The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  Espel considered this, and then she sat on the bed beside her. She smoothed the wrinkles in her silk trousers. “Why does my brother matter to you?”

  She hadn’t called him “the Traitor”; she’d called him her brother.

  It was as unexpected as anything else Espel had done on this voyage. Wil suspected Espel was altering her language to manipulate her. Humanize Loom and establish trust with her hostage.

  “I don’t understand,” Wil said. It was the truth.

  “You went to such lengths to conceal your identity from him, and yet you were his ally,” Espel said. “Why? Why offer any sort of help to your enemy? Were you spying on behalf of your king?”

  “No,” Wil said. Her time spent with Loom had been the opposite of spying, she realized. “I helped him because he loves his kingdom as much as I love mine.”

  “He’s a coward, you know,” Espel said. “He tried to murder our father as he slept. He wanted the kingdom all for himself.”

  Wil shook her head. “He doesn’t want anything for himself. He didn’t want to steal your kingdom. He wanted to protect it.” This was not a betrayal of Loom’s trust. These were not things he had whispered into her open mouth between kisses. These were simple truths that anyone who spent a moment in Loom’s presence would see. How big was the mountain palace in which Espel had grown up alongside her brother and never come to know him at all?

  Espel laughed. She had meant for it to sound haughty, but there was an uncertain waver to it.

  “He may not know the best way, but he always tries to protect what he loves. I wasn’t there the night that he tried to kill your father, but I know he did it to save Cannolay. He did it to save you.”

  Espel rushed to her feet, and for a moment Wil thought she would draw a dagger and kill her. Fury burned in her dark eyes. The outline of her tensed jaw jutted through her soft face.

  “That’s a lie,” she snarled. “If he had succeeded in killing our father, I would have been next.”

  “No,” Wil said. She recalled the knife Loom had thrown at Espel on the morning of Zay’s near-execution. He could have killed his sister, but he’d only aimed to incapacitate her. “Whatever you might do to him, he would never kill you.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I do know,” Wil interrupted. “That day we fled the palace, he was on the roof. You were right there, defenseless. He could have thrown a blade and killed you, but he aimed for your leg to stop you from chasing us instead.”

  Espel’s breaths were rapid, nostrils flaring. She looked so much like her brother, even in the littlest gestures. The tense shoulders, the way her mouth opened and closed because she was too enraged to form words. Her lovely, dark eyes that were now staring at Wil the way Loom had stared at her, as though every hope in the world depended upon what she would say next.

  “It does not have to be this way.” Wil’s voice was quiet, careful and slow. “You could have his loyalty anytime you might decide to take it.”

  “Enough.” Espel’s voice boomed. “You’ve spent a few weeks with the Traitor, and from that you think you know him better than I do. He was using you; that was all. Using others is all he ever does, because he’s weak.”

  “And now you’re using me,” Wil said. “Bringing me to your father against my will so that he can force my hand. Do you really believe this will be more effective than what Loom and I were trying to do? Do you believe that my family will want an alliance with a king who holds me hostage?” She stood, venturing a step closer to Espel, whose anger was thrumming like a marveler’s energy. “Loom broke away from your father. If he’s the weak one, why can’t you do the same?”

  Wil thought Espel would murder her right there. She could have done it. She was armed, and every guard on this ship would come running if she called.

  “I’m bringing you to my father not because he commanded me to, but because I want our kingdoms to come to a truce,” Espel said, her diplomatic tone eerie and edged. “If you refuse to cooperate, I can’t control what my father does to you.”

  Espel searched Wil’s eyes, looking for some modicum of fear. She would find none.

  “You can’t control anything at all,” Wil said.

  Fifteen

  “PAPA?” ALEEN’S VOICE WAS SOFT. She walked the hallway with bare feet, coming to a stop at her father’s chamber door. She tried the knob, though she knew it would be locked.

  Her heart was pounding in her ears.

  The door opened, and there the king stood, looking haggard and pale. He had dark eyes, much like Aleen, but even so, their features weren’t very similar. Where Aleen’s eyes were wide and soft and curious, his were sunken and dull. Where Aleen’s hair glinted with strands of chestnut and amber, his was blond and unruly.

  “Papa?” she said. “I heard a crash.”

  He slid between the door and the frame, pulling the door shut behind him before Aleen could see into the chamber. He had grown thin in the past two years, and, it seemed, a decade older.

  “Aleen.” He cupped her cheek, and for a moment he looked at her the way he had when she was a child, when she was the thing that set the universe right. “You must think I’d forgotten your birthday, but I was preparing something special.”

  Aleen stood still, watching him. She could not reconcile this man, half stranger and half father. Despite his inexplicable absence from her life in recent years, she still remembered him as a kind man, a good one. And here she saw traces of that man in his words and face. But there was so much that she didn’t recognize.

  “What is it?” she asked, not letting her wariness show.

  “Something I’ve meant to give you for a while now. Follow me. Be quiet. Your mother is sleeping.”

  Aleen followed him through the castle, not bothering with shoes, or to cover her nightgown. It was August now, and the air was heavy and humid.

  When her father led her outside, she began to wonder at what sort of gift he wanted to give her. She had been asking for her own ship. Hein had one, complete with a crew at his disposal. Sometimes she tagged along on his journeys, but she might have liked to go off on her own, and had been saying this for years.

  The night was balmy. Things chirped lazily in the grass, and the earth was soft against her feet.

  Her father led her between the trees, so far into the woods that she could hear the river, which meant they were close to the Port Capital.

  Here he stopped, in a clearing where the moon showed her his face. He was smiling, but his eyes were sad. They were always sad these days.

  “Listen,” he said in a hushed voice. Nearby, the clock tower was chiming its midnight song. “Three years ago, on this day, your mother confessed something to me. Do you know what it was?”

  “No, Papa.” Unease stirred in Aleen’s stomach. She had been in these woods hundreds of times, but now they seemed strange like her father seemed strange, as though they were all in on a secret and she was not.

  “She confessed that you do not belong to me,” he said.

  The words made no sense to Aleen. “Papa, of course I do.”

  “No.” His voice was eerily calm—like all else about this night, strange. “Your real father is one of the castle guards. One of my guards.”

  Aleen stumbled a step back. For a moment the dream swam with images of the queen’s laughing mouth pressing to that of a man. Shadows moving against a stone wall. Quiet conspiratorial laughter.

  “That isn’t true,” Aleen breathed. “Mother loves you. She wouldn’t.”

  “I could forgive anything,” her father said. “Anything, except being told that you are not my daughter.”

  “But I am your daughter,” Aleen cried. “Papa, I don’t care who Mother had an affair with. I don’t want to know. I don’t want anything from him.”

  At the sight of her tears, her father softened. She threw herself forward and her arms wrapped around him.

  It was as though no years had passed at all, the king thought. Aleen was still
a child. She still adored him. It was not her fault. It was the queen who had done this. The queen with her weak, selfish heart.

  He did not hold her. He didn’t dare. All of his plans would be ruined if he allowed himself to love his daughter, who was not, it turned out, anything to him at all.

  Instead, he said the words that he had been practicing over and over for the past three years. The words that would set things into motion.

  “You are the thing that I love most in this world.”

  With that, he pulled his dagger from its sheath and drove it through Aleen’s heart.

  The dream turned frantic, like every color of ink dropped into still waters, spreading rapidly in all directions, tumbling into each other as they went.

  The king, heartbroken and vengeful, seeking out a marveler who would teach him dark arts. The dagger he would have to forge himself from stone and steel. The nights he paced and plotted, and fell sobbing into bed. And the moment he finally worked up the courage, when Aleen came to his chamber door.

  It took the king a moment to realize that, of the two of them, Aleen was not the one who had screamed. She only looked at him, her eyes never leaving his even as her legs gave way and he caught her in his arms.

  It was a quiet death, and a slow one. Aleen seemed to be fighting it. Her lungs tried to find air even as they filled with blood. Her mouth moved as if to speak. Her eyes blinked even as they turned cloudy. He laid her on the grass, shushing her and touching his knuckles against her cheek.

  He sat with her even after she was gone. And all he could think to say in his daze were the last words she had ever heard. “You are the thing that I love most in this world.”

  By sunrise, Aleen had long since stopped bleeding. Her skin had gone white, her body rigid and cold. All night, the king had been waiting for the daylight to come so that he could have a better look at her, at this girl whose existence had broken him.

  But he didn’t find what he was looking for. He didn’t find traces of another man’s face in her features. He didn’t see a thing that had been conceived in a frenzy of lust and deception. He didn’t see his wife’s confession.

  Rather, he saw his daughter. Only his daughter.

  His chest began to heave. His body felt hot. Some new clarity entered him and he tried to combat it with whatever it was that had driven him to do this. Suddenly he couldn’t remember. He began to panic.

  It took him a long time to numb himself enough to lift her from the dirt. Blades of grass clung to her hair, and instinctively he brushed them away. He supported her stiff neck in the crook of his arm.

  It was easier if he didn’t look at her, and so he didn’t. By the time he made it back to the castle, he had replayed everything the marveler had told him. He remembered everything he planned to say.

  Guards rushed toward him as he approached the gate, and that’s when he remembered that the dagger was still in Aleen’s chest, and that, from a distance, she looked as though she could still be saved.

  He clutched her tighter, unwilling to relinquish her to any of the guards. This was not for them. This was for his queen.

  “Get my wife,” he told them, but a moment later he saw that there was no need. The queen was running down the stone steps, her long, light hair flying all around her. The king could see what his wife’s intentions had been when she awoke that morning. She had expected a pretty day filled with pretty things, as all her days had been. She wore a yellow dress with blue embroidered tulips across the skirt and ruby hearts at the chest. Her hair was brushed and curled and shining in the sun. Her lips were pink, her brown eyes painted in a way that softened her entire face.

  The king presented Aleen to her as though he were offering up a gift.

  The scream that she let out was unlike anything in the world. Inhuman. He wasn’t sure which of them fell to their knees first, but suddenly they were both in the dirt, Aleen cradled in their arms between them, just as she had been when she was born.

  The queen was trying to speak through her hysteria, but the king didn’t listen to any of it.

  “Look at me,” he said, and she did. “Her blood was the only way to pay the price. As long as the Heidle name rules this kingdom, it will be cursed.”

  Sobbing, the queen shook her head. Her voice was strangled and faint. “You did this?”

  “From now on,” the king said, “any queen who loves someone more than her king will be cursed, and the one she loves most in this world will be the one who destroys her.”

  Nobody saw Hein, who had come running out to the gate when he heard his mother screaming. Nobody saw his little sister’s body reflected in his eyes.

  Wil awoke, stumbling out of bed before she’d even come to her senses. Her chest hurt, as though the blade that cut through Aleen had torn through her as well. She was so certain that her own chest would be bleeding that she pried her tunic away from her perspired skin and inspected the mark on her chest. But it was unchanged.

  For the first time in her life, there, alone on a restless sea, Wil began to understand her father. She understood why he could never stand to look at her. Her father knew about the curse upon his family, and when Wil was born, plainly bearing the mark of that curse, he had known immediately what she was.

  It was why he’d thought about killing her. He confessed that he’d entertained the idea on the night he exiled her.

  Wil wondered what stopped him. She wondered if he had ever carried her to the bathtub when she was a wriggling little infant, intending to slip her under the water. It would have been a silent and easy way to do it. She had been helpless and at his mercy hundreds of times, and still he hadn’t brought himself to spare his wife and his other children her curse. Perhaps that was his own curse.

  Or maybe, she thought—shivering in her bunk as she curled up, alone—he had loved her.

  Everything ached. She tasted blood. And she knew that they had approached Southern waters because, even in the dead of night, it was sticky and hot.

  Somewhere in the depths of the ship, Ada was crying. No one came to soothe him, and Wil feared that he would be fed to the sea again just for the crime of interrupting Espel’s sleep. She feared that Zay would hurt herself trying to break free from her own prison to reach him. She feared, selfishly, bitterly, that Loom was blaming her for all this and hating her more with each crescendo of Ada’s mournful wails.

  Everything was broken. No. Not broken. Cursed.

  She closed her eyes, and there was Aleen, dead and ruined. Wil had known that Aleen surely must have been dead, and that whatever happened to her would be awful—why else would her father have kept her hidden from their lives? Now she knew. The king had done far worse than just murder Aleen—he had turned her into a weapon, sharp and true enough to slice through the heart of everyone else who made the mistake of being born a Heidle.

  Sixteen

  YOU’RE WIND. YOU’RE EVERYWHERE.

  Owen’s words gave her strength even now, in a place where wind had not touched her face for nearly a week.

  Cannolay shone like a beacon on the horizon. The mountain palace itself could have been crystallized, the way the sunlight hit all of its sharp angles and windows.

  Wil watched it drawing nearer through the porthole of her small quarters. It had been two days of solitude. Espel had not come to speak with her again.

  Wil felt the heat of the sun beating through the porthole. Land of Eternal Summer, even when the entire North was frozen.

  The air smelled sweet, almost sugary, which Zay once told Wil came from the saybells—cascading white and lilac flowers with red stamens, which grew by wrapping their vines around the trunks of slender trees. All the palace gardens had them, and the sea breeze carried their scent all the way out to the boat now. They served no medicinal purpose, but Loom and Espel’s mother, the queen, had favored them. She planted them along the trees where she used to sit and read, before giving birth to Espel killed her.

  The saybells served as markers of some distan
t memory, Wil thought. Footsteps of a woman whose own children had never known her.

  When Loom had lain in a cabin dying of his curse, Zay told Wil little stories like this to pass the time when they were alone. She knew quite a lot about her late queen, but she didn’t mention her around Loom. He had never asked, and it seemed easier for him that way. Best not to mourn a woman he would never know.

  Neither Espel nor Loom had ever acknowledged the saybells. Perhaps they didn’t even know the story behind them. Espel and Loom had not been raised on stories; they were not given memories of their mother to collect in their pockets like buttons or shells. But the servants had adored Zay when she was a child and told her the history of the palace and all its souls, and she kept them tucked safely inside of herself—someone else’s memories, someone else’s stories—because she understood when something was precious, even if it did not belong to her.

  When the door to Wil’s bunk opened for the first time since she’d entered it, Masalee was standing on its threshold. Her jaw was tense and something burned in her eyes. Contempt or suspicion, Wil couldn’t decide which.

  Masalee was flanked on either side by two of Espel’s guards. Espel herself was nowhere in sight, which was unusual; in the palace, one of them was never seen without the other. Something else was different about Masalee as well, or perhaps it was just that Wil had never been granted an opportunity to really study her. Proficient in battle as Masalee was, she couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. She was tall, corded with slender, solid muscle. Despite the youthfulness of her face, she had the stare of a soldier who had lived a hundred lives; it was the same look that had been in Owen’s eyes, as admirable as it was devastating.

  Today, though, she seemed weary. Even pallid. Her black hair had lost some of its sheen, and sweat beaded her brow.

  Wil pretended to take no note of this. Her heart was especially sluggish today, and now at last she saw that she was not the only one affected by Masalee’s skill. Masalee herself was making herself ill trying to maintain this hold over her.