The Impostor Queen (The Impostor Queen, #1)(42)
“Can you grind some corn for me?” she asks. “I’m trying to make Oskar a new tunic to replace the one he shredded last week, and Freya’s needed to fetch the water.” She doesn’t say it in an unfriendly or harsh way. It seems like she’s simply informing me of the reality of their lives. “Well?” she asks when I hesitate. “Can you?”
I blink at her, stiffly moving the fingers of my right hand within the long sleeve of my dress and trying not to wince as the raw flesh rubs against my bandages. “Ah . . . yes. Of course.”
She bobs her head. “Wonderful.” She points to a pile of dried-out corncobs, their husks pulled back, sitting in a basket woven from green twigs. “Corn’s there.” She points to a wooden bowl sitting next to the grinding stone. “Put it there when you’re done.”
She disappears back into the small, torch-lit chamber at the back of the shelter. I slowly move toward the corncobs, my heart thumping. I’ve read about this vegetable, how it’s planted and harvested, how it’s an important crop for our people. But . . . the only time I’ve actually seen real corn is when it’s been served to me on a plate, kernels roasted and plump and sweet. I know it can also be dried and ground into meal—and I also know that the pestle and grinding stone are used for that purpose. I smile. I can do this. It can’t be that hard. I kneel, pick up a cob, and place it on the grinding stone. The moment I reach for the pestle, I hear a giggle from behind me.
“Who taught you to do it that way?” Freya kneels by my side. She picks up the cob and strips the kernels off with strong, confident strokes of her thumbs. The tiny golden nuggets fall with little plinks to the grinding stone. When she’s finished, she piles kernels into the shallow depression, picks up the broad pestle, and crushes them with quick, decisive twists of her skinny wrist. She offers me the pestle. “Like that.”
I blow out a breath through my pursed lips. “Of course. Like that.” I accept the pestle. It’s heavier than it looks, rough against my thin, untested skin.
She tilts her head and gazes up at me. “Your kerchief really looks silly.” Without asking permission, she unknots it, then folds it on a diagonal so it forms a triangle instead of a long rectangle as I had done. I feel like such a fool, but am grateful as she flattens it over my head and ties it at the nape of my neck, beneath my thick locks. Next, she tugs on my sleeve. Seeing what she intends, I pull my arms in, and she turns my dress around so that it’s no longer backward.
“Thank you so much,” I whisper.
“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.