Kalyna the Soothsayer

Book 0: Failures of Four Kingdoms

by Elijah Kinch Spector

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure

Synopsis

A plucky, sardonic con artist must "prophesize" her way out of peril—discovering along the way that power and politics are nothing more than stories sold as truth.
Kalyna's family has the Gift: the ability to see the future. For generations, they traveled the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia selling their services as soothsayers.
Every child of their family is born with this Gift—everyone except Kalyna.
So far, Kalyna has used informants and trickery to falsify prophecies for coin, scrounging together a living for her deteriorating father and cruel grandmother.
But Kalyna's reputation for prophecy precedes her, and poverty turns to danger when she is pressed into service by the spymaster to Rotfelsen.
Kalyna is to use her "Gift" to uncover threats against Rotfelsen's king, her family held hostage to ensure her good behavior. But politics are devious; the king's enemies abound, and Kalyna's skills for investigation and deception are tested to the limit. Worse, the conspiracy she uncovers points to a larger threat, not only to Rotfelsen but to the Tetrarchia itself.
Kalyna is determined to protect her family and newfound friends, but as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia's destruction—or if her lies will bring about its prophesized downfall.

Release date: August 9, 2022

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 464

Sample

Some of the People Who Made My Life Harder

My Family

Aljosa Vüsalavich: My father, the greatest soothsayer I have ever known. (His second name means “son of Vüsala” in Masovskani, because he was born in Masovska.)

Vüsala Mildoqiz: My grandmother, the worst person I have ever known. (Her second name means “daughter of Mildo” in Cöllüknit, because she was born in Quruscan.)

Those Who Have Their Own Armies

King Gerhold VIII: King of Rotfelsen. Quite blank in face and mind. His army: the Reds.

Queen Biruté: Wife of King Gerhold. Originally from Skydašiai. Her army: those amongst the Reds who obey only her.

Prince Friedhelm: Younger brother to King Gerhold. Seems to be a thoughtless, sybaritic prince; is both more than that and exactly that. His army: the Yellows.

High General Franz Dreher: The somewhat avuncular defender of Rotfelsen. His army: the Greens, who actually fight wars and guard the borders.

Court Philosopher Otto Vorosknecht: A dangerous fool who talks a lot. His army: the Purples.

Those I Met in Masovska

Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way: The name tells all you need to know.

Ramunas: A flamboyant legal advocate and informant, who likes to send messages by terrifying bird.

Klemens Gustavus: A very important little rich boy. Heir to a number of changing banks.

Bozena Gustavus: His slightly smarter sister, whom I heard of in Masovska.

Lenz Felsknecht: Best forgotten.

Those I Met in Rotfelsen

Tural: The Master of Fruit, and my neighbor. Eccentric, but nice.

Jördis Jagloben: Chief Ethicist, and my neighbor. Perhaps also nice?

Vondel: Tenth Butler to High General Dreher. A real stickler for etiquette and tradition, but not in an overbearing way.

Gunther: The tall barkeep at the Inn of Ottilie’s Rock. Beautiful smile; supplier of starka.

Aue: A talented doctor who looks after royalty and nobility.

Gabor: Very chipper for a man who lives in a cave.

Martin-Frederick Reinhold-Bosch: A young swordsman employed by the High General. Within spitting distance of the throne. Arrogant, but pretty.

“Dugmush”: A tall and frightening soldier in the service of Prince Friedhelm. I had trouble remembering her name.

Behrens: A sharpshooter in the service of Prince Friedhelm. Quite friendly, when he isn’t looking down the barrel of his harquebus.

Alban: A brute in the service of Court Philosopher Vorosknecht.

Selvosch: The Lord High Quarrymaster. Unpleasant.

Edeltraud von Edeltraud: Mistress of the Rotfelsen Coin. A powerful and nervous noblewoman.

Andelka: An emissary from Rituo, one of the countries that make up the Bandit States. Acts as though she is very important.

Olaf: A lucky drifter.

Chasiku: A threat.

My Mother

“You killed your mother twice over, you know,” said Grandmother.

She pinched my cheek ironically and chewed on her gnarled, old pipe stem. Grandmother seemed to get more from rolling it around between her white teeth than from the scant smoke that leaked out.

I sat still in the dirt at her feet and rubbed my cheek where her thumbnail had left a deliberate indent.

“You killed her first, of course, with your birth: when you selfishly tore your way out, making your poor mother bleed so, so much.” Grandmother removed the long wooden pipe and curled her papery lips to luxuriously exhale a small amount of smoke.

I nodded slowly. I meant to show I was listening, but it looked like I agreed.

“And you killed her again two days later, when she, weakened and bloodless as she was, learned from your father’s visions that you would never possess the Gift.”

I nodded again from where I sat, looking up at Grandmother as she noisily replaced the pipe between her teeth. Her hard face, the small tattoo above her left eyebrow, peeking out from her scarf, and her thin old nostrils, full of char.

“Maybe,” I hazarded, in a squeak, “maybe she only died from the bleeding? Maybe . . . maybe I only killed Mama once?”

Grandmother looked down at me, then closed her eyes as though she need see nothing else ever again.

“Finally,” Grandmother sighed, “she admits it.”

As she sat back in her red velvet chair, unmoving, I wondered if Grandmother had died. If she had savored a last bitter happiness after I admitted the evil I’d done in this world and then, pleased with herself, expired.

If only.

Had I the Gift, I might have known better. I might have known that as I passed through the years, I would do so with Grandmother always at my back—remaining stubbornly, infuriatingly, alive and lucid.

Two of those decades later, I was twenty-seven and still sitting in the dirt at the foot of her chair, from which the velvet was all gone. Grandmother was unchanged since the day she told me I twice murdered my mother, except that her pipe was empty and unlit: she couldn’t smoke anymore, said it made her cough too much, so she spent her days chewing the cold pipe stem and spitting.

Grandmother was my father’s mother, and she cared for him above all else. Nothing ever seemed good enough for her son, and so we couldn’t understand how she had come to genuinely love and miss her daughter-in-law. But she did, fiercely.

It was to Papa that Grandmother had passed the Gift, and through him that it was meant to go to me. The Gift had been in our family for generation upon generation, through thousands of years; farther back than even Loashti nobles traced their lineages, let alone poor nomads like us. The Gift cared not for gender, legitimacy, national boundaries, nor family name, and was all that delineated our family down through the ages.

Until me.

Autumn Furs

At the end of autumn in that, my twenty-seventh year, our horse died. The following day, I untied the furs that had been stored neatly at the peaks of our tents. The soft remains of long-dead polecats, wolves, and marmots tumbled down, thick and stale, smelling like the previous winter in the kingdom of Quruscan: all cold mutton and maple and mildew. We had spent this autumn, which was now ending, on a grassy hill in the Great Field, north of the town of Gniezto, in the kingdom of Masovska.

Our goal was to keep from starving to death during the onrushing winter, just like it was every autumn. But now we were stranded with no horse, serving our few customers and building up meager winter supplies, which would mean nothing if we froze in our tents. I tried not to think of all the ways we could die before spring, nor of how we would ever afford a new horse. For now, I could only roll down the furs to keep out the cold winds.

These winds had cut through the Great Field all autumn, and would only worsen in winter, as I remembered from previous years we had spent here. At least when the snows came, we could winter among the tents crowding the Ruinous Temple. Perhaps it would have been better to go broke buying Papa a room in an inn, with four walls and a roof, but our family’s way has always been to move. Walls are traps.

In my time, we moved from place to place at a greater speed than even my ancestors had. We did so to escape reprisals, you see: sometimes long before my ruses were discovered, and sometimes fleeing angry mobs. I was, after all, lacking the Gift, and therefore an inveterate liar.

The Gift

The Gift is that of prophecy and soothsaying. Anyone possessing it can see the future, with limitations: the most important being that the better known a subject is to the bearer of the Gift, the less can be seen. Such a future is, to put it simply, blocked by the clarity of the present. This is why Papa and Grandmother couldn’t see my future, nor their own, nor each other’s, and why no one saw my mother’s death coming. This is also why a fortuneteller must make her living telling the futures of strangers, rather than making herself very rich by knowing whom to befriend, whom to kill, or where to open a changing bank. The moment any threads threaten to involve the soothsayer, she is less likely to see their ends.

This limitation can be stretched and twisted when the bearer of the Gift is near death. Papa almost died of sickness and starvation when he was looking after my mother in her final days, and it was in a fit of near-death, when his spirit was not so close to us, that he gained the distance to see that the Gift would never be mine. Knowing this, of course, killed my mother. Finally. Again.

These capricious workings of the Gift are another reason I prayed for Grandmother to finally die, as was her due. Perhaps on her deathbed she could tell us if there was any chance of the Gift skipping a generation, of my child not being hollow like its mother. However, by the time I hit my mid-twenties, she seemed to have decided the line ended with my father. Perhaps, in her old age, she once came closer to death than she ever let on, foresaw my failure, and then clawed her way back to life to continue tormenting me?

I often wonder whether the Gift is in me somewhere, and instead of being broken, I am simply too stupid to access it.

The Great Field

Masovska’s Great Field was not very great. It was less than a mile wide, and only a few miles long. In Quruscan’s minor steppes, for comparison, the grass could stretch in every direction until you got lost and spun in circles and felt as though you were drowning on a dry sunny day. I have heard that the major steppes drove travelers insane, and had oak-high grasses riddled with the corpses of birds in sizes never seen by polite civilization. The birds had, supposedly, lost their minds and their way as surely as any human traveler.

The so-called Great Field, however, was just a patch of shrubs and hills, with a sad old ruin in the middle. This Ruinous Temple had been constructed long before recorded history, from that supposedly unbreakable stone of the Ancients, before it was, somehow, torn apart. The prevailing theory was that the Ancients built the place to enact the hubristic, and ruinous, act of speaking the gods’ names out loud, thus dooming themselves. (No one ever seemed to ask how many names they got through before disaster struck.) Whatever its origin, from the Ruinous Temple you could see, and hear, the forests at the Field’s borders. I suppose the Field was considered “Great” because most of Masovska was forest: the kind where trees grow so tightly into one another that there’s no room for air or light, yet somehow giant boar and packs of wolves can slip between. The Great Field may well have been Masovska’s only field that was not human-made.

But, I suppose, to those who had seen no better, the Field could be “Great,” and in those days, it bustled with commerce right up to the edge of winter. Due to a local ordinance about A Certain Sort of Business, one could always find merchants, hucksters, prostitutes, mystics, messiahs, revolutionaries, and others who didn’t fit Masovska’s mores camping out in those shrubs and hills outside of Gniezto. The most lucrative ones formed a marketplace in the Ruinous Temple, which led to fistfights and sales wars, until winter chased away those who could afford to run.

We untrustworthy parties banished to the Great Field maintained cold cordiality with one another: businesslike, but never trusting. I have heard of fanciful thieves’ guilds—secret criminal societies buttressed by codes and mutual respect—that may or may not have existed outside of stories, but the trick of the Great Field was that everyone there felt themselves to be more legitimate than the rest. Surely one was dishonest, but he was not sacrilegious; while another was sacrilegious, but not foreign; and the foreigner could at least be sure that she was not unladylike; and the unladylike knew that she was not some disloyal dissident; and so forth. This way of looking at one’s neighbors was not conducive to respect or professional courtesy.

When winter arrived, most residents fled to more sturdy surroundings in towns and villages, where they continued to bicker, but those like us who could not afford traditional lodgings would crowd uneasily beneath huge canvases, heavy with snow, in the Ruinous Temple. I had pleasant memories of this arrangement from childhood, back when new smells, new voices, and excessive cold made things exciting. Papa told stories back then, and made it an adventure, but later I saw how close we came to having our food, clothes, and furs stolen. Not that a stable community has ever been quick to shelter my family either: few care for the survival prospects of an invalid huckster, his diminished shadow of a daughter, and his rancorous mother.

It lay upon me to keep Papa (and, I suppose, Grandmother) from starving in winter, and this year I was doing a terrible job. We did not have enough salted meat or kasha for half the season, and we could not even eat our poor horse. Yellow blight had sent the poor beast off to canter unsteadily across the sky with his twenty-legged horse god, and his meat was quite poisonous (although his hide would serve to patch up our tents). So, on the morning that I set the tent-furs, I saw a horrid bird landing on our hill, and hoped that it carried good news.

A Lammergeier

The bird was a huge, red-eyed lammergeier, with black and white streaked wings longer than I was tall, and a body the bronze of sunset. It carried a message from Ramunas, for whom a gray messenger pigeon would have been passé.

The curled parchment tied to the beast read: “GNIEZTO SQUARE, TOMORROW MORNING. FOR EIGHT-TOES. —RAMUNAS.” As though such a message could have come from anyone else. For tasks like this he had bought this terrifying bird, had it trained, barely, by handler-mages, and forced me to disengage the parchment from its gnarled, angry claws. I think the thing sneered at me as it flew away.

Ramunas was an ostentatious informant who often helped me form my false prophecies: he seemed to know everything that went on in the town of Gniezto, and the greater Gniezto Oblast that surrounded it. I had met him early during this stay in the Great Field, and his information had more than once paid for itself. Whether or not I liked him, he was effective and cheap, and always seemed to know a little more than anyone else I could afford. How such a flamboyant and theatrical man learned so many secrets was still beyond me. I had told him that even a prophet needed a bit of help and context for her visions, at times—which, in my father’s day, had been true—and Ramunas either believed me or did not care about my legitimacy.

What Ramunas had to tell me about a customer I knew as Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way, or why it needed to be said in Gniezto proper, I did not know. But a promise of decent information, even for a price, was welcome. All good news was holy, just then.

Once I was sure the flying beast was gone, I checked in on Papa and assured him that, yes, there actually had been a great bronze bird. I held his shaking, sweaty hand and kissed his red-brown brow until he went back to sleep.

Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way

When he had been able, Papa had taught me how to get by as a soothsayer on observation and generalities, which even those with the Gift must employ. I can often tell a man he will throw out his back if I see how he carries his goods, or tell a pretty young woman she has an admirer because of course she does. One with no skill, like myself, can do decent business with finesse: telling customers what is apparent, what they want to hear, and what is deeply vague. The rest is made up through theatricality, distraction, and research, such as that which comes by lammergeier.

Which brings us to Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way. Gustaw was the best sort of customer: a returning one. Fourteen years previous, our travels had brought us to the Great Field. Back then, Papa had still been the soothsayer, even as his health failed and his mind hiccoughed, and Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way had possessed a shorter name.

On a summer day in that year, Gustaw and his stupid friends drank at the Ruinous Temple market and stumbled about the Great Field, laughing and fighting and sweating as men in their early twenties do when they’re drunker on blazing sunlight than ale. Sallow Gniezto residents lose their minds when they are not shaded by trees. At our tents, Gustaw’s stupid friends dared him into a session with the spooky, exotic, legless soothsayer. I curtsied carefully and pivoted to usher Gustaw inside to see my father. His stupid friends leered at me and retched shredded goat meat onto the green grass.

Papa could barely do his job by the time I was thirteen. He was no longer the unflappable, endlessly confident prophet of my early years, who could recite perfect mixtures of truth and lie while running about on his hands faster than most men did on their legs. No, that day, seated on his great pillow, his hands shook, knocking over candles and ruining the mystique, and he often forgot the very real futures the Gift showed him. He did manage to blurt out that if Gustaw wasn’t careful, his left foot would be injured. Gustaw laughed his way outside, where his stupid friends burned their pale skins in the sun and suggested that the legless man only wanted to put a scare in him.

Based on the name Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way, I’m sure you can guess what followed. Gustaw and his stupid friends got into a drunken altercation that night with a man who was not drunk, and who was armed. A cross-guarded sabre took off Gustaw’s big toe and the one next, along with a triangular section of his foot.

Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way came to us again eight years later, when I had taken over from my father and we once more spent a season in the Great Field. That year, I (somehow) foretold Gustaw’s yet-unborn third daughter in enough detail to be convincing.

Now, in this waning autumn when I was twenty-seven, Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way visited us once more. He had come to respect and fear the Gift, and was well-liked enough in his community that some others did too. What’s more, Gustaw possessed some sort of affection for us: perhaps as a nostalgic vision of the end of mindless youth, and the beginning of slightly less mindless adulthood. I believe he still had the same friends, but they may have become less stupid.

He paid me in copper coins for a pleasant chat laced with vagaries and wish fulfillment. It was all so simple that I got none of the thrill of a well-executed deception, until he asked if there was any money coming his way. Here I found the seeds of a greater piece of fraud, and asked him to return soon if he wanted to learn more. I did not ask him why he expected to become richer.

Instead, I asked Ramunas. And a week later, I received his lammergeier.

Father and the Gift

It was not long after Gustaw’s severing, when I was thirteen, that Papa became too sick and distraught to work. I became his broken replacement. Sometimes luck would bring him a prophecy I could use, but I never counted on that.

You may wonder why my father could not do the soothsaying himself, as he was still possessed of the Gift. Why, instead, a broken failure like me? The short answer is tradition. In the extended history of our family, the next one with the Gift has always taken over upon turning twenty, no matter gender, station, or parentage. (We are like royalty and nobility, in that we actually track our ages very carefully.) At this time, the parent was meant to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labors, advising future generations while no longer being expected to laboriously pick through their own fevered visions.

The long answer is that Papa’s mind was troubled. When my mother was dying, he took terrible care of himself and became afflicted with both freezerot and redspit: these and grief addled him. His Gift was there, stronger than ever, but he lost tact, showmanship, restraint. If one asked my father about their future, they would hear everything he could see, with no preamble, no teasing, no vagaries, no withholding.

Imagine asking a soothsayer if this year’s harvest will be good and being told that it will be passable, and also your wife will be taken from you by a noble in a year, your son will die of consumption in two and a half, and you will follow only four months later when you hang yourself, unsuccessfully at first try, from that rotted beam in your home, which you chose because deep down you did not have the courage to end it all.

Now imagine that the string of deaths told to you includes your neighbor, a stranger, and a woman not yet born. His visions were scattered: he might see one innocuous moment from ten years in a customer’s future, or get snatches of tomorrow for everyone within three miles. Papa was done with the business long before I turned twenty.

Grandmother also had the Gift, but refused to help. Even if it meant we starved. She would watch me, angry at how bad a job I did, but offer nothing beyond her “encouragement.”

“You’re the soothsayer now, aren’t you?” she said when I was fifteen. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting us fed? Do whatever it takes: you could hardly debase our line further than you already have.” She spat. “And when you fail and my sweet Aljosa dies, he will be better off, while you will deserve whatever comes to you.”

On Food

After receiving the lammergeier, I worked until the evening. I had a few customers, who only required a little knowledge of human nature and a lot of leading questions, while I distracted them with smoke and trinkets. I smiled at each one as though they were the only person in the world, and when they believed me, I drank it in.

Besides that, I cleaned, packed, counted, and worried. A few townsfolk wandered past our hill in search of whatever sort of business they were looking for, but it was a quiet day in a quiet time of year. When the sky was red and the sun had disappeared behind the forest, I circled behind the large tent toward the fire pit, to make a weak stew over a weak flame.

My family of three traveled with two tents: one for plying the trade and one for Papa and me to sleep in. Grandmother stayed in the cart, where she could benefit from wooden barriers on all sides but the roof. A canvas on a stick was set up in the cart to keep me from seeing her angry gaze, and it was becoming too cold for her to place her skeleton of a chair outside. I wondered what would happen if the cart were to just roll down the hill and crash at its base while Grandmother lay inside.

She would survive on spite, I’m sure, and we would no longer have a horse or a cart.

The fire pit sat between the tents and the carriage, exactly where I had cracked half my fingernails and purpled my toe digging it months earlier. It was sheltered there, but with the cold winds picking up, I would have had to put my feet directly in the burning coals to keep warm. At least the fire lit, this time.

In my life at this point, food held no joy for me. I had wisps of memories from early childhood in which Papa, walking over to the fire on his hands and putting on the brave face of an adult, had cooked for Grandmother and me with something approaching relish. I remembered looking forward to the sounds of frying, and of onions and turnips shifting noisily about a pan. I even remembered that I liked their smells and tastes, but had no recollection of how they had actually smelled and tasted. Just that I had liked them.

Barring those phantom happinesses, meals had only ever been sustenance to me. I bought the cheapest and most filling foods—beans, potatoes, sometimes the intestines of a scrawny pig or goat that had been sold cheap—chopped them and boiled them into a sad stew every night. Grandmother always said that spices were decadent.

I would then bring a piping hot bowl of mushy stew to Grandmother. That evening, she was bundled in the back of the cart, leaning against her old, stripped frame of a chair, which lay on its side. Two eyes and a dead pipe stuck out from between blankets. She spat on the floor of the cart and cursed me for a failure, and my food as well. Had I brought her a perfectly poached egg of cassowary, imported from Loashti reaches, she would have done the same. And called me “soft” besides. So I knelt in the cart, let her think it was in obeisance, handed her the bowl, and hoped she burned her tongue.

“What, freak?” she snapped.

I had said nothing, but she saw through me. I shook my head and muttered, backing out of the cart and leaving her to her useless rage.

A few moments later, I heard her yelp at burning her tongue. I smiled broadly at my tawdry, pathetic revenge and sat back by the fire. In a few hours, Papa would wake in the middle of the night, and I would have his soft and lumpy stew ready for him.

I stared at the empty, cold kettle leaning against a rock on the far side of the fire pit. My throat parched in that moment, as though it had waited for me to notice it. We were almost out of tea, and could use more root vegetables besides. I had in total thirty-six Masovskan copper coins, officially called “little grivnas,” and ten of those would go to Ramunas in two days. Gustaw would have to pay me more if we were to survive the winter. A lot more.

My Father

I was in the large tent sweeping the rug when I heard Papa snort and moan through the canvas; he had woken up. The broom clattered against the dais behind me as I ducked outside.

I did not throw on a shawl, and just the twenty steps from the large tent around and back to the smaller one chilled me. I was shivering when I rolled down the leather door-flap behind me and saw my father.

Right by the door was the tall pile of furs, blankets, and pillows that made Papa’s bed, which lifted his prone body up high enough that when I sat on my own bedroll, I could look him straight in the eye. Having no legs, Papa and his bed didn’t take up much ground, and so I slept on a small cushion flush against the ratty, old bearskin rug. I wonder what great warrior far off in our lineage must have killed that striped Quru bear—my family tend not to be that type.

“Welcome, stranger,” Papa coughed out as I approached him, smoothing his gray beard, “to the tent of Aljosa the Prophet! In this humble place I will untangle the strands of fate that— Oh! It’s you, Kalynishka!”

He laughed at his little joke, the same little joke he made every night.

I sat on my bedroll and took his hand. It felt like a clammy little sun, radiating heat even as his teeth chattered. Papa’s drawn face rolled toward me, and just as quickly as he had smiled at his joke, the corners of his mouth fell.

“Oh, Kalynishka, I’m not well.”

“I know, Papa. I know.”

From the cart next door, Grandmother coughed herself awake. Her throat was a desiccated wasteland, but the cough was still exaggerated. She didn’t like me, but she didn’t like being left out either. Good. I ignored her.

I cared for my father as I did every night. Did he want some tea? He did not, but I brought him what I had brewed for myself and made him drink it. Would he eat? Just a bite, Kalynishka, just a bite, but he emptied the bowl. Once he was as sated as he was going to be, Papa settled back into his bedding and passed gas. I drew the furs covering his torso up to his neck, tightened his fur hat, and braced myself for what was always next: the Gift would come for him.

When Papa was comfortable and relatively awake, he began ranting about sundry futures, most of people he would never meet. It always pained him, and was almost never helpful. Often he would only see red and brown and green, maybe a tree, a button, or a stepping boot heel. Now and then he would see actual events, like an old woman dying or a boy touching himself. He was never sure what he was seeing; each vision was a question, a melting mist. He had no control over the Gift, and any attempt to concentrate on what he saw, or to see anything specific, ended in frustration.

That night, I held his hand particularly tightly and hoped beyond hope he would see something relating to Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way’s inheritance. I did not ask anything of him: Papa liked very much to feel useful, but not half so much as he hated to feel useless.

For a good half hour, Papa twisted and held my hand and muttered vagaries.

“A clove of garlic, Kalynishka, rotted. There is a bird. A string? Thousands of them, in all colors! Fluttering in the wind—and that wind is so strong, Kalynishka, so strong. Stone walls and lanterns, and blood and corn. Blood on corn. A great eye and a limping mustache. Sand? Where in the world could there be so much sand, Dilara?”

Dilara was a Quru name, my mother’s.

I daubed his brow and leaned in to listen closer. I did this every night, even though he always looked past me and never noticed. Papa was plagued by things only he could see, and since he was beneath the notice of most people, it seemed only right that someone be there to hear him. Even so, his colors and objects became chatter to me, and I listened only for knowledge of Gustaw’s future. Or my own.

“. . . Kalyna.”

Papa was looking at me unwaveringly. I met his gaze, and he stared directly into my eyes.

“I . . . Yes, Papa?”

“Kalyna,” he repeated. “Listen.” His voice was firm. The set of his jaw showed a conviction I hardly remembered in him.

I nodded. His face didn’t move, but his gaze was far away again. A tear formed in his right eye.

“This country,” he began, “this country will collapse in chaos and war, Kalyna.”

I exhaled. It was nothing about Gustaw or myself. I daubed his brow again and then leaned in to hug him. “Of course it will, Pap