The Glass Spare

by Lauren DeStefano

  Wil was grateful for the small distraction when the servants brought in trays of food. Glazed chicken in a bed of orange shavings, carrots, asparagus and potatoes sprinkled with barley, tiny silver bowls of gravy and melted butter. Since the sudden emergence of her powers, Wil’s appetite had been fickle, but she filled her plate regardless.

  “Perhaps they will come in handy tonight,” the king said. “A passenger ship arrived this afternoon from Brayshire. I’ve heard a rumor that there may be a Southern spy among them.”

  Owen spoke up immediately. “Papa, she isn’t ready for that. She’s never dealt with foreign spies, and if there is a spy, and he were to find out who she is, she would be taken hostage. Or—”

  “Nonsense,” the king said. “Rumors about the princess of Arrod change like the tide, but not a single one of them has come close to the truth.”

  Wil knew what he meant by that. There were rumors that the princess of Arrod was attending prestigious boarding schools, or sailing the world, or locked away in a tower safe from the eyes of suitors. But these tales all had one thing in common: the princess of Arrod looked just like her parents and brothers, with their blue eyes and gold hair.

  She did resemble the king a little, if one had a keen eye. So many of her expressions mirrored his, particularly when she was pensive or exasperated. But no one ever looked at her long enough to notice these things when she was beyond the castle wall, because she was quite good at making herself invisible.

  The queen laid her hand on her husband’s arm. As ever, her presence was gentle but strong. But Wil saw the way her lips quivered before she brought them to the king’s ear and whispered something. It was a protest, Wil knew, for her mother would never argue with him where others could hear it.

  The king leaned against her to listen, his eyes softening near imperceptibly, the way they always did for his queen. Whatever she said may have been enough to sway him. It usually was.

  “Papa.” Wil raised her voice, cutting off her mother’s hushed words. “I’ll do it.”

  She felt Owen’s and Gerdie’s cutting stares, but she kept her eyes on her father. He had never tasked her with anything this important before. Gaining intelligence on a foreign spy in a time of impending war would increase her worth to this kingdom by degrees. And if she could do this, soon he would be sending her out into the world for sure, months sooner than she’d anticipated. Then she could find Pahn and be rid of this power for good.

  “Please,” she said. “I want to do this for you. For Arrod.”

  Her father’s proud expression was tarnished by her mother’s paling complexion.

  “Wouldn’t you rather send me, Papa?” Baren spoke up. “I could wear a disguise—”

  “Don’t be a fool,” the king said, with a flourish of his hand. “Your sister is a disguise. The most valuable one we have.”

  Without looking at him, Wil could feel Baren’s eyes going dark and narrow. Another reminder that even she had a purpose.

  After dinner, Gerdie moved to his laboratory and beckoned Wil to follow.

  He stood over his worktable, twisting the hilt of her dagger apart so that he could refill it with sleep serum.

  “Thanks,” Wil said, affording a small bit of contrition in the wake of his obvious disapproval. She was running her fingertip along the open page of his notebook.

  He glared at her. It was a look she had pretended to ignore throughout the duration of the meal, but now its edge was sharper.

  “Whatever you want to say to me, just come out with it.”

  He sheathed the dagger and handed it back to her. “It wouldn’t make a difference. You never listen.”

  “Is this an attempt to make me feel guilty?” Wil said. “Because I’m losing time even as we stand here. Lecture me after I’ve returned.”

  “I’ll never understand the things that call to you,” he said. “Becoming a wanderer. The water. Your incessant desire to make Papa value you. He’s never going to, can’t you see that? You are nothing to him. We are nothing to him.”

  Wil adjusted the sheath to her thigh, tugging it roughly into place. She did not look at him. She did not want him to see that he was right, and that the thing she so wanted was the thing she would never have, even as she pursued it.

  “However Papa feels about my worth as a daughter doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t need his love. I only need his trust. He’ll use me as a spy—you’ve said so yourself. So I’ll be the best spy. I’ll be better than any of his men, and ten times more reliable because we share blood, and soon, he will send me out into the world.”

  “Out into the world for what purpose?” he pressed. “So you can employ magicians to cure you with potions made of bubbling soap and snake oil?”

  She paced past him, toward the stairs. She was so angry, she pressed her lips tight to keep from saying any of a hundred things she would regret later. She was tired of her brother’s logic, his lectures on the science of things. This was not a broken bone or a fractured collarbone or a fever carried over from a foreign land. He could not master it as he had so many other things. The thing that had overtaken her belonged to no one but her, and though she hated it, it was her possession. Only she had the right to speak to what it was, and what it could do, and how she could be rid of it.

  “You don’t know everything,” was all that she said. She slammed the door behind her.

  A short while later, Wil was making her way through the thick of the woods, wearing a pair of dark trousers and a gray tunic that had once belonged to Gerdie before he’d outgrown it. She had also helped herself to a pair of his platinum guns and a leather holster to go around her waist. On her way out, she had avoided her mother, who had begun tapping the walls and breathing in her compulsive numerical patterns.

  Whenever the queen felt helpless, it compelled her to do things in multiples of threes and fives.

  The queen believed that those numbers held the universe in balance somehow. That if she did not count correctly, if she did not step in time, some tragedy would befall her children. That when Owen set sail on one of his diplomatic affairs, the ship would never return and it would be because she hadn’t shown that she loved him enough.

  The bitter guilt of being the cause of her mother’s worry followed her out into the chilly September night.

  She had slipped down the halls and over the stone wall before her mother could find her. She couldn’t risk an embrace, the three inevitable kisses to her forehead.

  Her father’s source indicated that the ship’s fares would be headed into a village five miles inland from the Port Capital—a small, bustling strip of taverns and hotels, mostly. Wil had been there before. Working class. Modest. Low crime, although the occasional rowdy sailor could raise trouble after a few too many at the tavern. And the taverns would be what she checked first.

  There was a main road that led straight through, but, per her father’s instructions, Wil took the roundabout way through the woods. The leaves were gleaming, slick with recent rain. She followed the sounds of the river eastward, and then walked alongside the water until she reached the rapids.

  Here, alone in the darkness, her worry caught up with her.

  There was a natural bridge in the form of a rock wall, under which the water passed on its way back to the sea. The water seemed angered by its presence, churning and hissing and pushing against it, producing a thick froth. And unless she wanted to swim in the frigid shallows and walk a mile out of her way, Wil had to cross that wall.

  This was where she and Gerdie had hauled the dead vendor, and as the memory began to surface, Wil fought it back. She couldn’t afford to allow him into her head now.

  Another memory appeared in its place. She had crossed over these waters twice before—once to the other side, and once back—when she was a child and Baren had dared her. He had wanted her to fall in, and she’d known it. Here, the water wouldn’t have merely drowned her. It would have devoured her. No one—not even the king and all his soldier
s and guards—would have been able to recover her body.

  That was why she’d accepted the dare. She wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much Baren wished it were so. The entire time she edged along, he’d shouted that she was the useless spare, that she should just let go. How proud she was to land on her feet before him.

  How fitting that she was back here now, trying to prove her worth again.

  She was ashamed of the time she wasted standing there now. Forcing herself into action, she removed one glove, then the other, folding them and stowing them in her rawhide bag.

  She set one foot on the rock wall. It was rich with crevices, bits of mica winking at her like a thousand pairs of eyes in the starlight.

  She hoisted herself up, and her fingers found something to hold on to. There. Not difficult. A child could do this.

  The water spat at her boots.

  “You’re wind,” she whispered. “You’re everywhere.”

  She lifted herself higher, and imagined that she was floating above the river. Above the woods. The rapids were nothing from such a height. They were a babbling drunken argument on some noisy street—nothing that should matter to her.

  A snapping sound ripped her back down to earth, and her fingers tightened on the rock face. Her head whipped to the right. A figure was moving through the trees, strands of gold curls gleaming in the darkness.

  Owen.

  She charged forward with renewed fervor. She was nearly halfway across now—or so she told herself. Her heart was hurling itself against her chest like a violent prisoner in a cell, but her face didn’t betray any of that. She couldn’t show fear. She couldn’t be afraid. Not if she wanted to be worth anything in her family.

  “Monster,” he called after her.

  “Go away,” she said.

  She looked at him. His arms were at his sides, his shoulders lax. He was trying so hard not to press his authority on her. He was actually pleading. “Wil, please. Don’t be an idiot.”

  When was the last time he’d called her by her name? When was the last time he’d said “please”—to anyone?

  “I can’t have you in my head right now,” she said. She had to shout over the water. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

  “Let me talk to Papa about sending you overseas if that’s what you want,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. King Zinil’s spies are ruthless. Papa has threatened war. The entire South hates our family right now. If one of them found out who you are, you would be—” He was breathing hard, Wil realized. Something he’d just imagined had frightened him. “I wouldn’t forgive myself.”

  She wanted to give in, if only to erase that horrified look from his face. But something refused to let her. That eight-year-old girl with gritted teeth and a fluttering stomach, fighting to prove her place as the scrawny daughter in a royal line.

  “You don’t have to protect me,” she said.

  He said something else, but she had willed herself not to hear it, and in the next instant he was climbing after her. She hastened her speed, hoisting her boots from foothold to foothold.

  But she and Owen were matched wit for wit, stubborn heart for stubborn heart. He had always liked to tell her they were the same.

  “Just listen,” he said. They were both dead center now. Owen had no fear of this rock wall—he’d ventured it a hundred times, knew it like the back of his hand. He knew the entire kingdom, and so much of the world beyond. “Mother is beside herself. She pleaded with Papa, and he’s coming to stop you.”

  “What?” Wil said, her fear lost to her anger. “You didn’t try to stop him? How could you let him come after me like I’m a child?”

  “Maybe he realized what he’s asking of you,” Owen said. “He treats you as though you’re disposable—”

  “That’s why I have to do this,” she cried, pressing her body close to the rock to maintain her concept of space. The action stirred a lingering pain in her healing rib. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a spare. You couldn’t. Papa has always given you the world. The rest of us have to fight for glimpses of it.”

  The words hurt him, and she saw it on his face. Because she had just pitted herself against him, drawn a bold line that turned them into rivals. But she couldn’t take them back. She had meant them. She went on, and Owen stayed stubbornly beside her.

  She breathed through her frustration.

  Her boot slipped on the drenched rock face. She heard herself scream before she could stop it, a sound that didn’t even belong to her, a sound that held all the fear she’d been storing in her chest.

  She couldn’t regain her footing. Her vision was frenzied and moving fast, as though she were spiraling off the edge of the earth itself. For an awful moment she thought she had fallen completely, and she expected the water to fill her lungs.

  But something was holding her.

  “Breathe,” Owen was telling her. He had her collar bunched in his fist, somehow managing not to touch her.

  “Let go of me.” Her voice was just another version of her scream. Shrill, foreign.

  “It’s okay,” he was saying, calm for the both of them. “Lift your left leg; there’s a foothold right by it. You’ve got this.”

  Her arms were burning, and she realized with dulled horror that her hands and Owen’s grasp on her collar were the only things keeping her from certain death.

  Tears stung her eyes, making further chaos of her vision. Panic. She never panicked. “I’m not moving until you let go.” She sobbed. Later she would curse herself for that sob, she made a note.

  He released her collar, like he was agreeing to a hostage negotiation.

  She held her breath for a beat, then drew it in through her nose, held it, let it go through her open mouth. She worked to draw her left leg up, relying on her core, ignoring the stabs of protest from her rib.

  But if her mind was prepared to ignore that pain, her body wasn’t. Her arms shook, fingers went numb, and when she fell away from the rock face, there wasn’t even time for her to scream.

  An arm wrapped around her waist, drawing her up from the water that sloshed greedily for her dangling feet. A force. Motion. And then she was lying on her side in the damp grass, shaking. New hunks of emerald bit at her through her clothes.

  Owen was knelt beside her.

  “No.” Her voice was hoarse. “Owen, no.” The next sob to leave her was a violent one. She pushed herself upright and then to her feet. She staggered back.

  He stood to face her. For a moment they were the only things breathing in all the woods of Northern Arrod. He was twenty-five years old. And he was fifteen. And he was holding her over his shoulders to show her their kingdom. And he was pulling her up from the rapids. He was a million moments—an entire lifetime—all at once.

  He was staring her down with that same defiance he’d always had. The persistent haughtiness of a someday king.

  But they both saw the glint of diamond at his fingertip, and they knew that Arrod would never have him as its ruler.

  NINE

  HE STOOD FOR AS LONG as his body would let him, as the clear, merciless diamond hardened the veins in his arms, and paralyzed his lungs, and eventually, inevitably, took his heart.

  Wil caught him when his knees buckled and he fell forward, already dead. She stumbled to the ground with him in her arms.

  Even his hair had succumbed to it, brittle strands of diamond flaking off into the gold.

  Someone was saying his name. Screaming it.

  Her throat was raw.

  “What have you done?” Another voice came from the other side of the churning river. She saw her father, standing tall against the darkness, for once not flanked by his guards.

  In a blink, her father was on their side of the river. Wil didn’t even see him move.

  He pulled Owen from her arms, cradling him in his lap. This must have been the way he’d held Owen when he was a child, Wil thought. She had never imagined Owen as a child. He had always been so proud, it never o
ccurred to her that he had once been small. But here in death and moonlight, she saw that he was vulnerable. He had always been.

  The king cupped his hands around the skin of Owen’s face, which had been spared, save for the smooth diamond that had frozen at the curves of his cheeks and a glittering smattering of lashes.

  He looked like something that had been unearthed from snow.

  The king squeezed his eyes shut. “I should have killed you long ago,” he told her. “And I still can’t bring myself to do it.”

  Through her shock, Wil could hear in his voice that he had entertained the idea before. Did he know what she was capable of? Had he always? She was in no state to ask him. She was staring at Owen’s chest, willing it to rise with a breath.

  “Both of you died here tonight,” the king said. “Leave this kingdom. If I see you again, I will slit your throat, like I should have on the day you were born.”

  Wil could not feel her legs, but somehow she began to move.

  The kingdom of Arrod did not yet know what it had lost tonight, but the sky knew. Clouds churned like hands searching for something they had dropped in murky waters. The air rustled the leaves, making sobbing sounds.

  Wil did not realize, until she found herself far beyond the river, how far she had run.

  She stopped to catch her breath when her lungs began to burn and her vision roiled with bursts of darkness. And here, the quiet elegy of the woods gave way to distant laughter in the Port Capital, its towers muttering the hour in their language of bells and gears.

  Eleven o’clock. At ten o’clock, Owen had been alive and thriving, the rich blue veins in his arms fed by the beating of his red heart.

  Wil’s own heart began to settle the longer she stood still, and through her haze she realized the injustice of this.

  Walk, she told herself. If she lingered here between these trees even a moment longer, then she would never leave. She would lose her resolve and return pleading to her mother and crumple at her feet like a child. Her father would kill her for what she had done, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that her mother would know. Wil would rather her mother believed she were dead than know the truth. It would destroy her.