The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  “To kill something that has come back from the dead, you will need to sever the head and all the limbs and burn them. Bury the bones in separate graves, so that they cannot find each other and come back together. Do not bury them in water. Water is always moving and nothing in a watery grave is ever at rest.”

  Wil heard her own breaths coming hard and fast. She pressed her lips tight in an attempt to silence them.

  Dazed, she moved back out into the rain and returned to the tree where Gerdie was waiting for her.

  Over the churning of her thoughts, she barely registered his concerned expression. “What did you hear?” he asked.

  Thunder shook the sky, but the clouds had thinned, letting in rays of pale morning light.

  “I think I know how he’s managed to curse the kingdom,” Wil said. “I think he’s become a marveler.”

  Her heart was thudding in her chest, each beat sending out a faint shiver of pain she forced herself to ignore. Loom. She had to get back to him. If Baren was as powerful as she suspected, the darklead wouldn’t be the only attack on Loom’s kingdom. She had to warn him.

  Six

  BY THE TIME THEY RETURNED to the castle, Wil felt a pain that seeped into her bones like a chill. The sun was lurking behind the clouds, as though waiting for the rain to subside before coming out.

  “You need rest,” Gerdie said, after they’d both descended the wall.

  He said this casually, out of habit. But the small bit of kindness in his words meant so much to Wil that she was startled. Gerdie owed her nothing, and she had no right to help herself to his concern. Not after what she had put him through, not while she was still broken by this curse that had cost them so much.

  And then she thought of Loom, whom she’d left at Pahn’s mercy, whose kingdom was under siege by a brother whose reign was her fault. She thought of Loom’s heart stopping because she had failed to keep her bargain to save his life.

  “I don’t have time,” she said. “I need to find the reason behind this curse or Loom is going to die. And if I don’t warn him what he’s up against with Baren, his entire kingdom will be destroyed.”

  Gerdie stared at her for a long moment, with the uncertainty he afforded strangers. And as she looked him over, she saw that he was not entirely as she’d left him. His eyes, usually warm and intelligent and kind, had turned steely and cautious. His face was leaner, his posture more rigid and guarded.

  He looked gray, the way that Arrod looked gray. Had it only been September when they were laughing about the cauldron explosion that charred their eyebrows after they’d leaned too close? Had it really been only a handful of weeks?

  He exhaled hard, a little white cloud escaping his nostrils, which were red from the cold. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “Follow me.”

  He led her back to the castle, to the back entrance of the servants’ kitchen, where their mother was unlikely to spot them. The door that led to his basement laboratory was now marked with padlocks, which Gerdie set about unlocking. Wil supposed he took this measure after Baren had raided this place. The locks appeared common enough, but the complexity of the keys told Wil that they were no ordinary locks; they were yet another of her brother’s brilliant inventions, like the trick triggers of her guns that prevented a would-be thief from shooting them.

  The door opened, and the musty, charred smell of potions and cauldron smoke and dust flooded her. How she’d missed this place. It was comforting and familiar and it always carried the promise that whatever problem befell her could be fixed here. It still did, though that was impossible now.

  Gerdie shut the door behind them, and Wil moved downstairs as he worked through another series of locks.

  Rain leaked in through the cracks of the window, which was now welded over with bars. Droplets gleamed in a spiderweb woven across the stone, and a small puddle was forming on the floor.

  The arrangement of things had changed, but Wil expected that, the way her brother was always toiling with new projects.

  Gerdie descended the stairs and began rummaging through boxes, all of which were locked now, many of them chained to the wall. He seemed to be taking his time about finding whatever he was searching for, though Wil had never known him to misplace anything.

  With his back to her, he began to speak. “I couldn’t accept that you had drowned. And when the river itself gave me no answers, I began to wonder if your death had something to do with your newfound power. I wondered if Papa had murdered you, and Owen had tried to stop him and ended up dead as well. But that didn’t make sense either.” He slid a row of bottles to the right, revealing a small metal box that was dented and coated with rust. “I turned desperate. Maybe I’d lost my senses a bit—I don’t know. I began searching your room for clues. I couldn’t search Owen’s things because Addney was always in there, and I needed solitude. I needed quiet.”

  He worked a key into the metal box, and it creaked as it opened. From it, he extracted a folded piece of paper.

  Gerdie nodded for her to sit on the bench by the wall. She did, and he sat beside her. Gerdie never sat when he was in his laboratory, his body, like his mind, ever in pursuit of some great idea.

  “Like I said, I went through your chamber,” he said. “I began turning your things into dream serum. Little things—a bottle of perfume Papa bought that you had never cared for. A dulled pencil resting in the crease of an open book. I thought . . . if I dreamed of your things, maybe you would be there with an answer.”

  He looked to the paper in his hand, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. Wil ached, and she felt the crest of tears behind her eyes trying to break free. It was her fault that he had been in so much pain. All that time he’d spent grappling desperately for answers, and she had been off in the world and alive. She had been quarreling with Loom and meeting with marvelers and allowing herself to indulge in fleeting moments of some lie that felt like love.

  “You never were,” he said.

  “Gerdie, I—”

  “Eventually I began inspecting the stones in the wall,” he interrupted her. “One of them was loose, did you know that?”

  Wil blinked. “No,” she said.

  “I had to move the bed out of the way to find it,” Gerdie said. “It probably won’t make sense, but I just wanted to go over everything. Needed to.”

  It did make sense, but Wil didn’t interrupt him.

  “I found this tucked behind a loose stone.” He handed the paper to her, and then he waited expectantly.

  Wil unfolded the paper carefully. The center crease was torn, creating a slit across the image sketched on the paper.

  She went still, staring at what she had just revealed. It was a drawing of a girl, done in charcoal, with a soft face, dark eyes, and dark hair done up in an elaborate series of knots that gleamed like silk.

  If not for the utterly serene expression, this girl could have been her, Wil thought. But that wasn’t possible. Portraits were forbidden and she had never posed for one. She didn’t know anyone talented enough to work from memory.

  She raised her eyes to Gerdie, who was looking at her now. “What is this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I could almost swear it’s a portrait of you, but that’s impossible.”

  “Did you ask Mother?”

  “Wil.” Gerdie’s voice was soft. “Seeing this would have destroyed her.”

  Wil stared at the portrait, penitent as his words sank in. Royals didn’t allow portraits. Since the night of their disappearance, Owen and Wil had existed only in memory. And Wil knew what memory did to the face. It blurred the edges. It made the certainty of features go dull in some moments and too vivid in the next. Memories made dreams cruel, and waking hours harder still.

  “But it must have been there for years,” Gerdie went on. “Long before you were old enough to be its subject anyway.”

  “Right,” Wil agreed, her voice trailing as she pondered. She had never thought to move her bed, and she would have noticed if th
e servants had. She knew when any of her things had been misplaced, even slightly.

  “It must be a relative,” Gerdie said.

  Wil felt an odd kinship with the girl in the portrait, at that. Her brothers all bore a strong resemblance to both their parents, and to each other. But Wil could have been a stranger to them all.

  “It might mean something,” Gerdie said, as Wil traced her fingertip around the paper’s edges.

  Wil folded the portrait and tucked it gingerly into the breast pocket of her tunic. Then she stood and moved for the stairs.

  Gerdie followed after her. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to that marveler woman I saw in the tunnel with Baren. Maybe she’ll be able to tell me what this portrait means.”

  Her brother folded his arms. “The one who just instructed Baren on how to kill you.”

  “To a wanderer caravan, then,” Wil said, turning for the stairs. “Anything would be better than doing nothing.”

  “Wil, listen to yourself.” Gerdie kept pace with her. “You haven’t slept.”

  “Loom is going to die if I don’t do something about it,” she burst out. “I don’t care about sleep. I don’t care about guards, or about what Baren thinks he’ll do to me. I don’t care, all right? I can’t afford to care about anything until I know that I’ve done what I came for and Loom is going to live. I won’t have the death of someone else I love on my hands.”

  The words surprised even her. Love. She hadn’t meant to say “love.” Love was a lie and an illusion of her curse. Of Loom’s curse. She had been so careful not to say it, not even when Loom had said it to her. She had been careful not to think it, lest she water the seed of its meaning and cause it to take root in her skull like weeds.

  But, wrong as she knew it was, retracting it also felt wrong.

  Gerdie didn’t remark on it. Instead, he put his arm around her shoulders. His touch was the same as it had always been, gentle but solid.

  But now, with the absence of her curse, the touch hurt. Everything was starting to hurt in this cursed kingdom. Wil didn’t betray any of this, and she didn’t move away. It meant too much to her, knowing that she could still return home and be embraced after everything she had done.

  “Wil, we’re on the same side,” Gerdie said. “Nothing can ever change that.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Gerdie said.

  Wil felt it a moment after he’d said it. She brushed her fingertips under her nose and they came back slick with blood. She stared at it. Since the emergence of her power, she had never gone so long without summoning it.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said, holding up her bloody hand as evidence of this.

  “Rest will help,” Gerdie insisted. “You won’t be able to do anyone any good if you collapse from exhaustion, or you get shot by a dozen of Baren’s guards trying to climb the wall.”

  She stared at him, considering.

  “You’ve never gone this long without crystallizing something, have you?” Gerdie asked.

  Wil shook her head.

  “All right, then how about this. Sleep just for a little while, and that will help you keep your strength up. I’ll go through my formulas and see if there’s some way to coax your power out.”

  It was better than any solution Wil could come up with at the moment. Her head had been foggy since her return to the castle, and it was only getting worse.

  Hesitantly, she said, “One hour.”

  “Two, tops,” Gerdie said as they made their way up the steps.

  Seven

  GERDIE KEPT VIGIL AT HIS sister’s desk, trying to concentrate on a formula that would aid in her predicament. But he often found himself glancing over his shoulder at her instead.

  In her canopy bed, Wil looked small. Her head thrashed one way and then the other, and the pillow was dark with sweat.

  He left her only once, to retrieve a cold cloth and drape it over her forehead, the way she used to do for him. And then he stood still to watch her.

  He pictured the lungs inside her, imagining their motions as they drew and expelled air. He tried to comprehend that his sister’s lungs had been breathing this whole time, and that the churning rapids in Northern Arrod were empty of her.

  Wil had never seemed breakable, not even when she limped down his laboratory steps with a twisted ankle or a fractured rib; before this curse, he had believed his sister invincible. But now, suddenly, he saw how small she could be. He saw that she was just skin and muscle and organs. She was pieces that could fail, or be destroyed, or drowned. The river didn’t kill her, but it could have. Baren would surely try, and if Gerdie left her for an instant, he worried that Baren would succeed.

  It scared him.

  When he and Wil were young, their nanny would wrap them together in a blanket by the fire and tell them stories. One of the stories was of changelings—children stolen from their cribs and replaced by a flimsy substitute that was all rot and decay and evil inside. It might fool the family for a while, but eventually it would reveal itself to be something ugly and wrong.

  It might have been easier if this Wil, sleeping before him, were a changeling. Then he could hate it. He could cut it open from toe to crown and watch the illusion of Wil slide off its grotesque skeleton like a skin.

  But this wasn’t a changeling. There was no magic to her return, no dark marvelry that brought her back from the dead. She was just Wil, and all the lies that had been told in her absence. He would know his sister anywhere. The one he had spent his entire life trying to protect, whose bones he had set in plaster, whose bruises he had soothed with balms, whose questions challenged him, whose laughter echoed in the walls of a laboratory that was otherwise too still and somber when she was gone.

  He was so furious and so relieved that he felt ill with it.

  He had imagined a hundred other things that could have happened to Owen and Wil that night. A thousand. But none of them ever made sense by the end.

  So when Wil told him what had really happened, Gerdie believed her, because although her absence had been an act of deception, his sister had never lied to him. But also because her story accounted for all the gaps in his own theories.

  He had his answers now.

  Burying Owen and Wil in his heart had been excruciating, but unearthing one of them proved to be even harder.

  For nearly an hour, he held his heavy leather-bound journal over Wil’s desk and he studied the notes for all of his potions. He had to flip several pages back to find them. Since Wil and Owen’s disappearance, it had been impossible to concentrate most days. The more recent entries were notes about how long it would take to drown, and how long his father had been alone with Wil and Owen before his return to the castle. There were theories that had been scratched out before he’d finished writing them. And, as the result of one especially horrible day, the pages were warped by tears, some of the letters smudged and illegible.

  The pages devoted to his potions seemed flaccid and useless, something penned by a silly child a lifetime ago.

  The queen knocked at the door. It was early afternoon, and when she found Gerdie at Wil’s desk, she stood still. It was a familiar sight. For as long as Gerdie could remember, he and his sister had always just orbited around each other. They kept each other safe.

  The queen must have been thinking the same thing that had haunted Gerdie since Wil’s return. This girl sleeping in her canopy bed—they had mourned for her. They had stood at the water’s edge, hearts in their throats, as the king’s men dove and dug for her body. And now she was here, as though she had just fallen from the sky. She was not an apparition that disappeared in the night.

  “It isn’t safe for her here,” the queen said.

  “It isn’t safe for any of us,” Gerdie amended.

  The queen sat in the chair by Wil’s bed. Even rumpled and worried, she was elegant and strong. She looked as though she hadn’t gotten much sleep herself, but it didn’t take the
keen sharpness from her eyes.

  “She can’t stay,” the queen said.

  “I don’t think she intends to,” Gerdie said, unsuccessfully trying to hide his snap of anger.

  “You can’t stay either,” the queen said. She wasn’t looking at him. She was fussing over Wil and avoiding his stare, as though to say that she knew he wanted to argue but her decision was final.

  Wil awoke, kicking as though she had been trying to run. Her chest felt tight, her face and neck and chest soaked with sweat.

  She sat up and tried to calm her rapid breathing. Her cursed heart thudded in her chest like a caged thing, trying still to find a way out.

  Her ticking grandfather clock said that she had been asleep for nearly three hours. Three hours wasted while Loom’s life was cradled in her hands.

  Across the room, Gerdie had fallen asleep slumped at her desk with his cheek resting on his arm. The fire’s vivacity said that it had been stoked recently, so he couldn’t have been sleeping for long. His monocle was buried in the waves of his gold hair. There were purple shadows under his eyes. His face had thinned, revealing cheekbones that had never been prominent before.

  His sleep was fitful; she could tell by the way his eyes moved under their lids, the occasional slurred mumble. He looked so tired, drained of all the resolve he’d mustered since her return.

  Seeing him now only confirmed everything she’d feared since her exile: returning to him had hurt him. This curse belonged to him as much as it belonged to Owen, who died to save her, and their mother, who had insisted upon having a daughter, and their father, and even to Baren, who had somehow always known that she was cursed and had tried so many times to destroy her.

  And this curse belonged to Gerdie, to whom she was inextricably tethered, who had shared every gasp of excitement and pain of her childhood. Their hearts had always throbbed in tandem, until the day hers turned dark and vicious.

  She stood and moved quietly across the room. Firelight lit up the side of his face, and he still looked like a child when he slept.