The Diminished

“What’d you nick for us?”

“Couldn’t get much, what with the kitchen buzzing with folks getting ready for tomorrow, but I managed a bit.”

Sawny closed his eyes, smiled and stretched out next to me on his back, his long black lashes smudged against his dark olive skin. He was all heavy muscles and broad shoulders. Sawny’s easy good looks drew appreciative glances from anyone able to see past the overly mended hand-me-downs we temple brats wore—which, to be perfectly honest, was a fairly small group. My pale, freckled skin and dark, unruly curls might’ve been considered pretty at one point, but my twice-broken nose, combined with a face that rested somewhere between furious and disgusted, made folks’ eyes slip right past me. I couldn’t say I minded. Being a dimmy brought me attention enough.

“Well?” I held out a hand expectantly. “I’m ravenous.”

Sawny put his hand in mine and squeezed. “I’m going to miss you, Vi.”

“Shut up. You’ll find work,” I said, but the lie felt sharp on my tongue even as I spoke the words. “You and Lily both. Though Dzallie protect whoever hires her.”

“Vi,” Sawny cautioned.

I threw my hands up defensively. “I didn’t mean anything by it. You know as well as I do that your sister can be prickly. That doesn’t mean you won’t find work here in Penby.”

“We’ve been looking for months now, and there’s nothing. Nothing that pays enough to afford a room, anyway.”

Sawny rummaged in his bag and handed me half a loaf of bread thick with nuts and seeds. I turned it over in my hands. Guilt over my thoughtless expectation that Sawny would keep putting himself at risk by stealing food from the temple kitchen, same as he’d always done, gnawed at my stomach. His position was so tenuous now that he and Lily had come of age.

“There’s no way the temple’ll get rid of you,” I said, forcing assurance I didn’t feel into my voice. “You make the best cloud buns and salmonberry cakes of anyone in the kitchens. Don’t you think they see that?”

Sawny ducked his head. “Sure. If I was on my own, I might be fine, but Lily needs connections to get bookkeeping work, and we’ve none. The anchorites can’t get away with letting us stay much longer. We’ve been of age for nearly a full season now. I’m surprised they haven’t already kicked us out.”

I looked out across the wide square at the palace. It was an old-fashioned, elegant thing, all clean lines and contrasting angles with none of the frippery and decoration that was the style now. It’d been built a generation after the survivors of the cataclysm had settled in Penby, around the same time the people’d built the temple where Sawny and I’d grown up. The two buildings were practically mirrors of each other, with the same tall spires and the same high stone walls and narrow windows. But somehow, even though it was a stone’s throw away, the palace had always been impossibly out of our reach.

Sawny and I’d come to this spot for years. We’d look across the square at the lights glowing in the palace windows and imagine the people inside. The palace seemed so much warmer, so much friendlier than the temple. The lives of its inhabitants so much happier. I thought probably they were, but Sawny always reminded me that it only seemed that way because we couldn’t see their dark secrets the way we could see our own.

I caught a flash of white fluttering in the shadows between the palace and the temple. I nudged Sawny and jerked my chin. “Shriven. Think they can see us?”

He shook his head. “Nah. Even if they could, what do they care?”

The whites of their eyes stood out against the background of the black paint they wore across their foreheads, mingling with their stark tattoos. I could almost feel the weight of their gaze settle on me, sending shivers down my spine. The Shriven were always in the background of my life. They patrolled the city, looking for people like me. Keeping the citizens of Penby safe from dimmys on the edge of breaking. They served as the spine and the fist of the temple, and no crime in the empire escaped the ever-watchful eyes of the Shriven. Everyone followed their orders, even the palace guards and city watch. And while everyone in the empire knew better than to cross them, their shadow fell darkest on people like me—on the diminished.

“At least the Shriven watchdogs don’t track your every move the way they do with us dimmys.” I shuddered, remembering the last time one of the white-clad Shriven warriors decided I was up to no good. They may’ve been temple-sworn, same as the anchorites, but I’d never believed they were holy. Turning back to Sawny, I said, “You can get away with a few more weeks of looking. Maybe they’ll hire you over there.” I jerked my chin at the palace.

Sawny laughed. “Sure. And her Imperial Highness Queen Runa will take a liking to me and set me up with an estate of my own. Come on, Vi. The palace would never hire a temple foundling. Those jobs are passed through families, like heirlooms.”

I wished there was a way to argue with him, but he was right. Folks like us had to claw our way up to the bottom of the heap, and dreaming of anything else was setting ourselves up for failure.

Us temple brats worked long, hard hours to build the temple’s wealth and power with no praise, no pay and little enough reward, apart from the barest necessities to keep us alive. Meanwhile, the anchorites draped themselves in the pearls I harvested from the cold waters of the bay and wore silks and furs tithed to the temple. But even their indulgence was nothing compared to the Suzerain, the twins who led the religious order of Alskad. Their power was nearly equal to the Queen’s, and it didn’t take an overly observant soul to see the greed and corruption that colored their every move, like the silver threads that embroidered their robes.

Because of this, Sawny and I had our own brand of morality. It was fine for him to steal food from the temple kitchens because they were charged with our care, and we were always hungry. I wasn’t above swiping the occasional crab that wandered by the oyster beds during my summer dives, and in the winter, when I worked in the canneries, few days passed when I didn’t pocket a tin of smoked whitefish or pickled eel. I surely didn’t feel an ounce of guilt over taking a bit of that work back for myself. None of us did.

Sawny and I took our petty crimes a bit further than most temple brats, though. While most of them stopped at stealing from anyone beyond the temple, we’d no problem with nicking baubles and the odd tvilling off the rich folks who swanned around wearing furs and jewels and waving handfuls of drott and ovstri at poor folks, like the fact that they’d money to spend somehow made them special. We were smart about it, and the likelihood we’d get caught was so slim that the benefits always outweighed the risks.

But I’d gone even further than that over the past few years. The way I’d built my own little store of stolen wealth was too dangerous, so far beyond the line, that even knowing about it would put Sawny at risk. I couldn’t tell him. But I could hint—especially if it convinced him to stay, at least until my birthday.

“I’ll be of age soon. We could go north, the three of us. I can dive and fish—the two of you could work on some noble’s estate. We’d find a way to make it work.”

Sawny took the chunk of bread from me, broke it in two and smeared both sides thickly with birch syrup butter from a crock in his knapsack. He handed half back to me and eased himself back onto his elbows, chewing thoughtfully.

“Lily wants to take a contract in Ilor.”

I sucked in a breath, not wanting to believe it could be true. Ilor was a wild, barely settled island colony, but there was work to be had, and no shortage of it. The estate owners and the temple’s land managers there were desperate enough for labor that they’d pay ship captains to bring willing folks from Alskad. All Lily and Sawny had to do was walk onto a sunship.

A part of me knew this had been coming. Lily’d talked about leaving Alskad since we were brats. Their parents were dead, and they’d no family left in Penby. What family they did have had immigrated to Ilor before they were born, hoping for a better life, more opportunities. It made sense that Lily had always seen their future on those hot, jungle islands.

“You can’t actually be considering it. Haven’t you heard the rumors? Just yesterday a news hawker was lighting up the square with a story about an estate burned to the ground by some kind of rebel group.”

Sawny laughed. “And last week I heard one of them say that Queen Runa had taken an amalgam lover. Come on, Vi. You know better than to believe everything you hear.”

“There’s no such thing as amalgams, you oaf.”

“You grew up with the stories, same as me.”

The amalgam were the stuff of childhood horror stories, meant to scare children into good behavior. Twins who’d become one in the womb, they were said to have magic that let them see the future and control the minds of other people. They were supposed to be more ferocious, more bloodthirsty than even the diminished, willing to do anything to gain power and influence. Legends said they thrived on fear and power, like most monsters. I’d never believed they were real. If they were, they would’ve ended up under the temple’s watchful eye, like every other threat.

Like me.

I made a face at him. “Stop trying to distract me. There’s got to be something for you here. Surely you don’t have to cross the whole damn ocean to find work.”

“It’s only a few years, Vi. We’ll work hard and save our pay, and when the contract’s over, we can start a new life. Maybe I’ll open a bakery. Hamil’s teeth, you could even come over with us.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be an idiot. No captain would ever let a dimmy onto a ship planning to cross the Tethys, Hamil’s blessing or no.”

“You don’t know that.”

I tore a piece of bread off my chunk of the loaf and rolled it between my fingers, considering, before popping it into my mouth. The sticky butter clung to my fingers, and I licked each one, unwilling to waste even a ghost of sweetness and glad for a moment to think through what I’d say next.

“The only work you’ll get is on a kaffe farm.”

Sawny pushed a hank of black hair behind his ear and nodded. “We know.”

“It’s hard work. Backbreaking, and there’s no law there. None to speak of, at least. Nothing to protect you if something goes wrong.”

“Fair point,” Sawny said. “But since when did laws ever do any good to protect folks like you and me? The work’ll be hard, sure. Harder than anything we’ve had to do here.”

“Maybe not harder than enduring Anchorite Bethea’s worship seminars.”

Sawny’s laugh burst out of his chest, shattering the stillness of the night.

“No,” he said. “Not harder than those. But there’s no other option, Vi. And once we pay off our passage, we’ll earn a wage. Can you imagine?”

I could imagine. I’d spent hours thinking about the day I’d be free of the temple and earning my own living. Free to live what was left of my life happy, or as close to it as I could manage with the threat of inevitable, violent grief looming over me. For a moment, my mind slipped away from thoughts of that life and pondered the path our friend Curlin had chosen. She’d—Magritte’s teeth, it made me so mad!—gone and joined the Shriven. Broken every promise we’d ever made to each other and to Sawny.

That was the only other option for Sawny and Lily. It’d keep them safe and fed and earn them a kind of respect none of us could ever hope to gain on our own. We all knew it, but—unlike Curlin—we respected the promise we’d made each other, and we wouldn’t break it. Not even if it was the only sure way to keep us together. It wasn’t worth what we’d have to become.

I didn’t need to say it. I could tell Sawny was thinking the same thing.