The Heart Trials

Chapter 1

Dressing is a ritual.

The ash-colored, itchy fabric slips over my head and falls past my knobby knees. There are no buttons or fine threads or shape. The robes we wear in the districts feel like a sack for potatoes sewn into something we could put our arms into.

A horn blows outside. A warning.

I hurry, stuffing my feet in the issued shoes and bunching up my toes to get my heel inside.

The cold earth chills the pads of my feet through the worn soles.

I remove my silver chain with razor-thin barbs from its box, the second layer of my lowborn attire, and clamp it at the corners of my mouth.

My eyes water at the pain. I blink once and the hurt fades into me, not away, but simmering beneath my skin like an ember of a fire that’s always there.

My drab, dusty-brown hair—the same color as my dress, the floors of our hovel, the shoddy walls of this entire district—is tied into a low bun at the nape of my neck.

A thin blade is hidden inside it.

Last are my gloves. My protection. They slide with ease up my storm-washed pale skin—salt-bleached and wind stung.

The soft, dark lining is cool against my arms. For a moment it’s gentle.

Then, my fingertips tingle and a chill spreads over my hands beneath the fabric, dulling my touch, steeling something fragile inside me.

Touch is a gateway to love.

Expressions of love are forbidden here.

I grab my pouch of gold. It’s full of every gleaming circle I’ve earned smuggling since last solstice, when I got the idea to give up making a life on this wretched island and run.

I’ll march to the docks where trade ships rush into port each morning as consistent as the sun, find one of the northern captains with colorful clothes and a warm smile who smells like salt and sea, like freedom, and buy passage out of here.

If I can convince them to help me escape, I can go north.

I don’t know what’s beyond the Citadel’s ships that patrol our waters.

No one does. No one leaves the island. But I’ll take my chances. Anywhere but here.

The others in my orphanage left for the census earlier this morning.

With the crowds piled into the square, waiting in long lines for every family called forward, I should have just enough time to sneak to the docks.

I open the food tin but find only a ripped piece of stale bread.

Tonight, I’ll have some good news to share with Serafina even if the ration truck doesn’t come again today.

I step outside of the orphanage, pocket weighed down, hoping all I’ve saved is enough. I don’t know how much it takes to bribe a ship captain. I don’t know how much it costs to convince people to do a good thing. But I’m betting six months of savings has to buy me something.

The shoremen, dockers, warehouse workers, and merchants who usually wander the early-morning sandy streets of the Saltblood district are nowhere to be found.

Even Sleepy Stu, who is always passed out at the bottom of our building’s stairs, is gone.

His piss-stained blanket is still there.

The only sounds are waves gnawing at the shore in the distance and the groaning of wood against the wind as if it’s on the verge of collapse here too.

The faint creak of rusted metal stairs bites the air as a bound stack of the week’s pamphlets are tossed at my feet—the words Census Day are written in big, bold letters across its front.

“Hurry, we’re late!” Dorian flails his arm in greeting from the street with a hollow grin. He’s always doing odd jobs outside of our couriering duties, and not always for extra coin. He’s a model lowborn citizen, a dutiful Saltblood. Nothing like me. I do only what I must to survive.

The last time I saw Dorian Marsh, he asked me to marry him.

The only time the gloves and chains are allowed to come off—the only time lowborns are allowed to touch skin to skin—is to make children.

An unceremonious event, organized and overseen by an audience of Mercyenforcers.

His chestnut-brown hair was windblown that day, stringy around his eyes.

He smelled like smoke and oil from helping out at the driftwood fires.

I never forget a smell or the look in someone’s eyes.

Dorian was serious. He wanted me to agree to be his bedmate—make children with him by law, which means marry—abandon the orphanage, move into a mothers’ tenement, have children. I hardly know him! And besides, I’m not the marrying kind.

Dorian and his mother’s tenement is a few doors down from my orphanage.

His father lives in a fathers’ tenement upstream.

Dorian says our fathers knew each other before mine died.

That their rooms were across the breezeway from one another, as if that would make me like his proposal more. It didn’t.

When Dorian is out of sight, I kick the pamphlets aside and pad down the stairs and head downhill, away from the square.

My heart races my feet through Dockers Row.

Past the cluster of narrow wooden shacks on shaky stilts, stuffed between and on top of one another.

Past the bread stand and tax collector’s office.

Past the hull of homes, abandoned shops, and alleyways that lead to illegal touch parlors.

When I can taste the salt in the air, I know I’m close.

The narrow road opens up, emptying into the harbor.

Docks jut out like sharp teeth from the shore, ships bobbing in the distance.

There is one with a large mast, a coiled snake across its flag in bright green, the color of the lush trees of the Grainfolk district.

Another two are smaller but look formidable, their dark hulls low and fast, built for speed more than cargo.

A bulky freighter tilts slightly in the tide.

Its deck is cluttered with painted crates and coiled rope.

The little I know about ships, my father taught me. The gold in my pocket suddenly feels lighter. Meager. Would bribery for a spot on a smaller ship cost less?

“Saltblood, you’re required in the square.”

I freeze, my heart thundering.

The Mercyenforcer circles me in a patchwork of metal plates and leather, trimmed in Citadel silver and purple. He stops, gripping the rail, blocking my way, scanning me for compliance—my dress, my chain, my gloves.

Then, he moves closer to me.

And it feels like being choked.

I step backward, studying the splintered wooden planks beneath his boots and the lines painted there, keeping my eyes down like I’m supposed to in the presence of a highborn.

I tuck my toes at the edge of the white stripe painted on the ground.

Grid lines for our protection. No accidental skin grazes. Distance is safety.

Three feet apart.

Arm’s length.

Always.

The Mercyenforcer crosses the boundary, his hand moving to the stinger at his waist. He smells like cold iron and a field of flowers. Like danger. When he grips the collar of my dress, my hand is at the sharp point hidden in my hair in an instant.

“Where do you think you’re going, saltrat?” he asks gruffly.

I don’t want to die today. On the day I turned eighteen.

There is nothing special about my birthday.

But I like counting the number each year, watching it increase.

It feels like I’m winning a contest I didn’t ask to be in, defeating odds that should bury me.

Eighteen. Three years older than the grave-digger Saltbloods who work along our territory boundary.

Ten years older than the body that was found in the square last week.

The same age my mother was when she married my father.

Besides, if I die, what will happen to Serafina, Miss Omon, the others in the orphanage?

I have to find a different time to get to the docks, another way.

“To the census,” I tell the ground, releasing my bun and clasping my hands. “I think I’ve gotten turned around.”

The Mercyenforcer grabs my chin roughly, forcing me to meet his eyes, shattering our rules by reminding me, again, that he has none.

His eyes are angry and green like a forest set on fire, beneath thick blond brows.

The flowery scent on his fingers curls into my throat like barbed wire.

My skin prickles where his skin touches mine.

Every nerve in my body screams. But, I hold still. I pretend like a good Saltblood.

“I just got lost. Forgive me,” I say, angling my pocket of gold away from him just slightly.

His stare burns into me as if he can see my thoughts. When his grip loosens, I pull my chin away, gaze glued to the ground, not willing to break any rule right in front of him. He could kill me for less.

“Identification.”

“Axira Merreri.”

I show him my identification card. He orders me to follow him. I steal a look at the horizon, the sea waiting for me, my shot at freedom—lost—before he marches me uphill, past Dockers Row and across the river, which cuts through the island like claws reaching for the ocean.

The Dredge is packed with courier boats—empty, ready for tomorrow’s deliveries.

The route winds through all the districts, from the Saltblood shore, across the Grainfolk’s plains and Stonebound’s mountains, all the way to the pinnacle of the island—Skyhaven.

Ours is the largest of the districts, right at the sea’s edge, wrapping around the volcanic island like a skirt.

Books say that centuries ago, outsiders invaded our island for its rich resources.

They split the island into districts, taking the highest land for themselves—calling themselves Skyborn.

They said Ethyrians would be rich, an envy of the Sapphire Seas.

But Miss Omon says the only thing that’s changed since she was a girl is the reach of the Citadel’s shadows.