“Go!” Wil told her. Why hadn’t she fled by now? There was enough smoke and chaos for her to escape. The marauders were everywhere, but Wil couldn’t focus. The world had become too bright and busy. Adrenaline was still running through her, making her arms tremble. She clenched her fists to steady them. Turn him to stone, her body was pleading. She was starved for it. She couldn’t focus.
She turned for an alleyway and ran. If she could make it to the trees and out of sight, she could crystallize the grass instead.
But she didn’t get far. Something hit her ankle, and the world came up around her.
She flipped onto her back to face her assailant, and all she saw was a slender silhouette. Bright flashes throbbed across her vision. Had she hit her head?
There was barely time to form the thought before a white-hot pain lanced up her side. Then someone was trying to pull the rawhide bag that was crisscrossed over her chest.
She clung to it. There wasn’t much in it—just some geldstuk and silver, and vials of sleep serum to refill her dagger—but she refused to let it go. It was a piece of her old life. It was hers.
She landed a kick to her assailant’s stomach. The motion tore at her wound, and she screamed. Her fingers tightened around the rawhide strap.
Then another silhouette appeared, and the marauder’s grip on her bag slackened. Wil touched a gloved hand to the searing pain at her side. It came up red with blood. It was going to rust, she thought dully, and tried to wipe it against her shirt.
Someone was crouched over her. A boy with dark eyes and black waves of hair whose fringes caught fire against the sun.
“Can you stand?” he asked her, in accented Nearsh. His voice was a million miles away.
“Yes,” she said. But when she tried to move, the air itself had grown heavy and was sitting upon her chest. Breathing had become difficult.
Hands pressed against her wound. She saw blood on the sleeves of his long leather coat, and had the distant realization that it was hers.
“Don’t,” she started to say. She could feel her pulse thudding hard in her throat.
The boy reached under her back and her knees and lifted her up. Her head fell heavy in the hollow of his shoulder. She was going to kill him. She couldn’t stop it. Everyone would see. But she could feel her body losing blood, and knew that she wouldn’t live long enough to know what would happen next.
“You’re going to be okay,” the boy said, his voice low and soft against her ear. It soothed the frenzy of adrenaline buzzing electric in her veins.
And for one mad, feverish moment, she believed him.
TWELVE
THE BOY DIDN’T DIE.
Over and again, waves of unconsciousness, heavy with dreams, tried to pull Wil into their depths. But she always fought her way back.
The autumn sky blurred overhead, white and gray with no trace of blue. And on the burned wind, she could smell something sweet and medicinal.
The boy was still carrying her, rushing her past the dark bloody chaos in the market square, and Wil wondered if she was dreaming, or dead. There was no way he should still be alive.
With her waning strength, she brought a hand to his face to be sure he was real. His jaw was sharp, but his skin was cool and soft. He looked at her. And then everything disappeared.
Stillness.
Something soft beneath her.
The sound of her own hard breathing magnified in her ears.
Voices—the boy’s, with his Lavean accent, and a girl with a Brayshire accent.
Her eyelids were too heavy. Angry, hot flashes of pain stabbed at her hip, but focusing on the pain helped her return to consciousness. She could just make out a chandelier hanging from a wooden ceiling, its candles sleeping in a sunbeam. Everything was unfamiliar.
A vial was touched to her lips, and she flinched away.
“Can you hear me?” the boy said.
Wil moved her eyes to him. “Yes.” Her voice was hoarse.
“I’m going to give you something for the pain,” the boy said. “It’s called morfin. It’s going to put you out for a bit.”
Morfin; a leaf that grew only in the tropics of the Southern Isles, and impossible to find even on the underground market, especially now that there was an export ban.
She should have fought him off, Wil knew. She couldn’t afford to have her senses dulled any further. It was only pain, and she’d had worse. She had the fleeting thought that blood was spilling out of her, so much and so fast that her heart and bones would be carried off in the current of it. She felt heavy and numb.
The boy laid his hand on her forehead, and there was something comforting about the way his thumb smoothed her brow.
This time, when the vial was brought to her lips, she didn’t fight it.
In her dream, she was under the rapids, and her lungs were full of water. Owen was still clinging to the rock face, trying to find her hand and pull her up. Monster, he called. He was crying, frantic. But she stayed out of reach. She refused to pull him down into such depths.
It isn’t safe where I am, she told him. You need to go on without me.
The sound of calmer waters brought her back.
She opened her eyes, and in the far corner of the unfamiliar room, she saw the boy standing at a washbasin, scrubbing his hands. Something rich and herbal filled the air.
His sleeves were rolled to his shoulders, and slender black tattoos wrapped around his wrists and trailed to his biceps. The most intricate, elaborate rendering of vines and thorns and unfamiliar flowers and animals exploding into full bloom. Tattoos were a rite of passage in Southern culture, Wil knew. Even children had them, adding to them with each significant event in their lives—weddings, births, deaths, voyages.
When she was little, traveling through the Port Capital on Owen’s shoulders, she used to watch the Lavean vendors loading and unloading cargo, their sleeves rolled up or their shirts removed. She regarded their tattoos as a sort of novel, telling a story in a language she wanted desperately to decipher. But she could never seem to find the beginning, or the ending. Maybe there wasn’t one.
There was a tattoo at his throat, too, but most of it was covered by his high collar. All she could see were the tops of swirls, like the backs of creatures bobbing near the surface of the sea. Odd, Wil thought. He seemed to be deliberately hiding it.
She struggled to move. Her body was heavy. Her tongue felt like a lead weight in her mouth. But she managed to prop herself up onto her elbows.
She was lying on a mattress stuffed with down feathers. It was dark outside now. Candlelight flickered in the chandelier overhead, filling the room with warm dancing light.
Her arms were weighted, her mind hazy, vision blurring in and out. But she wasn’t in pain.
The boy saw her fighting to sit up and moved to her side in an instant. “Hey now,” he was saying. “Easy. You’re going to pull at the stitches.”
“Stitches?” Her voice felt far away.
He put his hands on her shoulders and eased her back down. “Marauder managed to land a pretty deep cut, but it didn’t hit anything vital. Lucky day for your kidney, I’d say.”
She blinked up at him, trying to understand what he was saying. Focus, she scolded herself.
“You stitched my wound?”
“I’ve had a lot of practice.” He said this a bit haughtily, and the corner of his mouth rose, evoking a dimple on his cheek. “The hydronus oxide will keep infection away, and you aren’t running a fever. All good signs.”
“You—touched me?” She was back to wondering if she was truly awake.
Candlelight caught the amber of the boy’s dark eyes. His face shifted from confusion to concern. “You should sleep more. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
This persistent exhaustion was beginning to frustrate her. “What happened?”
“What happened? You saved a girl from being snared by marauders and got stabbed for the trouble.”
“I don’t understand.” Wil w
as talking more to herself than to him. “You carried me? And you’re okay.” She stared down at herself. She was still wearing her gloves, though they’d been wiped clean of her blood. Half her tunic had been cut away, exposing her raw hip and the black thread holding the wound shut like eyelids that had been sewn together.
“The morfin is making you delirious,” the boy reasoned. “It’ll wear off by morning.”
The door on the adjacent wall creaked open. It was made of old, distressed wood with chipped gray paint, just like the ceiling and floor. Wil presumed this was an apartment in an old factory building; after the fall of Brayshire’s hierarchy, much of its industrial complex had been renovated.
The girl from the market square stood in the doorway, looking at her with pale blue eyes. “You’re awake.” Her voice was gentle, sweet.
Wil managed to push herself up onto her elbows again. “Where am I?”
“In my apartment, in Enow,” the girl said, and offered a sympathetic smile. “I’m Hettie.”
“Wil,” Wil said, lowering herself back against the mattress after her head began to feel too heavy. “Thank you for letting me stay.”
Hettie shook her head. “I should be thanking you. Marauders bombed half the market square. I don’t know how many were wounded, or taken, and I—” Her trembling was all too apparent, even in Wil’s muddled state. Hettie couldn’t bring herself to finish what she was going to say. “Do you feel feverish?” She reached a hand for Wil’s forehead, and Wil flinched away.
Beside her, the boy was watching her closely. Too closely.
“Some water, then,” Hettie said with verve. “I’ll be right back.”
Wil looked at the boy; he was still watching her. “Why did you save me?”
“I run into fires, not from them,” he said. “Like you.”
“I was definitely running from that fire,” she said.
He laughed. It was such an open, honest sound, and something about it made her feel better. “You landed a few good blows and saved a girl from certain torture first. That counts for something.”
“I’m glad.” Her lids fluttered as she tried to keep them open. “You still haven’t told me your name.”
“Loom,” he said.
She closed her eyes. Only for a second, she told herself, as the waves pulled her under again.
THIRTEEN
GERDIE TRIED TO APPLY REASON.
The pathophysiology of drowning went like this: two conscious people who slipped underwater would first hold their breath. They would understand that the air existed above the surface and would try to get to it. They would struggle and fight. This would use up the oxygen that was stored in their bodies, rendering them unconscious in thirty to sixty seconds.
Even if their hearts stopped beating, the damage done within those sixty seconds would not be irreversible. The brain would be key. Without air, its cells would begin to die by the third minute. One hundred and eighty seconds, the same amount of time it took to grind grayroot and arterleaves with a mortar and pestle, add serlot oil, and deposit the potion into a cauldron, which is what Gerdie had been doing when it happened.
After the fourth minute, survival with functional brain recovery was unlikely. By the tenth minute, all cells within the brain would have ceased functioning, and both of those people who had gone into the river—one trying to save the other—would be dead.
Death was final. He could not reach into his cauldron and find what he had lost. Could not fashion tallim powder and bits of broken glass and gears into an heir and a spare. There were no pieces left to fix.
Drowned.
It made no sense.
Each time he descended the stairs to his laboratory, he succumbed to a new habit of standing before the small window that leaked bleary light into the space. The bottom of the window frame was five feet two inches from the floor. His sister had been exactly that height, filling up the space perfectly when she stood there, as she often did, out of the way of his cauldron. The top of his own head came to the middle of the glass. An even five feet eight inches. He compulsively rerecorded his measurement daily, worried about growing even a fraction taller. Worried about moving farther from his memory of Wil, which existed without portraits, without so much as a recording of her voice. He had nothing of her but a room of lifeless trinkets, and the space between a window and a dusty floor.
Owen and Wil died on a Wednesday, and when Wednesday came around for the first time since their deaths, he forced himself to move. He couldn’t bear that castle, with its black gossamer draped over the mirrors and beds and its persistent silence a moment longer.
It had even proved too much for Addney, who had taken to sleeping in the unfinished house where she and Owen had planned to live. She made herself scarce; Gerdie hadn’t even seen any servants going out to tend to her needs. Only the queen herself would venture out there, morning and night, with trays of food, and sometimes one of Owen’s books.
Climbing the stone wall was excruciating. The weather had been cold and damp, and that morning it had rained. His legs ached, and the pain radiated up his spine, charting a path that lanced through his brain and stabbed at his monocled eye. The vision in that eye was weaker today as well, partially blinded by the gleam of dampness everywhere, distorting everything like a camera lens that could not get its focus. But he didn’t mind. This pain, at least, he could do something for. Brighter lighting would improve his vision. For his leg, there were stretches and tonics and salves. So many solutions—however temporary or weak they may be—that he couldn’t believe he’d ever complained about them. He would give anything for all the hurt in life to be so fixable.
He knew that Wil had walked through the woods and climbed the rock wall over the rapids. He knew because she had told him that was her plan. But he was not half the climber his sister had been, so he crossed the river where it was calm and walked alongside it until he’d reached the spot where the water turned angry and violent.
He stared at it, taken all at once by his anger for this thing that had killed his brother and sister. Reason came back to him, this time uninvited. Their bodies were still pinned down there, it said. Even if he could go down and find them, he wouldn’t recognize what he recovered. After a week underwater, the skin begins to peel away from tissue.
The queen had ordered men to recover the bodies. Part of Gerdie had hoped that they would be able to do it. If he could have seen them while they were still whole, he might have believed they were gone. But the task was impossible, and when the men returned empty-handed, the queen’s scream was even worse than the first had been.
Still, now, he found himself looking for his sister’s long hair, as though he’d see it fluttering like a flag, and he could grab on and pull her back up. And then—what?
When he awoke from his trance, he knelt in the grass and began to rummage for gemstones. For footprints. Torn beads from Owen’s coat sleeves. Anything.
“You have to help me,” he whispered to them both. “I have to know what happened. I can’t live the rest of my life not knowing.”
The queen, in her despair, believed the story the king told her, but she didn’t know what Gerdie and Owen knew, about Wil’s deadly new power. All week he’d thought of what Owen had said.
I know our father in a way that you never could.
“Did Papa kill you?” He’d thought it for days, but this was the first time he said the words aloud. He could almost expect to look up and see Wil knelt beside him, rolling her eyes, saying, “You’re the genius. You figure it out.”
“Have you taken to muttering like a madman?” The voice that called to him from across the rapids was real, and it startled Gerdie. Baren stood on the other side of the water, clutching the hilt of the sword at his hip. In only a week’s time, he’d talked his way into becoming their father’s high guard, his triumph a slap against the miserable silence within the castle.
Gerdie betrayed nothing. He forced back the threat of something awful and overwhelming t
hat began to stir within him. The realization that Baren was all he had left. He would not let his brother see him in mourning. He went back to searching the grass.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Baren went on. “But you won’t find anything. Papa said they never made it to the other side.”
Gerdie tried to ignore him. He thought about the trade nations and the cluster of Eastern islands. He thought about the Ancient Sea and the undead apparitions of the West. He thought of all the places Owen had been, and that Wil had longed to see. He thought about boarding a ship and leaving for one of those places—any of them.
“They’re dead, you know,” Baren said. He hated being ignored more than anything. “You’re not going to unearth them.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you?”
Gerdie looked up.
Baren’s straight blond hair had gone dull in the past few days. His eyes were ringed with gray lines. Strange, he almost appeared to be stricken by grief, though he had every reason to be happy. He finally had what he wanted. He was the heir.
“Are you seeing ghosts?” Baren asked. “At night—wet footprints in the hall, and voices whispering.”
Gerdie couldn’t tell if his brother was being sincere. It was cruel if it was a trick, but it wouldn’t be out of character. When Gerdie was ill, Baren loved to joke about a shadowed man roaming the gardens looking for a child’s soul to steal.
But then he noticed Baren’s hands. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Gerdie counted five times. It wasn’t like Baren to be compulsive, but he did it two more times.
Gerdie stood. “No.” His voice was guarded. “Ghosts aren’t real, Baren.”
“You don’t know everything, not everything,” Baren said.
The words lanced Gerdie’s chest. Those had been Wil’s final words to him, before she’d stomped up the stairs and out of his world forever. And she had been right.
“I’ve seen things,” Baren went on.
“What things?” Gerdie asked, even as he knew he’d regret playing along.