Girls of Paper and Fire （Girls of Paper and Fire, #1）
Natasha Ngan
FOREWORD
ON OCCASION, I COME UPON THE literary equivalent of a priceless hidden treasure—and it’s exhilarating. Even as a writer myself, I can’t begin to describe how terrific it makes me feel.
I started JIMMY Patterson Books with the mission to give young readers the kinds of books they really want, but the exceptional ones are hard to find. One of the joys of being a publisher is that I get to read many stories, and then bring the best ones to life as books. When I first read Girls of Paper and Fire, I knew I had stumbled upon something special.
With her lyrical voice and epic imagination, Natasha Ngan has created a vivid world where the line between people and animals is blurred, but the consequences of love, power, and revenge are clear. Girls of Paper and Fire is many stories in one—a portrait of an oppressed girl finding her strength, a forbidden romance in the unlikeliest circumstances, a tale of injustice that must be made right, an homage to the author’s multicultural upbringing. Somehow, Natasha brilliantly weaves together these different threads into a single literary work of art.
I believe Girls of Paper and Fire is one of the most important novels that we have published at JIMMY Patterson Books. With its heartfelt inclusivity and emotionally-charged yet sensitively handled scenes, Natasha’s spellbinding own-voices story offers illumination to all who read it.
I’m fortunate to have played a small part in bringing this book to life for you.
—James Patterson
CASTES
At night, the heavenly rulers dreamed of colors, and into the day those colors bled onto the earth, raining down onto the paper people and blessing them with the gifts of the gods. But in their fear, some of the paper people hid from the rain and so were left untouched. And some basked in the storm, and so were blessed above all others with the strength and wisdom of the heavens.
—The Ikharan Mae Scripts
Paper caste—Fully human, unadorned with any animal-demon features, and incapable of demon abilities such as flight.
Steel caste—Humans endowed with partial animal-demon qualities, both in physicality and abilities.
Moon caste—Fully demon, with whole animal-demon features such as horns, wings, or fur on a humanoid form, and complete demon capabilities.
—the Demon King’s postwar Treaty on the Castes
THERE IS A TRADITION IN OUR kingdom, one all castes of demon and human follow. We call it the Birth-blessing. It is such an old, deep-rooted custom that it’s said even our gods themselves practiced it when they bore our race onto the earth. When babies die before their first year, there are whispers like leaves fluttering darkly on the wind: the ceremony was performed too late; the parents must have spoken during it; the shaman who executed the blessing was unskilled, a fake.
Coming from the lowest caste—Paper caste, fully human—my parents had to save for the full nine months after the news of my mother’s pregnancy. Though I’ve never seen a Birth-blessing ceremony, I’ve imagined my own so many times that it feels almost like a memory, or some half remembered dream.
Picture smoke-cut night and darkness like a heavy black hand cupped round the world. Crackling fire. Standing before the flames—a shaman, his leathery skin webbed with tattoos, teeth sharpened to wolflike points. He’s bent over the naked form of a newborn, just hours old. She’s crying. On the other side of the fire, her parents watch in silence, hands clasped so tightly their knuckles are white. The shaman’s eyes roll as he chants a dao, painting its characters in the air with his fingers, where they hang above the baby, glowing softly before fading away.
As he comes to the crest of the prayer, a wind picks up. The grass stirs in a feathery rustle. Faster and faster the shaman chants, and louder and louder the rustle and the wind, until the fire whips upward, a whorl of orange-red flame dancing high into the sky before flashing suddenly out.
Blackness.
The starlit night.
Then the shaman reaches into the air where the fire had been for the object floating in its wake: a small, egglike golden pendant. But the pendant isn’t what’s important. What’s important is what the pendant hides within.
The baby’s fate. My fate.
Our kingdom believes words have power. That the characters of our language can bless or curse a life. Inside the pendant is a single character. One word that we believe will reveal a person’s true destiny—and if my life will be blessed, as my parents hoped when they saved for my ceremony, or whether my fate is something far darker. Cursed years to be played out in fire and shadow.
In six months, when I turn eighteen, the pendant will open and its answer will finally be revealed.
ONE
OUR SHOP IS BUSY THIS MORNING. Not even noon yet and it’s already packed with customers, the room bright with chatter, Tien’s brusque voice cutting through the thick summer air. Sunlight streams in through the slatted windows, drowsy with cicada song. Sandals slap on the floorboards. Beneath it all, like the shop’s familiar heartbeat, comes the bubble of the mixing barrels where we brew our herbal medicines. The six tubs are lined along the back of the store, so big they reach my shoulders. Five are full of pungent mixtures. The sixth is empty, filled instead with me—admittedly also pungent after an hour’s hard work scrubbing dried residue from the buckled wood.
“Almost done, little nuisance?”
I’m working at a particularly stubborn stain when Tien’s face appears over the edge of the barrel. Feline eyes rimmed with black; graying hair flowing softly over pointed cat ears. She regards me with her head cocked.
I swipe the back of my hand over my forehead. Little nuisance. She’s been calling me that for as long as I can recall.
“I’m seventeen, Tien,” I point out. “Not little anymore.”
“Well,” she says with a click of her tongue. “Still a nuisance.”
“I wonder where I get it from.”
A smirk rises up to challenge my own. “I’ll pretend you’re talking about your father. Aiyah, where is that lazy man? He was meant to refill our stock of monsoon berries an hour ago!” She waves a hand. “Go fetch him. Mistress Zembi is waiting for her consultation.”
“Only if you say please,” I retort, and her ears twitch.
“Demanding for a Paper caste, aren’t you?”
“You’re the Steel with a Paper boss.”
She sighs. “And I regret it every day.”
As she bustles off to deal with a customer, I smile despite myself at the proud flick of her neat lynx ears. Tien has worked for us for as long as I can remember, more family now than shop hand despite our caste differences. Because of that, sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are differences between us. But while my father and I are Paper caste, Tien belongs to the middle caste, Steel. Somewhere between my plain human body and the animal-like strength of Moon castes, Steel castes have elements of both, making them a strange meeting point between human and demon, like a drawing only halfway finished. As with most Steels, Tien has just touches of demon: a tapered feline maw; the graying amber cat’s fur wrapped around her neck and shoulders, like a shawl.
As she greets the customer, Tien’s hands automatically pat down that messy ruff of fur where it pokes from the collar of her samfoo shirt. But it just sticks straight back up.