“I think I can get us there in less than a week,” Zay said. “The Northern waters will be closed around Arrod, so we have to keep as far east as we can, which will add another day.”
“The lyster isn’t doing very much for his fever,” Wil said. “It’s like his body is trying to heal, but the curse won’t let it.”
“I’ll figure something out.” Zay tried to sound assured. “There are dozens of plants and potions all over this ship.”
Wil had more questions, but she knew she would not like the answers. How much worse was Loom going to get? What if the marveler couldn’t help? Or wouldn’t?
For a while, the only sound was of the water cresting against the sides of the boat. There were no cities out here, no insects buzzing in grass. The world itself could have ended and they wouldn’t know it.
Wil lay back against the deck, and her blood fell to the rhythm of the waves. She didn’t tell Zay just why she was so experienced in bedside manner. But she was thinking about it then.
Gerdie called to her on nights when he feared his illness would wrap around him like black wings and consume him.
Zay was the first one to break the silence between them. “When Ada was born, Loom heard me screaming and broke through the locked door to get to me.” She laughed. “The midwife and three servants tried to push him from the room; they said that any man who saw his wife in such a state would never find her attractive again. He drew his sword and promised to behead anyone who stood between us.”
She lay back against the deck. “This curse won’t stop me. I’ll beat down any door and take down anyone who stands in my path to save him.”
Wil rolled onto her side to face her. “Will the king be out looking for us?”
Zay shook her head. “Not for Loom, no. He probably expects him to already be dead, and in a time of war he can’t afford to spare any men to go chasing after him.”
“What about Espel?”
“There’s no telling what that one will do,” Zay said.
“She seemed—almost normal at times,” Wil said. “Not at all what I expected.”
“She wasn’t allowed to act sweet when she was a kid,” Zay said. “When she was three or four years old, I remember she came in from the garden after a walk with her nanny, with a flower tucked in her hair. The king told her to remove it, and when she refused, he drew his sword and cut the entire chunk of hair right off her head, flower and all. That day, he dismissed her nanny. It was all combat training after that.”
“So she did have a soul, once,” Wil said.
“She has a soul. It’s just a rotten one,” Zay said. “Loom has similar stories from his own childhood, and he didn’t turn out like her. Nothing like her.”
“Perhaps it’s different for girls,” Wil said. “‘We’re told who we’re meant to be, and we strive to be just that, even if we know it isn’t right. Love is used as a weapon against us. When we don’t do as we’re told, it gets taken away, and when we do, it’s returned again like a treasured doll.”
“It sounds like you speak from experience,” Zay said.
“You may think I’m a witch, but I was human once. Before all this.”
“You’ve just made me feel as though I have something in common with the princess of the Southern Isles, and that exceeds human ability,” Zay said. “You’re a strange thing. But one day I’ll figure you out.”
“If you do, maybe you can clue me in.”
Zay laughed. A loud, uninhibited sound that carried right up to the stars and across the endless waters.
“Have they always been pitted against each other?” Wil asked.
“I was too young to remember the queen dying in childbirth,” Zay said. “But everyone in the palace said that her death broke the king. And here he was left with the last thing she could give him. I suppose Espel just frightened him.” She shrugged. “Loom and Espel knew how to be what was expected of them. They were rivals. They had no choice in the matter. But Loom thought he could get through to her. Maybe he still does, though I can’t imagine why. I’ve never heard her say a kind word to him in her life.”
“He didn’t aim to kill when he threw his dagger,” Wil said. “He only wounded her enough to stop her, but he had a clear shot at her heart. He could have ensured right then that she would never be queen.”
Zay tipped the bottle toward Wil in a salute. “Nothing gets by you.” Her smile was sad. “I never had siblings. Maybe there’s something about his loyalty I just don’t understand.”
Wil thought of Baren. If throwing a dagger at his heart could somehow bring Owen back, she would do it. She would mourn Baren the way she mourned the rabbits the cooks skinned and drained for supper. A sacrifice could not be a tragedy. “He must see some good in her,” Wil said.
“Yeah, well, I worry his loyalty will be the death of him.” Zay stood, tugging her hair loose from its bun. It fell around her like a tangled black flame with flashes of silver. “I can be loyal too,” she said, turning for the stairs.
The silence of the sea at night was more fearsome than the storms they’d encountered on their way to the Southern Isles.
It was late, and the lantern was dim as it swayed over Loom, pulling at the sharp angles of his face. For some time now Wil had been fighting the haze of sleep, not wanting to return to her own bunk. Not wanting to leave the quiet, steady rasp of Loom’s breathing. Aside from the occasional whir as Zay strained the engine, his was the only sign of life.
Eventually, exhausted, she grabbed the comforter from her cabin and made a nest of it on the floor by Loom’s bed. He thrashed in his sleep, muttering fragments of Lavean in his fever. He turned onto his stomach, and sighed, and went quiet again.
Wil strained her ears to listen to him breathing, until she fell into a fitful half-sleep of her own. She had kept bedside vigil before, and she had mastered the practice of listening to what was around her, even in sleep. She was distantly aware of footsteps, and then the lantern being dimmed to conserve energy, and gentle voices.
“Hey,” Zay murmured. “How are you feeling?”
“Never better.” Loom’s voice was strained.
“Why is there a black tunic covering the porthole?” Zay asked.
“Wil put it there. I’m not entirely sure why.”
“Sit up. You need to drink something.”
“You’re worrying too much,” he said. “You get that from your mother.”
“I know what you’re doing,” she said, “and it isn’t going to work. You can’t make me angry.”
“Isn’t that your default personality?”
“Get some sleep, you rotten brat. I’ll check on you again in a bit.”
“Hey.” Loom’s voice softened. “I don’t suppose you were able to find your mother while you were in the palace.”
Zay was quiet for several seconds. There was the sound of blankets rustling. “A servant was able to get to me while I was being held in the dungeon. She told me that my mother fled the kingdom shortly after you and I left.”
“Would she have gone back to Grief?” Loom asked.
“I don’t think so. My father would know to look for her there.” Another pause, and when Zay spoke again, it was with difficulty. “She’ll be fine. She knows how to navigate the world, and she’s clever.”
“You get that from your mother too,” Loom said.
It didn’t surprise Wil to know that Zay was adept at navigating the world. Wil had sensed this about her the moment she first saw her, at the port in Brayshire. That was what had made her beauty so striking, Wil supposed: the ease with which Zay moved through the world, as though she had conquered it.
“Go easy in the control room, will you?” Loom’s words were beginning to slur in his fatigue. “I hear the way you’re straining the engine to go faster than it’s meant to. You won’t improve our situation if the ship breaks down out here.”
He was asleep as soon as the words were spoken.
Wil felt Zay’s shadow lingering over
her. Zay made no secret of her suspicions, but even as she lay under her glare, Wil knew that Zay would hold her temper for Loom’s sake. There was a balance, held in place by his fragile state, and everyone on the ship was at the mercy of this curse.
For days, there was no land in sight. Loom bobbed to the surface of consciousness on occasion, and sometimes Wil could even persuade him to have some broth, or a bite of the stale ration bars from the kitchen. She read aloud to him from the books under the bed, and even when he slept, he moved his lips to the lines he knew by heart.
After she’d finished the chapter, while Loom slept, Wil laid the open book on the bed beside him and reached for the lyster plant. The leaf turned to emerald even before she’d finished plucking it from its branch. Pain shot from her stomach to her throat and she pursed her lips to hold back a cry.
Somewhere, buried in the pain, there came relief. She had gone too long without releasing her power, lost as she’d been at sea and in her thoughts.
Loom’s hand reached out and touched her cheek. His sleeves were rolled to the shoulders, and she could see his marriage tattoo. The silver outline was fading, as though the black of the moons was absorbing it.
She forced a smile when he opened his eyes and looked at her. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I dreamed that something was coming for you.” His eyes were the most alert they’d been since the curse took hold of him.
“No one is coming for me.”
“Not now,” he said. “Years ago. Decades ago.”
“Decades ago, I didn’t exist and neither did you. Maybe we need to get some more food in you. Do you think you can hold it down?”
“Don’t mollify me,” he said. “Just listen. I dreamed there was a king. He had been studying dark marveler arts. He wanted to destroy something. He wanted to destroy you.”
She smirked. “If he wants to claw his way out of the grave, he’s welcome to try.”
“Pity the king,” he said. The humor drained from his face. With his current pallor, the look he gave her was all the more frightening. “Wil, marvelers don’t fight fair. I’m proof of that. But I won’t die. I refuse to let my father be that happy.”
“Let’s make him livid, then, and get you back into fighting shape,” Wil said. “Zay thinks she can get us to the marveler by end of tomorrow.”
“I hope she isn’t killing the engine. She drives this thing like hellfire when she’s in one of her moods,” Loom said.
She picked up the book, and he put his hand over her wrist, stilling her. “Don’t read that story. I’ve already read that one a hundred times.”
“When I was little, I loved the story about the Gold King,” she said. “Do you know it?”
“The fairy tale?” Loom asked. “Everything he touched turned to gold.”
“Yes,” Wil said. “But it isn’t just a fairy tale. There’s some history to it. Some several hundred years ago, a man set out to try and turn ordinary metals into gold, and that’s how alchemy originated: the art of taking materials and reconfiguring them into something else.”
“Did he do it?” Loom asked. “Did he make real gold?”
“It’s widely speculated and no one knows for sure,” Wil said. “But I doubt it. I think he just made something that resembled gold. I’ve seen glass cut and made to look like very convincing diamonds using alchemy, but it’s still glass. There are plenty of theories, though. One is that he managed to really make gold. It made him rich, but the gods of the high winds disliked his greed and cursed him with the golden touch. Since then, so it goes, alchemy has been limited to fusing and repurposing objects but never changing their core materials.”
Loom touched her chin, tentatively, as though she might draw another blade and hold it to his throat if he overstepped. “You know a lot about alchemy.”
That was Gerdie’s doing, but she didn’t say that.
In his feverish state, he had wrested away from the sheets, and now Wil noticed the tattoos that bloomed across his arms and collar, coming to frame his bare and unmarked chest. The two moons overlapping on his left arm were also set apart from the others, as though none of the other patterns could dare to touch something so sacred.
Even Wil didn’t feel right touching them, and had avoided those moons as she tended to his fever. They did not belong to her. She had heard of Lavean wedding tattoos, but hadn’t been prepared for the power they implied, like a tangible presence on his skin.
Loom followed her gaze, and then looked at Wil again with brows raised. He was inviting her to ask questions, but she didn’t. She had no right. And besides, she told herself, what did it matter that he was married?
It didn’t matter. She would repeat those words until she believed them.
“Tell me about you,” he said. He was holding the leaf in his other hand, bobbing it through his fingers.
There was a catch in her voice. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know about your family,” he said. “Your mother. Your brother. Did they abandon you once your power came out?”
She saw her mother collapsing into wails at the news of her children’s deaths. She saw Gerdie locking himself in his lab, furiously poring over his cauldron, his mind ever busy, desperate to think rather than feel, rather than accept what he had lost.
She saw the flames in Cannolay.
“There’s nothing for me to tell.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Loom said.
“Is this supposed to be a story or an interrogation?”
“A bit of both,” he said, in that presumptuous way he clearly thought was charming.
She narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t ask to be a part of your sojourn, Loom Raisius. You tricked me into coming along, and now I’m here, and, I might add, this morning I changed your sheets after you got sick on them. Some of it got in my hair. You can ask your questions, but I don’t owe you any answers.” She stood.
Who was this boy? This boy who had swooped into her life and never seemed to be far from her thoughts. He was a pin in a map, the paper spinning in place, never taking her anywhere. Somehow their destinies had become tangled, and Wil couldn’t help thinking she was to blame for failing to get away from him. For not wanting to get away from him now.
“Wait,” Loom said. “Don’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere. We’re trapped in the middle of the bleeding ocean. You should sleep. Try not to dream about any more murderous corpses.”
“It wasn’t a—”
She was already out the door.
THIRTY-SIX
UP NORTH IN THE EASTERN Sea, between Arrod and the Eastern Isles, there was a cluster of small countries.
Owen had once told her that this was a good place to disappear. Many of the countries were ancient and impoverished, always overlooked in times of war and rarely frequented by vendors.
But as the country named Grief appeared in the distance, Wil found it to be beautiful. The boats were lined up along the marina, slender and white like fragile bones, backlit by the setting pink sun. The hills were a violently bright shade of green.
It was Wil’s sixteenth birthday today, a fact that had nearly gone forgotten now that she no longer had her data goggles to remind her of the date. Time itself had drowned in all that open sea. For just a moment, she stood there with her secret. After days of anticipating Pahn and tending to Loom and cautiously befriending Zay, her mind traveled back to the castle. What was Gerdie doing? Was he safe? Was he thinking of her? He held dates and hours in his head like insects in a great web, and he surely hadn’t forgotten.
The brutal sound of coughing carried up the stairs, jarring Wil from her thoughts, and she ran to check on Loom. He, at least, she could do something for.
He was sitting up when she found him, his face skeletal, the sheen gone from his skin. He looked nothing like the boy he’d been just days before.
“We’re here now,” Wil said, and sat on the bed beside him and doused a lyster leaf for
his forehead. “You just have to hang on for a bit longer.”
He slouched forward and rested his brow against her shoulder, murmuring her name as though the sound of it brought relief.
She could smell his hair. Like the dirt after a long rain.
THIRTY-SEVEN
ZAY WAS GONE FOR HOURS. She took Ada with her. Maybe she thought that a small child would elicit some sympathy from this illustrious marveler. Or perhaps she just didn’t trust him in Wil’s care. Loom was in no condition to watch after him.
Wil sat beside him, mopping his brow. His fever kept breaking, but it returned with a fury every time. She thought he was sleeping, but as she pressed a cool leaf to his forehead, he caught her wrist. There was fight in his eyes, which were made amber by the late afternoon sun.
For a moment, she saw the child he must have been in that mountain palace, with a dead mother and a little sister he wasn’t allowed to love, who wasn’t allowed to love him. How lonely it must have been, she thought.
“Hey,” she said. “How are you feeling?” The tenderness of her voice surprised her, as though they were old friends, as though they were anything to each other at all. “More dreams of evil kings come to steal me away?”
He shook his head against the pillow. “No.” His voice was a whisper. “No dreams. Just thoughts.”
“Oh?” She brought a spoonful of water to his lips, and he drank it obligingly. He probably didn’t want it, but after many bedside arguments he had learned not to fight her on these small, necessary things.
“I was thinking of the day I saw you in the market square,” he said. “The way you moved, this blur of fight and blood and muscle. There had been a rip in the blue sky and you broke through it. You just appeared, and the world changed.”
An ache in her chest. Blood pushing her veins toward him as roots through the earth seeking out a means to survive.
“You’re delirious,” she said.
“I don’t want for us to be enemies,” he said.