Instead, he said, “I don’t understand. What’s so appealing about sleeping on the ground and sailing on ships?”
“The world speaks, and some of us can hear it,” the queen said. “The shifting sand, the turning sea, the way the wind makes everything shake and flutter as though it’s dancing full of secrets.”
When Gerdie and Wil were small, Owen would sometimes sneak them off to the Port Capital with him. One and then the other, he would carry them on his shoulders. The three of them would tuck their hair into gray wool caps, and they would pretend to be nomads so that nobody would know who they really were. It was a game they played.
While Gerdie studied the mechanics of the ships and the structure of the buildings, and while he wondered at the cogs in the machines and the motion of the water mills, his brother and sister spoke easily with sailors and vendors, mimicking their accents flawlessly and pretending to be from anywhere but Arrod.
“I wish I felt it too.”
The queen was about to say something, but the crunch and clatter of footsteps running over dried leaves silenced her. A servant emerged through the thickets, gasping. “Your Majesty,” she blurted, dipping into a hasty curtsy. “It’s the king. He’s taken a turn for the worse.”
The queen moved fast, her nightgown swimming around her. By the time Gerdie made it to his father’s chamber, his mother was already by his side.
Gerdie froze at what he saw. The king was sprawled on the mattress soaked with sweat, thrashing, crying out like a child in pain. He wasn’t conscious, Gerdie noted, but his lips were burbling with blood. In his vigil, he focused on the details, which led to no logical conclusions. After a while, those details panned out, giving way to larger details, which turned into questions. What would become of this kingdom if his father were to die? What would become of the war that already loomed like thunder across the water?
How was it possible that so much had befallen their family so quickly? He had never expected that the universe held a divine purpose for anyone within it, but this felt deliberate. First Owen and Wil, and now his father, all being pulled into a churning current of death. Without logic. Without explanation. There must have been a pattern he was missing.
He thought of Wil, which had become a compulsion since he’d lost her. He had argued when she called what happened to her a curse. But now he wondered.
The king was drowning in blood as he coughed it up.
Maybe they would all drown.
Servants ran to and from the room, carrying cloths and sloshing bowls, awaiting the queen’s directive. The queen knelt by the bed, stroking the king’s face, whispering something into his ear and then kissing the side of his head.
Baren moved to stand beside Gerdie. His eyes were glazed. “Papa will be dead by morning,” Baren whispered. “The ghosts are killing him. They’ll come for you next. Now do you believe me?”
TWENTY-SIX
IN THE MORNING, LOOM AND Wil headed for Messalin. A topical salve had lessened the pain in her leg, but deep within her bones it still ached. She didn’t let on. She didn’t want to delay this hapless venture, and she didn’t want Zay to have the satisfaction besides.
“Maybe you shouldn’t speak,” Loom said, as he led Wil to the tiny rowboat that bobbed along the shore.
“Excuse me?” She bypassed his extended hand and took a shaky step onto the boat.
“I don’t mean it that way. I just think it would be better if you . . . didn’t. At least, not in Messalin. Your pale skin won’t give you away—you could be from Brayshire, or parts of the West. But your Northern accent is unmistakable. They’ll only hear the voice of the enemy. It’s dangerous.”
Wil swept her long hair over one shoulder and gripped the edges of the boat as he used the oar to push them from land. “Suppose I talk like you,” she said in Lavean, taking on her best impression of his accent.
He laughed. He was easier with his smiles out here, away from Wanderer Country. It was far too hot for his coat in the South’s swampy heat, and he had covered his tattoos that morning with concealer Zay ground from cacao and sun oil. He was far less mysterious this way, Wil thought. Just a boy.
“That wasn’t a terrible impression,” he said.
“Well, what do you expect? I’ve had no one but you to listen to for the last week.” She was still imitating his inflections, and her careful pace stole some of the edge from her words.
“Practice punctuating your syllables,” he advised. “Up in Northern Arrod you let one word bleed into the next. Down here we enunciate.”
“Noted.”
As he rowed toward the mainland, she looked over her shoulder. Messalin was a dull scar on the horizon. She would never admit it to him, but she was excited to see what the Southern Isles were truly like, away from the sullen quarantine of Loom’s castle.
“How much do you know about the royal family in Arrod?” Loom said, breaking her out of her reverie.
She shrugged. Her heart began to race.
“You know about the three princes, surely, and the princess,” Loom said.
Wil’s grip on the edge of her seat tightened, and she willed their boat closer to its destination. “Yes,” she said.
“And you know the heir and the princess drowned,” Loom said, with the same detachment anyone would have when speaking of a distant kingdom. “The heir had married a woman from Cannolay. That right there was the first sign a war was imminent. He was forming an alliance. After his death, I wondered if she would return home, but she has proven to be a traitor.”
“Does she have to be a traitor for not returning?” Wil said, in her own tongue again. “Maybe she just loved him.”
“That isn’t how political marriages work,” Loom said. “Believe me. I know. Especially between different nations about to go to war. She was hoping to gain something from that alliance, as was the prince.”
She forced herself to look at him. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“To give you an idea of the chatter you’ll hear on the streets.” He pushed the oars forward with extra force. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ve upset you.”
She exhaled hard. “How long until we arrive?”
He stopped rowing, and the boat rocked helplessly at the whim of the waves.
“Tell me what I’ve done.”
The mainland sat silent in the distance, still too far to swim for it. Loom would surely dive in after her, and she still didn’t trust herself not to drown him for bringing her here.
“Just row.”
“I want to understand,” Loom said, his voice firm. She dared to look at him and his eyes were too serious, boring through her. If he gazed any harder, he would see through her skin, through her skull. He would see her memories and know what she had done.
“High winds.” Wil grasped the oars. “I’ll do it myself.”
She was able to row at nearly twice his speed. She wondered what it was that suddenly made him so soft.
She could not figure him out. He resorted to dirty tactics to have his way, and then he seemed to care how she felt about it.
She didn’t understand herself when she was around him, either.
He didn’t try to recover the oars until they were so close that the sounds of city chatter could be heard. There was the smell of roasted boar and poultry, heavily spiced and coaxing an appetite out of her. It competed with the sea air. She didn’t want to admit that she’d always been curious about Lavean food. She didn’t tell Loom that she wanted to know everything about the world, every little piece of it, or that she had dreamed of coming here. Loom didn’t deserve to know this. He didn’t deserve to know anything about her.
“We’ll want to head toward the mountains a bit,” Loom said. “There are children who will guard your boat from thieves if you pay them enough.”
“How do you know the children won’t steal your boat?” Wil asked. “Or sell it off?”
“Incentive,” Loom said. “If
they recognize you, and they do what’s asked of them, they know you’ll pay a higher price for their loyalty the next time.”
As the boat jostled against the mainland, Wil felt a somber silence emanating out from the city, like a cloud eclipsing the sun.
The heat of late morning was magnified here, compounded by some persistent manmade smog that smelled of spices at one turn, and of something odious the next.
Wil recognized it all too well. During Gerdie’s frequent childhood illnesses, a parade of doctors and herbalists trailed to his bedroom. Wil would hover, spying, in the halls. She would breathe in the mists and medicines and the palpable sick, like death had come but could not find entry.
Sweetness mingled with the fear and the loss.
Sickness, she knew. It was an old, uninvited friend.
Wil hadn’t known what to expect of Messalin. In some regard, when she thought of new places, she always imagined that they would be a bit like her home. There would be gardens, and a clock tower to trill the passage of time. She expected, she realized with shame, traces of affluence.
Cannolay was affluent. She could see it sparkling in the distance, catching bits of the sun. But there would be none of that wealth here in Messalin. She climbed out of the boat, dodging a messy-haired young boy who offered up his hand, and tried to see the city that lay beyond a twist in the mountainside.
All she could make out from here was the flutter of faded sheets.
Loom struck a deal to ensure the boat’s safety, and then he moved to Wil’s side.
He leaned with his mouth close to her ear. His voice was a murmur that melted under her skin. “It isn’t safe for me to spend too much time on the streets. Someone may recognize me.” A cloak would only raise suspicions in this heat. “Stay near me. We’re going to visit a friend.”
The last friend she’d met had been his wife, and Wil was not put at ease.
“What do you need me to do?” Wil asked.
“Just watch,” he said. “You think I’m going to exploit you, but I brought you all this way to make you see.”
“I have a hard time believing that.”
“I have faith in you,” he said. “Once you’ve seen what I have, you’ll do what you think is right.”
What you think is right, she wanted to say.
After walking the short length of a dirt road, they found themselves at the heart of Messalin’s city proper.
Loom had not prepared her for the volume of the crowd. The entire population of the Southern Isles must have flocked to this small market. He grabbed her wrist and tugged her deftly between bodies through makeshift passageways, ensuring she didn’t so much as graze a shoulder.
Silver bangles sang from the wrists of women flitting past. Delicious meats lingered amid incense that burned to ward away sickness—Wil knew the latter firsthand.
They passed a vendor who was selling loaves of parmii, a sweet multigrain bread that Wil knew only from photos. Something about the sight of it comforted her, as though she had wandered into a page of Owen’s atlas.
“How are you feeling?” Loom’s breath disturbed the hair along her neck. “Anxious at all?”
“A little,” she confessed. “Crowds don’t bode well for me.”
“I can give you something for the adrenaline if you’d like.”
“No.” She couldn’t afford to have her senses dulled.
A moment later, she realized that she had wrapped her gloved arm around his, her body leaning into the safety that encompassed him. It was a tentative, wary closeness. She was still waiting for him to betray her, and she would be ready when he did.
For now, though, he provided an odd comfort.
The crowd relented as they walked on, and Wil at last felt as though she could breathe.
For the first time on this patch of land, there was grass, spreading up a hillside in brilliant luminescent green, dotted with strange gray blossoms that wrapped around lengths of rusted wire. The wires were bent into clumsy circles.
“What are those?” Wil asked. She was speaking Lavean in her best Southern accent.
It was safe to stop walking, for everyone passing by seemed to avoid the ground before this hillside.
“That’s where the dead are buried,” Loom said. “Those wires are passages for their souls to enter the afterlife. Only flowers the color of ash are permitted to grow there, to ward off any lingering spirits looking for color and life.”
Wil had never heard of such a thing. If it was in any of the books in the castle, she had never found it. But then, many of the pages had been torn out because of her mother’s superstitions, and it was very possible that they had been burned to ward off anything that made her uneasy.
It was so beautiful and sad, she thought. “Do you believe in it?” she asked.
“Your Northern Arrod is showing,” he said. “Belief is not a luxury that gets contemplated here. When it comes to death, it simply is.”
He started walking and she took a broad step to catch up. “But you must believe something.”
“Whatever I do or don’t believe isn’t important.”
It was the first time he seemed frightened of anything, and Wil was left to wonder. He stole touches from a girl whose heart could turn life to stone, and he navigated through that horrifying storm at sea without a batted lash, but a simple question about the afterlife and he was like a child afraid of the dark.
She decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. Death traditions were a grim topic in a city that didn’t need further help being grim.
Wil could see where it had once been pretty. Homes were carved out of the mountainside, against and atop one another, run over with flowers on vines.
Hanging from every cluster of mountain homes, and fluttering throughout the market, were cloth signs with hand-painted letters:
Long Live King Zinil. Long Live the Royal House of Raisius.
Loom said nothing about these. That musty scent of illness and incense lingered everywhere.
“How much farther?” she asked.
“Just at the end of this row here.” He looked at her. Reflexively she returned his gaze and was stricken by the sight of him. He seemed wilted, all at once, and tired where just moments earlier he had been vibrant. Something about this place drained the blood from his cheeks.
He stopped walking and pulled her against a stone wall, away from foot traffic. “The woman’s name is Rala. She’s a cousin of Zay’s. She’s the most fitting example of why these isles need your help.” He nodded to the mountains that climbed atop each other in the distance. “Any plant you can dream of is in those mountains. You could climb right up and take them. But these people, this kingdom—they don’t have the resources to process them into medicines anymore. The king barely holds that power himself. It’s right there, but it’s useless unless we can afford the equipment.”
“You’ve said as much before,” Wil said, unnerved by his desperation. Even if she hated his methods in dragging her here, she wished that she could help in the way he believed she could. She wished it were possible without endangering her secret and putting her entire family at risk.
“But now I’m going to show you.” He began walking again, and in a few strides they had arrived at a small house set apart from the others. It was carved in the mountainside and overrun with roots of competing trees. The door was ornately hand carved, painted bright green.
“Rala?” he called. When he opened the door, two small children darted past, chasing each other into the crowd and giggling.
Wil froze in place. There had already been something lingering in this city, but it was especially prevalent in this house. She would recognize it anywhere.
Gray Fever.
“Come on.” Loom was already ahead of her, in that dark single room with its sounds of rattled breathing.
Wil forced herself past the curtain. It brushed against her bare forearm, a musty caress.
The room was small and cluttered, with one large bed that took up nearly h
alf the space. There was a washbasin stuffed with clothes to indicate that many children lived here, but there was only one child alone in the bed.
There was a woman sitting beside the bed, dabbing at the child’s damp face.
“Rala,” Loom said again, gently. “I’ve brought someone for you to meet. This is Wil.”
The woman’s eyes fell on Wil.
Her heart was racing so much she felt that words alone could turn everyone on this isle to ruby. She meant to say hello but what came out was, “Steam will help with his breathing. Boil a pot of water and tent a blanket over it. An hour a day, if he can sit up for that long.”
Rala offered the barest smile, first to her and then to Loom. “You’ve found a budding doctor, is that so? Does Zay approve?”
“Zay hates her,” Loom said, and some of the tension lifted with his easy tone. “That’s how I know she’s good for me.”
“I’m—not a doctor,” Wil said. “But I know someone who lived through Gray Fever.” She emphasized that word, lived. “It clung to him for a good two years or so, but he got better. There are all sorts of herbs you can try, and mint ground into a paste to open the air passages at night, but it’s best if you boil them and have him breathe in the steam. And you’ll want to give him lots of milk and eggs and organ meats, if you can. The riboflavin will help prevent vision loss.”
Long after Gray Fever had diminished the vision in Gerdie’s left eye, he’d researched everything about his illness, ever seeking answers for why things happened the way they did. The Gray Fever had eaten away at the riboflavin in his body, weakening his cornea, causing it to thin and his vision to blur. Now whenever he feared a relapse, he drank a putrid cocktail of milk, eggs, and organ meats. Wil couldn’t stand to be in the room when he downed it, but it did seem to work.
After she’d said the words, Wil noticed the eggshells discarded in a bowl at the foot of the bed, and she shrank back in embarrassment. Of course Rala would already know how to care for her child. Southern medicine had far more to offer than even the finest doctors in Arrod.