The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  In addition to her own curse, she felt another tide shifting. Just as she fought, Baren fought, until the curse he had placed on the entire kingdom shattered and broke. Wil felt it fall away.

  Baren’s body went rigid. His eyes—the old woman’s eyes—rolled back.

  All Wil’s strength went out, and she let go and fell to her hands and knees, gasping. It was a wonder, she thought, that she could prop herself up at all. She felt as though her muscles had melted and her insides had gone hollow. She coughed and spat a trickle of blood into the dirt. Soldiers were coming for her now. One had already reached Gerdie, who was no longer shackled and was pulling himself to his feet.

  Baren lay several yards ahead—had she thrown him? She crawled to his body, which was limp and facing skyward. For an awful instant she thought that she had killed him, but then she heard the rattle of his breath.

  Someone knelt beside her and put an arm around her back. Loom. She couldn’t feel his presence as she had so often been able to, but she knew the feel of his touch, the smell of him, the rhythm of his labored breathing when he was frightened. He took her face in his hands and turned her to look at him. “Are you all right?”

  Dazed, she nodded. “I think she’s dead now.”

  “Who’s dead?” Loom asked.

  “My grandmother.” The words felt so strange to say. She’d never had a grandmother, but at the same time she’d always had one, waiting in the wings for the opportunity to kill her.

  Loom didn’t press her for more answers. He cared only that she was still alive. “Can you stand?”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  Two soldiers lifted the unconscious heap of Baren’s body. Just as Wil felt drained, Baren also looked as though everything had been scraped out of him, leaving him hollow.

  “Be careful with him,” she said.

  Wil didn’t allow Loom to carry her back to the castle. She walked, and he patiently kept up with her slow pace, even as she swayed and stumbled.

  Gerdie flanked her other side. Soldiers carrying Baren had moved ahead of them, and Gerdie’s eyes were filled with the light of their distant lanterns.

  “What happened to you?” he asked Wil. “What was that?”

  “Maybe there’s a little bit of marvelry in me after all,” she guessed. “It’s in our blood.”

  Gerdie thought about this. Normally he would have argued against such a thing, but given that he had seen marvelry for himself in recent history, he could not scientifically dismiss it. Rather, he would have to learn how it worked so that he could gain an understanding. That was how his genius worked, and one of Wil’s favorite things about him.

  “Could marvelry be how I survived Gray Fever all those times?” he wondered aloud.

  “Maybe.” Wil shrugged. “Or maybe it’s just that you’re strong.”

  Thirty-Five

  FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE her return to the castle, Wil drew a bath. The water was hot and coated in a pearlescent sheen of bubbles. She smeared her chest wound with a waterproof salve and then submerged herself, working the lather through her hair and under her nails. And then she rested her head on a folded towel on the tub’s edge and closed her eyes.

  She must have fallen asleep like that, because a knock at the door startled her. The water was turning cold, and she kicked her leg, trying to stir up the last of the warmth.

  “Wil?” Loom’s voice was muffled by the heavy oak door. “Just checking that you’re still alive.”

  She laughed. The sharp intake of breath hurt. Now that the chaos had subsided—at least for now—she was beginning to notice things like pain again. And she was in a great deal of it.

  “Come in and see for yourself,” she said.

  Loom opened the door just enough to step inside and then close it behind him. His hair was damp and had left wet spots on the shoulders of his borrowed shirt. It was gray, with a ruffled collar and sleeves. He’d probably found it in one of the infinite guest bedrooms that occupied the halls. Wil had often wondered if her mother had been prepared to have a hundred sons and fill all the castle rooms if she hadn’t been given a daughter on her fourth try.

  Loom knelt by the tub. He brushed his thumb along her jaw and tugged gently at a clump of her wet hair.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him. He looked haggard. His eyes were sunken with exhaustion, and swollen.

  He laughed. “Am I all right? Asks the girl who’s been stabbed in the chest by her own dagger.”

  She waved her arm, coaxing up a splash of soapy water. “It’ll take more than that to kill me. Pahn should have tried a bit harder. Some dynamite, perhaps, or fire.”

  Her teasing brought no light to Loom’s grim expression. “You were dead,” he told her.

  “Well, I’m alive now,” she said.

  “Because of me, you almost—”

  She pressed three fingers to his mouth to shush him. She sat up in the water, and her chest felt cold when it touched the air. “Help me up,” she said.

  He held her arms to steady her as she stepped out of the tub, and then he grabbed the towel she’d draped over the stool by the dressing table. As he fitted the towel around her shoulders, he couldn’t help staring at the wound his own hand had inflicted. It was still raw and ugly, her skin held taut by Zay’s even stitching of black surgical twine, and it shone with salve.

  Loom’s fingertips hovered over it, not quite touching. Instead, he touched her bare hip, drawing her a step nearer. She sucked in a breath.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked.

  “No.” She put her hand over his so that he wouldn’t draw it away. She shrugged the towel from her shoulders and it puddled at her feet. “It just feels different is all.”

  “Different?” Loom’s other hand went to her waist, and then across her stomach. It was exactly where he had touched her after their night together. It had made her tremulous and excited then, but now it made her feel safe and at peace, not just with Loom but with the entire world around him. She felt truly seen by someone who did not want her for her curse or her kingdom or because she had been born a girl. Someone who just wanted her.

  She leaned forward and rested her head to his chest.

  Moments earlier, she had wanted nothing more than for this night to end. Now she didn’t mind if it went on a little longer.

  It took her longer than usual to dress. Raising her arms aggravated her wound. In the end, she conceded to sitting on the stool and letting Loom help her. She had selected black trousers from her wardrobe, and a bright blue tunic with red birds printed all over it like dots. It was hand-dyed, purchased from a wanderer’s cart last summer, which seemed a lifetime ago now.

  After, Loom brushed the tangles from her wet hair and began pulling it into a braid that wrapped around her head. Wil watched him in the mirror. “You’re good at that.”

  “I used to do it for Zay,” he said. “In the thick of the summer, it’s hot as all the hells and the last thing anyone wants is hair sticking to their sweaty skin when they’re trying to sleep.”

  Zay’s name didn’t flood Wil with the jealousy it once had. There were times, on the ship, when she’d resented Loom and Zay’s intimacy, not only for what it was, but because it would never go away. If they each lived a hundred more years, they would fill those years with more secrets and more memories.

  This was still true, but it didn’t seem so menacing now. She wanted Loom to have love in his life. He’d been deprived of it for so long. He looked different to her now, as though she had been looking at him through a fog all this time and had finally emerged. He was beautiful—she’d always thought so, even when he infuriated her—with dark eyes that contained all the kindness and heartbreak and knowledge in the world. His hands were thick and veiny, but long and elegant too. Wil could see the tendons move under his skin as he worked.

  He pinned the tail of her braid into her hair, hiding it.

  “I know I’m not as familiar as you are with Northern fashion,” he said, “but
you don’t look like you’re dressed for bed.”

  “I’m going to check on Baren,” she said, wincing as she stood. “Before I think about sleep, I need to make sure he’s not been possessed by any more of our ancestors.”

  Loom followed her to the door of Baren’s chamber, which was being guarded by two ever-loyal soldiers. For all her father’s faults, he had picked fine men and women to guard his kingdom.

  When Wil turned the knob, Loom knew not to follow her. He stepped back and let her go in alone.

  The antechamber was cold and dark. It was the sort of deep chill that only existed when a place had been very cold and without light for a long time. The chamber itself was a little warmer. Someone had lit a fire at the hearth. Two more soldiers stood at the foot of the bed, where Baren lay thrashing fitfully. Another soldier—an appointed medic—sat beside him. Her hair was gold with bits of red. She was dabbing at his face with a damp cloth.

  “He’ll be fine, I believe,” she said. “Just a light fever.”

  Wil wasn’t sure that Baren had ever been ill in his life. Growing up, she’d taken great lengths to avoid her second-eldest brother. If she didn’t encounter him for several days at a time, she’d count herself lucky and not question why. She thought she knew her brother quite well: cruel Baren; hateful Baren; sneaky Baren, always finding his way into shadows and beyond thresholds with an ear for all the castle’s whispers. But now she realized just how much of a stranger he was to her. How much of what she’d believed of him had been filled in by her own fabricated image.

  She had thought Baren weak and even stupid, but he had turned out to be his own sort of genius. Wil thought she was the castle spy, but Baren had found a way to make himself even more invisible still: he made himself hated. When he was gone, no one looked for him. No one questioned him when he returned. And all that time, he was meeting with a marveler in an abandoned train tunnel, on a path no one ever followed, slowly accumulating enough power to become a formidable marveler himself.

  “Leave us,” Baren croaked, and opened his eyes. At first, Wil thought he was talking to her, but it was the soldier who stood, bowed low, and moved for the door.

  Baren watched her go, and then his gazed fixed on Wil. She was standing at the foot of his bed now.

  Once the door to the antechamber had closed, he sat upright and propped himself against the headboard. There were heavy blue and purple rings around his eyes, and he was so pale she could see the veins in his cheeks. His expression was sour, but then it turned curious. “What do you want?”

  “I came to see how you are,” Wil said, surprised to realize this was the truth. When Baren didn’t answer, she went on. “I know what our grandmother did to you. I saw her lure you in when you were just a child.”

  “You don’t know a thing about it,” he snapped. “She knew what you were. Everyone else thought I was crazy to hate you as I did, but she knew. She predicted everything: that you would kill Owen, that I would become king, that you would be back to bring destruction.”

  It was true. All of it. Wil steeled herself against the enormity of it. But was all of it her fault? Her curse was the reason Owen was dead. That was what set everything into motion, but where had Baren been between then and now?

  “Baren,” she said, and her fists clenched at her sides. “How did Papa die?”

  Baren’s cold gaze turned soft for just a moment—just a beat as long as a flicker in the firelight—and then it hardened again. “He got sick.”

  “How?” Wil pressed. “He’d never been sick.”

  Baren averted his eyes. He clenched his teeth so hard that his jawbone jutted.

  “You should know,” he finally murmured. “It was a poison you smuggled in.”

  That didn’t narrow it down. She had brought in dozens of chemicals for Gerdie or her father, any number of them lethal.

  “Tallim,” he clarified. “Mixed with mint, it’s rendered flavorless. I put it in his tea.”

  “Why?” she gasped.

  “Because,” he snarled. “I didn’t know he had exiled you, but I knew he still suspected you were alive.” Baren turned his head toward her again, and Wil could see that he was forcing himself to look at her. “I overheard him talking to one of his soldiers. He didn’t tell the soldier the truth of what happened. He said that Mother had lost her wits with grief and convinced herself that you may have hit your head when you fell into the water and developed amnesia, and that he should go out and look for you. But it was a lie. Mother said no such thing. Mother believed you were dead. Papa had just changed his mind.”

  Wil staggered a step back. Her father had wanted her to come home. She thought of his words on the night of her banishment: I should have killed you long ago, and I still can’t bring myself to do it. He had known of her curse, and yet still he’d looked at her and seen his daughter. Perhaps he had even seen Aleen, the child whose face Wil had all but stolen for her own, and he couldn’t bear to end another life too soon.

  “He wanted me,” she said, still breathless.

  “He would have let you destroy everything,” Baren spat. “Everyone does, when it comes to you. No one has ever had the nerve to kill you for this kingdom.”

  “This kingdom is still standing,” Wil cried. “If it was in any danger of falling, it’s because of you. You killed the king.”

  “You killed the heir,” he snapped. “Sending you away was the best thing Papa could have done for this kingdom and he knew it. I could almost respect him for that, but his heart softened for you. You had him under your curse just like everyone else in this bloody kingdom except for me.”

  She paced closer to his bedside now, and he winced when her shadow touched him. “We could have worked together, Baren.”

  He laughed.

  “It’s true,” she said, and her voice went quiet. “You’ve been spying on me from the moment I was born, so you must know that I have done everything I could for our kingdom.”

  “Don’t act so pious,” Baren said. “You hid things from Papa. You think I don’t know that? You and Owen and Gerdie, all of you whispering and conspiring against him.”

  Wil controlled her temper. Her brother wasn’t wrong, but she still wanted to damn him. He knew so little about his own siblings because he had poisoned himself against them. But it wasn’t his fault.

  “Our grandmother,” she said. “You let her into your head, and she controlled you. You thought you were saving the kingdom, but, Baren, she was going to use you to destroy it. She wanted all of us dead. You must see that.”

  “You’re wrong,” Baren said, but his voice had turned distracted. “She wanted to protect this place from you.”

  “I am not the only cursed thing in our family,” Wil said. “Suppose you’d killed me, and then what? Somewhere in the future generations of Heidles, there would be another queen who loved someone more than her husband and it would begin all over again. Think about it. Our grandmother was trying to break the cycle. She convinced you to provoke a war with the Southern Isles so that we’d all be killed.”

  “No,” Baren said, but he didn’t sound certain.

  “You were a child,” Wil went on. “The day I was born, you ran from home. Our grandmother sensed that I’d arrived. She felt my curse, and she knew it even then. But she sensed you, too, didn’t she? An angry, impressionable little boy she could manipulate. She used you.”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Baren said.

  “But I do,” she said. “I caught a glimpse of it in the cavern. She manipulated you. How many times did she try to convince you to kill me? And when you couldn’t do it, she used you to provoke this war so our entire kingdom would be destroyed.”

  “I could have killed you,” Baren spat out. “I could have killed you in your crib and there would have been no one to stop me.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” The edge left Wil’s tone because she was asking in earnest.

  He looked away from her, and his silence was its own answer. He
couldn’t do it. Wil remembered when she was too small to fight, before Owen had taught her how to wield a blade; Baren grabbed her under the arms and dangled her from her bedroom window as she screamed and squirmed, Gerdie furiously kicking at him. He could have dropped her, but he never did.

  Maybe there was something more than hatred in his heart for her, buried deep.

  “Get out,” he said. It was a growl, but when Wil didn’t move, the next time it was a scream. “Get out of my sight!”

  Two soldiers burst into the room, but Wil had no reason to linger. There was nothing more to say.

  Thirty-Six

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN WISE, Wil thought, to sleep aboard the ship. But she didn’t fear Baren’s wrath as she once had. Whether she was in Baren’s good graces or not, he had not officially banished her from the kingdom, and she was still a member of the royal family. For that reason, guards also kept watch at her chamber door.

  When Wil changed into her nightgown and slid into her bed, Loom came and lay beside her.

  They were quiet in the light of her dimmed chandelier. His arm was draped across her stomach, and as she playfully danced her fingers between his, she tried to work out what was so different about him. He smelled a bit of the herbal soaps that were common in Arrod, rather than the more floral and fragrant soaps ground from plants indigenous to the Southern Isles, but everything else was the same. He exhaled a hard breath through his nostrils and it rustled her hair.

  “We should sleep,” he said.

  “I don’t quite remember sleep,” Wil said. “How does it go again?”

  He laughed, and she burrowed closer.

  “We should set sail in the morning, don’t you think?” Wil said. “With Pahn dead, your father will be more vulnerable. Now is the perfect time for you to strike.”

  “Espel and I talked it through while you were in the bath,” he said. “We’ve decided that this is something we should do without help from the North.”

  Wil shifted, canting her head to look at him. “Without me, you mean? I don’t understand. You’ve been wanting my help from the day we met.”