Kaitlyn Sage Patterson - The Diminished

After I pulled the pearl from each of my oysters, I tossed its meat to the seagulls gathered around me. My stomach was talking at me, but even that wasn’t enough to make me eat the pearl oysters. Unlike the oysters we gathered to sell to the nobility for pricey appetizers, pearl oysters were tough and tasted of seaweed and slime. I wished I’d had the foresight to steal a couple of scallops from their seabeds.

I worked fast, leaving a heap of shells in the sand next to me. By the time I finished, I’d harvested sixty-three pearls, my biggest haul yet—and of them, twenty were some of the biggest I’d ever seen, oysters I’d left undisturbed since I put them on the lines nearly ten years before. I dug a quick hole in the wet sand and buried the shells that had housed my small fortune. By the time the ocean pulled them back up, I’d be long gone.

Pearls tucked safe in a pouch beneath my shirt and sweater, I hauled the bags of the anchorites’ oysters up and over my shoulder. If I could get back to the temple before the end of the morning’s adulations, I might be able to sneak a sugar-dotted cloud bun from the anchorites’ tray before it went up to their buffet. I didn’t just miss Sawny for the treats he’d pocketed for me, but I would’ve been lying if I said I didn’t wake up thinking about cloud buns and sweet, milky tea on mornings like this.

I picked my way across the gray puddles that littered Penby’s streets. The merchants and street vendors had just started stirring as I stepped into the market square. Bene’s bakery windows were misted over with the fragrant steam of rising dough. My mouth watered at the thought of her spiced pigeon pies, which I’d tasted a few times but could rarely afford to buy on my own. Shopkeepers leaned against doors just opened and sipped their tea as their assistants chalked specials and sales onto display boards. Early risers bustled down the streets, shopping baskets hooked over their arms. A farmer set bowls heaped with the first salmonberries of the season onto his cart next to jars of bright pickled onions and the cabbages and potatoes we’d seen through the winter. I nodded to Jemima Twillerson as she flipped the sign to open her apothecary shop, but her eyes—no great shock—slid away from mine.

No one wanted to be seen associating with a dimmy. Worse still, a dimmy like me—penniless and a temple ward. In all my life, Sawny’d been the only twin willing to call me friend. Others, like Jemima, might do me a kindness from time to time, but not where they might be seen—and worse yet, judged—.

I pushed away the familiar sting and adjusted the sack of oysters balanced on my shoulder. A bright slash of red caught my eye, and I turned on a heel to see a girl I recognized streaking through the market square. She clutched a long, curving Samirian knife in each white-knuckled hand, and her feet were bare on the stone road.

Her name was Skalla. I’d only met her the once. She was some Denorian merchant’s daughter, and he had enough drott to dress his girls in imported silks and brocades. Her twin sister had died a couple weeks back, and when the girl didn’t seem to be succumbing to death herself, Anchorite Lugine dragged me on a visit.

“Vi,” Anchorite Lugine had said, “it’s important that she sees the glorious contentment that your faith has sustained, even after all these years of being diminished.”

The implication—that the grief would inevitably catch up with me—had lingered in the air unsaid all through the painfully silent visit with Skalla and her family. What could I say to her? That I was sorry for her; for what she’d become? What we’d both become?

I hated those visits. They were such a lie. I had no faith, and I certainly hadn’t kept myself from violence all these years through prayer and piety. I was a fluke: I would eventually lose the tight hold that kept my anger from turning to violence. Just because I’d lasted this long didn’t mean I would be able to avoid the grief forever.

Skalla’s silks were damp with sweat, and her arms prickled with gooseflesh. Her eyes were blank with rage. She was gone; lost to the grief she felt for her twin.

Before Skalla, it had been at least a month since another dimmy was lost in Penby. There’d been rumors of an incident in Esser Park, but I’d overheard a group of the Shriven saying that it’d been a ruse. Folks did that from time to time. Used dimmys as an excuse, as an explanation for their bad behavior.

I clenched my jaw and sidled toward an alleyway. I didn’t want to see what happened next. Sometimes it seemed like I always managed to find myself nearby when a dimmy lost their grip. When I was younger, I’d tried to stop one of the temple brats, a dimmy, when she attacked Lily in a dark corridor in the middle of the night. I got between them right before the Shriven arrived and threw me off the other girl. That was the first time I’d broken my nose.

Skalla’s bare feet smacked slush from potholes, and, in a moment, she was across the square, dragging the baker from her doorway before the woman had a moment to think. Still frail from a bout with the whispering cough, Bene never stood a chance.

Blood spattered across the bakery’s steam-covered window.

I froze in horror. Skalla smeared Bene’s blood over her porcelain pale face, screaming. The sack of oysters was an anchor, tethering me to the walk outside the apothecary’s shop. No one moved. We sank into the shadows, took shallow breaths, willed ourselves to become invisible. The Shriven’d appear soon, all tattoos and white robes and swift, deadly action. We’d be safe once they arrived. As much as I hated them, they were good for that much, at least.

A high, keening wail poured from deep inside Skalla’s body, and then she screamed. In a language that had to be Denorian, her voice filled the square. She’d be cursing the gods and goddesses. They always did. Even the Denorians, who placed an irreverent amount of value on science over religion, spent their last, raging breaths cursing the gods for condemning us with grief.

The names of the Alskader goddesses spurted from her rant as the Shriven slipped silently into the square. Magritte the Educator. Rayleane the Builder. Dzallie the Warrior. I couldn’t parse all her words, but I knew that feeling of vitriol. It rose in my chest, the anger, and I bit down hard on my cheek. I couldn’t afford to feed the slow burn always smoldering next to my heart.

Not a day went by when I didn’t bite back fury. Every moment was a fight against the close heat of rage when I caught someone’s eyes staring, and I knew from that one look that all they saw was a dimmy. I stopped being a person and was reduced to danger wearing the skin of a teenaged girl in a hand-me-down sweater. But the anchorites’ chorus of voices in my head reminded me that anger loosened my grip, and I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t be like Skalla.

The Shriven descended on her like a shroud. Their long staves whipped through the air, fast and dangerous as eels. I lost sight of her for a moment, then dark crimson spurted over one of the Shriven’s white-clad shoulders. He collapsed in a heap with Skalla on top of him, and I gagged as I caught a glimpse of her face. Blood streamed out of her mouth and down her neck—she’d torn the man’s tattooed throat open with her teeth.

A moment later, it was over. Skalla’s wrists were held behind her back at vicious angles by two of the Shriven, another two stood at her elbows and a fifth had his hand wrapped tight around her throat. She wasn’t but a slip of a thing, but dimmys were unnaturally strong, and it looked like the Shriven were going to be extra careful with Skalla. They didn’t often lose one of their own—they were trained for this work.