Aleen.
In her dream, Wil heard the girl’s name.
Aleen. It was Aleen’s father’s favorite word, because she was her father’s very favorite thing. From the day that Aleen was born, her father doted on her. Her bassinet had dripped with crystals and ribbons. When she was a toddler, he carried her on his shoulders, showing her off to his loyal subjects, filling her head with promises. Her brother Hein would inherit the kingdom, but the world would all be hers.
Wil awoke, clutching a crystallized spider.
She rolled onto her back and held the thing close to her face to study it. It was of the larger, furrier variety—a spider she often plucked from sacks of grain and rice in the pantry. A stowaway spider, as they were commonly called, because they always seemed to find their way on cargo ships.
Its little fangs were bared as though it had been about to bite her. “Sorry,” she told it, and tucked it into the pocket of her coat. The return of her power meant that she was out of cursed waters, at least. It had been a wretched night, but she felt better now. Her mind was clear, and the only pain she felt was a slight ache from a night spent on the cargo hold’s floor.
Morning light stole in through the porthole. She wandered onto the deck and found a vendor selling day-old bread and hard cheese. She ate as she stood at the railing. Laid out before her was a perfect, clear blue. The water was calm, the winter sun beaming and unencumbered by clouds.
Everything since her return to Northern Arrod felt like a bizarre dream. The old woman, what had happened to Baren, what her mother had done. Addney, carrying the last living piece of Owen inside herself and fleeing with it into the night.
None of these were questions Wil could afford to resolve just yet. She had to tuck all of them away until she could return home. And she would return, she promised herself just then. She would not become what that old marveler woman had predicted. Even if she could never rid herself of this curse, even if she would have to live the rest of her days unable to embrace her family again, she would never allow those she loved to be destroyed. Not anymore. Not ever again.
Her thoughts returned to Addney, the girl in the portrait and in Wil’s dreams. She had an aunt. Her father had a sister.
The entire dream had smelled of blood, and Wil knew that this was a parting gift from the marveler woman. But why had she wanted her to see these things?
Though Wil didn’t have the answer for this, she was plagued by a lingering dread. Her father had kept his only sibling a secret, deliberately omitting any trace of her from the castle before his own children would come to fill it.
Whatever had happened to Aleen, it was surely awful.
The journey to the East took three days by boat. Wil did not dream of Aleen again until the last night of her journey.
In the dream, Aleen was thirteen years old, and she was pacing the hallway outside her father’s chamber, worrying. When her father wasn’t locked in his throne room and not to be disturbed, he wasn’t in the castle at all. He left before dawn sometimes, and returned long after she’d fallen asleep waiting to hear the heavy sound of his boots striding down the hall.
He staggered about as though in a daze. Dizzy, appearing drunk. And when he was clumsy, he always seemed to break things that his wife loved. The porcelain urn containing her mother’s ashes, or a painting of alber blossoms gifted to her by a loyal subject enchanted with her beauty.
Hein took over much of the running of the kingdom. He forged his father’s signature when it was long overdue, and the guards all began bowing to his authority.
But Aleen—she often lingered outside her father’s chamber, pleading for him to return to his senses. This was not the sort of man he was. While her brother had long given up on their father, she clung to the hope that he would be the man he had once been.
“Papa.” She was wearing a brown dress, embroidered with pink and green tulips on swirling yellow vines. She leaned against the door frame. “Papa, you haven’t eaten for days. Please come out.”
Something stirred on the other side of the door. But it did not sound like a man. It was a sort of monster in the blackness of the darkest, most fearsome nightmare.
The knob slowly turned.
Wil awoke, grasping at empty air.
She felt impossibly alone, just her and a girl who filled her dreams but evaded her when she came too close to learning who she was.
The city of Grief in the Eastern Isles was on the horizon; if Wil were to have looked to the porthole, she would have seen its carnival of electric lights and glowing wires and their shimmering reflections in the ink-black sea. But without having to look at all, she could sense it all. She felt Loom’s presence like a breath to the back of her neck. Like his row of straight, smooth teeth taunting her skin with a smile, close as a kiss.
He was close. She had returned to him. She did not have all the answers Pahn demanded—not yet—but there was still time. It had not yet been a month.
She had believed that leaving Loom behind would give her the focus to understand her curse. His very presence confused her. His nearness made her own heart a stranger to her.
But distance had not given her clarity. Returning home had made her feel like a stranger meant to wear a dead girl’s things. Even the word “home” no longer felt true. All the world felt like a desert, searing and hot and empty. Except for him. He was the place that made sense. Every ship she ever boarded would point in his direction.
She lay awake for the rest of the night, trying to sleep and finding it impossible. Aleen eluded her once more. She had not yet decided if she would tell Pahn what she had learned; it seemed too tenuous a thing to divulge until she understood how it related to her curse. She felt a strange loyalty to this girl. Though they had never met, they were blood, and Wil’s father had loved her. That was more than she could be certain he had done for her.
She would tell Loom all of it the moment they were alone. It was his life that hung in the balance now, and she owed him that much.
By the time the ship arrived at the Eastern port, Wil had crystallized more than two dozen spiders and dropped them into the ocean, along with too many gnats and flies to count. It had been enough to maintain her strength, but as she exited the ship she was eyeing the trees hungrily. It made her feel less monstrous to compare this hunger to use her curse to something more human, such as unbuckling her boots in anticipation of scratching at an itchy heel.
Fortunately, there were plenty of trees between the city and Pahn’s cabin. Once she had stepped into the thick of the woods, she crystallized a fistful of maple leaves, creating a bouquet of rubies and emeralds and diamonds, which she then tucked into her pockets. The city’s electricity thrummed and throbbed, and she felt as though it were charging her as well. The smell of the sea and of things being cooked in the market all reached her with perfect clarity. The dying, bleeding girl she’d been back in Arrod was a stranger to her now.
Something rustled behind her and she froze, listening. Whatever it was, the sound had been faint. A breath. A step. She might have believed it was a forest creature if not for the sudden, strange feeling in her blood. Her heart felt heavy and sluggish. Something was trying to rend its way inside her mind to subdue her. The city—moments earlier loud and bright and alive—now sounded underwater.
Something reached for her arm and she twisted away, spinning on her heel. And there before her was Espel, flanked to her left by Masalee, her ever-loyal high guard.
Loom. The name burned through the haze that had suddenly, inexplicably worked to claim Wil’s mind. His sister had come for him. To kill him for his crimes against his kingdom, or, worse, to throw him to their father’s feet as a sacrifice. In a single moment she could vividly imagine his neck laid out on the guillotine, the rope being pulled.
Her heart should have been furious by then, but it would barely beat.
Loom. The name repeated itself inside of her over and over. Loom. Loom. She had to warn him. She had to get to him before it w
as too late.
She ran, ignoring the muffled shouts that came after her. Dodging branches, moving in erratic paths, she ran, even as her body protested. She felt as though she were falling asleep. Was this a dream? Would Aleen step out from behind an oak tree and show her a new vision of her fraught past?
A blade bit into her calf and she fell forward into the thin drifts of early snow. Arms wrapped around her own, hoisting her up.
“It needn’t be this difficult,” Espel said in Lavean.
Espel was on one side of her, Masalee on the other. They were fearless in handling her.
“What have you done to me?” Wil snarled. Her voice felt very far away.
Neither the princess of the Southern Isles nor her guard gave a response as they dragged her forward.
Wil had been accosted several times before, by market vendors twice her size, and she had always managed to free herself. She had the element of surprise; no one expected a small thing like her to put up much fight, or to manipulate gravity to her advantage. But here, now, she could not free herself from Espel and Masalee’s hold. There was no element of surprise. They both knew exactly what she was.
By the time she had been dragged aboard the ship, Wil stopped struggling. It wasn’t because she had given up, but rather because of what she saw awaiting her on deck. Loom stood flanked by guards, his wrists and ankles weighed down by iron shackles and chains. His eyes were a dark fire. Zay lay in a heap before him, unconscious, but by all appearances unharmed, save for the thin line of crusted blood at her forearm.
The scene told the story. Espel had come for her brother and anticipated his being able to escape, so she had rendered Zay helpless with one of her serum-laced daggers, ensuring his cooperation. He would risk his own life, but not Zay’s. Never her.
Everyone had a vulnerability, and Espel knew how to find it.
Loom saw Wil and there was the slightest tension in his biceps, a rising tide in the sea of rage that already filled him. But he was quiet, both of them waiting for the time to strike. It would come, shackles and all.
A new panic rose in Wil’s chest, beside the place where her heart refused to beat harder. Where was Ada? Zay was never without her son.
She didn’t dare ask. She didn’t dare to draw attention to the most vulnerable among them. If Espel knew that Ada mattered to Wil in any capacity, it would only turn him into leverage.
Though Wil couldn’t summon her adrenaline, Loom had plenty of his own. He was exhaling hard through his nostrils, sending white bursts into the frigid air.
Espel waved off her guards, and they stepped away from Loom. There were five of them in total, forming a half circle around them at a distance. Only Masalee remained, her hand ever at the hilt of one of her many blades.
Wil fought the persistent numbness of her limbs. She didn’t betray her inexplicable weakness, and straightened her spine.
Pahn emerged from belowdecks, wearing thin olive-green linens, and unaffected by the cold.
“Ah, good, you’ve brought her,” he said, as though Wil were an anticipated shipment of garden slugs. He regarded Wil with his arms spread out at either side. His smile was beaming. “I apologize for the ambush,” he said, “but there’s been a change of plans.”
Wil felt at war with her body. Something tried to strangle her heart in a vise.
“Our deal is off,” Pahn said. “It’s come to my attention that you already belong to King Zinil.”
“Belong?” she spat. “I don’t belong to—”
“This is a time of war,” Pahn said, “and you are a tool in that war. You presented yourself as a cursed girl, but you never told me that you also happened to be the princess of the Northern Isles.”
The world went still around her. The air left her lungs. The sea stopped its shifting and turning. The howling winds went silent, and all she heard was Loom’s soft voice. “Wil.” His gaze had been on Pahn but now it was on her. Stunned and then desperate. Tell them it isn’t true, that gaze said. Tell them it isn’t true. Tell him that she didn’t have the blood of his enemy inside her. Tell him he hadn’t fallen in love with the girl whose family was destroying his kingdom.
She couldn’t lie to him anymore. This was the truth, and it was the least that she owed him.
Loom was the one to look away first. He stared at Zay, the one true thing in his tragic world. Zay had hated Wil when she entered their lives, and it had not been jealousy. It had not been because Zay wanted Loom’s affections for herself. It was because she had known that this strange, cursed passenger on their little ship would undo him somehow. She knew how purely and truly Loom offered up his love, and she knew even then that Wil did not deserve it.
Wil had known it too. That was why, when Loom offered her his heart that night as they sat above the electric city, she had tried to give it back. She had tried not to let him love her, and she had tried not to love him back, but standing there with both their hearts raw and open and bleeding, she knew that she could not stop herself from loving him. In that way, too, she had failed him.
Somewhere far away, voices were talking, but Wil wasn’t listening. One of Espel’s guards snared her arm and pulled her toward the steps that led belowdecks. Wil staggered but didn’t fight. It didn’t matter where they were taking her. It didn’t matter what they intended to do to her. Hang her by her ankles and try to bleed her curse from her veins, bottle it up for their own use. Lord her capture over King Baren, who would tell them to go right ahead and kill her for all he cared—spare him the trouble of doing it himself.
She would escape, one way or another. She would steal into the control room and break the captain’s legs if she had to. She would dive into the open sea and swim for land. That was the least of her worries now.
As she was pulled down the stairs, she looked over her shoulder at Loom. He turned away.
Thirteen
WIL HAD UNDERESTIMATED ESPEL. SHE had made the mistake of looking for herself in the Southern princess. They were both liars. They both knew how to prettily arrange their hair and paint their nails and dress brilliantly and smile. They both wore knives sheathed to their thighs beneath their ornate clothes. They were both only daughters of zealous kings.
Wil had expected Espel to be cruel. But she had not expected that cruelty to be equal to her own.
How had Espel known? Had she always known? Wil had been so careful. She had hidden herself so well that even she nearly forgot who she had once been, to whom she had once belonged. But the princess of Arrod would not die so easily. She still left pieces of herself to be found.
The rivalry between Espel and Loom had existed long before Wil entered their lives, and it would exist long after she had left them. But in this battle, Espel had won. Loom would no longer want Wil. He would let them drain her powers dry, or kill her. He would let her escape. He would do nothing either way, because she was already dead to him.
Wil was shoved unceremoniously into a cabin and the door was locked behind her. This was not the same ship on which she had traveled with Loom all those weeks ago, but it was of the same Southern design. Ornately carved oak trimmed the windows, and on the bed were satin sheets with embroidered flowers in Lavean design, just like those on the clothes that hung in the closet—all of which belonged to Espel.
The cabin was smaller, though, and there was nothing but a bed and a tiny washroom with a standing shower barely wider than Wil’s shoulders.
By nightfall, the ship was deep at sea. There was nothing to be seen through the porthole but blackness. Even the stars were buried. No one had come to Wil’s cabin, not even to offer her food. She had nothing but time to sit, and fume, and plot her revenge. Loom would never forgive her, and she would learn to bear that burden. But he would become king, because tonight she was going to kill Espel.
In the washroom, a towel had been neatly folded and draped over the shower. The only other thing in the room was a glass dispenser filled with pale green soap.
Wil waited until it was wel
l past midnight, when she was certain the guards would be sleeping in shifts. It was a large ship, and Wil estimated that three of the guards would be patrolling it, as two others rested. To find Espel, Wil would have to look where those guards were not stationed; Masalee would be the one guarding the princess, and she would be the true challenge. Incapacitating the others first was key.
She wound the soap dispenser in a satin tunic to muffle the sound when she smashed it on the edge of the porcelain sink. She selected the largest shards, wrapping them in scraps of cloth to form makeshift hilts. She tied them to her wrists and around her waist, under the loose-fitting tunic she’d taken from the closet.
Next, she scraped handfuls of the green soap from the sink and ran the water, lathering it to a bubbling froth, which she smeared down the side of her mouth. It dripped against her skin, green and white and resembling a putrid sort of bile.
Then she screamed, a shrill, inhuman sound like an animal being slaughtered alive.
Footsteps pounded across the planks of the hallway. When a guard opened the door, he found Wil on the floor in convulsions, green froth coming from her mouth.
“Oh hells,” he swore. He knelt at her side, and Wil could sense his hands hovering anxiously over her.
She went still as death. When he felt for her pulse, she struck, swiping his throat with a shard of glass.
It would be a fatal blow, she knew; Espel and Masalee were the true challenge, and the fewer bodies she had working against her the better. There was no time to think beyond this.
She ran down the hall, summoning her memory of Loom’s ship. If the layout was the same, then the control room would be to the left. She ran. Somewhere behind her, another guard had found the bloody mess in her cabin and was shouting.
An alarm wailed. The lights flickered, hot, bright white, then red. Chaos was good. Chaos could work to her advantage.
She spotted the captain at the end of the hall, swinging the door to the control room shut. She dropped her weight, sliding, extending her leg just in time for it to slam between the door and the threshold.
The Cursed Sea Page 8
