owlcloth cloak around her shoulders and stepped out of the blistered land.
The curse tugged at her as she went, an itch like mosquito bites across her skin. She slapped at her arms instinctively, even knowing that there was nothing there.
The ground felt strangely hard underfoot, as if she had just stepped off carpets and onto stone. She looked around, blinking in the bright light.
She made ten steps, more or less, holding her hands against her chest, before someone shouted, “Stop!”
* * *
It was barely a season after Damia’s funeral when word came down that the prince was willing to marry Kania.
“Not yet,” said Marra’s mother. “Not for a year or two. It wouldn’t be seemly. But after that, to keep the alliance going.”
Kania nodded. Her skin was darker than Damia’s had been and she was at least six inches shorter, but at that moment, Marra thought they looked very much alike—resolute and strong and a little bit afraid.
“No…” said Marra, but she said it quietly, and no one heard.
It was absurd to think that Kania would die because Damia had. Damia’s death had been an accident—that was all. It had been a tragedy. It was no one’s fault.
Marra knew all these things. They did not shake the gnawing dread that had lodged itself under her breastbone. She felt as if the dread must be visible to other people, like a growth, and it seemed strange that no one ever commented on it.
“Be careful,” she said to Kania one day. “Please. Don’t…”
She stopped. She didn’t know how to finish that. Don’t get married? Don’t walk down any stairs?
Kania gave her a sharp look. “Careful how?”
Marra shook her head miserably. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel like something’s going to go wrong.”
“Nothing will go wrong,” said Kania. “What happened to Damia was an accident. It won’t happen to me!”
Her voice rose sharply on the last word, and she turned and stalked away.
I’ve made a mess of it again. I can’t say anything until I know more.
A year passed, and Kania went away to the north, with slightly less pomp than Damia had. Marra dug her nails into her palms and watched her go. Her sister was much too young, and no one was saying anything about it.
Before Damia died, Marra would have spoken up and demanded answers and explanations. Now she bowed her head and said nothing.
Everyone else knows. They must know. They are not talking about it for a reason. Why is no one talking about it?
“Don’t cry,” her nurse said, as she stood on the castle wall, watching the prince’s horses take Kania away. “Try to be happy for her. You’ll have a prince of your own someday.”
Marra shook her head. “I don’t think I want one,” she said.
“Of course you do,” said her nurse. She was hired to see that the princesses were dressed and fed and learned to walk and talk and smile politely, not to unravel the strands of their thoughts. Marra knew this and knew that she was asking for too much, so she said nothing more and simply watched the horses take her sister farther and farther away.
* * *
Marra went to the convent eight months later. She was fifteen. It made no sense that she would go to a convent, when she might conceivably marry a prince and bear sons, but Prince Vorling did not want that. Kania had not yet had a child. If Marra married and bore a son before Kania did, then that child might be a challenge to the throne of the little Harbor Kingdom.
Prince Vorling got what he wanted. The Northern Kingdom’s knife was still at the little kingdom’s throat, and now he had Kania as a hostage.
The queen explained this to her, although she did not use the word hostage. She used words like expediency and diplomacy, but Marra knew very well that hostage was lurking somewhere in the background. Kania was hostage to the prince. Marra’s future children, if any, were hostage to Kania’s fertility.
“You’ll like the convent,” said the queen. “More than you like it here, at any rate.” She and Marra looked very much alike, round and broad-faced, indistinguishable from any number of peasants working the fields outside the castle. The queen’s mind was as brittle-sharp as an iron dagger, and she spent her days delicately threading the web of alliances and trade agreements that allowed their kingdom to exist without being swallowed up. She had apparently decided that Marra could be withdrawn from the game of merchants and princes and safely set aside. Marra both resented her mother for being so clear-eyed and was grateful to be free of the game, and she added this to the store of complicated things piled up beneath her heart.
And she did like the convent. The house of Our Lady of Grackles was quiet and dull, and the things that people expected of her were clear-cut and not shrouded behind diplomatic words. She was not exactly a novice, but she worked in the garden with them and knit bandages and shrouds. She liked knitting and cloth and fibers. Her hands could work and she could think anything she wanted and no one asked to know what it was. If she said something foolish, it reflected only on her, and not on the entire royal family. When she shut the door to her room, it stayed shut. In the royal palace, the doors were always opening, servants coming and going, nurses coming and going, ladies-in-waiting coming and going. Princesses were public property.
She had not realized that a nun had more power than a princess, that she could close a door.
No one but the abbess knew that she was a princess, but everyone knew that she somehow was of noble rank, so they did not expect her to shovel the stable where the goats and the donkey lived. When Marra realized this, a few months after she had arrived, something like anger flared up inside her. She had been proud of the work she was doing. It was something that belonged to her, to Marra, not to the princess of the realm, and she did it well. Her stitches were small and fine and exact, her weaving uniform and careful. That she was still living under the shadow of the princess woke the stubbornness in her. She went to the stables and picked up a pitchfork and set, inexpertly, to work.
She was very bad at it, but she did not stop, and the next day she went back to it, even though her back ached and blisters formed on her palms. It is no worse than when you first fell off a horse. Keep shoveling.
The goats watched her suspiciously, but that did not mean anything, because goats watched everyone suspiciously. She suspected that they didn’t think much of her shoveling technique.
“No one expects you to do this,” said the mistress of novices, standing in the doorway of the stable. Her shadow fell down the central aisle of the stable, like a standing stone.
“They should,” said Marra, gripping the pitchfork’s handle while her blisters shrieked. She edged the tip of the tines under a clot of manure and lifted it cautiously.