The Deepest Blue(36)

In the center of it all was the heir, Sorka, untouched by even a breath of wind.

Hero or dead, Mayara thought.

I wish there were a third choice.

TWELVE GIRLS AND WOMEN WERE TO BE SENT TO THE ISLAND FOR the test. Mayara made a point to learn who they were, because if they were destined to die together, she wanted to at least know their names.

Tesana was a fisherwoman from northern Kao. She left behind a husband and son.

Amilla worked with stained glass, along with her mother and her sister.

Nissala sold grilled pineapple to early-morning clamdiggers.

Osa hauled crates on and off ships on the docks of Yena.

Quilan didn’t like coconuts.

Dayine hadn’t cut her hair since she was five years old, when she lopped it off with a machete. She didn’t know why her parents let her near a machete, but that was the family story.

Resla didn’t talk much, but she wore a necklace made of shells.

Balka had just become a mother.

All of them had people they’d left behind. Work. School. Dreams. Aside from Roe, only one other, a young woman, barely more than a girl, named Kemra, seemed to want to become an heir. She chattered nonstop about how this was their destiny and their duty, and how morally reprehensible it was to hide your power and deny the world your gift. Most of the others ignored her, even Roe, who clammed up about her plans after seeing how unpopular Kemra’s views were. The other ten women had all hidden their power, because that was what you did if you wanted to live a long life, and that was what your families begged you to do if they didn’t want to say goodbye.

As the twelfth to join them, Mayara expected to meet more resentment—it was her arrival and her failure to hide her power that had triggered the start of the test. But she was treated more with pity. She’d had less time than any of them to accustom herself to her fate, and she knew less of the basics than any of them. She told them she was a deep diver, an oyster gatherer, who’d been married the day she exposed her power. She told them how she’d lost her older sister to the test, and how she’d promised to avoid the spirits and never use her power. As a consequence, she knew very little about how it worked.

The introductions were quickly over, though, and Heir Sorka delivered an opening speech, very little of which made sense to Mayara. As she finished, Mayara leaned over to whisper to Roe and Palia, “What is she talking about? How do we ‘expand our consciousness’ and ‘tap into the essential nature of the spirits’? What ‘essential nature’?”

“She means their instincts,” Roe whispered.

Sorka pointed to Tesana, Quilan, and Kemra. “You, you, and you! Come with me.”

Mayara whispered back, “I thought their instinct was just ‘kill humans.’”

Rising to follow Heir Sorka, the fisherwoman Tesana clucked at Mayara. “Such a beautiful bride. Such a shame.” She stroked Mayara’s hair as if consoling a baby, and then she headed down the hill for her training session.

“Hey, she might live!” Roe called after her.

“She probably won’t,” Palia said.

Roe glared at her. “Must you?”

Another of the women, Balka, who had been taken from her newborn daughter seven weeks ago, shushed them. “I can’t hear the lesson.” At the base of the valley, Heir Sorka was beginning to lecture the first three women on how best to subdue an earth spirit.

They were being trained in small groups, at least to start with. Mayara, Roe, and Palia waited near a fire, lit by a lizardlike spirit that writhed over a pile of dried-out driftwood. The others were spread across on the same rocky hill, all focused on Sorka and her first students.

Listening, Mayara tried to follow the lesson.

She felt Roe watching her, and her cheeks heated up as she blushed—it’s obvious how little I know. “If we’re going to be a team, you need to know more than ‘spirits are bad,’” Roe said. “Can you handle a condescending lecture from someone nearly your age?”

Relief coursed through her. Yes, that sounded like exactly what she needed! “Pretend I know nothing, since that’s close to accurate.” Mayara hadn’t realized how little time she’d spent thinking about the spirits. She hadn’t cared much what they were or how they worked, so long as they weren’t chomping on her when she dived.

“She knows they want us dead,” Palia said. “That’s the important bit.”

“She may want a bit more detail than that,” Roe said.

The woman who had shushed them, Balka, glared again and moved farther away, but Mayara noticed that a few others—Nissala, Osa, and Dayine—had shifted closer, listening to Roe. That made her feel less like an idiot. Maybe I’m not the only one who hasn’t done this before.

“Okay,” Roe said. “There are six kinds of spirits: water, air, fire, earth, ice, and wood. Sometimes that last one is just called ‘life,’ but it means plant life exclusively. The spirits vary in intelligence. Some are as smart as us. Others are as dumb as a barnacle. But they all operate on two basic instincts: to create and to destroy. Their creation powers let them shape the natural world. Unchecked, they’ll just keep creating and creating until the world is in constant flux and completely unlivable, even for them, which is why they need queens, even though they hate us. In the beginning, the land was—”