The first ribbon was attached to a family photograph, each ribbon-end stuck on by cracking adhesive, lines of gold looped over an old nail.
In the photograph, black and white angles made up the gentle face of Atana’s father, the sea roiling behind him, Atana next to him, her mouth a grey line.
Her sister, Irela, was a blur in the corner, diving into a wave. In photographs, Irela had the knack of disappearing. She could be found in the margins, if Atana looked closely. Sometimes camouflaged, her head turned away from the eye of the camera. Sometimes, it was as if she had never been there at all.
Her mother had been behind the camera, snapping one memory into forever.
That day at the beach, Irela led Atana to tide pools full of sea urchins. Irela let her hand be sucked into their spiny centers, until Atana begged her to pull back. Sand scratched Atana’s bare feet. The ocean coursed, like a drum struck to the earth’s rhythm.
Irela leaned closer, the sound of the ocean almost obscuring her words. “Do you ever wish you lived in Ulez?”
Atana’s stomach churned like the waves beneath them. “You can’t ask that,” she said, her voice overfull so that the words broke off before they were truly spoken. This was not, Atana decided, a declaration of unloyalty to Bartask, for her sister had only asked a question. It was easy enough to forget.
Atana had never wished to be a citizen of Ulez, not even in the darkness of her room, upon the cot she shared with her sister, when the world was asleep and she looked out at stars that darted ribbonlike across the sky, twisting the blue ring on her finger. She was of Bartask and always would be.
Atana did not remember if they had been in Bartask or Ulez that day with the sand under their toes, waves caressing their feet. The boundaries of the cities shifted like the tides, as if God’s hand each moment turned over a cup of water upon a map. Two cities, bound together, but separate as the black and white lines in the photograph which Atana ran her fingers over, trying to catch her sister back from the waves.
A ribbon can be wrapped around anything.
When they were children, Atana and Irela played a game with a chess board. Atana would wrap a blue ribbon around a pawn. The other pieces would line up to attend to this pawn; even the king would bow. Knights strode gallantly past for the pawn’s amusement. Bishops whispered softly by, making sure the chosen pawn wanted for nothing.
The real game was this: when did the shift occur? The only rule was that they could not say aloud when it had happened. Perhaps it started when a knight turned away, its wooden head catching shadows, or when the white-square bishop fled daintily to the other side of the board.
By the end of the game, the pawn was imprisoned. A traitor resting on its side, the ribbon transformed into a noose.
Atana always wondered what the pawn felt in that moment of realization. Was it terror, or only a sense of relief?
Once, Irela had slipped her blue ring around the chosen pawn. Atana caught up Irela’s hand, forcing the ring back on, fighting the panic that rose in her, like the spear of a bishop pressing into the hollow of her throat.
“Don’t be so pious,” said Irela. “It’s only us and Father here. Besides, this corner of our house is in Ulez today.”
Of the seventeen immutable laws of Bartask, adherence to the donning of the blue ring was the most visible law of allegiance, the easiest law to break.
“Things can shift so quickly,” said Atana. She touched her own blue ring, warped to the shape of her finger, each ridge known, the inner band worn smooth. She had never thought whether she liked the look of it, this aqua metal twisted like a wave. It felt like another part of her body. Another beating ventricle. A second, less fragile, heart. Another thing to look after, lest it be lost or betray her.
When they weren’t playing chess, Irela would beg Atana to take her to the barrier surrounding Bartask and Ulez.
Unlike the shifting boundaries of the cities, the barrier never changed, standing sturdy along the dry-grass ground and at edge of the ocean, keeping citizens of both cities from the rest of the world.
“What do you see when you look at the barrier?” asked Irela.
The barrier looked different for everyone. It was a personal question, and Atana, though she loved her sister dearly, found the words would not come.
To Atana, the barrier that surrounded Bartask and Ulez took the shape of a blue band, although sometimes the image wavered, like a ribbon blown in the wind.
“What do you see?” asked Atana, but Irela shook her head.
“You know what Father sees?” asked Irela. “Once, he told me. The metal hoop of a barrel.”
“That’s not a common one,” said Atana. Citizens of Bartask often saw lines of fire, loops of blood, walls of stone. The especially pious saw the comforting hook of a shepherd’s crook, and when she had been asked this question by the Shepards, this was what Atana always claimed to see, a wooden hook encircling them all.
“If I look closely, sometimes I think I can see what’s beyond,” said Irela.
“Shush,” said Atana, worrying her blue ring in a circle. She had a fear if she let her ring be still, it might stick forever.
“No one can hear us,” said Irela.
“But still, these are things we should not speak of,” said Atana.
If her sister was caught saying such things, the Shepards might ask for her blood to speak, and what traitorous things might Irela’s blood say? It was best not to talk about the barrier at all.
Later, they sat together against a stone wall near the market square, watching clouds, making chains of daisies. Atana held Irela close, her arms wrapped around Irela like a barrier. She made a promise, then, to protect her sister; her conviction washed over her, an ocean, a memory, but Irela slipped out of her arms, in that way that she managed to shift to the edges of photographs. Atana followed the sound of her sister’s laugher home through the cool air as the sky turned to dusk.
When she was sixteen, Atana attended the market day for the Feast of Pious Junlien, whose blood had purified the barrier when the cities were new, in the days of the rule of Alto Veternican, in a past so refracted that learning the history was like trying to read a handwritten text through a stained-glass window. Alto Veternican was a patrician or king, murderer or saint, a man of few words or an author of thousands or none of these things or all of them, depending on the text one consulted in the archives of Bartask. In Ulez, he was a minor noble, nothing more. In Bartask, he was a traitor. The texts he may or may not have written were burned to rest ashless in the murky fog of history. In the year of his imprisonment, his crime sang through his blood when his finger was pricked. This was agreed upon by all, that his blood had sung out his intentions and betrayed him. The nature of that crime, too, had been lost, but not the fact of it. Blood did not lie.
The market was bursting with ribbons branching from stalls selling honey sticks and daguerreotype cameras and jeweled tablecloths made of lace.
This is what Atana remembers first about that market day, from the cell in which she now sits, how the ribbons were so plentiful they wove another sky.
The market took place in the Square of Tinted Lilies, in a position of flux between Bartask and Ulez. Great maps hung in the center of the square, their boundaries constantly shifting. It was not unusual, in the Square of Tinted Lilies, to have one foot in Bartask and one in Ulez.
A man in a layered carrick coat haggled over the price of a glass bird, his voice rising above the market squall. He spread his hands over the bird. The seller gasped, instinctively weaving her fingers into a circle, the sign of the barrier, to ward off blasphemy.
There was no ring of blue upon his hand.
A murmur spread. No ring. No ring.
The man smiled, sticking his hands into his carrick coat, which must have cost five dafirs or more. He did not show fear when three Shepherds made a circle around him.
“Show us your hands,” said a Shepherd, her face a mask of calm. She popped the last of a chocolate covered zefir into her mouth.
“I am a citizen of Ulez,” said the man, as if that would solve everything. He must have been very wealthy indeed to believe that.
“That may be,” said the Shepherd, “but you are in Bartask.” She pointed to the map.
“This glassmaker’s stall is clearly in Ulez,” said the man, his smiling slipping slightly.
“It was in Ulez this morning. Now it is in Bartask, and in Bartask, there are rules,” said the Shepard. Her voice carried over the crowd, although she made no effort to raise it. It was only that everyone had frozen silent in a circle around them.
The citizens of Ulez often commented, with pity in their voices, on how Bartaskians were forced to wear blue rings. Many times as a child, Atana had been chased by Ulez children, who shouted that the ring she could never take off would fuse to her skin. Of course, the people of Ulez always wore blue rings as well. For fashion, they claimed, or in shades that were merely light purple or indigo, and not truly blue. Worn by choice, they said, taking the rings off once safely in their Ulezian houses, where the tides of the cities did not shift so quickly.
“I am in Ulez. From Ulez,” said the man, who smiled too widely, as if to show he would be magnanimous about this misunderstanding.
The Shepherds did not take care with his fine coat when they led him away. He chanted, “Ulez, Ulez,” like a prayer, as if that could protect him.
Atana tried to school her features into fearfulness, like the others around her, watching this man who could not be saved from punishment by his wealth or status or citizenship. If she felt vindictiveness in her heart against the Shepards, she did not show it. If she thought this man did not deserve to be spared, she did not show it, either. Why should he be spared, when so many others had not been?
Beside her, Irela clutched her hand, as she had not done since childhood, and Atana brought her sister’s face against her shoulder, as if she could shield her, even though Irela was not such a child any longer, even though they had both witnessed worse.
“Will they ask his blood to speak?” asked Irela, curiosity and fear warring in her voice.
“There’s that stall of honey sticks you like. The ones with lemon,” said Atana, her voice a still pond that reflected nothing.
“They’ll keep him, won’t they? When his blood betrays him,” asked Irela. “And his family will be like ours, and not know, and--”
But Atana would not hear. She steered her sister toward the honey stick stall, thrusting several small coins into her palm.
“I have my own money,” said Irela, pushing the coins back.
“You should take a gift when it’s offered,” said Atana, relieved to be engaged in something as familiar as a sibling squabble, careful to keep her voice stern.
Irela took three of the coins. “I’ll buy you one with rose,” she said.
Watching Irela haggling over prices, Atana thought that it was terrible to love someone so much, so fiercely. She twisted the blue ring on her finger—a second, less fragile heart.
The next ribbon Atana remembers is a wave of overgrown flowers, splashes of red and purple and gold.
She rarely went into the garden—no one had tended it for years, not her father, or Irela, or her.
Ruins of a trellis poked up, half rotted, an explosion of green and purple pulling it toward the dirt. Once, it had stood whole, back when the vegetable beds were full of tomatoes and cucumbers. In the time before the worst had happened. Still, even in dilapidation, life grew. Or perhaps it only reverted to its original form, the way the land would have been if no hand had ever touched it.
The garden was another absence. Another reminder.
Atana planted a seed in the wet earth behind the dying cloverfind tree, squeezing three drops of blood upon the seed, which splashed darkly, painting the seed crimson, the redness soon disappearing under mud, burying any truths her blood could have sung.
The fifth ribbon Atana remembers is not hers. It belongs to all of Bartask.
Atana was twenty when she first visited the archives of Bartask. The laws of Bartask were etched on a long, white ribbon, which wound snakelike along the walls, encircling the archives like a barrier. Seventeen immutable laws were written on the archival ribbon, and the details of what would befall anyone who broke them.
Those who speak ill of Bartask eat stones. Those who remove their rings shall have removed the left ventricles of their hearts. Those whose blood betrays them shall wash the barrier with their corrupted blood, until it runs clear.
Printed on the ribbon was the punishment for traitors, which Atana could not bear to read. She knew it by heart.
Ulez had its own laws. Its own words stained on ribbon.
After, Atana met her sister in a cafe that had shifted into Ulez, where they drank iced chocolate and ate too many pastries. They were close enough to the edge of the city that Atana could see a blue band rising up, her own vision of the barrier that surrounded both Bartask and Ulez. Irela had discarded her childhood fascination with the barrier and did not even look behind her.
When Irela reached into her bag, a green ribbon fell out. Irela snatched the ribbon back, but not before Atana saw the insignia burned onto it. Atana felt like the world was tilting; she couldn’t speak, she could barely breathe.
“Where did you get that?” Atana asked. Her gaze darted around, looking to see if anyone else had noticed. It was a resistance ribbon. Atana couldn’t believe her sister had been so reckless, so careless as to carry the ribbon on her person.
Irela lowered her voice. “I only have it in my bag because I just came from a meeting. I don’t want to talk about it here.”
“Get rid of it,” said Atana. “You have to promise me.” Her voice shook. “Promise me you’ll never go again.”
Irela met her eyes, defiant, and said nothing.
At home, Atana went to the garden, to the spot where she had planted the seed. In its place, a flower had bloomed, with petals like ribbons, blood red, and a blue stem, perfectly circular, like a ring.
The next ribbon she remembers was tucked firmly into the family typewriter. The living room had been filled with light filtered through the lace curtains and books stacked two deep on the shelves. A cozy room she had always liked.
She had never kept a diary, but she wanted to write a few sentences about her life, to see the facts of it neatly arranged.
“I am a lower trade specialist employed by the city of Bartask,” she wrote. “I have been trained to pass goods through the barrier.” The words stared back at her, thin black marks. Innocent, in this arrangement.
She did not trust these marks. Documents had a way of making thoughts permanent, and that was dangerous. She would burn this paper.
And since she would burn it, she typed, “I once, when swimming under ocean waters, removed my ring, and put it on again.”
She typed, shaking, “Sometimes, I wonder what it is like to be a citizen of Ulez.”
She typed, “I do not believe I am worthy of love.”
Sometimes, she thought if she had been more perfect, it never would have happened.
The seventh ribbon was pale yellow, tied around the dress that used to be her mother’s.
Atana stood with one foot in Ulez and one in Bartask. She could not tell the difference between them. It was her own form of resistance, of sacrilege.
When her father saw her in the dress, he paused, frozen, his face filled with some emotion she could not name. He touched the sleeve of the dress as if it were glass or a ghost, something that could be broken, something that could disappear.
“Where did you find this?” he asked, his voice catching. “I haven’t seen it for years.”
Atana wanted to reply that if he had only looked, he would have found it in the boxes where they kept so many lost things, things too filled with memories.
“You look just like her,” he said.
In town, Atana saw a figure in the distance, running. Irela, her eyes wild. Irela’s cloak had come undone, the pin shaped like five stalks of wheat hanging open. Her hair tangled across her cheeks like so many unbound ribbons.
Atana knew, before Irela said a word, that the Shepards were coming. She knew what the Shepards would find if they asked Irela’s blood to sing.
The punishment for traitors, in Bartask, is to be wrapped in seven ribbons. One to bind the hands, one for the legs, another wrapped around the neck like a garrote. One ribbon around the ribs, another a blindfold, another to gag the mouth. And the last ribbon wherever the blood has been taken from.
Seven ribbons, to bind a traitor, before they are tossed into a sea dark as night.
Atana, a lower trade specialist, knew how to get goods through the barrier that surrounded Bartask and Ulez. It was not so different to sneak a person through.
The barrier was warm against her hands, a living thing. Shaking, she pushed until it opened, working her hands into the heated air, then pulled Irela inside.
The barrier wrapped around them. For Atana, it looked like a suffocating blue ring.
“Chess pieces,” said Irela. “That’s what the barrier looks like to me. It’s how I can see through it. The gaps between the pawns.”
Atana fixed Irela in her mind, as if Atana could make a camera of her brain, as if she could make this memory a photograph. Irela, with her hair wild about her, her eyes singing. Unlike a photograph, memories are ephemeral, no matter how closely we hold them. And Irela had the tendency to slide out of photographs, black and white lines blurring to grey, as if she had never been there at all.
“Come with me,” said Irela.
“I need to seal the barrier behind you. Find a ship,” said Atana, clasping Irela’s hand, wishing she had time to say more.
She pushed Irela through the barrier. By the time she had sealed it, the Shepards had come.
Did my mother remember ribbons, Atana wondered, as her hands were bound, as her feet were bound, as ribbon looped around the softness of her ribcage and lungs.
She was carried over the ocean by invisible hands, waves rising darkly beneath her.
When she was tossed into the sea, the blindfold came loose. She thought she saw an outline of a ship over the waves. She thought she saw a hand reaching down. Then all was blackness, wrapping around her like a ribbon unfurling, like a wave of blood, like a barrier finally unlocked.
