Girls of Storm and Shadow (Girls of Paper and Fire, #2)(13)
Lord Ketai promises me that you will be returning to the palace within two months or so, once your mission is over. I am already counting the days. Until then, burn bright, my brave daughter.
Love, now and always,
Your Baba
Laughter erupts around the fire, but I feel worlds away. I read the letter again, but soon my eyes are too wet, my shaking fingers making the paper tremble, the words a blurred mess, so instead I clutch it to my heart. Tears spill down my cheeks. I breathe slow and deep, feeling strength coursing through me from Baba’s words, an overwhelming rush of hope and sadness, of happiness and love.
“Now and always,” I whisper thickly, the words a promise.
The last time I saw my father was at the Moon Ball. Tien and Baba and I had clung to one another and cried, before the guards pried us apart. The briefest of reunions, after dreaming about that very moment for months.
More roars of laughter jolt me back to reality. I fold the letter up carefully, placing the small square into the breast pocket of my wrap shirt. Then, sniffing, I scrub my eyes, trying to compose myself as Nitta hands me a bottle of plum wine with a kind smile. The liquid burns as it goes down. It merges with the warmth that filled me at Baba’s words, and in the pit of my belly, something hot and fierce stirs.
Burn bright, my brave daughter.
My eyes pass over the group. Bo’s right. We’re a strange mix. But Ketai Hanno seems so confident we’re the right group, and two times now in my life I’ve made families out of people others might never have put together—once with my father and Tien, then at the King’s Hidden Palace with my fellow Paper Girls. I know that sometimes the combination least expected can forge the strongest bonds.
Just then, Wren and Hiro return from outside. Wren comes straight to me, shrugging off her coat and shaking out her long hair, flakes of snow caught in the wet tangles. “Please say there’s food left,” she sighs tiredly, rubbing her hands together in front of the flames. “The whole time we were setting the dao I was worrying the siblings would have eaten everything by now.”
“Bo tried,” I reply. “But Nitta was kind enough to save you and Hiro some. Here.”
I hand her a banana leaf piled with roasted goat flesh, still deliciously fragrant. Wren takes it gratefully. After a glance over to where her father is deep in conversation with Caen, the two of them half-turned from the fire, their heads tilted together, she dips in quick to press a wind-frozen kiss to my lips. “I love you, Lei,” she whispers, her brown eyes sparkling and beautiful, despite the deep circles beneath. “I know my father can be… I know what he can come across like. But he wants to bring down the King’s court just as much as we do. So I trust him when he says this is the plan that will do it.” Checking over her shoulder once more, she grabs my fingers, squeezing hard. “I need to know that you believe so, too.”
My own father’s letter seems to glow with heat where I hid it. And again, in the depths of my gut: heat. Burning embers. Not just from the alcohol, but from the thought of the King. Of what he did to us, and what we did to him—and what we are going to do to the rest of his legacy, to all remnants of his rule.
“I do,” I tell Wren, and I mean it.
Wren and I might not be Paper Girls anymore, but we are still capable of creating fire.
And now we have a whole world to set ablaze.
FIVE
NAJA
IN THE HIDDEN PALACE, THE WHITE fox was dreaming.
She stirred, restless, her furred face scrunched while the storm rolled outside her private quarters in the Inner Courts, beyond the embroidered rugs and the meticulously cataloged collection of butterflies on the wood-paneled walls, which hung also with delicate batik paintings by a famous artist who came from the faraway province she was dreaming about.
Xienzo.
She never spoke of it—never even let herself think of it—during the daytime. But her past found her when she closed her eyes, as if it had been crouched there all along, waiting for her nightly returns.
It was distorted in its dreamscape, bizarre details twisting it out of its original shape, but the general features were present. The tiered stretch of their farm, either dark and glossy from the monsoon rains or faded under the unforgiving burn of the summer sun. The rubbery feel of the tea leaves between her fingers. The ache of her back after hours working the fields or bent over shaking the plucked leaves in bamboo trays to speed up the oxidation process, the pain so deep and fierce she can still recall the quality of it: like fire on the surface of raw bones. Biri, Reikka, Chaol, Poh, and Min, her meek, brainless siblings, so different from her. And, of course, her parents, rice-wine-addled and gods-blinded, obsessively reading her fortune in everything they could, from the shape of clouds to the scattered patterns of petals in the wind; from the type of birds that landed in their daughter’s path to the voices that whispered to them as they oversaw their children’s work, never without a drink in hand. Voices they claimed belonged to the gods themselves.
As if the gods would waste their precious breath on the likes of them.
Tonight, Naja was back in her family’s cottage. In real life, it had reeked of mangy fur and old tea and alcohol fumes. In her dreaming mind, it was clean. The air smelled of dust and endings. She moved through the bare space as voices eddied around her.
born under the three archer stars
with her tail curled, remember what the diviner said that meant