ON THE EAST SIDE of the Drowning was an ancient, weather-beaten temple teeming with vervet monkeys and fire-eyed grackles. It was as close to leaving the city as I ever got, a kind of halfway house between the urban sprawl of Bar-Selehm and the wilderness beyond. By day, an elderly priest burned incense and chanted among the weed-choked altars for whoever put a copper coin in his bowl, but by night, the little shrines and funerary markers were haunted by baboons and hyenas. For a city girl like me, it was unnerving, but I had no choice. Two years ago, my father’s remains were buried here.
Papa.
He was a good Lani, a good father, a kindly, brown-eyed giant of a man, quick to grin, to play, to tease. I had loved him with all my heart, and I missed him every day.
“I’ll always keep you safe, Anglet,” he had said. “I’ll always be there to look after you.”
The only lie he ever told me.
I was already grown up when he died, already working, but till then and in spite of everything I went through in the Seventh Street gang, I had never felt truly alone. Papa had always been there, a buffer between me and my sisters, my work, the world in general, ready with a touch, a word, a smile that calmed my raging blood, dried my tears, and told me that all would yet be well. Always. He was my rock, my consolation, and my joy. When Papa looked at me, the universe made sense, and all the words the others hurled at me fell harmless at my feet or blew away like smoke.
He died in a mining accident with four other Lani men. He was trying to reach two apprentices who had been trapped by a rockfall, but the new passage they opened released a pocket of gas. There was an explosion. It took a week to get to the bodies after the shaft collapsed, and I was not allowed to see him. His remains were burned, as is our custom, and the ash strewn over the river, save for one fragment of bone that was interred in the hard, dusty grounds of the temple.
Two years to the day.
I have been alone ever since. I believe the two apprentices were found unharmed.
Tanish came with me to the grave, eyeing me sidelong and careful not to make noise. Partly he was trying to show respect, but it was also the place that left him subdued. He had seen enough death for one day. I would have told him to leave me to my thoughts, but a family of hippos had taken over the riverbank below the temple, and a Lani woman had been killed by one of them when she went to draw water only a couple of weeks before. I didn’t want him wandering alone, so I let him hover awkwardly at my back as I found the marker and knelt down, sitting on my heels.
Someone had placed crimson tsuli flowers on the grave, bound with gold cord. They were fresh and lustrous, hothouse grown at this time of year. Expensive.
Vestris.
It had to be. I felt a quickening of my pulse as I sensed my sister’s presence, and my eyes flashed hungrily around the graveyard as if she might still be there. But she was gone, and my disappointment felt suddenly shameful. Deflated, I adjusted the flowers and focused on the stone marker, feeling young and alone.
Family is family.
Except when it’s gone.
I said nothing, feeling the coin I wore on a thong around my neck.
All steeplejacks wore something that connected them to their past. It was a claim to a version of yourself that wasn’t about the work. Berrit’s had been his sun-disk pendant. Mine was an old copper penny Papa gave me. It had been misstamped and bore the last king’s head on both sides. The Seventh Street boys thought I kept it for luck, because I could flip the coin and always guess correctly what would come up, but I didn’t. I kept it because Papa gave it to me and because when he did, he said, “Because it’s rare. Like you, Ang. One of a kind.”
He thought I was special. I wasn’t, but he believed otherwise, and that almost made it true.
Now I turned the coin over and over in my fingers, and the face embossed on its twin sides became his in my mind so that I pressed it to my lips and closed my eyes like a little kid who thought that wishing might bring him back.
I had never lived in Rahvey’s house, but those refuse-blown streets with the sour smell of goats and the stagnant reed beds by the river were all too familiar. Whenever I went back to the Drowning now, all I found was what was gone, the spaces Papa had left behind him. No wonder I hated the place. It was a land of ghosts, of absences.
I had learned long ago not to cry, no matter the hurt in your hands or your heart. Tears in the city gangs meant fear and weakness, and they were punished without mercy. I knew that, and I knew that after this morning, Tanish needed me to be strong.
But this was hard.
Harder than I had expected. It had been, after all, two years. The grief at first, coupled as it was with shock and horror, had been almost unbearable, but over the subsequent weeks and months, it lessened. In my childish imagination, I figured it would continue to fade, like a distant ship sailing beyond the reach of vision until it disappeared entirely. But it hadn’t, and I saw now, kneeling on the sandy dirt and staring at the roughly carved stone that bore his name, that it never would. I would always be straining to see him, reaching for him, and he would never be there. I would carry his absence like a hole in my heart forever.
I remembered Berrit, a boy I had not known, who died on Papa’s anniversary, and a single tear slid down my nose and fell onto the dusty earth as if I were watering a tiny seedling. I wiped the trace away before turning to Tanish, who was gazing about him, looking glum and a little bored. He had not seen.
I laid a fistful of wild kalla lilies on the grave next to Vestris’s tsuli flowers and set my face to meet the world, but as I half turned to Tanish, someone called.
“Anglet!”
I recognized the girl as one of those who did errands for Florihn, the midwife. “What?” I called back, though I knew what was coming.
“It’s started!” cried the girl.
* * *
I FOLLOWED HER TO Rahvey’s house, where Sinchon was sitting on the porch, scowling. As I approached, a roar of agony came from inside, a woman’s voice—though one so pressed to the limits of human endurance that I heard no sign of my sister in it. I didn’t speak to Sinchon, but yanked the door open and stepped inside.
It was even hotter than it had been earlier, and Florihn, crouching between my sister’s legs, shot me an irritated look when I entered, as she had the first time. At the far end of the bed, Rahvey’s red, glistening face was a rictus of pain.
As I set my things down, she began to scream again, an unearthly, animal sound like the weancats that prowled the edge of the Drowning when prey in the hinterlands was scarce. I winced, the hair on the back of my neck prickling, but Florihn just grinned.
“That’s right,” she said to Rahvey. “You cry it out.”
As soon as the contraction passed, I said, “I thought there would be no baby today.”
From her place between Rahvey’s legs, Florihn scowled at me, then refocused on Rahvey and said simply, “Now.”
It took no more than five minutes, and I kept my gaze locked on my sister’s face for as much of it as possible. When the baby emerged, I did as I was told, but I couldn’t stop staring at the child.
It was a girl. The fourth daughter.
For a long moment, no one moved or spoke. The baby wailed over Rahvey’s exhausted panting, and I just looked at it, registering the awful truth, so that for a few seconds, it seemed that time had stopped.
At last the midwife seemed to come back to herself. Her face was ashen, but she brought her fluttering hands together and pressed her fingertips, a gesture of composure and resolution, both hard won.
Then she stood up and took a deep, quavering breath. “Where’s my knife?” she asked.
“Wait,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Cutting the cord,” said Florihn. “What did you think?”
Rahvey gaped, her eyes flicking to the midwife for guidance.
“Then what?” I asked.
There was a moment’s stillness, then the baby began to cry again. The midwife wrapped the child in a towel and set her on the floor before turning on me and speaking in a low whisper. “Fourth daughter,” she said. “You know what that means. Rahvey can’t keep it. It goes to a blood relative or we take it to Pancaris,” said Florihn.
Pancaris was an orphanage run by one of the Feldish religious orders—dour-habited, grim-faced white nuns who raised children to be domestic servants.
“Till she runs away and turns beggar or whore,” I said, looking at the brown, wriggling infant, so small and powerless.
“There’s no other choice,” said Florihn dismissively. “And they’ll teach her what she needs.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Florihn gave me a hard look for my temerity, but she answered. “They’ll teach her to scrub. To cook. To wield a pick or wheel a barrow. Anything else is just making promises you can’t keep. You of all people should know that.”
I looked to Rahvey, but she kept her eyes fixed on Florihn, the way Tanish stares at me to avoid looking down from the chimneys.
“Rahvey,” I said, dragging her gaze to my face. “Maybe there’s another way. Maybe this fourth-daughter business can—”
“Can what?” demanded Florihn.
“I don’t know,” I said, quailing under the woman’s authoritative stare.
My sister gaped some more, at me this time, then looked back to the midwife. She squeezed her eyes shut, and a tear coursed down her cheek. Her grief gave me the courage I needed.
“Maybe we could keep her,” I said, feeling the blood rise in my face.
Florihn blinked, but she maintained a rigid calm. Her eyes became two slits as she considered how to respond. “‘We’?” she said, staring me down. “What will your contribution be to raising an unseemly child? Where will you be when your sister has to raise more money to feed another mouth?” When I said nothing, she added, “Yes, that’s what I thought.”
“Sinchon could look for a different kind of job,” I said unsteadily, but Florihn, reading the panic in Rahvey’s face, cut me off.
“And you’ll tell him that, will you?” she demanded. “You have forgotten everything. This is our way. The Lani way.”
Then it’s a stupid way! I wanted to shout, an old rage spiking in my chest. You should change it.
But faced with Florihn’s baleful glare, I couldn’t get the words out. Rahvey looked cowed, but her eyes wandered back to the mewling infant. I moved to the child, stooped, and gathered her inexpertly into my arms.
“Put it down, Anglet,” said the midwife. “You are only making things harder. This is not helpful. It is cruel.”
I avoided her eyes, crossing to my sister with the child.
Rahvey gazed up at me, and beneath the exhaustion and hesitation, I thought I saw a flicker of something else, a faint but desperate hope.
“She looks like you,” I said, finding an unexpected smile.
Rahvey took the baby with trembling hands, moving it to her breast. The crying stopped abruptly. My sister tipped her head back a fraction and closed her eyes.
“Three daughters only,” Florihn intoned. “Blessing. Trial. Curse. The fourth is unseemly.”
“Florihn?” Rahvey said, gazing at the infant now.
“Look what you are doing to her!” said Florihn, seizing my arm and turning me round. “You don’t live here, Anglet. You don’t belong here.”
Anger flashed in my eyes, and she let go of my arm as if it were hot, but then her face closed, hardened.
“We will give the child up,” she said. “That is the end of the matter.”
“Florihn?” said Rahvey.
The midwife turned to her reluctantly, her expression softening. “What do you need, hon?” she asked, sugar sweet.
“Maybe,” Rahvey began, like a woman inching out over a narrow bridge, “if we explained to Sinchon and the elders that we could raise her, maybe they would listen.”
“No,” said Florihn, so quick and hard that Rahvey winced, and the midwife had to rebuild her look of simpering benevolence before she could proceed. “I am the elders’ representative here. I speak to and for them. We cannot allow our traditions, the beliefs handed down to us from our grandparents and their parents before them, to be trodden underfoot when they do not suit our wishes.”
“The world changes, Florihn,” I said, amazed at my own audacity. “The things we assume will last forever go away like the Beacon.”
“That is the city,” said Florihn. “That is not us. The Lani must stand by their ways. No mother can have four daughters.”
“Perhaps Vestris would help?” said Rahvey. “She’s rich, connected—”
“Do you see her here?” snapped Florihn. “Your precious sister has not come to see you for how long now?”
Rahvey said nothing.
“You should forget her as she has forgotten you and the place where she grew up,” said Florihn.
I bristled at this, but kept my mouth shut.
Rahvey, meanwhile, seemed to crumple inwardly and, as she began to weep in silence, nodded.
“But she is still your daughter—,” I began.
“The matter is closed,” said Florihn. “I suggest you leave us to our ways, Anglet. You aren’t Lani anymore.”
“What?” I exclaimed. She had said it like it had been on the tip of her tongue for years and she had waited for the necessary anger to say it aloud. The accusation awoke a new boldness in me. “Look at me!” I said, sticking out my arms. “Lani through and through. Like the people I have worked with every day since I left the Drowning.”
“Steeplejacks!” Florihn sneered. “What kind of work is that for a Lani?”
“Common,” I replied.
“Urchin work,” she shot back. “City work.”
“Compared to what?” I returned, fury sweeping away my usual diffidence. “Growing a few onions on the edge of a swamp? Mending pots and pans? Peddling folk crafts to people who think they’re quaint? Panning for gold in a river of filth?”
“I will not defend our customs—our heritage—to a … a kolek!”
Even in her rage, she had to steel herself to say the word. A kolek is a type of root vegetable. Its skin is brown, but the flesh within is white.
If she had not been three times my age, I would have hit her.
She saw me flinch and a flicker of cruel satisfaction went through her face, spurring her on. “But you are not even a kolek,” she said. “If you were, the chalkers would treat you better. You are not one of us. You are not one of them. You are not one of the blacks. You are nothing, and your opinions mean nothing here.”
I reeled as if struck, and the sensation was not just anger and outrage. Her words were a match touched to the powder in my heart, and now it blazed with a hot and poisonous flame: a part of me thought she was right.
There was a long, stunned silence while I gathered my thoughts, and when I spoke, it was quietly and with conviction. “I will take the child,” I said, thinking suddenly and painfully of Berrit, who the world had already forgotten. “She is beautiful. She has been born on the same day Papa was taken from us. She should not grow up unwanted.”
The room fell silent again.
“You?” asked Florihn.
“Yes,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt.
“By yourself? With no husband?” Florihn pressed.
“What use has Sinchon ever been in the raising of your family?” I asked my sister. She looked away. “I will come for her tomorrow, but you can tell the elders that you want to keep her. Make them talk about it. If they won’t change their minds—” I faltered, but only for a second. “—I will keep her. And if I can’t, there is always Pancaris.”
Florihn stared, her mind working, and Rahvey watched her, wary and unsure, like a cornered weancat.
“Tomorrow?” my sister repeated.
“Yes.”
Rahvey looked pale, uncertain, suspended between feelings, but when she felt Florihn’s eyes on her, she nodded.
“This requires a blood oath,” said the midwife, picking up the knife. “You must swear by all we hold true and precious. Hold out your hands.”
I stared at the knife, and the scale of what I was doing crowded in on me so that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. “Not my hands,” I said. “I have to be able to work.”
“Your face, then,” said Florihn, her eyes hard. “There may be scarring.”
I blinked but managed to shake my head fractionally. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Very well,” said the midwife with a tiny, satisfied smile. “Kneel down.”
I did as I was told, feeling the quickening of my heart, as if the blood that was to be let were rising up in protest.
“Anglet Sutonga,” she intoned, “do you swear you will take this child, this fourth daughter, from your sister Rahvey and raise her as your own or, failing that, find suitable accommodation for her, so that she grows up in a manner seemly and fitting for a Lani child?”
I opened my mouth, but the words didn’t come out.
Florihn’s eyes narrowed. “You have to say it,” she said.
“Yes,” I managed. “I swear.”
And without further warning, Florihn slashed my cheeks with her knife, first the left, then the right.
The edge was scalpel sharp, and I felt the blood run before the pain sang out, bright and hot. With it came shock and a sudden terrible clarity.
What have I done?
Florihn methodically took up one of the towels she had brought and clamped it to my bleeding face, gripping my head tightly and staring searchingly into my eyes for a long minute.
There was a knock at the door.
“Can I come in?”
Sinchon.
“In a moment, sweet,” said Rahvey.
“Just tell me,” he demanded. “Boy or girl?”
The three of us exchanged bleak and knowing looks.
“A girl,” Rahvey answered heavily. “We will keep her for tonight, but Anglet will come for her tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
Sinchon said nothing—expressed no sorrow, no commiseration with his grief-stricken wife, nothing—and moments later, we heard the outside door of the hut slam closed as he left.
Florihn was still clamping the towel to my face, pressing hard to stanch the bleeding, and I felt a flare of rage that, for the moment, burned away any doubt that what I was doing was right.