She didn’t know what sort of queen she could be until the new heir was born; all she had was a broken castle filled with bodies to bury. But she was going to try. She had to try.
Twenty-Nine
LOOM STOPPED WALKING BEFORE THE Port Capital was in sight. His heart throbbed in his ears. The earth was quaking. The stars shook in their sky.
Espel was beside him, and she looked calm. How could she be calm when the world was falling apart?
She narrowed her eyes. “Pahn has done something to you,” she said.
He shook his head. “Where’s Wil?”
“She’ll be headed back to the ship. If she’s smart, she’s hiding.”
“No,” Loom said. He was certain that Wil had not gone ahead. He was certain that he could feel her, as surely as he had felt Pahn’s energy by the water’s edge. She was not going toward the ship. She was going toward the castle.
He turned on his heel and ran back into the thick of the woods. Espel chased after him, muttering curses.
She was talking, and Loom got the sense that she was trying to make him see reason. But her words were too far away, too soft, too nonsensical for him to comprehend. All that mattered was Wil. She was just ahead. He had to find her.
Once she had passed through the castle gate, Wil began to feel the old familiar ache in her muscles. The kingdom was cursed and dying and taking her down with it. No greenery crystallized under her touch, though the current moved desperately through her blood, pushing at the insides of her fingers and palms.
How would she rebuild this? She had the thought that she would die alone in that dark and empty castle, guarding its doors with her corpse.
Loom would be gone by now, off to save his own kingdom. He was the only hope that she had left. Once he had claimed his throne, perhaps he would afford some aid to hers. He would save the kingdom that had once been his enemy. There would be something left for Addney and Owen’s child to claim.
Wil should have gone with him. She knew that. But Arrod was her first love, the place that held her entire life’s memories contained, like the little globes Owen would bring back from his journeys.
When she heard footsteps charging toward her, she spun, unbelieving. She had expected one of Pahn’s silent men coming to finish her off, but instead it was Loom, Espel on his heels.
His eyes were strange and cold. His steps, normally elegant and deft, were heavy. Even angry.
“Loom?”
She could almost believe that she was imagining him.
As he barged through the ruined gates, Wil recoiled. She took a cautious step backward and reached for her dagger, only to remember that it was gone. It had been left on the alchemized corpse.
Her breath hitched. At last she identified what was so strange about Loom. There was an energy radiating from his body that was alien to him. It was marvelry. It was Pahn.
“Wil,” he said. His voice made her uncertain. He spoke her name the same way he always had. For a moment he was so familiar that she wanted to fall into him. She wanted to leave everything and return to his kingdom. She could almost believe, with that one word he’d spoken, that everything would be okay.
He put his hands on her shoulders. One hand moved to the side of her neck, and then to her cheek, cupping her face.
This isn’t Loom. The thought woke her from the trance into which she had briefly fallen.
“I made a deal,” he said. It was his voice, but not. Wil thought he was going to say more, but he moved the hand that had been touching her face. His grasp on her shoulder tightened, and he drew the dagger from his sheath and plunged it into her heart.
Wil didn’t feel the blade cut through her. She didn’t feel her fingers clutching at his wrist, wrestling him until her own dagger slipped through their bloody hands and fell to the dirt.
This wasn’t Loom. This wasn’t him. Pahn’s energy turned repugnant. Her vision clouded with it, obscuring the stars and the moon, making Loom’s face hazy.
Espel screamed. It wasn’t the helpless shriek of a girl horrified by what she had just seen, but the purposeful call of someone coming to action. She was calling for Masalee, the only one among them who was strong enough to combat Pahn’s energy.
Wil felt the earth rise up to meet her. She tasted blood, felt it filling up her lungs.
The air smelled like the dirt after a long rain.
Wil had hated that smell for as long as she could remember, ever since the year that Gray Fever came to steal her brother away.
She felt Masalee beside her, and she understood, too, that she was dying.
Masalee said something, but when Wil looked at her, she saw Gerdie instead, kneeling over her and sweeping her brow the way she had done for him when he was ill. She knew that he was not truly here; his face was blurred and missing details, as faces often were in dreams. He said something about the story of the singing wolf, a bedtime fable their mother used to tell them.
It was one of Gerdie’s favorites, and so Wil had pretended to love it as much as he did, so that their mother would tell it to them at bedtime.
It had always been vivid in her imagination. A giant gray wolf whose howl caused the first bite of winter. The snowflakes were fragments of its song. Only now, when she thought of it, the sky was dark and it smelled of rain. The snow was black and crumbling like soot. The song was a scream.
Time was bleeding into the wind and the wind was carrying it away. She tried to stop it. She tried to make the world go still, but the wind didn’t listen. It never did.
Gerdie’s face became Masalee’s again, and Wil wanted to tell Masalee to drag her inside the castle. To close the doors and cover the windows so that death wouldn’t find her. But it was too late. Death had already come. Wil saw it; it was a shadow standing over her, bearing Loom’s shape.
Thirty
THE MOON BROKE FREE OF the clouds, and the world became sharper in its glow.
Loom was staring up at it when he awoke from his trance. Espel’s knee pinned his stomach in place, her hands pressing his wrists into the ground. He would always be astonished by his sister’s strength, but especially now, because when he looked up at her face, he did not see the ruthless monster their father had raised. He saw pity. He saw what looked, for just an instant, like love.
“What have you done, you idiot,” she whispered.
The kingdom swelled with the loud breath of a winter breeze. All the trees and leaves shook. Thin lines of snow twirled across the ground.
When the wind passed, Loom became acutely aware of the silence. He felt Wil’s stillness, several yards off to his right. He knew, even before he turned his head, that the sound of her breathing had stopped. Without it, the world felt impossibly quiet.
His own breath hitched. He tried to throw Espel off him, but her grip only tightened.
“What have you done to her?” he hissed. He tried again to throw her, and that’s when he saw the blood on his hand. The streaks from where it had dripped down to his wrist and stopped.
Espel didn’t answer him, but she eased her grip, waiting for him to understand.
The memory was far and faded, like the stories the palace servants used to tell about his childhood, until what he truly remembered was tangled up with and indistinguishable from what he had been told.
“No.” He pushed Espel away. She didn’t try to stop him as he staggered on his hands and knees to where Masalee knelt at Wil’s side. Wil’s tunic had been torn open, and the wound lay exposed. Smeared blood buried the mark of her curse in violent depths of red.
Masalee’s eyes were closed, her breaths shallow and quick, her brow drawn in strain. One hand was pressed over the wound, which had stopped bleeding and turned into a gaping pit as black as the night had been before the clouds dissolved. The other hand was to Wil’s forehead.
Wil was still breathing, Loom realized.
His hands were shaking, but the persistent numbness that had plagued him earlier was gone now, replaced by a vicious clarity that
would not allow him reprieve from what he had done. “Wil, stay with me.” His voice cracked. “Please stay with me.”
Her eyes opened at that. Her eyes, dark and deep, and where he always felt himself drowning.
She shook with a feeble cough, and a line of blood slid from the corner of her mouth. Her teeth were coated in red. No. No, Loom refused to accept this. This meant death. It meant that the blade had severed something vital and she was going to drown in her blood.
Pahn knew. He had to know. Anyone else who ever came at Wil with a blade would be dead before they could so much as take their aim. But for Loom, she had hesitated. She had ignored her instincts because she trusted him.
He remembered, now, the wet sound of the blade tearing into her flesh. He remembered her eyes going wide with shock, and then immediately dulling. He remembered the hilt in his fist and the sound of the dagger hitting the grass.
Masalee had since drawn a vial from the belt and poured it over the wound to clean away some of the blood and have a better look. It was Espel’s belt, Loom noticed for the first time.
“You can fix her,” Loom choked out.
“You tore her arteries,” Masalee said. Her tone was practical and even.
Wil rolled her head toward the sound of Masalee’s voice, and Loom wondered if she was still conscious in there, or if the spirits of the Ancient Sea had swum all the way to Northern waters to lure her under with their whispers.
“Marvelry isn’t a magic show,” Masalee said. “I can’t bring back the dead.”
The dead. Loom’s world was going dark around him.
Loom became aware of Espel sitting behind him. For once in her life, not presenting him with some sort of challenge. He thought he felt her hand touch his arm and then withdraw.
“It isn’t your fault,” Masalee told him. “You were in a trance. It nearly knocked me over, it was so strong.”
Wil’s eyes were closed now. He had done this to her, and not just with the dagger. This had been set in motion the moment he made a deal with a marveler.
Pahn arrived as though Loom’s thought had summoned him, in a swish of dust-light snow and silken robes.
“This is much more preferable to a congealed pig’s heart,” Pahn said. “But you haven’t completed our deal. I need that heart cut from her chest while it’s still beating.”
Loom rose to his feet, but before he could lunge, Espel moved before him and stared at Pahn. “We both know that my brother is reckless and shortsighted,” she said. “And you knew that this deal was never going to be made. What is it you truly want?”
“I truly want the girl’s heart,” Pahn said. He canted his head to look at Loom. “I will have it, and you will be the one to bring it to me.”
Fog was pervading Loom’s mind again. His body was light, caught in a dream. He didn’t feel his knees bend as he crouched. He didn’t feel his hand fumble in the frozen grass and grasp the dagger hilt.
Espel threw him onto his back, hard. The air left his lungs and he curled onto his side, heaving, straining to get his breath. Wake up, he pleaded with himself.
With a weary sigh, Pahn unsheathed his dagger. “I had hoped to return you to your father alive,” he said to Espel. He lunged for her, but she dropped into a somersault, missing his blade by a hair.
She jumped to her feet behind him and raised her dagger, but before she could throw it, he twirled in a flourish of silk and sliced her forearm. The pain was no deterrent, not to Espel, who knew how to get lost in her fury. She dodged his next swipe, her blood splashing a dotted line into the snow. Her dagger flew at his chest, but he evaded it, and the weapon disappeared into the darkness behind him.
Something crawled across her skin, something small and biting. She rubbed at her leg, her arms. Hundreds of spiders had invaded her clothes and were pouring out through her sleeves and collar.
It was an illusion. She knew this, even as their bites made her swell and bleed. She ignored the burning little stabs of their fangs even as her throat and eyes began to swell shut from the venom. This is an illusion, she told herself over and over again. Ifpac mountain spiders were indigenous to the Eastern regions; one bite would kill a man thrice her size. Hundreds would leave him a bloated and purpled corpse.
When her next dagger landed in Pahn’s shoulder, he laughed. “You were always the best your kingdom had to offer,” he said. “A fighter from the day you were born, excelling where the world’s finest soldiers have faltered.”
She wanted to claw the skin from her bones.
“And this battle has been a true pleasure,” Pahn said, “but I need that heart still beating, and our time for games is over.”
His arms were still at his sides, but his sword swept forward and slashed her ankles, tearing the tendons. She fell with a scream, not of pain, but of rage. Masalee rushed to her, and Espel shoved her away. “Stay with Wil,” she commanded. This was what Pahn had anticipated. He had trained Masalee from a child, and he knew how to toy with her heart. He knew how to tear her from the side of a dying Northern queen.
Too late, Masalee realized it too. Pahn had advanced on Wil. He knelt over her. His hands glowed with the same throbbing purple energy he’d used to handle the false heart by the river. If all else failed, then he would reach into Wil’s chest with his bare hands and take her heart for himself.
Masalee charged, but she was too late. She wouldn’t reach Pahn in time to stop him.
Something else would reach him, though. A cloaked figure moved through the castle gardens. A blade gleamed in the figure’s hands. No—it was not gleaming in the moonlight. It was glowing, with a dark energy to match Pahn’s. Before Pahn could turn, the blade tore through his back, pinioning his heart to his ribs as the blade broke through his chest.
The figure removed his hood, revealing a medley of golden curls. He set his boot on Pahn’s shoulder, pushing him as he withdrew his sword. Pahn crumpled, already dead.
Loom rose to his hands and knees. Pahn’s marvelry had filled his head, and the sudden release of it left him dazed.
He must still be dreaming, he thought, because it was impossible that this figure standing over him now was real. He had seen this man just hours earlier, slumped dead on his throne. He blinked, but King Baren of the Northern Isles stood before him, as alive as he had ever been.
And then he turned for the open gates and was gone.
Thirty-One
IN THE DREAM, WIL WAS watching Aleen from someplace high.
Aleen was floating along the calm shallows of the river, her arms fanning at her sides. Her blue skirt and white petticoat rippled and tumbled and swam.
“I wanted to live to be a hundred,” she said, and Wil knew she was talking to her. “I wanted to see how far electricity would go. If eventually the entire world would be filled up with wires and lights that outshone the stars.” She was beginning to sink. Water crept up to her cheeks and touched her lips when she said, “If I’d lived, my brother wouldn’t have met his queen. It’s because of my death that he fled the kingdom, and that’s when he found her. If I’d lived, he would have stayed in Arrod and there would have been someone else eventually, I suppose, but he wouldn’t have loved her. He wouldn’t have had you, or your brothers. You wouldn’t all have my curse.”
Wil felt her body turn heavy. She dropped to earth and she knelt at the water’s edge. She reached out a hand to Aleen, but Aleen didn’t take it.
“How do I undo the curse?” Wil said. “There must be some way.”
“I can’t help you,” Aleen said. “No one can.” The river pulled her under and she let herself drown.
Thirty-Two
ESPEL AND ZAY CARRIED WIL inside the castle on a stretcher that had been hastily fashioned from a blanket and tree branches. Masalee moved alongside them, fixed by concentration.
Loom had never seen Wil so fragile. Having been trained to duel to the death under his father’s watchful eye, Loom knew the look of someone who was about to die. The ashen skin. The strangle
d rattle of breath. And he knew what it was to have caused it.
He knew this sickening knot forming in his stomach as well. And, for once, he couldn’t push it away. Dark dread was filling him. If Wil died here tonight, he knew the world would end around him.
“There must be bedchambers upstairs,” Espel said.
“No,” Masalee said. Her voice was strained. Her collar and under her sleeves were dark with sweat, despite the cold. “She’s already been moved too much. She’s going to die if we carry her all around this castle.”
“There’s a fireplace in there,” Zay said, peering down the hall into the open doorway of the servants’ kitchen.
Loom kept distance between himself and everyone, watching as Wil’s stretcher was laid before the fireplace on the floor in the servants’ kitchen. Just carrying her this far had been a risk; she wouldn’t have survived being carried to a bed.
As Ada slept curled in a blanket by the hearth, Zay was the one to stoke the fire. She drew her thread and carefully stitched Wil’s wound while Masalee labored to keep Wil’s heart beating and to drain the blood from her lungs.
She wasn’t going to survive the night. Loom knew this. Pahn was dead and he had dragged Wil down with him. There would be no kingdoms left to save. There would be no end to this war.
It was his fault. How many times had he warned Wil about making a deal with a marveler? And here he had done that very thing, risking her life as the cost.
He knew better than to go to her. He couldn’t stop himself from imagining her body wrapped in that blanket rather than stretched out atop it. He had killed her. Soon she would be gone.
A memory he didn’t know that he had, of his mother slowly dying as servants tended to the infant crying elsewhere in the room. He’d been hiding under his mother’s dressing table, where no one could bother to notice him in the frenzy. More than the unfocused image of his dying mother, he remembered the powerlessness he had felt. The surety that she was slipping away and there was nothing to be done.
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