Chapter 2: Star System

Viola M'et-Sepirot-Keita said her life ended the day Sybil died. Of course she was lying. Her life didn't end when Sybil died. If anything, her life started just a couple days after the wake. But that was a harsh truth she couldn't and perhaps never would be able to look in the eye.

Since then, she'd put down roots at the staying house. Same as it ever was. Her office in the basement, drying lines hung from the ceiling and metal washtubs all over the floor. A big scarred mahogany writing desk in the corner where she liked to work. A printing press surrounded in towers of The Origin, Viola's independent newspaper. Journals stacked along the walls like soldiers bound in spiral.

She wore her long black hair in freeformed locs, her skin so dark it was nearly obsidian. Attired in a black cotton cape secured around her throat, her doughy legs in thick dark pants and her feet in leather workman's boots. The cape made her look and feel like a human-sized bat.

Viola pulled a scrap of paper out the typewriter and squeezed it into a tight ball. At her small age of twenty-six, her knees and hands were already starting to ache. And she was starting to wonder what was even the point. Why was she still in Alcoast, when she could have been anywhere?

She'd explored every cave, climbed every tree, watched every sunrise, even talked to the giant black cat roaming and guarding the outskirts of their humble little town. It didn't talk back, just looked at her with its big spotlights eyes. As if waiting for something she was no longer equipped to give.

To Do List, Item One. Send a letter to Fareed. Thank them for the typewriter. Her desire to keep her silly little newspaper outweighed her desire to study in Turaq, but to each their own. He wanted her to visit. A month of blistering heat and flies, riding by camel and sleeping in a mud hut. The forests in Turaq were beautiful, they told her. It would be stupid of her to rot in Arcadia when she could be studying biochemistry or mathematics at a university in Bala.

But she'd never wanted to study in Turaq anyway. Her dreams rested on an old childhood memory, of a festival in the town of Balsam. The dancers in their long wing-shaped sleeves, spinning their great big skirts in waves of orange, pink, and red, stomping their deerskin outside slippers to the music. Her sister Mara said the dancers practiced for half a year and made their own costumes if they were able. No two were the same, when one looked close enough. But right then, in the flickering light of torches and the beating of drums, they moved as one. As if this was what they'd been born to do.

Viola cast her eyes at the small pile of fabric, jewelry, and feathers abandoned haphazardly under her desk. Her one and only attempt, before it slowly dawned on her. She didn't have the coordination, the focus, or the stamina. That was why her guardians wanted her to attend university in Ladezi or North Shoal instead, where she could learn something useful. They knew her weaknesses better than she did, yet she persisted. A masochistic yearning.

To Do List, Item Two. Eat something. A task she'd found increasingly difficult as the days wore. She took her meals in the kitchen after everybody else went to sleep. She didn't eat much anyway. Plain white bread, fruit butter straight from the jar, canned peaches, butternuts, brown sugar biscuits, corn pudding, potatoes. But even that was too much most nights.

Staying houses weren't like hotels in Ladezi or boarding houses in Eudora. People moved in and out freely without having to pay. Nobody owned the house. It was abandoned before Viola was born. Probably during the war. Most of Arcadia was like that. People lived where they wanted to.

Viola hoped her newspaper would make Arcadia a better place. But she knew better days, before the king rose to power and before the war, would never come again. Not in her lifetime.

The wall behind her desk was plastered with photographs and articles. One of the photographs caught her attention. Three adults and three children holding hands in front of a small house. Viola remembered when it was taken. She was twelve years old and Mama M'et made her wear a blue dress with a yellow belt cinched around the waist. To her right stood her oldest sister Mara, sixteen years old. She wore her short dark brown hair in cornrows. Mara took after Mama M'et, with her big eyebrows and wide hips. To Viola's left was her other sister Yvette, fourteen years old. Yvette took after Mama Sepirot, with her dark brown braids and the perpetual scowl on her face. Viola and Yvette both had Mama M'et's heart-shaped lips and big liquid brown eyes and her wide flat nose. But Fareed took after Mama Keita and their grandmother, with their discordant afro and their whole face covered in freckles like a star system. Viola had freckles too, but nothing like theirs. And she had Mama M'et's lips.

She didn't know if her guardians and sisters were okay and she didn't really care. Her cheeks stung with bruises long since vanished, from before she packed a bag and left in the middle of the night. Only fourteen years old. She had no idea where she was going. A pair of traveling merchants picked her up and took her to Alcoast, where she moved into the staying house and just never thought to leave.

And now she was here. For the third time in so many years, her life was about to change.