The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Read Free Book Online

element banished. And for a few days the girls would slip out early, whispering in the hall and returning only when the sun was setting to lock themselves together in Siski’s room. But irrepressibly the laughter would burst from her balcony and soon it would spread through the house again, into all the corners. Once she dashed upstairs and shouted as she passed my room, “We’re eating out on the terrace, I must put on my shawl.”
    Whirling past my door again with the shawl about her shoulders she paused, the black and scarlet fringes settling slowly against her dress. “Don’t you want to come outside?” she said. “They could bring you in a chair.”
    “No,” I said.
    She did not move, she stood by the door.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing,” I said.
    She stood there for a moment. Then she said: “Then why won’t you look at me?”
    I told her that I was tired and when I glanced at the door again she was not there, she had slipped away without making a sound. And I felt my bandages under the blanket and struggled to sit up. I’d work, then pause, holding my position, propped on trembling arms. Work, then pause. Work, then pause. Thinking of the last time I’d seen her, five years before, when our happiness had shattered. Her horse, the beautiful Tuik, had died. Siski mourned through the corridors, knot-haired like a bereaved woman in a song. We all supposed she’d get over it, it was terrible, of course, but after all not the end of the world, everybody said. I remember the intense darkness of the house that autumn, the way the halls seemed to lengthen when you stepped in with a candle. I didn’t like to go up the stairs alone. Dasya was silent and morose—he too seemed wounded by the death of Tuik. And I was outside, subtly abandoned, too young for them, for the first time. On the day of the first snow they went out alone. No one knew they were gone until Siski returned without our cousin, chilled and filthy and with blood upon her cheek.
    Work, then pause. Work. When I swung my legs out of the bed the pain slammed into my gut and nearly made me retch. I sat there sweating and shaking like an overworked mule but I would stand up, I was going to stand. I clasped the bedpost. I had never asked my sister what had happened that dreadful day. It seemed impossible. They bathed her and put her to bed in Mother’s room. The doctor was called and prescribed a draft of oinov. Nenya stopped me when I tried to go in: “My heart, get back, don’t you know your sister is ill?” Her eyebrows, flecked with gray, stood up like the quills of an angry goose. But what was wrong with Siski? No one would say. And when Dasya returned, very late I learned from Gastin, they dressed him in traveling clothes and sent him down to Klah-ne-Wiy in the coach.
    Work. Work. I stood up, gasping, my weight on my good leg. It is possible for the world to change in an instant. Siski needed to be alone, she needed peace and quiet, Mother said. My sister who thrived on noise. I was to go to Bain, to spend the season with Uncle Veda, who had recently been called upon to take up his role as duke, to leave his dogs and horses, his dusty carpets, the stedleihe brewery in his cellar, and go into the west. Before I left, I visited Valedhara. Uncle Veda’s former steward—now the owner of the house—met me at the door. He clung to the doorjamb with small, alert fingers; his eyes had grown very bad. “It’ s cold in here, ” he said, “since the old man left.”

    Late in the summer Siski and Kethina’s friends came from Nauve. I was walking then, I had even ridden Na Faso in the meadow, and we had heard of a slaughter in the Valley, unarmed peasants massacred on the orders of the Priest of the Stone. I had had no letter from Dasya, but I knew what he must be thinking: that this was our chance, that for the first time the Valley was divided against itself. That if the anger simmering in Kestenya could be released now, swiftly, we