This light didn’t apply to Wil.
The smell of charred air and melted steel hit her even before she’d begun to descend the crumbling steps that led into the basement.
She found her brother standing in a smoggy rectangle of light that streamed in from the only window. He was staring into his cauldron, so deep in his concentration that he flinched when Wil touched him.
She laughed. “What were you trying to make?”
“Flexible armor,” he said.
“What would you do with flexible armor?” Wil asked. She peered into the cauldron. He tugged her arm, reeling her a step back from the smoke.
“You’ve seen knights’ armor,” he said. “Imagine if it had all that durability, plus the flexibility of leather.”
Wil raised a brow. “Papa asked for this?”
“No, this was purely my own idea,” he said, proudly raising his shoulders. “I do get those on occasion. But Papa was rather anxious to see if I could pull it off.”
With her thumb, Wil wiped at the condensation on his monocle; though he was nearly blind in his left eye even with the lens, it did provide just enough improvement to help his acuity when he worked. It was held in place by brown leather straps that wrapped around his head like a claw. The dull bronze hue of the leather complemented the metal braces that held his legs steady. Remnants of where the Gray Fever had ravaged him. He was a boy who by the looks of it had arrived in the world before he was finished being assembled.
He blinked at Wil as though waking from a trance. “Did you get it?”
She unlashed the bag from her shoulder and set it on the table. “Yes, I think most of it survived.” She extracted the tin of granules, the smell burning her throat as she unwound the cloth. “What do you need it for this time?”
“Bullets.” His voice trailed. He was watching the strain on her face when she breathed. He had not missed the fading burns on her hands. “High winds, Wil. What exactly happened out there?”
“It’s no big deal.”
He nodded to the bench that lined the wall. It had been there for hundreds of years, one of the few pieces of furniture he hadn’t hauled down the steps himself. Not that he ever used it—the idea of being still hardly ever occurred to him. “Sit,” he ordered.
Wil obliged. Sweat beaded her brow.
Gerdie stood in a beam of light, assessing her as though she were something he’d just extracted from the smoke with a pair of tongs. Bruises were beginning to blossom on her cheek, around her throat. The sight of them awoke him from his frenzy, and for the moment he was not a maddened genius but a boy again, with round cheeks and worried eyes. Her injuries told him the story. The vendor had tried to strangle the life out of her.
He knelt before her, braces creaking like rusty gears, and brushed the tips of his fingers over her left ribs.
Wil choked on a scream of pain. Gerdie jerked back. He saw the way her eyes darkened, the way she gasped as she regained herself. “There’s a break,” he said.
“No.” Wil shook her head. “Just sore. I’m fine.”
Gerdie ignored her. “I should have gone with you.”
Wil did enjoy when he snuck away with her into the Port Capital. The way the cogs of his mind turned in such places, the flashes in his eyes as he analyzed the mills that churned the water to harness electricity. The way he caught all the little imperceptible pieces that made a city live.
But bringing him into the slums was a bad idea. He had a soft heart under all that genius frenzy. He would have been trying to rescue all the orphans, or stopping to buy enough cheese and bread to feed a small village and then trying to do just that.
Wil eased her back against the wall and closed her eyes. It was nice to be home, at least, where no one was trying to kill her. “Did you see the cement mixers this morning?”
When she opened her eyes again, Gerdie was handing her a mortar of green mush. The cool tangy smell of mintlemint leaves ground with water and serlot oil filled the space. The usual concoction he mixed to ease the pain when she came home broken.
She raised it to her lips and took a tentative sip. Swallowing didn’t hurt, at least.
“Owen told me about the wedding this morning,” Gerdie said, sitting beside her. His eyes stared through the floor as he considered. “I don’t know what Papa is planning for this war, but I don’t like it.” He looked at Wil. “He can’t know that you’ve been smuggling in supplies for me. I don’t want him to find out about the bullets I’ve been working on.”
“You still haven’t told me what they’ll do.”
“Once it gets past the skin, the tallim has a magnetic pull toward the spinal fluid,” Gerdie said. “If I can get these bullets right, they’ll seek out the spine and dissolve into it. Should incapacitate the target for several hours.”
His voice lowered to a whisper, even though there was no one to hear them in the basement—not even Baren could have eavesdropped through the heavy door that guarded this space. “I’ve been working on something for Papa for months now.” He took Wil’s arm and steered her toward his shelf of bottles and boxes and powders.
He took a small wooden box and held it up. Wil looked curiously at it. It was small, crude, wholly unremarkable. He opened it to reveal a metal orb, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. It was smooth and black, and when Wil leaned forward to inspect it, she could see her own reflection in its surface.
Then, before she could touch it, Gerdie closed the box and placed it back on the shelf, carefully camouflaging it among his things. “There’s enough accelerant and shrapnel in there to set a city on fire,” he said. “I call it darklead. It’s a fusion of metals and gunpowder, mostly. Without alchemy, it wouldn’t be possible to condense so much matter into such a small space.”
Wil took a step back from the shelf, as though the mere explanation might cause the thing to detonate.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She thought of all the hours her brother spent laboring alone in his lab, the gait of his somnambulated daze when he hadn’t slept. These things were so typical of him, she hadn’t thought anything unusual was troubling him. But she knew with certainty that their father had forced his hand on this. Her brother loved making weapons, loved perfecting them, creating something that had never before existed. But he didn’t have it in his heart to destroy a city, no matter that his brain was capable of creating such a thing. Not even one in an enemy kingdom.
“It wasn’t safe to tell you,” Gerdie said. His eyes were serious. “Papa can’t find out I’ve told you.”
“You know that your secrets are safe with me.”
“I’m the only one who knows how it works,” Gerdie said. “Papa has seen it, but he wouldn’t be able to use it without me.”
Wil looked to the smoking cauldron, dread stirring within her stomach. If this war came to fruition, Gerdie’s hand would be forced. He would be their father’s weapon. All of them would be.
THREE
ON THE EVENING OF OWEN’S twenty-fifth birthday, the castle grounds were filled with life and strangers.
Wil sat on the wall where she could see the kingdom entering the gate and carrying all manner of grandiose things.
She also noted more guards standing along the wall’s perimeter. Yesterday, she had narrowly evaded one on her way into the city, unable to predict the new tumult of their rotations.
Beside her, Gerdie was struggling to position his left leg before him. His bones always gave him trouble when the weather was humid.
“Oh, Gerdie, look,” Wil gasped. “Is that a mermaid fountain? It is! It’s so gloriously tacky.”
“Wonderful,” he muttered. “We’d better go before someone sees the king’s failure spying on the heir’s glorious party.”
Wil’s head snapped to him. “Are you still sulking about that? Papa sent me away, too, you know. To buy perfume, no less.”
“The less you are seen by the kingdom, the more he can use you as a spy,” Gerdie reminded her. “He doesn’t want
anyone to see me because he’s ashamed of me.”
“Hey.” She inched in front of him and stared until he met her gaze. They looked nothing alike, save for the sharpness of their chins. But they were part of a set just the same. “Do not welcome Papa into your head. You know better.”
Her brows were drawn, jaw set. This was the way she had looked at him when they were small, and he whispered on his sickbed that he was dying. He had said it only once, and she had hit him. Sometimes he could still feel the spot on his arm pulsing when she glared at him.
It hadn’t been the last time his sister would bruise him. She was a ruthless sparring opponent, always a move ahead, always at his back before he could follow. But when they were on the same side of a fight, they worked in effortless tandem, as though they were limbs of a shared mind. With the exception of Owen’s training sessions, Gerdie had never been in a fight that didn’t involve his sister; peril of any sort only seemed to find him when she was present.
Gerdie didn’t want to admit it—he was awful with emotions—but her solidarity made him feel better.
He looked past her shoulder, to the parade of brass instruments and carts of imported food being wheeled in through the gate. “We should go,” was all he said.
Though Wil was the one who climbed the stone wall a dozen times a day to escape her instructors, and was always the fastest of her siblings, today she could just barely keep up with her brother as they descended the outer wall, he was so eager to get away.
Gerdie watched her place one foot gingerly on the ground before the other. “It’s been two weeks,” he said. “Is that rib still hurting?”
“The mintlemint leaves have been helping.” She charged forward, brushing off his concern. “Come on. I heard some chatter in the Port Capital that there were some wanderers headed east of the river.”
“When did you go back to the Port Capital?” Gerdie asked, keeping pace beside her. “You made an enemy when you stole that tallim. You should be avoiding the city until at least next month, when the vendors leave with the exports.”
“I didn’t want to steal it,” Wil said. “I am not the one who chose to do things the hard way. Anyway, he’s probably forgotten all about me by now.”
“Didn’t you also set two of his slaves free?”
In the waning sunlight, Wil answered him with a wicked smile. Gerdie laughed, despite everything. “You just can’t resist causing trouble, can you?”
“I don’t cause it. It just . . . seems to find me.”
They trudged through nearly a mile of woods before they heard the sounds of distant song. Wil grabbed Gerdie’s arm, stilling him, ceasing the croak and groan of his braces.
“And with his touch of gold
Of gold!—
He was cursed with what his god foretold. . . .”
Lyrics they knew well; their mother often sang about the Gold King as she milled about, and it had been one of the many lullabies she’d used to soothe them to sleep as children.
“Sounds like they’re straight ahead,” Gerdie said.
The sky was going dark now, stars beginning to burn bright against it. Now would be the time that wanderers ceased their traveling and began to set up camp. The warm summer air already smelled of wood fire.
As they drew closer and the songs grew louder, Wil began to recognize their accents. Overwhelmingly Southern Arrod, but others with various Eastern inflections. And some Brayshire.
Wil drew the voices in like air. Her stomach fluttered in that sick, dreamy way, both painful and longing.
Wil’s mother had once upon a time wandered the world herself, with sand bejeweling the slender bones of her ankles. And even as a queen, she was wild in her billowing gowns, barefoot when she roamed the gardens, her fingertips callused, her skin bronzed by the sun. She kept secrets in her mouth like chocolates. With that mouth she had once smiled at a young king, and he swept her up and spun her in diamonds and made her his queen.
The princes gave little thought to the songs their mother hummed or who she had been before she was their mother. But Wil often felt that she was a wanderers’ daughter. That if the king of Arrod had not been the one to steal her mother’s heart, she would have been born out under the shimmering stars. She would have been lulled to sleep by the crackling of fire, atop a pillow of crisp grass and cool earth.
Gerdie caught her swooning and bumped her shoulder. “Maybe you should just run off with them.”
“You could come with me,” she replied. “I’ve seen the way you can alchemize glass and paperclips to look like diamonds and chains for Mother. I’m sure your skills would be quite profitable.” She elevated her chin, proud of her idea. “We could be rich.”
“We’re already rich.”
She narrowed her eyes. “All logic; no imagination. Can’t you just play along for once?” But they were laughing now, both of their moods lifting the way they always seemed to when they were free of the castle.
The wanderers had set up their camp about a half mile from any neighboring towns, but already the camp was thrumming with people who had come to be wooed by the mysterious things for sale in the glowing tents. Scarves spun from silkbug strands, smooth stones purportedly capable of healing afflictions of the body and mind.
Gerdie averted his eyes from the vendors of miracle cures, the good humor fading from his face. He clenched his jaw. “What is it?” Wil said. “Are your legs hurting again? Is it too damp?”
“No.” He snapped out of his thoughts. “I’m fine.”
She tugged him onward. “Come on, then. The perfumes have to be this way. I can smell them.”
They wove between dancing women and giggling, shrieking children. Some men were sitting cross-legged in a circle, whittling chunks of wood into toy trains and soldiers and stars.
Wil stopped before a caravan whose cracks and crevices were aglow with the light of the lantern inside. The tiny door swung open just as she’d raised her fist to knock.
A young woman stood before them, with honey-colored hair tied into a thick, burdening braid that rested on one shoulder and trailed past her waist. Her eyes were big and icy blue. Her fair skin was warmed by the lantern light. The smile she gave them was an embrace.
“I remember you from last year, wasn’t it?” she said to Wil, in her wispy Brayshire accent. “You bought all those bottles of jesseray.”
Wil felt warm at the idea that such a beautiful woman might remember her. “For my mother,” she said.
The woman stepped aside to let them in, her slender arm holding the door open as they ducked inside.
The caravan was small as a closet, and a silk cloth hung over the lantern, swathing the space in a pink glow. The walls were lined with shelves that housed hundreds of tiny glass bottles secured by leather straps.
In a corner was an elderly woman with silver hair pulled back into a tight bun, her eyes the same haunting blue as the young woman’s. She was hunched over a mortar and pestle, grinding petals and oils, trickling them into a jar.
Gerdie studied the bottles with wary curiosity. His eyes watered, and Wil could tell he was trying to hold back a coughing fit. The rabid cacophony of smells enchanted Wil, but they only aggravated Gerdie’s already-fragile lungs.
“You could wait outside,” Wil whispered. He shook his head.
“How many bottles did you want this time, lovely?” the girl asked.
Wil raised the flap of her rawhide bag. “Four should be enough. One for each season.”
The girl winked when the bottles and geldstuk exchanged hands. “Jesseray chooses whom it favors, you know. The scent changes when it touches the body,” she said. “I bet your mother is very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Wil said, mesmerized by the gleam of the bottles, the small music they made as they touched each other. She wrapped each one in cloth before tucking it away.
Not all of it was for her mother. Wil intended to keep one for herself, to spray it into the air sometimes and pretend she was someplace where
wild jesseray blossoms grew in a smattering of colors.
Gerdie nudged her. It was just a subtle enough gesture to get her attention. She raised her eyes and realized that the old woman was staring at her. “I’ve seen you before,” she said. Her voice sounded surprisingly young.
“Yes, Gram, she’s come back for more of your perfume.”
“No.” With great difficulty, the old woman brought herself to her feet. She was scarcely taller than Wil, and when she leaned her face in close, Wil could smell the mint on her breath and skin. “When you were just a baby. Your mother brought you to me. She told me you were dying and she asked for my help.”
Gerdie grabbed Wil’s wrist. He tugged at her, but she was rooted there. “She did?”
“But you weren’t dying,” the old woman said. “You were marked, but not for death.”
“Wil,” Gerdie said. “Let’s go.”
Wil ignored him. “I was sick,” she said. “When I was born.”
“No.” The old woman shook her head. “You were never sick. It was far worse than that.”
All the smells and colors within the caravan suddenly took on a sinister persona.
“What was it?” Wil asked hoarsely.
“Darkness in your blood.” The old woman’s eyes flickered to Wil’s chest, right where her scar lay hidden beneath the green bibbing of her dress. “There’s something ugly in you. Something vicious.”
“Grandma,” the young woman cried, at the same time Gerdie pushed open the door.
“Enough.” The fury in Gerdie’s voice made Wil flinch. Stunned, she let him pull her back out into the sticky night air. “Can we go now?” he said, even as he was stomping to the outskirts of the camp, Wil following in a daze. “Do you have everything Papa wanted you to get?”
His biting tone only added to Wil’s unease. Unconsciously she brought her palm between her breasts, feeling oddly exposed. Had the woman known about her birthmark?
“She was a marveler,” Wil said, reasoning with herself. “She must have been.”
“Wil, listen to me.” Gerdie turned to her. “Marvelers are swindlers. Spells and curses are nonsense. Magic is a fairy tale. And Mother—she gives these things too much weight.” Sadness in his voice at that last bit.