by Anna Bright
I stepped close to him, jutting a finger at his chest. “My plan didn’t put anyone’s safety at risk.”
“Selah, you were never in danger.” Lang bent his head, casting both of us in shadow. A few droplets of rain trembled in his hair. “I had everything under control before y— Well, before.” His face was close to mine, earnest enough to infuriate me.
My breath left me in a rush. Red burned my neck and cheeks.
“Do not treat me like a child,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m not a fool, and you are not all-knowing. Anything could’ve happened while I was stumbling around blind.”
“I would’ve kept you safe.” He swallowed, and his throat bobbed. “I would have.”
I turned back to the bread, too angry to look at him anymore. Angry at his lies. Angry at my own weakness.
Lang came closer to me, two steps in the silent kitchen. I paused, wrist-deep in my work. When he put his hands on my shoulders, heat spread over my skin, furious and faltering.
“I don’t mind if you’re angry.” Lang’s thumbs stretched and tensed against my shoulder blades. He was close enough I could feel the words against the back of my neck. “I can take your anger. I just can’t take you shutting me out.”
“You were guilty of that long before I was, Lang.” I closed my eyes tightly. “I trusted you from the beginning. You were the one who wouldn’t let me in.” I looked over my shoulder and met his gaze. “And now you’re going to have to wait while I come to terms with this.”
My skin was colder when his hands fell away from it.
3
At dinner, the crew members were cheerful, warmed by their food and one another’s company. By this, only her second night aboard, Anya had already charmed them all; her sunshine-bright beauty had drawn their attention, but it was her genuine kindness that had everyone eager to make room for her as they’d once done for me. J.J. was attached to her side, his hazel eyes downcast and shy but lighting up every time Anya spoke to him.
Even Perrault, my protocol officer, seemed won over by her. I caught him glancing between Anya and me and the folder beside his plate, his expression almost wistful. Presumably, he’d brought the folder to discuss my next suitor—Fritz, of Katz Castle. I couldn’t imagine a topic I’d less rather discuss.
Did Perrault wish Anya were his charge? Was he thinking of how much easier his job would have been had he been tasked with marrying her off, instead of me?
I had sat where Anya sat, once. The crew’s shiny new toy, welcomed and admired. But I couldn’t be her tonight. I couldn’t be that girl anymore.
Skop stood behind her now, hands instinctively protective on her shoulders, laughing at some joke Basile had made. Safe, with Skop at her back, Anya had gotten her happy ending. Mine had slipped through my fingers. I tried not to let myself dwell on the ways that was Anya’s fault.
But if Anya had taken my place tonight, it seemed only fair that I be allowed to choose a new one.
The galley was one space divided in two by a low wall. I could still see everyone sitting at the two long tables from the kitchen side of the galley. But it was all the retreat I could make without looking like a spoiled child. With chores and the dividing wall between us, I felt less smothered by their happiness.
“I can take care of it, Selah,” Will protested, hands hovering uncertain before him as I shooed him toward where the others sat, smiling the falsest smile I’d ever worn.
I caught Vishnu’s eye over Will’s shoulder as I turned back to work. The ocean waves tattooed across the handsome sailor’s forearm swelled and receded as he pushed a hand through his dark hair, and he dropped his eyes away.
He felt guilty.
Good, I thought. They all should.
Cobie always ate slightly apart from the others, standing sentry against the galley’s low dividing wall. Tonight, I mimicked her, eating as I worked.
I felt Lang’s eyes heavy on me, frustrated, impatient, curious. I refused to look at him.
When the dishes were finally clean, I slipped out of the galley, casting a glance over my shoulder at the crew huddled close together. Silver-haired Yasumaro and J.J. with his cap low over his head and Basile with his laugh a mile wide. They were a perfect circle beneath the lamplight, their happiness a golden halo above their heads.
I would ruin their evening if I stayed.
The part of me full of smug, self-righteous anger wanted to remain and force them to confront what they’d done. They deserved to have their comfort spoiled.
The other half of me—the miserable half, the guilty half, the betrayed half—just wanted to hide.
For the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel like one of them.
Lang met my gaze, a question in his eyes. Both he and Perrault half rose, Lang’s lips parting as if to speak, Perrault’s pretty face confused. He lifted the folder in his hands, as if in summons.
I shook my head at both of them, my breath leaving me in a rush, and pushed out into the night and the still-falling rain.
With my cabin door shut tight behind me, I heaved Godmother Althea’s book out of my trunk and retrieved the radio she’d smuggled me from where it lay hidden beneath the back endpaper.
My godmother had been my mother’s best friend, the angel watching over me for as long as I could remember. Missing her was like an ache in my bones.
I wouldn’t be able to speak to her out here on the sea; my little radio and I were too far from a tower to transmit a signal. But it could receive one, if Godmother was speaking into the radio on her end.
I hoped she would be. I longed for the comfort of her voice. I hadn’t heard from her since we’d spoken in Norge a few days earlier.
Torden had proposed to me that day. It might as well have been a hundred years ago.
I sat back against my headboard, swallowed hard, and switched on the radio.
Empty air filled the silence. I was still alone.
One tear and then another spilled down my cheeks as I sat on my bed, my weary limbs splayed out like a broken doll’s.
I’d cried too much lately. I wiped my eyes and nose fiercely, swallowed the lump in my throat, and replaced the radio inside the endpaper. I added another tick mark to the rows of marching lines that numbered the days since I’d left home and my father behind.
I closed my eyes and tried to envision how the marks would multiply as the days passed, weighing the time apart from my father against the choice I had made to help the Waldleute resist the Imperiya.
Daddy would never want me to turn my back on those I had the power to help. I had to believe this, had to believe my godmother would agree that the danger the Imperiya’s subjects faced outweighed my duty to race back to Potomac and stand against my stepmother.
I opened the storybook over my lap and tried to read, to dwell on things that would give me comfort. On my father, on starlit nights on his balcony with him and my mother.
But happily ever after felt as far away now as once upon a time.
How I longed for the strength and safety I’d felt when Torden held me. How I missed the sense of possibility I’d felt with Daddy at my side, before I’d known I’d be forced to leave him.
No matter how much I told my heart that it was the right choice to venture east, I still felt lost. Adrift, here on the Frisian Sea, making for the Canal Route that would carry us to Katz Castle, where more things than another would-be suitor waited.
Lang and Yu had intelligence that said the Waldleute—the Shvartsval’d branch of the rebels working against the Imperiya—were active in the region near the castle. They were the reason we were adhering to my stepmother’s schedule: we were going to arm them with the weapons the zŏngtŏng, the president of Yu’s home country of Zhōng Guó, had given Yu and Lang to smuggle inside the Imperiya.
I had my own intelligence, too.
I’d been listening to my godmother one day on her radio when I’d accidentally stumbled on another frequency—on another conversation altogether.
&
nbsp; Hansel and Gretel, they’d called themselves. They’d been making plans.
“Burg Cats?” he’d asked. His voice had been cool and sharp, his accent almost English, with v’s like z’s. “Or Burg Rhein—”
She’d asked him if he was crazy. Told him anyone could be listening in.
She’d been right.
I had thought more than once to tell Lang and the others what I’d heard. But something had stopped my mouth before, had kept me from telling the others that they were right, and that the Waldleute were perhaps even working with someone inside the castle. Now there was no mystery to what had kept me quiet: I was too angry to share my secrets. They’d certainly taken their time sharing theirs.
Even having overheard Hansel and Gretel, I faced a great unknown on the map. Hic sunt dracones. Hic sunt lupi.
Here be dragons. Here be wolves.
Not only monsters awaited us in Shvartsval’d, inside the gray boundaries of the Imperiya Yotne. We would meet plots already in motion, characters in masks designed to deceive.
The courts I had survived thus far would be nothing compared to what lay ahead. Danger awaited us, and the days loomed long and fearsome as the teeth of the wolves the Imperiya’s tsarytsya loved so much.
Looking at my marks scratched out in pencil, wobbling from one edge of the endpaper to the other, I felt doubt creeping cold up my spine and wondered if I had chosen wrong.
Swallowing hard, I set my godmother’s book aside and dug deeper into my trunk.
I sat back on my bed and ruffled the pages of the folder in my hand—the folder Alessandra had thrown in my face the day we’d left Potomac so many weeks ago, my father weary and sick, most likely poisoned at her hand, my position as Potomac’s seneschal-elect teetering on the edge of a knife. But it was more than a dossier on the suitors ahead of and behind me; it was the story of where I’d come from and how far I had still to go.
Bertilak, prince of England, Duke of Exeter. Firstborn son of the king of England was first inside the file. He was England’s crown prince, Oxford-educated, thoughtful and wise, and I’d been horrified to find him close to Daddy’s age.
The folder didn’t contain details on my real suitor—Prince Bertilak’s son, Bear. He had gotten to know me disguised as a guard, and I’d fallen for him. I’d discovered their deception in front of the entire court and left completely humiliated.
I wasn’t angry at Bear anymore. He’d done what he had to do, just as I had. But my sigh rustled the pages as I turned past his profile.
Torden’s eyes stared up at mine.
When Perrault had first related Torden’s profile information—his height and hair color and his rank among Konge Alfödr’s sons—I’d asked if Norge was proposing courtship or selling horses. I didn’t feel any of that cynicism or anger now as I looked at Torden’s portrait. Sparse though it was, the artist had somehow captured the determined square corners of his jaw, the earnest set of his mouth and furrow of his brows.
With Torden at my side I had felt broad as the sky and solid as the earth. Utterly invincible, the future clear before me.
I knew where I was headed now. But thoughts of the future filled me with an uncertainty that shook my bones.
I thumbed the illustration, my throat tight, and turned to the next profile.
Reichsfürst Fritz of the Neukatzenelnbogen. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium height. Age: twenty-seven. Oldest son of Hertsoh Maximilian of the Imperiya Yotne, Reichsfürst of Terytoriya Shvartsval’d.
Then Perrault’s note: Clever.
“Twenty-seven.” I shook my head again—though, at least this time, I’d been informed of my suitor’s age.
Lang and I had exclaimed over it together, a lifetime ago, when I thought he cared about what happened to me. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t headed for the Shvartsval’d in search of love or a husband. I was going there to honor a mission, to help people defend themselves against a tyrant whose cruelty I’d heard of in whispers and stories since I was a child.
I bit my lip, thinking of everything Homer and Lang and Yu had told me about the tsarytsya and her Imperiya. Of the mosques and churches and temples shuttered and left to ruin, the books burned, the punishment for those who dared flee the villages she controlled. Of spies, and children taken from their families.
I swallowed hard and turned the page again, my forehead pinching as I scanned the remaining profiles. Prínkipas Theodore, only child of Déspoina Áphros and Despótis Hephaistios of Páfos, a smiling young man with dark curls; Perrault had scribbled philanderer below his description. Baltazaru Turchinu, a young prince in Corse searching for a seventh wife after the first six had mysteriously perished or disappeared, to whose profile Perrault had added only the word terrifying. And dukes and barons and other nobles besides.
So many men to visit. So many men appointed to ensure I did so. So many who had lied to me and used the cause of my pain for their own purposes.
I had been lonely before; the feeling was an old friend. But I had never been so angry.
It burned.
4
It was late when a knock came at my door. “Selah?” Anya’s voice was soft, but I tensed.
“It’s not locked,” I called, not moving.
The door creaked open, and Anya came and crouched at my side, moonlight from the porthole washing her fair hair pale as silver.
“I can’t sleep,” she whispered.
I swallowed, searching her face for questions about why I’d left dinner early—questions that would mean uncomfortable answers and truths about how bitter I felt. But I found none.
Maybe Anya was too content to wonder.
“Hammock no good?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Their room’s crowded already. And Jeanne’s lovely, but . . .” She paused. “I don’t think Cobie likes me. She’s never nice to me.”
“Well, Cobie isn’t nice to anybody.”
“She’s nice to you.”
“She isn’t, really,” I said, my brow furrowing. Though I was still angry at the crew, my ire burned a little cooler at Cobie, and I finally understood why: she had never pretended to be friendly to me. She hadn’t smiled and acted like she cared about me while plotting behind my back, as the rest of them had. Cobie’s behavior had never changed, and I found comfort in that consistency.
“They pay her not to be mean to me, though,” I told Anya with a wan smile. She laughed softly, eyes roving over my wardrobe, my trunks, the bed too large for me alone.
I knew what she wanted me to ask.
I wanted to want company. I wanted to feel like myself again.
But the crew’s quarters were already cramped. Whether I wanted to share my room or wallow in private, it didn’t matter.
“Do you want to sleep here?” I forced myself to ask.
“Yes, please,” Anya exclaimed, nodding vigorously. She wriggled across the quilt and under the covers, curling up with her back to the wall. She gave a sigh, eyes sinking closed.
“Better?” I smiled tightly.
Her voice was soft. “It’s like being at home again.”
A lump grew in my throat.
We were a snug fit in the little bed, though hardly a tighter squeeze than we’d been back in her room at Asgard.
But this was nothing like being in Anya’s home.
I didn’t miss Alfödr, or his rules. But Anya had left her adoptive father of her own volition, had run away with Skop’s hand in hers. Torden wouldn’t be waiting for me in the galley when I got up tomorrow, and she had complicated what chance I had of getting back to the father I’d been forced to leave behind.
Even in the dark, Anya must have read my thoughts on my face.
She bit her lip. “I wanted you to be my sister.”
“I wanted to be your sister,” I said. I meant it. But the words hurt.
“I’m glad I’m here anyway.” She squeezed my hand. “I can’t believe I get to stay with Skop. For as long as we want.” Joy radiated from her face.
>
I was glad to have Anya here, too. Safe, with us. But as much as it shamed me, her happiness was like salt on a wound still raw.
It wasn’t quite fair or true that Anya had gotten her happy ending at the expense of my own. That was her father’s fault.
But it also wasn’t fair that Anya’s happiness took up so much air while I could hardly breathe for mourning what I’d lost. It wasn’t fair that Torden had been taken from me so quickly after I’d found him.
I felt myself avoiding Anya and the others, finding places to hide myself as we crossed the cold sea and, on the fourth day after we left Norge, sailed into the mouth of the Canal Route, a bay called the Jade Bight. It was a bleak place, mud flats and gray beaches rendered stark and barren in too-harsh sunlight, but my jealousy was uglier still. It hurt, and I felt Anya’s hurt every time I hurried away from her and Skop at the table or in our room.
Anya had endured so much; I wanted not to begrudge her joy. I knew she wouldn’t have resented mine, if our places had been reversed. But that only made me feel worse.
I couldn’t help that I wasn’t the person she was. I was no shield-maiden.
My own weakness disappointed me. But avoidance was my only strategy, so my days aboard the Beholder found me everywhere but still. I washed dishes during meals instead of eating with the others, busied myself in my little garden of pots and half barrels instead of joining their circle when we were all on deck. When I let myself rest during the day, I didn’t take to the room I now shared with Anya; I climbed to the crow’s nest with Cobie, taking comfort in her reliable, unvarnished sharpness.
When I had first set sail, first begun to visit courts, first begun to contemplate the role that Alessandra had assigned me, I had felt like our figurehead. I had been the belle in search of her prince, the grand symbol at the fore of our journey with stars in her eyes and slippers on her feet.
But I had left my handsome prince behind me, and the stars in my eyes had been put out.
I felt too damaged to be a symbol anymore. But it didn’t matter. I wanted to be something more than that.
