The Diminished

Curlin’s dark blue eyes searched my face. “There’s still time, you know.”

“Time for what?” I asked.

“Time to change your mind, idiot,” Curlin snapped. “They’d still take you. It’s not so bad. Better, at least, than what you’re walking into. Do you really want to spend the rest of your short life hauling stones until your fingers bleed or your back breaks? You’ll never make it twenty-five years. I bet you’ll hardly last one.”

I ran my hands through my still-damp hair, working out the snarls and doing my damnedest to stay calm. “Do you have no recollection at all of the promise we made?”

“Of course I do, but—”

“I’d rather die than break it,” I said, cutting her off. “I would rather die than turn into a monster like them. Like you.”

Curlin’s brows furrowed, and she set her jaw. I’d gotten under her skin. I couldn’t help but dig a little deeper.

“At least in Ilor, I’ll be near Sawny. Near someone whose word actually means something.”

“Actually,” Curlin said slyly, her voice taking on a cruel, musical edge, “you won’t. They’re sending you to the far side of the islands. They know the kind of trouble you two get into together. They’d never chance letting you see Sawny again. You don’t deserve a reward like that after what you did.”

Bile rose in my throat. There was no one in the temple who could possibly care that much about my only friendship. “Horseshit,” I said. “They’re sending me away to die quietly. Where I won’t embarrass the Suzerain when the grief breaks me.”

Curlin scoffed. “If the Suzerain knew what you’d done, that you’d stolen pearls from them, you’d be waiting for an execution block, not a ship. Count yourself lucky that the anchorites care enough to protect you. Though I’ll see Hamil dry the seas before I understand why.”

“Are you going to tell them?” My nails dug into my palms, suddenly wondering if Curlin had truly changed that much.

It would be the right thing for her to do. Her loyalty had been to the Suzerain since she’d taken her vows. There was a part of me that hoped some flicker of our friendship still warmed her, though. Just a little.

“I could. One more dimmy given over to the gods and goddesses to excise in their mercy,” she pondered, her voice icy and distant.

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. “We were friends once, Curlin, and you’re a gods’-cursed dimmy, too. Remember?”

“No,” Curlin said. “I’m Shriven now. Shriven of all sin. Past and present. No more rules. No more holding back. My only task is to protect the faithful. I am not cursed, but forgiven. Each time I do violence, I bask in the glory of the gods and goddesses, for I act as the arms of the Suzerain, and they are the embodiment of the gods and goddesses.”

Curlin crouched in front of me, looked me in the eyes and raked her sharpened nails across my face. Pain shot through me, and even as I forced myself not to flinch away from her, the tears that’d welled in my eyes snaked down my cheeks, mixing with my blood.

“You could have been saved, Vi. But you’re too stupid to save yourself.”

“Get. Out,” I snarled.

She smiled at me coolly. Unable to contain my fury for another moment, I spat in her face. Shock played over her features like wind over the ocean, and before I could even process what I’d done, she’d stood, lifted one booted foot and kicked me in the gut, sending me sprawling backward. Air gusted out of me. It had been a long time since someone’d caught me and given me a proper beating, but the red-hot blaze of pain was uncomfortably familiar.

She was gone, with the door slammed closed behind her, before I’d gotten my breath back.

* * *

In the gray light of the predawn, I walked the foggy streets of Penby for the last time, surrounded by the women who’d colored and shaped my childhood. Sula and Lugine flanked me on either side. Bethea walked in front, her two canes clattering on the cobblestones, and Curlin trailed behind. No one had remarked on the three slowly scabbing wounds on my cheek where Curlin’d scratched me, but I was well aware of them, especially as the icy air stung the tender skin.

I would’ve left Penby on my sixteenth birthday anyway, but instead of heading toward a freedom I’d chosen, clouded though it was with the threat of my own unstoppable violence, I trudged toward twenty-five years of hard, never-ending physical labor—and the inevitable loss of myself in a land impossibly different from the one where I’d grown up.

I knew a little about Ilor, but only what we’d been taught in our history lessons. After the moon split and the goddesses and gods rained their vengeance down on the world, little land was left habitable. The virtuous chosen who survived fled to the places not pocked by falling moon shards or covered in fiery rock spewing from the fragmented earth, splitting into three settlements.

Samiria, a distant, mountainous land, had closed themselves off from the world. Even now, everything we knew about them came through their ambassadors. Trade ships were forced to dock in their harbors and wait for the Samirians to come to them. There were rumors of magic, but, much like the stories of the amalgam, hardly anyone believed them. Denor’s people were said to have little fear of the goddesses and gods, instead living their lives guided by the murky principles of science. And in the Alskad Empire, all gray and frozen drizzle, lived the only people brave enough or stupid enough to venture out to explore and colonize the unsettled lands decimated by the rage of our goddesses and gods.

When Alskad’s explorers had harnessed the power of the sun and built the first sunships, they set off to explore the land left empty since the cataclysm. It was in these explorations that Ilor had been discovered. Its wild jungles, high mountains and deep harbors had lured some sailors to stay, and thus, the first settlement on Ilor had been born.

The crowd on the docks hushed and parted in the presence of the anchorites. The great hulking masses of the sunships, nestled into their places along the docks, took on new meaning this morning, though I’d seen them almost every day for the past ten years. We approached the ship that would take me to Ilor, its portholes like black sores lined along its lower levels. The decks that ringed its upper third were already half-full of folks flapping their handkerchiefs at the lives they’d chosen to leave behind.

Irony of all ironies, it was the Lucrecia. Tears pricked my eyes at the thought of Sawny and Lily, but I fought them back. I wouldn’t let Curlin see me cry.

“I don’t suppose I’ll see any of you again,” I said. “Let my ma and pa know what you’ve done with me, yes? And Curlin...” I smiled sweetly at her. “I hope you rot and die.”

Curlin glowered, and I could see the effort it took to keep her trap shut. She deserved it—her vindictive prying had gotten me into this mess in the first place. I’d never forgive her for that, never forgive her for becoming one of them. I was glad to be rid of her, even with the short, hellish life that was laid out before me.

Anchorite Lugine tsked at me and handed a slip of paper to the familiar uniformed woman at the end of the gangplank. I recognized her fox-collared coat and the humor crinkling the corners of her dark brown eyes. She was the same woman who’d arranged for Sawny’s and Lily’s passage to Ilor. She examined the paper and rifled through a box before handing me a ticket. She didn’t seem to recognize me, but why would she? I’d just been one in a sea of unremarkable faces she saw every day.

Lugine pulled a parcel from the pocket of her wide skirts and pressed it into my hand. “Rayleane bless you, child.”

Sula exchanged a meaningful glance with Bethea before saying, “Remember what we’ve taught you. Only devotion can save you from the burden of your diminishment.”

I did my best to keep from rolling my eyes. These women had raised me from a babe, but they’d forget me before I’d been gone a month. My ma certainly had. Da’d come to see me from time to time, plying me with sweeties when I was little. Later, after some brat had broken my nose the first time, he’d taught me how to climb walls and find hidey-holes. He’d even taught me how to throw a punch, the idiot. Not many in Alskad were stupid enough to encourage a dimmy to violence.

I shook away the thought. I didn’t want to think about Da. The man, as much as he’d tried to be kind to me, had still abandoned me to the temple. All those memories brought with them were darkness and pain. No matter how many times he’d come to see me, no matter how many times he’d told me he cared, at the end of every visit he still left me there, alone in the temple, and went back to my brothers and sisters in their warm house on the good side of the End. And not once did he hug me. Not once in all those visits had he held me close, like he did his other brats.

I was far better off without him. Without any of them.

I didn’t look back as I climbed the gangplank. Not once. Not even a glance. I’d forget them as quick as they’d push me out of their heads.

See if I don’t, I thought petulantly to Pru.

By the time I made my way to the railing on the third-class deck, the tugboats had begun to chug us out toward the open ocean, where the sunship’s sails would unfurl. The folks around me wept and laughed and talked in nervous whispers about the lives they had to look forward to in Ilor. They talked like they’d never heard about the way folks treated their contract workers. No one mentioned the temple’s demands on the folks they hired to manage contract workers like these folks, and the length those managers would go to to see those obligations fulfilled.

It was like the news hawkers on the streets of Penby never once hollered a story about rebel groups destroying crops or workers so mistreated they ran away, only to be hauled back, the terms of their contracts doubled. The world we were chugging toward wasn’t any better than the one we were leaving behind, but I understood the impulse to escape. Sawny and Lily weren’t the only folks who’d had trouble finding work in Penby. Outside fishing and shipbuilding, jobs were hard to come by. At least in Ilor there was a chance, albeit a vanishingly small one, for a person to make something of themselves. To change their station.

That chance existed for some people, anyway. But not for dimmys. Not for me.

I raised a hand to my brow to protect my eyes from the icy drizzle and watched the capital of the Alskad Empire disappear into the fog of the early summer morning.

Good riddance, I thought.

I took one last look across the frigid gray waves and spat into the water. Hoisting my bag over my shoulder, I elbowed my way through the folks peering over the railing as if they could still see their kin on the docks. I wanted to claim a bunk in the cabin where I’d sleep for the next two weeks. I didn’t plan to do much more than sleep there, though. The ship was filled with so many things I wanted to see, so many rooms and luxuries I’d only ever imagined, and I planned to savor every moment of freedom I had left. I never thought I’d get the chance to explore a sunship, much less live on one for any length of time.

Free of the crowd, I rested my bag on an empty bench, blew on my numb fingertips and tried to get my bearings. It’d gotten colder on the deck as the ship picked up speed, even in my sweaters and scarves, and I wished that I had thicker leggings and another pair of woolen socks on under my worn knee-high boots.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, miss.” The deep voice still held the nasal vowels of the End, though softened and disguised. Anyone who got out of that poor, shabby neighborhood always tried to leave it as far behind them as they could.

I assumed my most polite expression before turning around. “Yes, sir?” I asked, gray eyes wide and innocent. That look worked on all the anchorites, even Bethea, unless she was in a particularly foul mood.

“See your ticket?”