Page 39 of Queen of Nothing

The door clicks softly behind me before I tackle the creaky steps one at a time.

Down one landing, and it’s like stepping out of a quiet bubble and into a chaotic one.

The house is claustrophobic at the best of times. But rush hours—breakfast, lunch, dinner—has the thinnest air and the slowest, most clogged traffic down the staircases.

It’s also the best time to sneak out to the garden unnoticed.

My face twists with the annoyance as I side-step along the wall, avoiding the staggering manure-smelling workers from the goat enclosure. I guess the goat enclosure because they don’t have chicken feathers clinging to their clothes as they push by in their rush to the upstairs bathroom.

Sofía is insistent on everyone being clean for dinner.

But between the runaways returning from gruelling physical labour—that I consider to be more along the lines of slave labour than paying off shield debts—and the ones now getting up to start their night shifts, it’s a good few minutes before I’m even on the ground floor.

I slip outside, and the fresh air floods my lungs.

The sky is brushstrokes of pinks and purples above me as I rush across the dirt, out of the lights that glare from the house, and down to the private garden.

The gate squeaks against its hinges—but the noise of dinner and the runaways clogging the halls and stairways masks it.

I haste downhill, following the trail until I’m out of sight, and I’m surrounded by shrub.

It’s dark this far down.

I don’t risk using a torch.

All I have right now is the fading sunset on the horizon, hardly there anymore, and the moon that’s starting to rise.

I drop onto my knees and roll up the sleeves of my sweater—the same sweater I wore in the chilly hours of Bluestone.

I force that out of my mind.

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

Sofía’s warning is what I hold onto, a way to trick my mind out of memories, and I just repeat her words over and over in my head.

With my bare hands and nails that were once manicured, I reach under the roots of the apple tree, and I start to dig.

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

I hum the tune of the words in my head.

A song that grounds me with each wrenching handful of dirt out from under the exposed roots.

A memory tries to intrude.

The ritual on the mornings of the New Year. Digging up the earth by hand with my family, pouring my blood into the soil, a bagged sacrifice that I convince myself is just an animal…

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

But it’s the plea I make to the gods that snakes into my mind, stubborn.

‘I offer no blood, because it is unworthy.’

But what is unworthy about deadblood, blood that should still contain the gods’ magic, blood that should reflect the night sky?

The three extra phials of blood in Witchdoctor Dolios’s briefcase burrow deep into my brain—three extra phials that did not come from me.

The whisperings between Mother and Father, of bribing witchdoctors and a dreadful truth realised with blood tests.