She had been wrong about Loom. That was the only thought she had left. He was willing to kill her after all.
An eternity—or perhaps a second—later, her lungs came alive with a gasp.
There was air again.
The net hung from a rope on some sort of pulley that jutted from the side of the ship. Her vision returned with bright clarity.
Zay and Loom stood on the ship’s deck now, two silhouettes against the cloudy sky, watching her. They were four yards away, Wil noted. Maybe five.
“I told you that wouldn’t be enough to kill her,” Zay told him. “See? She’s fine.”
Fine. Wil shoved the dagger back into its sheath; it was powerless here.
Underwater the net had been sharp and cutting, but when it was exposed to air, it became sticky and persistently clingy.
She hung helplessly amid the tatters of broken raft and drew deep, measured breaths, preparing her lung capacity in case they pulled her under again.
“You had to find the one creature in all of Northern Arrod who isn’t as dumb as she looks,” Zay complained to Loom. “This was supposed to be easy.”
Loom didn’t reply. Instead, he looked to Wil. She tried to read his expression, but it was blank. “Tell me your name,” he said.
“You already know my name,” she snapped. Don’t let him see your anger. She focused on breathing.
“I know you Northern types,” he said. “You like to give your daughters long names with a flourish of syllables. Wil is an abbreviation if I’ve ever heard one.”
She had to decide. Her name was a small compromise. If she conceded here, she could resist when he asked her something important.
“Wilhelmina.” It felt strange to say. Only her mother ever called her that, and her father, if he bothered to refer to her at all.
“And?”
“And what?”
“Everyone has a last name. Tell me yours.”
“I don’t have one.”
Heidle. Same as the king. Same as the queen and all the princes, including the dead one. It was an easy name to say. Winds knew she’d frittered away precious hours of her life writing it in clumsy calligraphy under the scrutiny of her instructors. She could see those infuriating curls and twists even now. Wilhelmina Heidle. But even if it killed her, she couldn’t bring herself to confess, couldn’t be that dead princess again.
“Tell me your name,” Loom repeated.
She just stared at him.
“You could stay in there all day,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere pressing to be.”
Winds, he was irritating. “I already told you, I don’t have one. My mother traveled the world, and I’ve never met my father.” It was partly true, which was more than he deserved.
“How are you able to turn things to stone?” Loom asked. “Were you cursed?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to find Pahn.”
“How can you not know how you turn things to stone?” Zay demanded.
“I just don’t,” Wil said. “The same way you don’t know how to deflect a kick to the face.”
Zay’s fury was palpable. “Just throw her back in the water,” she said.
Loom ignored that. “Where is your mother now?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“When exactly did this start?”
She didn’t reply. If she told the truth, he might figure out that her powers had emerged shortly before the princess of Arrod died. She didn’t want to take the chance. He was clearly perceptive. He had somehow anticipated that she’d be on a ship headed west and beaten her to it.
Zay said something that prompted an exasperated sigh from Loom, and they began to argue in Lavean murmurs that Wil couldn’t hear at her distance. While their attention was off her, she studied her confinement. The spaces between the netting were diamond shaped, just big enough for a closed fist to pass through. There had to be a weak link in here somewhere. Some way for a captain to escape if he’d been held captive on his own ship. It was an old alchemist’s trick that Gerdie had told her about. Any means to confine a prisoner had a hidden vulnerability so it couldn’t be used against the one meant to use it.
She shifted her weight. At a glance, it would seem that she was trying to stretch her cramping limbs, but she worked at the diamonds of the rope with her boot, searching for an out.
She clutched the top of the net, where it gathered at the rope that held it in place. If she broke free, she could swim for shore. It wasn’t very far; she could make it.
And then she found a weak length of net. Her boot kicked it apart. But rather than breaking the net, it severed it from the rope on the pulley, causing her to drop helplessly into the water.
The instant she went under, her body tried to kick itself to the surface, but the net ensnared her, cutting at her skin where she fought it.
No matter what she did, she was sinking.
Some dull, faraway part of her mind began to panic. No, she told herself. If there was one weak length, there had to be another nearby. But as she sank farther into the depths, she lost track of which end was which.
Everything was dark, too dark. Her lungs gave protest, forcing her to draw in water like a breath. For a moment, the pain of it woke her. She saw the daylight wobbling overhead, before it was blotted out by darkness.
SEVENTEEN
Monster . . .
There was something in all that darkness of the Ancient Sea, calling to her. Something she thought had been lost to her forever.
Listen to me, Monster—
The calm filled her the way the water filled her. She knew that Owen was dead. She’d felt his last breath against her throat when she caught him. But even so, she knew somehow that he was not gone.
He was here.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t think, and only barely felt her brother’s arm snaring her body and pulling her through the black.
She inhaled, knives shooting down her throat, shredding her lungs. A hand was hitting her back, hard, forcing the water out so that air could find its way back in.
Bits of pale sky shone through her lashes. She heard herself retch and splutter, and under all that, a soft voice that said, “I’ve got you.”
It was not Owen’s voice. Delirium was replaced by clarity. The living voices replaced the dead. She opened her eyes and saw the ship. That vile, cursed thing, floating in the water before her.
Loom had an arm around her, his fist gripping the back of her shirt. She wanted to murder him.
His closeness infuriated her, and she tried to push him away, but as oxygen made its way back into her body she felt as though she was spinning in a riptide. He was watching her. She tried to glare at him, but had the sense that she looked more like she was going to pass out instead.
He was swimming for the ship now, and she resisted the instinct to rest her heavy head against his shoulder.
When they reached the rope ladder that hung over the side of the ship, she shoved him away and climbed onto the deck. Water dripped heavy off her clothes, her hair. Her gloves felt full with it.
Thin, hard drops of rain fell sparsely onto the deck. Loom had been right about a storm coming.
Zay was standing over her, arms crossed. The bruise on her chin greatly diminished the effect of her death glare.
Loom took Wil’s elbow and tugged her to her feet. He opened his mouth to say something, but Wil reeled back and punched him in the jaw before he could. He staggered. When she came at him again with a kick, he caught her ankle and knocked her onto her back.
“Listen,” he said, pinning her wrists. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She locked an arm around his elbow, slid a knee under his torso, and overtook him with a sweep, rolling him onto his back and straddling his waist.
He twisted his hips in an attempt to throw her off. She unsheathed her dagger in an instant and held it to his jugular.
He went still.
“What do you want from me?” she demand
ed.
There was a moment of bewilderment on his face before his guard went up again, and she reveled in it. He was clearly not used to getting bested, especially not from a runt like her. Her knees dug into his sides.
“All right,” he snarled. “I’d been watching you for a while, trying to figure out where you got all those gems you kept trading.” He blinked as a raindrop landed in his lashes. “When I saw the way you handled that marauder, I thought you must have been involved with the underground market. I wanted in.”
“In?” Wil asked. “In illegal trade?”
“Yes.” Wet hair shifted around his head, its own little sea of black waves. “You seemed to know what you were doing. And then, in the woods, when I discovered the truth—”
“None of this answers my question. What do you plan to do with a bunch of gemstones?”
“‘A bunch of gemstones’? Ha. You Northern Arrod types have so much wealth to burn—”
She pressed the blade tighter to his skin. The arch of the dagger cradled the knob of his throat.
“That kind of wealth could save a kingdom,” he went on.
“So what if it can?” Wil said. “Why should you be in charge of it?”
She was aware of Zay hovering somewhere behind her, but she didn’t dare take her eyes from Loom. His breaths were shallow, revealing his vulnerability; Zay was some sort of ally—that much was clear—but he was the only fighter between them.
“I know you want to find Pahn,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I can help you. I know where he’s hiding out.”
“You really do think I’m stupid,” Wil said.
“It’s the truth. I’ve had the immense displeasure of knowing him since I was a child. My father keeps Pahn under his thumb.”
Wil narrowed her eyes. Her other hand was still pressed against his wrist, and she could feel his pulse through her glove. Rhythmic. Steady. If he was lying, he was good at disguising it.
Still, she couldn’t be sure. She shifted the angle of her dagger. He swallowed hard, his skin flirting dangerously against the blade.
“Unbutton my collar,” he told her.
“Loom,” Zay hissed, “have you lost your mind?” She was speaking in Lavean. Wil didn’t let on that she could speak the Southern Isles’ language fluently. Most Northerners wouldn’t bother unless they dealt in the ports, but her father had insisted that all his children speak the trade tongues.
But Loom ignored the words and kept his focus on Wil.
Still holding the dagger in place, with her other hand she undid the button at his collar and peeled away the fabric that had been obscuring his tattoos. She shifted the dagger to rest under his eye. He didn’t move as she studied the marks. On the right side of his neck, black lines emerged from his hair, reaching around his throat like needle-thin flames. At a glance the lines seemed to swirl aimlessly, but up close she could see thin, detailed figures within them. Leaves and insects and columns of jagged branches that appeared to be choking him.
At the knob of his throat, there was a crown made of blades. She watched the way it glided with his skin when he inhaled deep. She had seen that crown before. It sat atop an anatomically correct heart impaled by blades that formed an X clean through it.
It wasn’t merely a tattoo. It was the royal crest of the Southern Isles.
“High winds.” She met his gaze, bewildered. “Did the king do that to you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Loom said. “He’s my father.”
For a second, she didn’t believe him. But then she realized that from the time she first saw him, she had recognized something about his sullen nature. The way he walked. Looked at her as though he was searching for something. But especially in the guarded way that he spoke, as though his bones had been splintered and were slowly healing into new shapes.
Hiding his royal lineage. She understood.
King Zinil of the Royal House of Raisius had never spoken of his children. He’d earned the title throughout the world as the Reclusive King, and even Wil’s own family knew only that he had a son and a daughter, and barely anything beyond that.
“You can’t return to the palace, can you?” she asked, easing up with the dagger a little. “He disowned you?”
Loom didn’t deny it.
“But I don’t understand. If the king disowned you, why would you want to help his kingdom?”
“A kingdom shouldn’t be blamed for the actions of its king,” he said. The words reminded her so much of something Owen would say that for a moment she was sure her heart had stopped beating.
“Banished or not,” Loom went on, “those are still my people. They need someone, and my father is destroying the entire kingdom with his stubbornness and greed.”
Maybe kings were not all that different.
Wil thought of her father. “It wouldn’t stop the war that’s coming,” she said. “You can’t expect to take on the wealthiest kingdom in the world. Even a ton of diamonds wouldn’t grant you the allies for that.”
“I don’t need to take on the kingdom,” Loom said, and there was a spark of excitement in his eyes. A sense of purpose. “I only need to kill its royal family.”
Her throat went dry. He wanted to kill her family. Her father, her mother, her brothers—slaughtered. Gone. And he wanted her to help him.
What would he do if he knew that she was a Heidle? She remembered the look on Owen’s face that night he’d come to stop her at the rapids. The terrible fear in his eyes.
The entire South hates our family right now. If one of them found out who you are . . .
Loom would never find out, she told herself. She scarcely looked the part of a princess. Without constant fussing, her hair fell wild, creeping out of braids and ponytails like the undead apparitions that stole across the Western moors. This side of her skin, there was her mother’s restless blood, centuries of wanderers and believers of tall tales and magic. It was easy to abandon the princess of Arrod for dead.
She still had him vulnerable. She could kill him now and be done with it. Overpowering Zay would be no challenge, and then—what? Roll their bodies into the water and take his ship? Continue searching for Pahn amid clueless travelers? If Loom was telling the truth, then he might be the only one who could help her.
“I am willing to bet that your little trick got you banished from your family,” Loom went on. “Am I right? They didn’t want anything to do with you once they found out. You don’t have to be alone. We can help each other.”
“What do you think happens if you kill the royal family?” Wil said. “You’ll just take over the throne? The king has advisers. He has a council. There are dozens fit to take over, and there’s no promise they’ll be any better than the Heidle family themselves. Northern Arrod has the world’s leading alchemists. Your entire kingdom could be razed by explosives in a day.”
“I will kill however many are necessary,” Loom said.
Wil betrayed nothing. “I won’t help you do that.”
“Now can we throw her overboard?” Zay asked, this time in a language she knew Wil could understand.
Something cold swept across the back of Wil’s neck, and before she could turn on Zay to see what she had done, her head filled with fog. She fought to keep her grip on her dagger, but from somewhere very far away, she heard the blade clatter against the deck.
EIGHTEEN
IT HAD BEEN TOO MANY days, and the castle was far too silent. Much as Baren’s siblings had burdened him, their absence was more troubling. Silence was not the absence of presence—it was its own presence.
The morning that Baren met his sister for the first time, he had been eight years old. He followed his brother into their mother’s chambers, and there she sat in a beam of light, pale and smiling, her hair tangled and sweaty. She was as beautiful as ever, and it stood to reason that any daughter of hers would inherit such beauty.
Only, his new sister wasn’t beautiful. She was frightening. So pale her skin was like parchment paper c
oncealing something uglier within her. He could see the hints of her bones. He could see fine purple lines in her cheeks, around her beady eyes.
Even the ever-cordial Owen scrunched his mouth at such a sight. “She looks like the undead monsters of the West.”
The queen had laughed. “She does not.”
“Can I hold her?” Owen asked.
The queen patted the space on the mattress beside her, and Owen climbed up, watching as the baby was transferred into his arms. He studied her face, carefully tracing her cheek, her bump of a nose, as though she were a broken bird he’d just found. “Hello, Monster.”
“Don’t you want to have a better look?” the queen asked Baren, who had backed against the wall.
“No,” Baren said. He didn’t need to look at his baby sister. He already saw how much his mother loved her. It was a different and more generous love than she had ever shown him. For that, he hated his sister more than he had ever hated anything, or ever would.
And now, not sixteen years later, the earth had opened up and water rushed through and pulled her under, and on her way down, she had pulled Owen with her. What would Owen have thought all those years ago, Baren wondered, if he knew the baby he held would grow to be the death of him?
But even though she was dead, Wil found her way back to the castle. She had been dead for six days the first time it happened. Baren was awoken in the still dark night by the sound of wet footsteps on the oak floor, getting closer. She sat in the chair by the window, where the waxing moon bathed her pale skin in blue, and she rocked the chair slowly forward and back.
Her hair was long and dark and dripping, and her eyes were as black as the empty space behind her. She was so real, even breathing—he thought—that he believed she had crawled her way out of the river, back to life, back to the world of beating hearts and blinking eyes.
She came back every night after that. She never spoke, only stared. He tried moving the chair, but the next night, she had dragged it back to the window. He broke the chair after that, grabbed it by its back and threw it against the wall until it was in splinters, which he then threw into the fireplace.