The Broken Kingdoms

7 “Girl in Darkness” (watercolor)

My dreams have been more vivid lately. They told me that might happen, but still… I remembered something.

In the dream, I paint a picture. But as I lose myself in the colors of the sky and the mountains and the mushrooms that dwarf the mountains—this is a living world, full of strange flora and fungi; I can almost smell the fumes of its alien air—the door to my room opens and my mother comes in.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

And though I am still half lost in mountains and mushrooms, I have no choice but to pull myself back into this world, where I am just a sheltered blind girl whose mother wants what’s best for me, even if she and I do not agree on what that is.

“Painting,” I say, though this is obvious. My belly has clenched in defensive tension; I fear a lecture is coming.

She only sighs and comes closer, putting her hand on mine to let me know where she is. She is silent for a long while. Is she looking at the painting? I nibble my bottom lip, not quite daring to hope that she is, perhaps, trying to understand why I do what I do. She has never told me to stop, but I can taste her disapproval, as sour and heavy on my tongue as old, molding grapes. She has hinted at it verbally as well, in the past. Paint something useful, something pretty. Something that does not entrance viewers for hours on end. Something that would not attract the sharp, gleaming interest of the priests if they saw it. Something safe.

She says nothing this time, only stroking my braided hair, and at last I realize she is not thinking about me or my paintings at all. “What is it, Mama?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says, very softly, and I realize that for the first time in my life, she has just lied to me.

My heart fills with dread. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is the whiff of fear that wafts from her, or the sorrow that underlies it, or simply the fact that my garrulous, cheerful mother is suddenly so quiet, so still.

So I lean against her and put my arms around her waist. She is trembling, unable to give me the comfort that I crave. I take what I can, and perhaps give a little of my own in return.

My father died a few weeks later.

I floated in numbing emptiness, screaming, unable to hear myself. When I clasped my hands together, I felt nothing, even when I dug in my nails. Opening my mouth, I sucked in another breath to scream again but felt no sensation of air moving over my tongue or filling my lungs. I knew that I did it. I willed my muscles to move and believed that they responded. But I could feel nothing.

Nothing but the terrible cold. It was bitter enough to be painful, or would have been if I could feel pain. If I had been able to stand, I might have fallen to the ground, too cold to do anything but shiver. If only there had been ground.

The mortal mind is not built for such things. I did not miss sight, but touch? Sound? Smell? I was used to those. I needed those. Was this how other people felt about blindness? No wonder they feared it so.

I contemplated going mad.

“Ree-child,” says my father, taking my hands. “Don’t rely on your magic. I know the temptation will be there. It’s good to see, isn’t it?”

I nod. He smiles.

“But the power comes from inside you,” he goes on. He opens one of my small hands and traces the whorling print of one fingertip. It tickles and I laugh. “If you use a lot of it, you’ll get tired. If you use it all… Ree-child, you could die.”

I frown in puzzlement. “It’s just magic.” Magic is light, color. Magic is a beautiful song—wonderful, but not a necessity of life. Not like food or water, or sleep, or blood.

“Yes. But it’s also part of you. An important part.” He smiles, and for the first time, I see how deeply the sadness has permeated him today. He seems lonely. “You have to understand. We’re not like other people.”

I cried out with my voice and my thoughts. Gods can hear the latter if a mortal concentrates hard enough—it’s how they hear prayers. There was no reply from Madding, or anyone else. Though I groped around, my hands encountered nothing. Even if he’d been there, right beside me, would I have known? I had no idea. I was so afraid.

“Feel,” says my father, guiding my hand. I hold a fat horsehair brush tipped with paint that stinks like vinegar. “Taste the scent on the air. Listen to the scrape of the brush. Then believe.”

“Believe… what?”

“What you expect to happen. What you want to exist. If you don’t control it, it will control you, Ree-child. Never forget that.”

I should have stayed in the house I should have left the city I should have seen the previt coming I should have left Shiny in the muck where I found him I should have stayed in Nimaro and never left.

“The paint is a door,” my father says.

I put out my hands and imagined that they shook.

“A door?” I ask.

“Yes. The power is in you, hidden, but the paint opens the way to that power, allowing you to bring some of it out onto the canvas. Or anywhere else you want to put it. As you grow older, you’ll find new ways to open the door. Painting is just the first method you’ve found.”

“Oh.” I consider this. “Does that mean I could sing my magic, like you?”

“Maybe. Do you like singing?”

“Not like I like painting. And my voice doesn’t sound good like yours.”

He chuckles. “I like your voice.”

“You like everything I do, Papa.” But my thoughts are turning, fascinated with the idea. “Does that mean I can do something besides make paintings? Like…” My child’s imagination cannot fathom the possibilities of magic. There are no godlings in the world yet to show us what it can do. “Like turn a bunny into a bee? Or make flowers bloom?”

He is silent for a moment, and I sense his reluctance. He has never lied to me, not even when I ask questions he would rather not answer.

“I don’t know,” he says at last. “Sometimes when I sing, if I believe something will happen, it happens. And sometimes”—he hesitates, abruptly looks uneasy—“sometimes when I don’t sing, it happens, too. The song is the door, but belief is the key that unlocks it.”

I touch his face, trying to understand his discomfort. “What is it, Papa?”

He catches my hand and kisses it and smiles, but I have already felt it. He is, just a little, afraid. “Well, just think. What if you took a man and believed he was a rock? Something alive that you believed was something dead?”

I try to think about this, but I am too young. It sounds fun to me. He sighs and smiles and pats my hands.

I put out my hands, closed my eyes, and believed a world into being.

My hands ached to feel, and so I imagined thick, loamy soil. My feet ached to stand, so I put that soil under them, solid, hollow sounding when I stomped because of the air and life teeming within it. My lungs ached to breathe, and I inhaled air that was slightly cool, moist with dew. I breathed out and the warmth of my breath made vapor in the air. I could not see that, but I believed it was there. Just as I knew there would be light around me, as my mother had once described—misty morning light, from a pale, early-spring sun.

The darkness lingered, resistant.

Sun. Sun. SUN.

Warmth danced along my skin, driving away the aching cold. I sat back on my knees, drawing deep breaths and smelling fresh-turned dirt and feeling the glaze of light against my closed eyelids. I needed to hear something, so I decided there would be wind. A light morning breeze, gradually dispelling the fog. When the breeze came, stirring my hair to tickle my neck, I did not let myself feel amazement. That would lead to doubt. I could feel the fragility of the place around me, its inclination to be something else. Cold, endless dark—

“No,” I said quickly, and was pleased to hear my own voice. There was air now to carry it. “Warm spring air. A garden ready to be planted. Stay here.”

The world stayed. So I opened my eyes.

I could see.

And strangely, the scene around me was familiar. I sat in the terrace garden of my home village, where I had almost always been completely blind. Not much magic in Nimaro. The only time I had ever seen the village had been—

—the day my father died. The day of the Gray Lady’s birth. I had seen everything then.

I had re-created that day now, falling back on the memory of that single, magic-infused glimpse. Silvery midmorning mists shivered in the air. I remembered that the big, boxy shape on the other side of the garden was a house, though I could not tell if it was mine or the neighbors’ without smelling it or counting my steps. Prickly things near my feet danced in the breeze: grass. I had rebuilt everything.

Except people. I got to my feet, listening. In all my years in the village, I had never heard it so silent at this time of day. There were always small noises—birds, backyard goats, somebody’s newborn fussing. Here there was nothing.

Like ripples in water, I felt the space around me tremble.

“It’s home,” I whispered. “It’s home. Just early; nobody else is up yet. It’s real.”

The ripples ceased.

Real, yet terribly fragile. I was still in the dark place. All I’d done was create a sphere of sanity around myself, like a bubble. I would have to continue affirming its reality, believing in it, to keep it intact.

Trembling, I dropped to my knees again, pushing my fingers into the moist soil. Yes, that was better. Concentrate on the small things, the mundanities. I lifted a handful of earth to my nose, inhaled. My eyes could not be trusted, but the rest—yes. That I could do.

But I was tired suddenly, more tired than I should have been. As I squeezed the clod of dirt, I found my head nodding, my eyelids heavy. I hadn’t slept much, but that did not account for this. I was in a strange place, scared out of my mind. Fear alone should have had me too tense to sleep.

Before I could fathom this new mystery, there was another of those curious rippling shivers—and then agony sizzled behind my eyes. I cried out, arching backward and clapping dirty hands to my face, my concentration broken. Even as I screamed, I felt the false Nimaro bubble shatter around me, spinning away into nothingness as the sickening, empty dark rushed in.

And then—

I landed on my side on a solid surface, hard enough that the breath was jarred from my body.

“Well, here you are,” said a cool, male voice. Familiar, but I could not think. Hands touched me, turning me over and pushing my hair from my face. I tried to jerk away, but that jarred the racheting agony in my eyes, my head. I was too tired to scream.

“Is she all right?” That was a woman’s voice, somewhere beyond the man.

“I’m not certain.”

The words felt like godwords, slapping my ears. I clapped my hands over my ears and moaned, wishing they would all just be silent.

“This isn’t the usual disorientation.”

“Mmm, no. I think it’s some effect of her own magic. She used it to protect herself from my power. Fascinating.” He turned away from me, and I felt his smugness like a scrim of filth along my skin. “Your proof.”

“Indeed.” She sounded pleased as well.

At that point I passed out.