CHAPTER 1
THE LAST WORDS Elly said before she disappeared were “I hate you.”
To Corin, the sentiment was nothing new. Saying “I hate you” was a universal language between sisters, and their tongues spoke it fluently.
Elly yelled it whenever Corin stomped over her chalk drawings and wiped them off the concrete. Corin hissed it whenever Elly hummed songs in the middle of her sleep and woke them up. They went to bed angry yet huddled for warmth every night. After the warplanes destroyed their homes and soldiers seized their family’s belongings, the only thing they had left was each other.
But this time was different.
This time, when Elly said “I hate you,” Corin knew she meant it.
Her sister had vanished as swiftly as any other resident come sunrise. Anyone living within the dilapidated buildings or rubble-filled streets of Gyldan knew their home wasn’t forever. There would be a few years of normalcy and routine, if their factions allowed it, before the rumbling sound of bulldozers came to tear down the walls. A century-long turf war between rivalingcountries meant constant itinerance: new military, new flags, but never any warnings for the families who lived in Gyldan. Houses were simply strategic locations to be secured, and people like Corin and Elly were just collateral damage, about as insignificant as roaches that were crushed to death if they didn’t move out of the way.
As Corin wandered through the city center in search of Elly, she could hardly imagine these same streets bustling with trade and people a century ago. Her grandparents had risked their lives seeking refuge in the prosperous kingdom surrounded by forests, but those dreams were quickly dashed when the royal family abandoned its people, leaving an ungoverned country to descend into chaos. Warring groups divided into territories, and with soldiers patrolling the borders, Corin knew Elly couldn’t have left their faction.
She pasted posters with her sister’s likeness around soup kitchens, town squares, even shops that had closed their shutters, like the burning bakery she had looted for bread after the last round of warplanes came. Her stomach rumbled with hunger by the time she circled back to the marketplace, a deserted area with ramshackle storefronts and stragglers sorting through trash. She approached a few of them to ask if they had seen the girl on her poster, but their eyes glazed over the image, or they muttered a noncommittal response, or they cursed her out, which always resulted in her cursing them back.
Mostly, though, Corin was ignored, like another body rotting on the street.
Her appearance probably didn’t help. Hunger had whittled her limbs to bones and hollowed her cheeks. Swaths of crow-black hair stuck to fresh bruises across her face. Tattered pants and rippedsleeves revealed grime and mud, the stains blending with her dark skin and old scabs. At eighteen years old, she already looked dead.
Corin nailed her last poster onto a wooden pole and took a step back, examining her work. She had recreated Elly’s face in charcoal with all the details she remembered. Every freckle on her dark skin, every birthmark on her long limbs. Her short, choppy hair, which always curled behind her ears. She had a small, rounded nose and wide cheekbones, two large pools of eyes the color of summer soil after it rained. While Corin inherited their father’s broad shoulders and strong nose, Elly carried their mother’s features, soft and feminine like a black-eyed daisy.
The longer Corin stared, the more she hated the drawing. The sketches were too crude and badly smudged. They looked like Elly but couldn’t capture her. They didn’t show what it felt like to hold her hand, to feel the stickiness of her palms from all the times she broke dandelion stems and marveled at their white milk. They didn’t show the light in her eyes whenever she heard a new story, the cuts on her fingers from plucking weeds in the cracks of sidewalks, the dirt under her nails from digging into soil and shouting that there was another world underneath that they couldn’t see.
“She’s still asleep down there,” Elly would insist in rushed breaths, “the princess from long ago—”
Corin shook her head, dispelling her sister’s foolish enthusiasm for fairy tales. Even at the age of twelve, Elly still latched onto bedtime stories she’d heard as a child when they had lived with other artisans. Corin thought leaving the commune last year would, at least, let Elly outgrow childish interests and forget their friends. In the end, it was only Corin who wanted to forget them.
Before she dwelled longer, the sound of footsteps approaching made her reach for her belt. She turned to flash a dagger at thestranger’s throat, then pulled back as the elderly woman before her gasped.
“I’m sorry,” the stranger stammered, her voice frail and light. “I wanted to see your poster.”
Deep wrinkles etched the woman’s face like a crumpled plant. She wore a faded shawl that thinned above her wrists, showing a wedding ring that glinted from her finger. Corin handed her the crinkled paper and watched the woman squint at the drawing of Elly. Her lashes nearly brushed against the charcoal as her face pressed closer to the parchment. White clouds that surrounded her pupils shifted, her eyes straining to scan every detail.
“The shading on the girl’s face is excellent,” the woman murmured. “You’re very talented.”
Corin counted her breaths to keep from cursing at the stranger. She felt foolish for hoping Elly would be recognized, and angrier that the woman would waste her time by prattling compliments. She was not here to show off her technical skills in some pitiful act of panhandling. But why would anyone care? Even if people knew Elly had been missing for a full day, they would assume she was simply another street rat who faced the early mercy of death.
But Elly wasn’t dead. Corin knew this, because there was no body. She had checked the usual places her sister loitered: the soup kitchens filled with lines of gaunt figures, the root cellars they hid to shelter from rain, even the riverfront where their old friends had built their commune, a now-destroyed home that Corin swore she would never return to again.
No, it wasn’t that Elly was dead. It was that she was nowhere to be found. As if she had disappeared into thin air.
“You remind me of the artists that lived by the river,” thewoman observed. “People only remember the insurrection, but before then, I used to see them paint and build. Tragic, really, what happened to them.”
Corin steeled herself to shut out the sound of bullets, the smell of burnt flesh, the muffled scream that burned in her throat whenever she imagined that day. It had been a year, and still the scene came to her in nightmares and woke her in sweat and tears. There was no point in picturing how even the autumn leaves died that night, crumpled like the bodies strewn over the debris. She had not been there, after all. She needed to focus on the opportunities in front of her, here and now.
“Are you an artist?” Corin asked.
“Yes. But it’s difficult now, as you can see.” The woman’s disfigured hand gestured to her cloudy eyes. “My husband used to describe a scene to me and I would draw it. Before he died, we drew so much together.”
Corin imagined the woman and her husband, hunched over an easel, splatters of paint dripping over the canvas edges. Their voices were soft murmurs, an echo of her own parents’.See this, Corin?Her mother’s hand steadying Corin’s fingers over a brush. A round smear of orange paint, bright like apricot, messy like juice.You just made the sun.
“My parents were artists too,” Corin said. “My mother was a painter. She taught me everything.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. And your father?”
“A sculptor. He liked making pots, the tiny ones you grow plants from. I’m better with a brush, though, so sometimes I’d paint them after he finished.”
