Daughters of Steel, page 1
Dedication
To every little girl who dreams of a better world
Don’t wait for a hero
Be one
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One: Sisters
Chapter Two: Halan
Chapter Three: Nalah
Chapter Four: Sisters
Chapter Five: Halan
Chapter Six: Nalah
Chapter Seven: Halan
Chapter Eight: Nalah
Chapter Nine: Halan
Chapter Ten: Nalah
Chapter Eleven: Halan
Chapter Twelve: Nalah
Chapter Thirteen: Halan
Chapter Fourteen: Nalah
Chapter Fifteen: Halan
Chapter Sixteen: Nalah
Chapter Seventeen: Sisters
Chapter Eighteen: Sisters
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Naomi Cyprus
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Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Sisters
When all the fires go out, the dust will rise:
A cloud of hate and bleeding lies.
The choice is left to balance, love and trust:
A parasite or sister? Door or dust?
From The Rubaiyat of the Sands, attributed to the prophet Cyrus and said to foretell the future
Cobalt, the glass falcon, spun and glittered in the air above the royal palace of the Magi Kingdom. He spread his wings, his feathers chiming against each other as he soared on the hot currents that rose from the sunbaked bricks of the Magi City and the endless Sand Sea.
As he circled, he could see the haze-shrouded deserts around the city, the far-off patches of green around the Delta Lake, and the cold black peaks of the Talon Mountains looming in the distance.
Below him, peals of laughter echoed between the high walls of the palace, and Cobalt tipped his wings and swung down toward them. On a terrace high above the city, among the peach trees and tall trellises covered with flowering peonies, two almost identical figures were sitting in the speckled shadow of a cypress tree, their heads and feet bare and their shoulders shaking with stifled laughter. They were playing a game they’d grown to love over the past few weeks, a very special kind of guessing game. They’d realized, after they met, that they had the ability to communicate through their thoughts, a benefit of their special bond. They’d quickly gotten used to using it, sending each other messages even when they were in the same room. Now, Halan was concentrating on sending Nalah an image of Lord Helavi in his yellow robes, transforming into a cheeping little chick, pecking at the ground.
Nalah must have received it, because she was consumed in a fit of giggles.
“Oh, poor Lord Helavi,” snorted Queen Halan Ali, Ruler of the Magi Kingdom. “I gave him enough trouble when he was trying to teach just me, and now there are two of us!”
“It’s a promotion, at least,” said Nalah Bardak, Halan’s twin and the Queen’s Sword, cupping her chin in her hands. “Not many Thauma lords get to go from royal tutor to chief vizier in the space of a day.”
“No, but in some ways I think he was happier as a teacher,” Halan said. “He could hide up in the tower with his books for days without being bothered. But now—” She broke off with a yelp as something smooth and solid landed on her foot, its tiny jaws closing gently on one of her toes.
“Oh, it’s just you, Chestnut!” Halan said, and reached down to scoop up the little wooden kitten. “I thought you were a scorpion or something.” He was warm from lying in the sun, and he immediately pressed himself against her throat and began to purr in his strange, creaking way.
“Someone’s happy to be out of storage!” Nalah said, reaching over to stroke the top of the kitten’s head.
Halan put Chestnut down in her lap, and he trod the purple silks down with his paws before curling up in the folds of her dress. She’d received him as a gift at one of the great showing-off banquets where the Thauma lords used to present their best work to her mother and father—
She stopped herself and put a steadying hand on Chestnut’s small, polished body.
Actually, the Thauma had brought their goods to Asa Tam, the last king—the man she had thought was her father.
That banquet seemed so long ago now. A lifetime away. So much had changed in only two months.
Now I know there’s a whole other world, just on the other side of the mirror.
Asa has been banished, I’m the queen, and I have a sister. . . .
She scooped Chestnut from her own lap and put him down in Nalah’s. The girl wasn’t really her sister—she was her tawam, her mirror-self. While Halan had been raised a princess in the Magi Kingdom, in the world on the other side of the mirror, Nalah had been a pauper. Halan lived in a land of powerful magic, but didn’t have a magic bone in her body; meanwhile, the extent of Nalah’s amazing powers had yet to be seen. After traveling to the Magi Kingdom, Nalah had discovered that she was a Fifth Clan Thauma, the kind of wonder worker who came around only once in a generation.
They were opposites, and yet they were exactly the same. Both of them had had everything and nothing. And now they had each other. In the weeks since Halan had taken the throne, she and Nalah had been almost inseparable. Whenever Halan wasn’t dealing with the trappings of being a queen, she and Nalah would steal away to explore the palace, visit Ester in the laundry to gossip, and occasionally take a couple of horses down to the market to check out the newest Thauma items the vendors had to offer. The more time they spent together, the closer they became—they were fascinated by their differences and delighted by their similarities. It was strange and wonderful, and Halan could no longer imagine a world without Nalah in it.
Nalah cradled the kitten to her chest and grinned with delight. “How was he made?” she asked. “Was he carved all in one piece? Or did his maker put him together out of parts? How did they bring him to life?” She held Chestnut up in front of her and examined his belly. He stuck out a dark wooden tongue at her and blinked.
Halan stared up at the branches of the cypress tree, watching a bird flit between the leaves. “I remember the lesson,” she said, frowning. “It was something about blood. The blood of the maker can infuse a craft with life.”
“Blood . . . ,” Nalah said, and looked up into the sky, where the glass falcon was still swooping and circling, like an indecisive shooting star. Then she looked down at her hands. Halan noticed that Nalah’s hands weren’t quite like her own: they were the same brown color and shape, but they were lightly scarred and callused from handling molten glass. Halan’s hands were unmistakably those of royalty: clean and soft and smelling faintly of sandalwood and jasmine.
“When I made Cobalt, back in New Hadar, he wasn’t alive,” Nalah said slowly. “But he did crack in my hands. The cracked glass must have cut me, and he was infused with my blood then.”
Halan nodded. “Lord Helavi said that as long as the maker lives, it’ll draw power from them. I remember a story about an ancient Thauma who carved a whole wooden menagerie, but it made her so weak she could never work again.”
Nalah shot her a shrewd grin. “I thought you said you never listened to any of Lord Helavi’s lessons.”
Halan elbowed her, but gently. “Perhaps I listened more than I let on. Anyway, it’s good that I did. I’m not just the princess anymore, I’m the queen. If I can’t make any Thauma crafts myself, I at least need to understand how my subjects do it.”
She tweaked one of the ropes of gold and amethyst that hung around her neck. Chestnut leaped out of Nalah’s hands and pounced onto a trailing golden tassel.
“Woodworking’s still a bit of a mystery to me.” Nalah sighed.
“Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” Halan said, getting to her feet and stretching. Chestnut danced around her feet, chasing the tassel as it dangled just out of his reach.
“Is it?” Nalah said. “I thought you were hiding from Lord Helavi and his accounts book.”
“How dare you?” Halan said, planting her hands on her hips and faking shock. “A queen would never try to get out of a lecture about cumulative interest loans. And anyway, don’t change the subject. We came out here to practice your woodwork. Come on.” She reached out and pulled Nalah to her feet.
Nalah got up and turned to look at the huge cypress tree, her shoulders drooping.
“You were the one who said you wanted to try it,” Halan reminded her again, stepping back. “You can do it—I’m sure you can!”
“I’ll do something,” Nalah muttered. “I’m just not sure what.”
“All the more reason to try it out while we’re alone—and on wood that’s still planted in the ground. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Nalah didn’t reply, and Halan wished she hadn’t said that.
The truth was, being a powerful Fifth Clan Thauma was . . . complicated. Halan had spent many nights as a child dreaming of what it would be like to be a Thauma. Any clan would do—wood, glass, metal, fabric—as long as she had the power to create something. When she first found out about Nalah’s ability to create with all four elements, she envied her so deeply that it hurt. But after seeing how unpredictable those powers were, and how they brought her such suffering, Halan felt only the desire to help her sister.
Halan sat down on the low wall that encircled the garden, her back to the steep drop down into the city, a light breeze st
“Go on,” she urged. “Don’t be afraid.”
Nalah stepped up to the cypress tree and gingerly put her hands up to touch it. The trunk was as wide as four adults, and in the shade of its far-reaching branches she almost felt cold, despite the beating sun just a few steps away.
She glanced back at her tawam and immediately felt steadied. Having Halan there was almost like having an external brain: someone who would always listen, even if they couldn’t really understand. It was nice not to feel alone. And as the only living Fifth Clan Thauma, she felt alone a lot. Especially since the battle with Tam in the courtyard on that beautiful, terrible day two months ago.
As soon as she had picked up the Sword of the Fifth Clan, in the midst of that chaos, everything had gone quiet. In that moment, she’d felt a deep, strange connection to the whole world, and she knew, without a doubt, what she was meant to do. She spoke with the voice of the earth and commanded the very winds to banish Tam and his cronies from the kingdom.
And it felt awesome.
But it was as if a dam within her had been opened that day, and now there was no way to close it. And the ensuing flood—of power and strength and emotion—threatened daily to consume her.
When she lived in New Hadar, her power sometimes exploded out of her when she was frightened or upset, but most of the time she was just an ordinary Thauma. Now steering her power was harder than ever, and she felt more and more like a tiny boat, tossed and beaten on a stormy sea of her own making.
I wish Papa were here. The thought came out of habit, but every time it did, it still took her breath away. Not now, she told herself. You have to concentrate. If she let those feelings overwhelm her, grief and magic would tangle up with each other and come out as a painful mess that did nobody any good.
While she was in the palace, she had to be the Queen’s Sword. For two months, she’d been learning to swordfight with Soren and getting daily history and thaumaturgy lessons from Lord Helavi’s assistant, Lady Nadia. She’d participated in a handful of formal ceremonies, standing next to Halan’s throne while she made pronouncements to the people of the kingdom. Most of the time, she felt excited and proud of what she was doing. But then there were moments, when she was alone in her chambers, when she was filled with doubt.
In those moments, in the darkest part of her mind, she began to wonder if Tam had been right. If all this power had been given to the wrong girl. Because if she were truly the hero that Fifth Clan Thaumas were supposed to be, why couldn’t she control her powers? Why did everything always go wrong?
When those thoughts filled her mind, Nalah longed for her father. He always knew the right thing to say to make her feel better. She missed him terribly, but she tried to put on a good face for Halan. Her sister already carried the burden of knowing that Tam—the father she’d defended until he betrayed her—was the one who killed Nalah’s papa. Nalah didn’t want to be a constant reminder of that pain. She didn’t hide much from her tawam, but she hid that.
Maybe later on, she could go down to the Astodan, the tombs where Amir Bardak’s bones had been interred with the greatest honors and ceremonies the Magi Kingdom had to offer. Then, and only then, surrounded by nothing and no one except stones and the dead, she might allow herself to cry.
For now, she needed to continue to work at controlling her power. Taking a deep breath, she concentrated on the cypress tree. She felt the rough bark on her fingertips and, beyond that, the sap of life pulsing through it. She sensed the way it moved all the time, growing and swaying in the changing winds. She smelled its spicy, velvety scent and allowed the whole of its being to fill her until she felt as if she and the tree were one.
Nalah hadn’t been trained to work with wood—like her father, she was a glassworker. She’d learned to use tools and magical materials to create glass Thauma objects. But as a Fifth Clan Thauma, she could create those things just with her touch. And not just glass, but wood, fabric, metal—all four of the elements. But just because she could do it didn’t mean she could do it well. Too often, her attempts blew up in her face. That’s why she had to practice. She had something in mind for the cypress tree, something she’d been wondering ever since she’d first held a piece of wood in this world and felt the life of the tree pulsing through it. She’d made little things out of pieces of wood, but she hadn’t heard of anyone manipulating wood that was still alive. What would happen? she wondered, a little thrill passing through her body.
She was about to find out.
Her heart was beating strong and steady. Nalah closed her eyes and visualized the garden she was standing in—its beautifully symmetrical paths and shady trellises, and the water that was constantly pulled from a deep well to trickle between the flowerbeds. She held the image in her mind, and then she changed it. Instead of the cypress tree in the center, there was a beautiful wooden gazebo. It was eight-sided, with elegant supports crisscrossing as they rose toward a roof of deep green leaves.
Trunk and stem, she whispered, and her voice sounded like the creaking of ancient branches in the deep forest, shelter and shadow, open for me.
A burst of exhilaration made Nalah dizzy, but she managed to control herself, focusing only on the flow of magic through her palms. Her hands moved apart as the trunk of the tree split, unwinding and spreading out around her. It felt almost as if the tree had wanted this all along—that it had been growing here all these years because it knew that one day Nalah would come along and help it transform into something more than a tree.
Soon she was standing with her hands out to her sides, still touching the bark that had been in front of her. She opened her eyes slowly and found herself staring into a green space, floored with twisting roots, with a leafy canopy above. Eight open archways faced the sunshine, perfectly framing a magnificent view of the palace’s towers rising into the sky.
“Nalah,” Halan breathed behind her. “It’s amazing!”
Nalah allowed herself a moment of triumph, a moment of pure joy, and then—there was movement on the path between one of the arches, and a voice:
“Your Majesty! Where are you?”
Nalah twitched. Someone’s coming! She sent the thought out through the air to Halan, who received it immediately and met Nalah’s eyes.
It’s all right, Halan thought back. I’ll deal with it—just focus on the tree!
But Nalah was already shaken, wondering what the newcomer might think, worried that she would lose control and ruin everything. Her pulse quickened, and the tree trembled as if it were an extension of Nalah herself. The archways twisted. A shower of leaves fell around her, and Nalah tore her palms away from the trunks and stumbled back, staring up at the cypress tree. Instead of a graceful conical roof over the gazebo, its upper branches were standing out stiff and straight, like the prickles of a frightened hedgehog.
“Oh,” said Halan softly.
“Queen Halan, there you are. I have been looking for you— Good gracious! Nalah, what on earth have you done?”
The voice belonged, of course, to Lord Helavi. He came striding down the path, his faded yellow robe fluttering around his ankles. He blinked at Halan and Nalah, and then up at the tree, trying to understand exactly what he was seeing. There was another man with him—the head gardener, Nalah realized with a sinking feeling—and he was standing with his hands clasped over his head, as if he were afraid it might fall off.
“My lady,” the gardener gasped. “That tree was hundreds of years old! It survived the Year of Storms! Now it’s a—a—” He stammered, at a loss for words.
Nalah wrapped her arms around herself and clasped her elbows. Power quivered through her, cut off suddenly with nowhere to go. It was just as she’d feared it would be.
She opened her mouth to apologize to the gardener, but Halan stepped up to her side and linked her arm through Nalah’s.
“Master Rumiya, you will not speak to the Queen’s Sword so rudely,” she said in her most stern and regal voice. Softening, she added, “The tree is still very much alive. In fact, you now have eight of the oldest trees in the Kingdom, where you used to have only one. As well as a lovely sitting area for visitors. Many things have changed around here lately—all for the better, I should think—so just consider this tree another one of our recent improvements.”
