Chapter 2
A Dirt-Poor Blind Girl
TEN YEARS LATER
Eiko stirred from sleep to the sound of birdsong.
The blackbirds in the tree right outside her window always let her know when it was time to wake up.
Unlike the soft churring and whirring of the bedtime nightjars, the morning blackbirds’ melodic calls had a clear, deep sound.
They always started off with a few slow notes before falling into a sequence of happy whistles and trills.
They paused every now and then, as though listening for a reply, before launching into the music again.
Their song didn’t reflect it, but it wasn’t just daytime … it was that day.
The day of the royal Kingsfete.
Even though the fete passed through every year, it had been ten years since the royals had cloistered into that great golden carriage.
It had been ten years since she had seen the world in colours and pictures, but she still remembered it well.
It was like a vivid dream—so vivid that sometimes she forgot while she was asleep, and she woke up confused as to why the darkness wouldn’t clear.
She remembered the grey slab of jagged mountainside as the sun stroked into each pocket and crevice, the way mist curled through the valley of the Sigh, wrapping the looming stone fingers like rings, and the scattered, spraying fires of the fete.
She remembered her brother’s grin and her grandmother’s crinkled half-moon eyes.
Those were her very last images. The last images of her life.
Kaito had pulled her away from the shore as soon as he found her, so neither of them knew if Prince Chasin had survived until years later, when she overheard some traders from Goldmoor gossiping during the Kingsfete, so deep into their cups that they didn’t care who heard them.
According to the drunker of the two, all of the womenfolk of the capital were mourning Prince Chasin’s removal from the marriage market as he took up his position as the commander of the Godsguard.
“Everyone knows,” he had claimed in a slur, “that the commander of the Godsguard can take no wife and father no children.” The story was probably fake, but it didn’t matter.
If there was gossip about the prince, then he had survived.
That boy who screamed such awful sounds of pain, who looked to have been shredded by a hundred claws across his torso and neck, who had been unmoving when she dragged him from the cave to slump in puddles of his own blood … had survived.
He had grown into a man.
She had paid for his life with her sight, and he would never know.
Perhaps the royal family were blessed by the sun after all.
She could only imagine the kind of monster he carried inside him, if it had shredded him with such violence during their bonding.
It must have been a Rustling. Those were the psychotic ones, the most feared and dangerous.
Silencing them was thought to be impossible.
If one were trying—for whatever nonsensical reason—to Silence a monster, encountering a Rustling would have to be a worst-case scenario.
The Rustlings were the monsters that would sooner tear a person apart than attempt to negotiate with them in slimy rhymes and riddles.
Not that it mattered to her.
She didn’t consider herself broken in any way, but the woman she had become was a far cry from the girl who used to run into the dark and scale the cliffs just to see as far into the horizon as she could.
She was more sensible now.
Mostly.
“Good morning,” she murmured, touching the cool glass window by her bed as she swung her legs from the mattress.
“Morning,” Kaito grumbled back, making her jolt in surprise, as she had said the greeting out of habit, just to check.
“You’re still here?” she asked, turning towards his voice.
“Slept in.” Her brother’s words were grunted, his brain still waking up. She could hear the thump of him groggily pulling on his boots.
She was twenty and he was twenty-four, so they shouldn’t still be sharing a room, but they lost their grandmother a few years ago, and Eiko couldn’t be left alone all night. Not when she couldn’t see the candles, the lanterns, or the hearth. Not when she had no idea how close to danger she was.
Even though she lived in perpetual darkness, her physical body still needed the light to protect her from the dangers of the Quiet.
“I’ll make your lunch,” she offered, shrugging on her housecoat and reaching for her small ivory cane.
She didn’t need it to walk through their cottage, but Kaito sometimes left his shoes in her path when he stumbled back from the mines in the evening, hunched in pain and exhaustion.
Because she couldn’t work, he had to support them both, and with the Lord of Stonesigh increasing taxes these past few years to fund his growing purity army, Kaito had been forced to spend more time down in the mines than ever before.
She made her way into the kitchen and hung her cane over one of the drawer handles, slicing the soft bread she had baked the day before. She prepared cheese, seeds, nuts, one of the last rations of dried meat, and a plump apple, latching his metal lunch tin just as he clumped into the kitchen.
“Stay out of trouble, all right?” He took the tin from her, and she expected the brush of his fingers through her hair, tired but affectionate.
He was always tired.
“I’ll try,” she whispered, but the door was already falling closed behind him.
There was something about living perpetually in darkness while her body was still protected by the light that had brought her closer to the Quiet.
She couldn’t hear the monsters, not really, but she could feel them.
She could feel their simmering rage like a distant refrain, so low, so quiet, she hardly noticed it until she tripped into disaster.
They hated that she was so close and they couldn’t get to her, that they couldn’t break through the Quiet to reach her, so they punished her in every small way they could manage.
They conspired to get her into all kinds of trouble.
That was why she couldn’t sleep alone. Too often, the candles had flickered out in the dead of night, and she had jolted awake, screaming, with their voices exploding into her head.
They couldn’t seem to extinguish the fire in the hearth, but there had been sticky summer nights too hot to leave it burning. Those nights, she barely dared to sleep at all.
After dressing and braiding her hair, she pushed outside, pausing to sigh as the sun hit her skin. She stood there, soaking in the warmth, the safety, the blessing, before pushing off the door, her cane tapping gently against the ground.
“Watch out—”
“Oof.” The air was knocked right out of her as a cart slammed into her side, sending her sprawling into the grass before running over her feet.
Luckily, she wore Kaito’s hand-me-down boots and pants beneath her buttoned coat. For this very reason.
“Eiko, I’m so sorry.” The voice and the burst of jasmine-scented soap belonged to Rion.
She lived in the cottage further up the rocky hill, and like Eiko, she had managed to escape the mines.
Her father and mother worked down there while she looked after her younger siblings and kept the house.
She was already a couple of years past her coming of age and should have taken over for her mother, but whenever it was mentioned, Rion’s mother huffed and puffed and bustled about in a busy, insulted sort of way.
“Send my daughter to the mines,” she would intermittently expel, the words wobbling with her shaking head.
It was usually accompanied by the sound of her shoving a little spade into the garden outside, the sharp and angry stabbing of dirt somehow fierce and annoyed.
“I’m a woman of the mountain,” she would say.
“It’ll take more than a day’s worth of hard work for me to start cracking and crumbling. I’ve a few good years in me yet.”
“Are you okay?” Rion fussed, pulling Eiko to her feet and pressing her cane back into her hands.
Unlike Rion’s mother, Rion was soft as silk. Her heart was a sponge, her words always a whisper away from praise or laughter. She was a joy, and Eiko loved her dearly.
“I’m fine—” she started, but Rion cut her off with a despairing wail.
“The cart!” Rion took off, and Eiko followed as fast as she could, meeting her at the bottom of the hill where the road widened.
They lived in a basin of farmland and scattered communities fenced in by towering cliffs, the mountain and the Sigh, and Jagged Bay, where the docks stood fast against the constant battering of the ocean.
“Impregnable,” her grandmother used to call it.
“A son of a bitch to travel anywhere,” Kaito had often countered.
She missed their bickering fiercely, just as she missed her grandmother’s company on her morning excursions into the marketplace. Her grandmother would always haggle with the merchants while Rion casually verbalised everything her eyes set upon.
“Disaster averted,” Rion breathed out, looping her arm with Eiko’s as she pushed the cart ahead of them. “I have enough potatoes in here to take out half the village.”
The false image filled Eiko’s head immediately.
Rion’s cart would have instead been filled with flowers from her mother’s garden, which they would sell in the marketplace, but every morning, she made up some other thing her cart was full of.
Potatoes could mean …
“Tuberose?” Eiko predicted.
“You guessed that too fast,” Rion complained. “You could have pretended for a little while longer.”
“Sorry. How do you plan to succeed in this potato genocide?” Eiko asked, putting her trust in Rion and tucking her cane beneath her arm.
“Cannons.” Rion was ready with the answer far too quickly. “Lined up along the tops of the cliffs—which are looking exceptionally grey today, by the way. I can see birds nesting in the little nooks further up, where they’re sheltered from the wind.”
It was so easy to imagine.