“I’m sorry about your fingers,” she says, looking down at my bandaged hand as it emerges from the sleeve. “Does it make you very sad?”
I bow my head so she doesn’t see the tears starting in my eyes. Missing two fingers feels like a drop in the Motherlake compared to all the other things I’ve lost. “Not too sad,” I say, trying to weave a bit of cheerfulness into my tone. “I’m glad to be alive.”
“I’m glad you’re alive too.” Freya gets up and grabs a large wooden bucket from the corner. “We can always use an extra pair of hands, even if one of them has only three fingers.” She ducks through the curtain of fur.
I stare after her, fighting the crazy urge to laugh and cry at the same time. A fortnight ago, I was the someday queen, and now I’m an eight-fingered girl with a back full of scars, whose only worth is in doing things I have no idea how to do. I used to be loved by an entire people, and now the only person in the entire world who cares about me is Mim, and I’ve lost her. She might even be punished because of me. At the very least, I’ve left her worried sick. I rub my hand over my chest, which feels like it’s being squeezed in the grip of a giant. What I wouldn’t give for her to appear and wrap her arms around me.
I swipe my sleeve over my eyes, and then my body buckles, unable to withstand the weight of my grief for another second. I wrap my arms around myself and lay my forehead on the cold grinding stone. I’ve lost everything.
“How old was your Valtia when she died?” I’d been trying to gather the courage to ask her all night, and now we were waiting for my sedan chair to come and take me away from my Valtia until the planting ceremony, a whole winter away.
The Valtia put her hand on her stomach and took a step back, but when I rushed forward, apologies already falling from my lips, she put her hands up. “It’s all right, Elli,” she said, her voice thick with sorrow. “She was thirty-two, I think.” Her smile was full of pain. “I wasn’t ready to say good-bye.”
She opened her arms to me, and I slid into her embrace, desperate to soothe the sadness that I had caused. “Why did you ask me that?” she whispered.
“I don’t understand how someone so strong could fade so young.” And I was terrified to think of when I would lose my own Valtia. She was fast approaching the end of her twenties.
“Our lives aren’t ours, darling,” she murmured. “We are only the caretakers of this magic. We don’t use it to protect ourselves—we use it only to protect the Kupari. They call us queens, but what we really are is servants.” There was no bitterness in her voice at all. But then again, she was only repeating what I’d been told at the beginning of my daily lessons for as long as I could remember.
“It’s not fair,” I mumbled into her shoulder. I could hear the footsteps of the acolytes coming down the hall. My time with her was ending. What if I never saw her again? My fingers curled into her sleeves.
She kissed my hair. “We were made for this. You and me. And that means we’re strong enough to bear it.” She gently pried my hands loose and clasped her fingers over mine. Her pale-blue eyes were fierce with determination. “You’re strong enough to bear anything, Elli. That’s why the stars chose you.”
I raise my head. Nothing has changed, Raimo whispers in my memory. I might not be the Valtia, but if the old man is right, I was chosen all the same. I grit my teeth and reach for the pestle again. “Everything is different,” I whisper. “But nothing has changed.” And then I find it within myself to chuckle. “Except that now I really am a servant.”
The fingers of my right hand are too clumsy and sensitive to grip the corn, so I hold each cob clamped between my ribs and my elbow as I use my left to strip the kernels, and then to grind them into meal. Maarika comes out after a while and tells me it’s not fine enough, so I pour the bowl of crushed kernels back onto the grinding stone and return to work.
My left palm is blistered and the bandage on my right is dotted with blood by the time Oskar returns with a brace of pheasants. He glances down at me, hunched over the grinding stone. His eyes flick to my hands. And then he disappears into the back and has a murmured conversation with Maarika, so quiet I can’t hear.