Page 1 of The Heart Trials

I

Dependence

1

Dressing is a ritual.

The ash-colored, itchy fabric slips over my head and falls past my knobby knees. There are no buttons or fine threads or shape. The robes we wear in the districts feel like a sack for potatoes sewn into something we could put our arms into.

A horn blows outside. A warning.

I hurry, stuffing my feet in the issued shoes and bunching up my toes to get my heel inside. The cold earth chills the pads of my feet through the worn soles. I remove my silver chain with razor-thin barbs from its box, the second layer of my lowborn attire, and clamp it at the corners of my mouth. My eyes water at the pain. I blink once and the hurt fades into me, not away, but simmering beneath my skin like an ember of a fire that’s always there.

My drab, dusty-brown hair—the same color as my dress, the floors of our hovel, the shoddy walls of this entire district—is tied into a low bun at the nape of my neck.

A thin blade is hidden inside it.

Last are my gloves. My protection. They slide with ease up my storm-washed pale skin—salt-bleached and wind stung. The soft, dark lining is cool against my arms. For a moment it’s gentle. Then, my fingertips tingle and a chill spreads over my hands beneath the fabric, dulling my touch, steeling something fragile inside me.

Touch is a gateway to love.

Expressions of love are forbidden here.

I grab my pouch of gold. It’s full of every gleaming circle I’ve earned smuggling since last solstice, when I got the idea to give up making a life on this wretched island and run.

I’ll march to the docks where trade ships rush into port each morning as consistent as the sun, find one of the northern captains with colorful clothes and a warm smile who smells like salt and sea, like freedom, and buy passage out of here. If I can convince them to help me escape, I can go north. I don’t know what’s beyond the Citadel’s ships that patrol our waters. No one does. No one leaves the island. But I’ll take my chances. Anywhere but here.

The others in my orphanage left for the census earlier this morning. With the crowds piled into the square, waiting in long lines for every family called forward, I should have just enough time to sneak to the docks. I open the food tin but find only a ripped piece of stale bread. Tonight, I’ll have some good news to share with Serafina even if the ration truck doesn’t come again today.

I step outside of the orphanage, pocket weighed down, hoping all I’ve saved is enough. I don’t know how much it takes to bribe a ship captain. I don’t know how much it costs to convince people to do a good thing. But I’m betting six months of savings has to buy me something.

The shoremen, dockers, warehouse workers, and merchants who usually wander the early-morning sandy streets of the Saltblood district are nowhere to be found. Even Sleepy Stu, who is always passed out at the bottom of our building’s stairs, is gone. His piss-stained blanket is still there. The only sounds are waves gnawing at the shore in the distance and the groaning of wood against the wind as if it’s on the verge of collapse here too.

The faint creak of rusted metal stairs bites the air as a bound stack of the week’s pamphlets are tossed at my feet—the words Census Day are written in big, bold letters across its front.

“Hurry, we’re late!” Dorian flails his arm in greeting from the street with a hollow grin. He’s always doing odd jobs outside of our couriering duties, and not always for extra coin. He’s a model lowborn citizen, a dutiful Saltblood. Nothing like me. I do only what I must to survive.

The last time I saw Dorian Marsh, he asked me to marry him. The only time the gloves and chains are allowed to come off—the only time lowborns are allowed to touch skin to skin—is to make children. An unceremonious event, organized and overseen by an audience of Mercyenforcers. His chestnut-brown hair was windblown that day, stringy around his eyes. He smelled like smoke and oil from helping out at the driftwood fires. I never forget a smell or the look in someone’s eyes.

Dorian was serious. He wanted me to agree to be his bedmate—make children with him by law, which means marry—abandon the orphanage, move into a mothers’ tenement, have children. I hardly know him! And besides, I’m not the marrying kind.

Dorian and his mother’s tenement is a few doors down from my orphanage. His father lives in a fathers’ tenement upstream. Dorian says our fathers knew each other before mine died. That their rooms were across the breezeway from one another, as if that would make me like his proposal more. It didn’t.

When Dorian is out of sight, I kick the pamphlets aside and pad down the stairs and head downhill, away from the square. My heart races my feet through Dockers Row. Past the cluster of narrow wooden shacks on shaky stilts, stuffed between and on top of one another. Past the bread stand and tax collector’s office. Past the hull of homes, abandoned shops, and alleyways that lead to illegal touch parlors.

When I can taste the salt in the air, I know I’m close. The narrow road opens up, emptying into the harbor. Docks jut out like sharp teeth from the shore, ships bobbing in the distance. There is one with a large mast, a coiled snake across its flag in bright green, the color of the lush trees of the Grainfolk district. Another two are smaller but look formidable, their dark hulls low and fast, built for speed more than cargo. A bulky freighter tilts slightly in the tide. Its deck is cluttered with painted crates and coiled rope.

The little I know about ships, my father taught me. The gold in my pocket suddenly feels lighter. Meager. Would bribery for a spot on a smaller ship cost less?

“Saltblood, you’re required in the square.”

I freeze, my heart thundering.

The Mercyenforcer circles me in a patchwork of metal plates and leather, trimmed in Citadel silver and purple. He stops, gripping the rail, blocking my way, scanning me for compliance—my dress, my chain, my gloves.

Then, he moves closer to me.

And it feels like being choked.