Heather Terrell - Relic

“What are you doing back there, Eva?” my mother demands.

I slide the journal and the tools under the largest bag, and meet her eyes to answer, “Just organizing my equipment.”

She shakes her head, gestures around the room at the chaos. “Eva, all this must fit on your back or on the dogsled tomorrow. How in the Gods do you think you’ll manage?” Her voice is at its true level, but she is no less the Lady in her quest for perfection.

“Don’t worry, Mother. It’s more organized than it looks. It’ll all fit.”

She glares at me. “I suppose I thought you’d still have the sense to quit now. In fact, I thought we’d had enough of your un-Maidenly behavior long ago with that tapestry business.”

My heart squeezes. I should have known she’d bring up that embarrassment: the ill-fated mark that ruined my otherwise perfect ascent toward Ladyhood. On the other hand, she has a point. What had I been thinking with the tapestry? I knowingly deviated from the Lex-prescribed depiction of the Healing by including a symbol of the false god Apple hanging from a tree. Worse: with a tiny bite taken out of it. In my defense, those few illicit stitches had been prompted by a secret Faerie tale Nurse Aga told me about Apple, a Maiden, a Gallant, and a Garden … and I’d lost myself in the beauty of the tableaux. The daydream-fueled stitching led to banishment from the afternoon sewing circles. The Maidens who’d been my friends forgot about me.

Instead, I began my tenure as an apprentice Gardener.

But not all was lost. I discovered that I loved learning about botany and agriculture from the Ark Gardeners. I think that irked my mother more than blasphemy itself: that I grew to prefer my punishment in the Ark to my time sewing and chattering.

When I don’t answer, she continues. “Despite all that unpleasantness, you’ve decided to Test. Even though you’re a Maiden.”

“Other Maidens have competed in the Testing. What about Madeline? And Carina was given permission.” I almost wish Jasper were here to back me up. While researching The Praebulum and The Lex—in an effort to prove that a Maiden should be permitted entrance into the Testing—I learned about two Maidens who sought the Archon position in the past.

“Those two Maidens —” my mother practically spits out the word, “participated in the Testing or the Commitment over one hundred and fifty years ago, when some females still carried the vestiges of the unseemly qualities of the pre-Healing days. Before they fully transformed into the Maidens and Ladies of the Aerie that you see today—women of The Lex. Madeline even trained with Gallants. Do you want to become like Madeline and Carina? Brazen and coarse?”

“Mother, you don’t know what they were like—”

She raises a hand. “Enough. You’ve proven that I can’t stop you, but that doesn’t mean I have to approve. You’ve managed to sway your father, but not me. Your place is here, in your home. And one day, perhaps with Jasper. If he’ll still have you after all this nonsense is over.”

And so it is as I’d suspected. I turn my attention back to my packing. There’s nothing more to say.

My mother exhales. It’s a sigh heavy with exhaustion, despair, and sadness. I almost feel badly for her. She’s suffered over Eamon, too, and even though I jest to myself and Lukas about her ridiculous adherence to The Lex, I know it’s her way of coping with her grief. I see her face soften, and I wonder if she might walk across the room to touch me. But then she hardens again into her Lady mask. As far as I can tell, all of my mother’s gentle emotion—what little she believes The Lex permits—died with Eamon. Only duty and appearances and survival remain.

The door slams shut. I thought I wanted solitude. I’d longed for it all day, even escaped to the turret to find it. I relished the thought of finally relinquishing the Maiden role. But now I feel truly alone. I make myself imagine the next morning, when I’ll stand alone on the town square dais with the eleven other contenders for the Testing. I envision the solitary departure from the Aerie, through the Ring—and the race out into the vast, white ice of New North, and onto the Frozen Shores. I might have to scale glaciers or descend into crevasses searching for artifacts, those terrible reminders of the past that washed onto New North’s shores in the Healing. Then, if I’m lucky enough to find a Relic, not even one of the scale my father found, I’ll study it in the isolation of my igloo. I’ll extract a lesson from my Relic so that mankind will never again repeat its catastrophic mistakes. Only then will the Gods select an Archon from among us twelve.

The other eleven Testors are Gallants, like Jasper. Of course.

Deep within myself, I believe I can do it, despite my lack of training and the fact that, until now, everyone thought of me as a Maiden. Not exactly compliant, but a Maiden nonetheless. I must believe. Is that what Lukas always tells me? And didn’t his insistence on faith in myself prove true as he pushed me to scale Aerie ice walls and learn all the types of snow by touch alone?

For the first time in days, I feel at peace. It is almost as though Eamon himself had given his blessing.

I unlace the front of my Feast gown to put on my sleeping shift. In the coming days, I’ll not have the luxury, but day after day will sleep in the same layers of skins and furs for warmth.

The stays of my gown are tighter than usual, as demanded by the Feast, and I struggle with them. I consider calling for Katja, but I hesitate. Katja was chosen explicitly to suit me as a Companion, and yet I have never felt particularly close to her. She’s nice enough, and loyal, but our relationship is nothing like the bond that had formed between Eamon and Lukas. That we all three shared, really.

A tiny knock sounds at my bedroom door. It can only be Katja. My mother is long gone, and my father’s knock is distinctive and forceful.

“Come in. I was just about to call for you,” I reply.

The door opens, and my throat catches. Lukas fills the room. Broad-shouldered and wide of chest, he somehow manages to make even the largest of tunics seem too small.

I turn around and scramble to pull tight the stays of my gown.

He backs away. “I’m sorry, Eva. I shouldn’t be here.”

As I reassemble my gown as quickly as possible, I rush to reassure him. “No, no, Lukas. Please stay. I wanted to thank you for—”

“The turret? No need. I was just doing my job.”

I am angry in spite of myself. “Is that all it is? Your job?”

“Of course not, Eva. You know better than that.”

We stare at each other, uncertain what to say next. The Lex explicitly bars the kind of friendship that sprung up between us and Eamon: let no familiarity pass with those of the Boundary; we are their caretakers, not their friends or families . Consequently, I sometimes struggle for the right way to speak to Lukas. For me, this kind of free talk, unburdened by The Lex, makes me awkward and blunt. Even bold.

“Tell me about Nunassiaq again, will you?” I find myself blurting.

“I thought you were the storyteller, Eva. Not me.” He’s trying to put me off, referencing the times when we three hid away on the turret listening to the tales I respun from Nurse Aga. But I won’t have it.

“Come on, Lukas. Please.”

He pauses, then shakes his head.

“Eva, you leave the Aerie tomorrow as upernagdlit , not Inuit . When you make the Passage tomorrow, you’ll enter a land that isn’t Nunassiaq anymore. That place died when the floods came—excuse me, the Healing happened—and New North created the Boundary land for my people.”

Now I truly don’t know what to say. My mother would call Lukas’s slip about the “floods” blasphemy, but I’m not offended that the Boundary people sometimes have different beliefs. Mostly, I feel sorry for them, that they don’t have the comfort of our faith in the Gods. Besides, I have too much respect for Lukas to lecture him about the Gods-blessed events that led to the creation of New North: the voyage taken by the Founders to the Arctic islands that became our home, the manner in which the Founders banded together to fashion a rightful society when the Healing submerged most of Father Earth, and New North’s sacred mission to avoid the mistakes of the pre-Healing world with The Lex and the Boundary and the Testing.