The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(101)

Phalue curled her fingers into the soft linens of her cot. “If I’m not hard on myself, who will be? You? My father?”

Tythus shrugged, his lips pursed, his gaze on the leaking ceiling. “Ranami.”

She laughed. Yes, Ranami had been pushing the issue for almost as long as they’d been together. Urging her to see the others around her, to open her eyes to the suffering of the farmers here. “Yes, well there’s her if no one else.”

“Did you patch things up with her?” Tythus asked, as though they were still sparring in the courtyard.

“Not enough. I was good enough to get her. I don’t know if I’m good enough yet to keep her. I’m trying, but the way she wants me to go is muddy and full of thorns. I’m not used to it.” It would be easier to go back to the way she’d been, to forget what she’d seen at the farms, to use all the same justifications her father did. She’d told herself that her life had been hard. That she’d worked for what she had. That she’d earned it. But this would be the hardest thing she’d ever done. She swung her legs around on the edge of the bed to face Tythus. She forced down the voice in the back of her mind that screamed at her to leave everything be, to continue on as if nothing had happened. She took the way of thorns. “If it came down to me and my father, which of us would you choose?”

“You.” He said it seriously, with no hesitation.

“And the others?”

“I can’t say with one hundred per cent certainty, but I’d wager you as well, Phalue.”

She would start making things right – with Ranami, with the world. “Unlock the door.”





37





Lin


Imperial Island

My room was a prison. The balcony doors were locked. The door: locked. A little light shone in between cracks in the shutters and the doors, but for the most part the room was dark. Only two lamps, burning low. I lay in bed, my gaze on the ceiling. Something had happened down there in Ilith’s lair. The last thing I knew was Ilith’s face melting, and me trying to fix her. I strained to remember, but it was like trying to get a fishing line free from the rocks. Each tug only served to lodge the memory deeper from my reach.

No. There had been more. I looked to my hand, still clenched, hoping somehow that it had been a dream. But when I opened my fingers, Thrana’s bloody crane stared back at me. I didn’t know what hurt more – the guilt or the loss. Father had killed them, but I’d led him there.

And then the gasping realization returned to me: I was something he’d made.

It explained so much: how I didn’t remember before five years ago, my memories of the chrysanthemum-ceilinged room upon waking. I lifted my hands in front of my eyes, wondering how he’d accomplished this. Bayan had said he was growing people. Not just a person. Was I not the first?

I pressed my palm into my forehead. Bayan was a construct. My father had tried to change something within him the way I’d tried to change something in Ilith. Only it had gone all wrong. And then Bayan had shown up in my room, begging me to help him and to hide him.

We were both my father’s creations.

But up in Uphilia’s nest, there was a record of my birth. Then again, there was also a record of my death. If I was not Lin Sukai, if I was not the Emperor’s daughter, then what was I? I curled in on myself in the blankets, my belly a dark, rotting hollow. Did I have a will of my own? My father had made me for some purpose. Whatever his purpose was for me, I knew this: I did not wish to know it. I needed to get out.

I rose from the bed, though it was an effort. A heaviness lay in my chest as if I’d been weighed down with stones. Perhaps I had – what did I know of what I was? A mad laughter bubbled within me. I shoved it down, took a few deep breaths in and out. Think. Father might have made me, but I was not some halfwit. I went to the door, tried the handle again.

It was locked.

For the first time in my memory, I wished Bayan were here. We were more similar than I would have ever guessed. We could have helped one another. Perhaps I could have pried away at the shards inside of him, released him from my father’s service, found a way to unlock the memories my father had erased.

The memory machine. The growing people. I needed to know the rest.

I went to the balcony door, to the shutters. Locked. All of them. And each time I touched my hand to a door or a shutter, I could feel the weight of failure pressing in on me. I sat back on the bed, tempted to shrug off the jacket, the slippers, and to lie down again.

Maybe I’d already done this once before. I couldn’t be sure.

My heel touched something. I reached down and pulled the green-bound journal from beneath the bed. I’d hidden it carelessly, but my father rarely came to my room. Unsure of what to do and too frightened to try and fix myself, I flipped through it again.

This time, new details seemed to jump out at me. The trip to the lake in the mountains. The weather had been unseasonably good, I’d written. But if I’d been sixteen, then it would have been the dry season. The weather was nearly always good in the dry season. The sea snake that had bitten me. I’d written that I’d been swimming in the bay. The first time I’d read it, I’d assumed I’d meant the harbor – but why would I write the bay when everyone referred to Imperial harbor as a harbor? And I’d made some reference to the fish my mother cooked. Why would my mother, the Emperor’s consort, cook fish when she had servants to do it? I’d thought when I’d first read it that perhaps my mother enjoyed cooking and so went to the kitchen sometimes to indulge herself. All these assumptions I’d made because I’d read this journal wanting it to be some record of past memories. There hadn’t been a sickness; I hadn’t lost my memories. I’d only begun to form them five years ago, which was when my father must have made me.