“What do you need me to do now?” she asked.
“We’re done,” he said. “You should rest.” She opened her mouth to argue, but he interrupted. “There’s nothing more to do until nightfall. That’s when I’ll stage Addney’s murder. It’s what Mother and I have been planning. Until then, you need to stay out of Baren’s sight. By the time he realizes you’re no longer in the castle, you could be on a dirigible halfway to anywhere.”
“I should at least look for wanderers,” Wil said. “Before I leave.”
“It makes more sense for you to save your strength,” Gerdie said. “If you leave tonight, you can arrive in the Western Isles by morning. The kingdom is filled with wanderers. Much more than there are here. There’s still enough time to make it back East.”
He was right. Wil knew this, and yet the thought of sleeping precious hours away frustrated her.
Still, when she returned to her chamber and lay atop her blankets, sleep claimed her immediately.
Gerdie was the one to wake her. The sun was setting by then, casting pink light into her chamber. She pretended the rest had helped, for her brother’s sake, but in truth she felt worse. Her muscles were stiff and painful as she moved. Her head felt stuffed with cotton. Sounds were far away and then very close.
She said nothing as Gerdie led her through a servants’ channel hidden within the walls. Eventually it took them back out into the night air.
A cart was parked beside the door, covered in layers of burlap.
Gerdie tried to smile. “Your chariot awaits,” he said. “Mother will be along soon with Addney and then you’ll be off to save your prince.”
“Gerdie,” Wil began, and found that she didn’t have words for what she felt just then.
“I’ll see you in June.” He smiled. “You’ll have to return home then to meet our new heir to the throne.”
Wil threw her arms around him. It might be the last time she would ever have the chance. The next time she saw Gerdie, Baren would no longer be king and the only curse in Arrod would be her.
Ten
GRIEF WAS NOT A LOGICAL thing. Unlike other emotions, it didn’t come in any particular sequence. It shifted from a whisper to a roar without any warning.
In the weeks following his sister’s and brother’s supposed deaths, Gerdie had not allowed himself to be still. He labored in a fury over his cauldron. When thoughts of what had happened that night—what had really happened—overwhelmed him, he recited the periodic table of elements. He stirred powders into liquids, cast potions into cauldron steam. He became a creature of compulsion, of habit. In this way, he survived. He even made it through Wil’s birthday.
By late October, the air had turned bitterly cold. Snow flurried in its early, noncommittal way, never sticking when it fell. It was on one of these cold mornings that Gerdie had awoken and found himself unable to get out of bed.
His legs had still worked. He hadn’t been aching or running a fever. But he couldn’t move.
The fire at his hearth was burning. A servant had come in during the early morning hours to stoke it. Warm orange light flickered on the stone walls, the ancient wooden floor.
Wil. His mind had hissed the word, taunting him. Owen and Wil would be skeletal by now, he had thought. Their soft tissue and their sinew worn away by the current. Perhaps bits of them would break away and float downriver. A decayed hand washing onto a distant shore, a tuft of matted hair being plucked up for a seagull’s nest. He had the thought that he wanted to go out into the world and find these pieces of them. And he had the thought that he would never be able to.
“Wil,” he had whimpered, his eyes filling with tears. “Oh gods, Wil.” He rolled onto his stomach so that his face was buried in his pillow. But rather than muffling his sobs, doing this only made them come faster. His body had shaken with them.
He had not allowed himself to cry for his dead siblings, much less his father, or the life he’d had when all these things had been in place. Wil in her chamber, Owen out exploring the world, his father glowering down at all of them from his throne. He had been spoiled. He had been arrogant. He had believed that because he lived in a castle, he was immune to having his life shattered. He had believed his brother and sister to be invincible.
You don’t know everything, Wil had said before she left him for good.
He heard her voice so clearly in that memory, and it made his grief flare like a flash in his cauldron. If someone had asked him about his sister while Wil was still alive, he would have remarked on her ability to fight, her fierce protectiveness over those she loved. Her stubbornness. Her irritating fascination with illogical things.
He wouldn’t have even thought of mentioning her voice, or the way she swung her feet when she sat on his laboratory table and handed him things. But now that she was gone, it surprised him how important these inconsequential bits were. If he stopped remembering them, they would stop existing.
Why was he crying? Tears were useless. Tears would not water the earth and make the dead bloom back up like perennial flowers.
Calling the dead by their names was also useless, he knew, but he couldn’t stop sobbing for her. “Wil. Wil. Wil.”
No one had answered him. The pain had been so overwhelming that he had almost been able to believe it would change something. Change the rules about who lived and who died. But in the end, all that happened was that logic had come flooding back in. He found the strength to sit up and dry his eyes. The strength to wash his face and get dressed and buckle his legs into their braces.
“Wil is dead,” he had told the fire in the hearth. “Owen is dead.” And then he’d left his chamber once again to face the world.
And now, he stood to watch his sister disappear under the cover of nightfall, and a bit of that old grief stirred in him anew. With no one there to see them, those traitorous tears came to his eyes again. It wasn’t grief this time, he realized. It was relief. Even anger with his sister for having frightened him so much. Anger with Owen for still being gone. Anger with himself, because when Owen went after Wil that night, Gerdie couldn’t be bothered to go with him. He was too busy sulking about his sister taking on their father’s mission. He had been jealous of her value to their father. Jealous because he had agreed with their father: Wil was a valuable weapon. She was the kingdom’s greatest spy.
Before Owen went after Wil that night, he had stood at the door of Gerdie’s lab and said, “Please come. You’ll be able to talk some sense into her.”
Gerdie had not even looked up from his work. “Talking sense into our sister would be like pouring water into a sealed well.”
If he hadn’t been so bitter, he would have just gone with Owen.
He would have been able to save them both.
They had always been there to protect him, but he had left them to face the rapids alone.
Eleven
BY THE TIME THE HORSES began to pull the cart, Addney was shivering. She reached for Wil’s hand. Maybe she just wanted the comfort. Wil took Addney’s hand in hers, though she knew she had no right to. Addney wouldn’t want to reach for her if she knew what Wil had done, that she was the cause of all this.
“Addney,” Wil whispered. The name was heavy on her tongue. The name of the woman her brother had loved. The woman who was left to carry this child alone without him. “When all this is over, there’s something I need to tell you. Something you have a right to know.”
The approaching footsteps and voices silenced her.
From somewhere beyond the heavy layers of burlap, Wil could hear her mother directing the soldiers toward the pyre. It was deep into the woods and far from any trails frequented by wanderers, much less citizens of Arrod. The disposal of bodies was an ugly business best done out of sight, her father had said.
Without wanting to, Wil thought of Owen. What had her father done with his remains? Buried him? Cast him into the rapids?
She felt sick and weary and weak. She could not recall ever being so weak, not even
when she’d crawled to her brother’s lab bearing wounds from the Port Capital.
The cart rolled to a stop. Addney covered her mouth with her hand, as though she didn’t trust herself to stay silent.
“Take your horses and ride a half mile west of here,” the queen was telling the soldiers. “When you see the smoke over the trees, you’ll know that it’s done. Come back for me only then.”
Addney held her breath until the sound of hooves had moved far into the distance.
“It’s going to be all right,” Wil whispered to her. “I promise you.”
Then, the queen raised the burlap coverings, exposing Wil and Addney both to the winter chill.
“Move quickly,” the queen said, helping Addney to the ground. “There’s no time.”
Through the darkness, Wil could just make out the shape of a wanderer’s caravan through the trees. It was completely silent, save for the impatient whinnying of a horse that had surely not been there a moment ago.
It took Wil no time to recognize the woman who climbed down from the caravan to meet them. She was much older than when Wil had seen her last, and her graying hair was now completely white, but she was still the nanny Wil remembered from her childhood. The one who had tucked her and Gerdie in to sleep and stoked the hearth on winter nights, who’d spoiled them with stories and stirred honey into mugs of milk when they couldn’t sleep.
Wil had missed her nanny horribly once she’d been sent into retirement, but now she couldn’t even bring herself to call to her. Instead, she kept to the darkness and watched in silence as Addney climbed into the caravan, Nanny Blay behind her. She said nothing as the caravan hurried away into the woods.
“Wilhelmina.” The queen took Wil’s face in her hands, startling her with her sudden closeness. “Love, there isn’t any time for you to stay either.”
“I know.” Wil’s voice felt small. No, that timid tone wouldn’t do. She would not give her mother more cause to worry about her. “Start your fire,” Wil said, sounding more certain of herself this time. She hopped down from the caravan. “The soldiers will be suspicious if you don’t. I’ll be long gone before they get back.”
Her mother held her by the shoulders, but she didn’t move to embrace her. It was too much for them to say goodbye to her again. Too much for the queen to send a daughter out into the uncertain and cruel world after having already buried her once before.
Her mother kissed her on the forehead and said only, “Travel by air if you go west, and water if you go east.”
She was speaking of the Northern winds and the way they moved the sky and the sea in the winter. It didn’t matter how many years she spent as queen in a recluse’s castle; the queen would always be a wild-hearted wanderer child. She would always know the world with a familiarity that even lovers did not possess.
Wil nodded. “I’ll be back to see our new heir.” It was a promise, and it was all she could give her mother just then.
The queen removed her shawl and draped it around Wil’s neck, tucking it into the collar of her wool coat. She kissed Wil’s forehead. “Go quickly,” she said.
Wil turned without saying anything more. It was best this way. She sprinted toward the Port Capital, whose lights were not yet visible in the distance.
Once she was certain she was out of her mother’s sight, she stopped to catch her breath. Each inhale came with a wheeze. She shuddered and coughed a mouthful of blood.
No time for that, she told herself, and began moving at a slower pace. Her own body felt strange to her. Never before had it pleaded so desperately for sleep. As Wil moved, she entertained fantasies of collapsing to the forest floor and sleeping forever. Of never moving again, never opening her eyes.
She gritted her teeth and persisted.
Something moved behind her—no, around her. The air took on that keening pitch, and Wil froze, dread coating her blood. No, it couldn’t be. She was imagining things. She—
Something splashed at her face, thick and warm and sour. It filled her eyes, blinding her, and her mouth, making her splutter and gag. Blood. It tasted like blood.
“You will have the answers you seek,” the old marveler woman’s voice hissed. Wil spun, swinging blind, but she could not tell where the old woman was standing. She seemed to be moving.
Furiously, Wil rubbed her eyes with her sleeve, trying to clear her vision.
“I will show you exactly what you are and why you don’t belong in this world,” the old woman’s voice went on in a snarl. “And you’ll come back to me begging for death. You’ll beg for the death of your entire, wretched family, so that another Heidle will never curse Arrod’s castle for the rest of time.”
The old woman’s voice was close now, a hot whisper in Wil’s ear. “You will never be at rest until you’re dead.”
Wil managed to blink through the blood and regain her vision just in time to see the blur of her mother’s golden hair rushing toward them. Then, her mother’s arm coiling around the old woman’s neck, jerking back and snapping it.
“Mother?” Wil gasped.
The old woman’s body sagged, sodden and dead. The queen let it fall. “Run,” she commanded Wil. “Hurry, before the ports stop taking their fares tonight.”
The queen did not seem startled by what she had done. It had been an expert move, an easy break, and one that could only come from having been trained to do so. The queen spoke little of her life before she’d become a wife and a mother and a queen—all three of those titles were stacked in rapid succession. She afforded her children beautiful and ugly stories of warriors and knights and orphaned wanderers, but none of those stories had been of her own life. And now, truly, Wil began to understand that her mother was so much more than what she showed to even her own children.
The queen, with her pretty face and lace dresses, knew about all the light and shadows of the world. It was no wonder she was consumed by so many strange numerical compulsions, Wil thought. She needed to control whatever small thing she could—the placement of forks, the symmetry of paintings on the wall.
“But,” Wil stammered, “she said—”
“I heard what she said,” her mother interrupted. “It will be all right, but only if you go now.”
Wil did as her mother said. Her mother rarely gave commands, and never in vain.
It wasn’t until much later, after Wil had scrubbed the blood from her face and coat with seawater and she was on a ship bound east, that she thought of the old woman’s words.
She would have the answer to her curse. The old woman had said that this knowledge would haunt Wil until she was dead, but didn’t the old woman know that it already haunted her? Didn’t she know it was already true that Wil would never be at peace with what she had done?
Twelve
FOR ONCE IN HER LIFE, Wil was seasick. She spent the first night of her journey sweating and vomiting belowdecks, burning with fever. Nothing would rid the taste of blood from her mouth.
Where had the old woman found blood? Had it been her own, from the wound Wil inflicted? Or had some poor forest animal made the mistake of crossing her path?
In her muddled state, Wil clung to the rough blankets and called out for Loom. She didn’t know why exactly; she wasn’t delirious enough to think that he would come for her now. But it soothed her the same way it made her restless, just like her mother’s numerical compulsions. He wasn’t here on this ship, but he was here in this world, and she would reach him soon.
When she’d reached the Port Capital and was faced with the decision of traveling west, to Wanderer Country, or east, to Pahn’s cabin, she’d chosen east.
When she finally found sleep, huddled on a pile of blankets in the cargo hold that had been fashioned into a bunk, the damp draft of the ship permeated her dreams.
She dreamed of Owen’s chamber, only it was not familiar to her this way. The books lining the shelves did not belong to him. The chamber itself was large and mostly bare, conservatively furnished.
And she
dreamed of her father.
Before King Hein Heidle was a husband or a father or a king, he had been a boy. At seventeen years old, he looked like Owen, the son he would one day have: tall and lean, with kind eyes and an easy smile.
He even slept in what would one day be Owen’s room. For now, its shelves were stuffed with different books, sparse and absent of many trinkets. There was an easel proudly displaying a painting of the Port Capital skyline, and the floor stones were speckled with dry paint.
Hein Heidle, a prince not yet a king, sat at his desk sketching a girl. Her face was nothing but blank paper for now, but her hair was turning into something quite elegant.
A crash out in the hallway made him raise his head. Outside, the sky was dark and overcast with clouds, and the thunder growled out a warning. Something in another room fell and shattered.
“Hein?” a voice whispered, and the door creaked open.
The girl stood in the cold gray shadow of the hallway, her cheek warmed by the lantern on Hein’s desk.
Hein rolled the paper and tucked it into his desk drawer. It was going to be her portrait, but it was too soon for her to see it. Her sixteenth birthday was still a month away.
“Papa again?” he asked.
She nodded. She didn’t look frightened, but she did look unhappy.
The smell of spirits filled the dream like notes of a dismal song. It could be tasted as easily as breathed. The girl stepped into her brother’s room and closed the door, sliding the iron bolt into place.
“What is he on about this time?” Hein asked.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “But Mother is screaming right back at him.”
Thunder shook the castle and all of the lights flashed and flickered, and then everything went dark.
The dreams turned tangled. Fragments of a smile. Bodies arching into a kiss before they tumbled to the sheets. Bare feet running through the oval garden, labored breathing. The smatter of blood on stone. A scream that made the stars go dull with sorrow.
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