The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(52)

But Ranami had already turned and was marching off through the trees toward a larger building down the slope. Phalue wanted to call after her, to tell her what she saw. She saw a stubborn woman. She saw a soft and gentle heart wrapped around an indomitable will. She saw the woman that she loved, forged by terrible experiences – experiences she’d never bothered to tell Phalue about. Instead, she merely gritted her teeth. “You’re impossible.” The wind and rain ate her words. If Ranami heard them at all, she gave no sign.

Phalue had to rush to keep up with her.

At the bottom of the slope, Ranami wrenched open the door to the building and stalked inside.

It looked larger close up. Phalue paused to crane her neck up to the thatch roof. All the windows had been shuttered against the rain. It didn’t look like someone’s house. It looked more like . . . a barn. Phalue ducked inside.

Only two lamps lit the entire space, so it took time for Phalue’s eyes to adjust. She smelled the people before she could see them. It smelled like dried sweat, made damp by the rain again, like breath gone bad, like old soup kept too long on the fire. The dark outlines of them became clear. Beds, piled on top of one another, and people piled into the beds. Someone coughed in the darkness. Phalue stumbled forward, trying to find Ranami. It was like swimming in a dark ocean filled with seaweed. “Ranami.”

And then she was there, in front of her, smelling sweet and clean. Phalue wrapped her fingers around the hem of Ranami’s shirt, clinging to her the way she would a buoy.

“This is where most of the farmers live,” Ranami said. “This is the living your father provides for them. If they want to grow enough nuts, most of the land must be used for the caro trees.”

Phalue had seen the conditions some of the gutter orphans lived in from a distance. She knew intellectually that their conditions were grim. Yet the press of these bodies, all this life crowded under one roof was a world she’d not experienced. She’d never been in the midst of it, asked to do more than to toss a few coins in charity. She glanced to the side and saw a father and son on a bed, all their worldly belongings on a shelf behind them. “Can we speak outside?”

“No,” Ranami said. She was a torch of anger, a burning spot in a sea of gray. “This is what your father does. He builds extensions onto his palace with his money and doesn’t spare anything to provide a better living for the farmers. You think this is much different than how I grew up? But they are not on the streets. They do well enough for themselves.”

Phalue heard the twist in Ranami’s voice when she said “well enough”, and she wished she’d never said it in the first place. There would be no reasoning with her at the moment. She sidled closer to her. She couldn’t be sure in the darkness but she felt gazes lingering on her, tendrils tickling at the back of her neck. “Which farmer is the one you trust?” she whispered.

Ranami looked at her as though she had peeled a banana, thrown it away and then consumed the peel. “All of them, Phalue. I’m bringing the boxes back to all of them.”

“How can you be sure—?”

“Because I’m just like them. I got lucky, if you could call it that, taking an apprenticeship with a bookseller who taught me to read because it made me more valuable to him. Treating me just like one of his books, putting his hands all over me in places I couldn’t grab back fast enough. But without that, I would have taken your father’s stupid bargain just to get off the streets. These people here have all lost people they love. The bog cough, other sicknesses, falling from trees while harvesting. How long will it be until you are governor?”

Guilt trickled into Phalue’s chest. “When my father is ready to retire.”

“And as long as he decides he’s not ready to pass on his title, you wait, patient and comfortable, while these people die,” Ranami said, her face thrust into Phalue’s own.

Phalue couldn’t hold her gaze. She couldn’t bear to be here, stifled among the beds and the coughing. She whirled, striding to the door like she was coming up for air. The rain hit her face, and even the chill of it couldn’t wash away the shame. But these people had chosen this. They’d made a bargain with her father. The land and a small cut of the profits for the caro nuts and the work. No one had forced them to it.

And then she remembered the meal she’d had before leaving her father’s palace. The cold noodles in peanut sauce, the rich and spicy goat curry, the greens cooked to the translucent shade of jade. Everything festooned with flowers, artfully painted on the side with sauces. The wooden beams above her head painted in gold and red.

If not for the apprenticeship with a bookseller, Ranami could have been one of them. Perhaps she would have worked her way into a position like Halong’s.

Perhaps not. She couldn’t believe that every one of these people crammed into this space were lazy.

So either her father dealt with these people unfairly, or they were simply worth less. And knowing Ranami, loving her, Phalue couldn’t wrap her mind around the latter.

Yes, she helped the orphans when she went into the city. Perhaps there would always be orphans. Phalue did what she could with her allowance, but it would never be enough. What would be enough when she was governor?

Ranami’s righteousness made her vulnerable. Phalue had sat in her father’s court. She knew the vagaries of human nature. Being leader of the Shardless and spouting ideals did not make Gio virtuous. Being poor did not make these people trustworthy.