But it was no matter. The next night, when he awoke, Owen came to visit him instead. He stood over the bed, his perfect curls destroyed, tangled, and full of roots and river weeds. His blue eyes had gone dark, hemmed by deep gray bags that made him look dead.
“What do you want?” Baren finally asked. And Owen smiled. For a second, it was the kind, sweet smile that turned him into a boy. The smile the entire nation had loved. But then the smile spread, turned ugly. His lips parted and revealed blackened, rotted teeth. The smell of decay came from his mouth. He canted his head back and laughed, a sinister croak of a sound, so loud that Baren thought it would wake the entire castle. But no one came. No one heard it, and Baren knew that no one would ever believe him.
So Baren stopped sleeping. For two days, he staggered about the castle, swaying from wall to wall as though on a ship in stormy seas.
With no sense of direction, he opened the door to his brother’s lab.
When he found himself halfway down the stairs, where the chemical smells and the scorched air began to reach him, Gerdie raised his head. And Baren saw his little brother for perhaps the first time. He saw how alike they looked, and he saw that they were the only Heidle children left with life in their eyes. He saw the expectation on his brother’s face, the hope. And just as soon as that hope flared up, it was slaughtered and gone.
Baren realized what he had done. There was only one person who had ever barged into this place on a whim.
Gerdie looked back to his cauldron, as though embarrassed for having a thought so stupid as Wil being alive.
It didn’t make sense, Baren thought. It didn’t make sense that Wil would haunt him rather than the brother she had loved, the brother who would want to see her, even if she was dead, even if she was gruesome, even if she didn’t speak.
“What do you want?” Gerdie’s tone was dead. He sprinkled some gray powder into his cauldron and it flickered and flashed green, like lightning.
“You don’t sleep for days sometimes,” Baren said. His own voice sounded strange to him. “I know you can make potions to stay awake. As the heir, I’m ordering you to make one for me.”
Gerdie looked up at him. “Last I checked, the heir doesn’t give orders.”
After two days of stumbling half-awake, Baren moved fast. In a blink he had his brother pinned to the wall, a blade at his throat. Broken glass crunched under his feet, and some felled chemical hissed and fizzed against the stone. “You will take orders from me, little brother, or you will live to regret it.”
There was no fear on Gerdie’s face. There was nothing. Their sister had pulled him under the rapids as well. She was a curse, that girl, in life but especially in death.
Baren pressed the blade into his brother’s flesh, and with a slight motion, a line of blood appeared.
Gerdie’s eyes flicked to the blade. It was one he knew well. “If you’re going to kill me with Owen’s dagger, get on with it.” His voice was low, and Baren’s blood went cold at the sudden viciousness of it. “You want to be a king, and kings don’t waste time threatening their prey. Do it. Add another ghost to your menagerie.”
Baren shoved him, and his grasp on the hilt tightened. “Listen to me,” he seethed. He could hear his own teeth grinding. “As long as I’m awake, the dead stay dead.”
He saw something on his little brother’s face. Concern? No. Concern was reserved for those he loved, dwindling though that population was. Curiosity.
“You think they’re dead but they won’t stay dead.” Baren eased up on the blade but twisted his brother’s shirt in his fist. “This castle is haunted, Gerhard, and they won’t stop with me. They’ll come for you eventually too.”
“Let them come for me, then,” Gerdie said. Despite his calm tone, Baren could feel his brother’s heart pounding against his fist.
“They aren’t the same,” Baren insisted. “They’re wrong. They’re evil.”
Gerdie took a deep breath. He hadn’t made a move yet to free himself. “Ghosts aren’t real. If you’re seeing Wil and Owen, it’s just your own mind projecting your regrets.”
Baren had considered this. He had considered everything. When his sister and brother came to visit him, he would stare at them, blood cold, skin clammy, until they went away. After, he would lie awake, questioning what he had seen. But there were no regrets.
“I’m glad they’re dead—both of them,” Baren said, at last causing his brother to wince. “I have no regrets.”
“Then maybe,” Gerdie began, slowly, “that’s why you’re the only one who’s being haunted.”
Gerdie hated himself for entertaining his brother’s delusions. He hated himself for agreeing to keep vigil over Baren that night to prove that no ghosts would visit him.
But he was intrigued.
When Gerdie and Wil were children, Baren had taken great delight in tormenting them with his stories of apparitions come to take Gerdie’s soul when his Gray Fever flared up. It didn’t upset Gerdie so much as it infuriated Wil. Her eyes would go dark and her fists would clench, and she would thrum as though electric with her rage. Baren had fast learned that Gerdie was Wil’s weakness, and the opposite was also true. If Gerdie found himself the victim of Baren’s rage, Baren would snatch Wil by the wrist and dangle her from the open window, which was a game he could only play until Wil grew big enough to fight back, at which point he would barricade her door, or set one of her books on fire.
Even in death, Wil remained Gerdie’s weakness. Wil was dead. Wil was gone. Gerdie had taken to saying those words in his head each morning to remind himself, and still it did nothing to convince him. It defied logic, but he felt that somewhere her lungs were still filling up with air.
This feeling, he had learned, was worse than accepting the truth.
Baren could still be preying on the bond he shared with his sister. But why? There was no sport in it now. Gerdie was more interested in this than in the notion of ghosts. So, after the sun had set and the castle was quiet, he went to his brother’s chamber.
Baren was beginning to frighten him, truth be told. His eyes were lost in his gaunt face, their brightness gone. He was pale, almost sallow.
“What happened to your chair?” Gerdie asked, by way of greeting. When each of the royal children had been born, their father had commissioned rocking chairs from a carpenter in the city, with their names carved into the backing. Now Baren’s chair lay splintered and charred in the fireplace.
If Baren had heard the question, he didn’t acknowledge it. He hugged his arms—he looked so painfully thin—and drew back the rumpled blankets of his bed. “You’ll see. They’ll come.”
Troubled though Baren was, it didn’t take long for him to fall asleep. It was fitful. He muttered and stirred, his hair dark with sweat.
Once he was sure Baren wouldn’t awaken, Gerdie eased Owen’s dagger from his brother’s sheath and tucked it into his own.
For hours, he sat on the floor at the foot of his brother’s bed, a notebook resting against his thighs as he wrote formulas by the light of an electric lantern.
Somewhere within the bowels of the castle, a clock chimed the hour.
Odd, he thought. His mother had silenced every clock nearly a week ago. This was not among her superstitions; it was only that the castle had become so silent that the chiming made her flinch.
He listened to each of the four chimes, tracking the sound. It was coming from Wil’s room. He was sure of it.
Each of the Heidle children had a chiming clock, and Wil had been terrible about remembering to wind hers, he recalled. But even if she had wound it right before she died, it would have stopped days ago. Had it been ticking all this time? Had he failed to hear it, hiding away in his laboratory whenever it marked the hour?
Gerdie whispered, “If you’re really here, come and haunt me. Not him.”
The only answer was the October wind, whistling as it crept through the latched window.
He didn’t know when he drifted off to sleep, h
uddled over his notes. It was still dark when the creaking of a door startled him awake. Door, his mind emphasized too harshly. Not a ghost. A door.
“Gerhard?” his mother whispered. She moved to kneel before him. The battery in the lantern was dying, its light flickering and waning. “What are you doing in here?”
He wouldn’t dare tell his mother the truth. Ever the insomniac, now she slept even less. She moved about the castle at all hours, fidgeting and counting and making sure the mirrors were covered—all to sate her wanderer’s superstition that her children would come back to haunt them.
“I was worried about Baren,” he said.
The queen offered a weak smile. It heartened her to believe that the estranged brothers were getting along, that smile said. But without Owen and without Wil, she was incomplete, and no small happiness could account for it.
“Come on,” she said softly, and pulled him to his feet. “It’s late and you should be in bed.” She held his shoulders, and then she touched the side of his neck, where the blade had sliced him that afternoon. He had predicted that his mother would break down, that she would be too fragile to endure the loss of two children. But she had gotten stronger instead, and in his mother he had begun to see the free girl she had once been, before she was anyone’s mother, or anyone’s queen, when she had survived tragedies he would never know. He saw that side of her like bits of color refracted on the wall.
He wanted to ask her if she felt it too—that sense that Wil might walk through the door at any minute. That Owen still had something left to say. That there were no bodies to bury, and so there was a chance that none of this was real.
Without meaning to, without even realizing the words were in his head at all, he said, “I really thought they would come home.”
NINETEEN
WIL HAD NO MEMORY OF blacking out, but when she came to, the storm outside had turned furious.
The ship lilted in one direction, and she clawed at the floor.
It was cool and soft. Satin?
There was another jolt, and with it, she managed to open her eyes.
She was back in the cabin Zay had initially shown her to, lying on the bed. An electric lantern was swinging overhead, filling the space with dizzying shadows.
She rubbed a hand against her forehead. Her gloves were gone, and she sat up immediately at that. She patted at her hips, her thigh. The sheath and holsters were empty.
Her captors wouldn’t be able to shoot her with the guns, at least. Her brother made all his guns with a trick trigger so his own weapons couldn’t be used against him; it was so complex it had taken Wil several attempts to learn.
The gloves rested by her feet, a little rumpled, but upon inspection they weren’t damaged. Loom must have searched them for hidden weapons.
She fitted her data goggles over her eyes. At least they hadn’t taken this small piece of her old life from her after they’d rendered her unconscious. The goggles were harmless enough—a tourist trinket made of solar-powered glass and a leather strap. She blinked. The time glowed in the lower right lens. Midnight. It was a highly concentrated variant of sleep serum to have taken effect before she could put up a fight, and it lasted half as much time as more regulated doses used for a night’s rest.
Loom must have anticipated that she’d be waking up, because the door to the cabin opened, and he stood at the threshold.
“I did offer to disarm you the easy way,” he said, and closed the door behind him. He dragged the trunk from the corner of the room to her bedside and sat with an elbow resting on his knee. Wil had the fleeting thought that he could have locked her in the trunk instead, if he’d really wanted to incapacitate her. It was more than big enough.
Wil pushed herself upright. Her tongue felt like sandpaper, and her arms scarcely felt attached to her body. “Don’t sell them,” she said. “My weapons.”
“I wouldn’t,” Loom said. “They’re works of art. Where did you find them?”
She drew one knee to her chest, then the other, and extended each leg slowly, trying to shake free of the numbness. “They were gifts. If anything happens to them, you’ll fast learn I don’t need weapons to hurt you.”
He canted his chin. “I already believe you about that. Who taught you to fight?”
“That was also a gift,” she said.
When she was a child and ever sitting at an ailing Gerdie’s bedside, Owen had worried for her. “Come on, Monster.” He’d hoisted her up from the floor and carried her on his back. “Let’s go to the oval garden. I’ll show you how to shoot an arrow.”
He’d only meant to distract her from her worries for a few hours, but she’d shown so much interest in learning to fight that it became a ritual of theirs. Something to look forward to. Short-range weapons, long-range, hand-to-hand combat, how to bridge a size disadvantage, evasion tactics. Their mother hadn’t exactly approved.
The lantern light cast a warm glow on Loom’s skin. But his face was colder than it had been before. Guarded.
This was not the boy who’d stood before her in the woods, all gentleness and wonder. That boy had been a mirage. A persistent one that she had been a fool to fall for—however briefly.
Now, he was wearing a loose-fitting cotton tunic, the unbuttoned collar revealing the royal tattoo that made him her enemy.
She stared at him. “What did you do to get banished from your own kingdom?”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“I’m curious. Given your astonishing charm, it’s a mystery that anyone would want to get rid of you.”
He searched her eyes, matching her scrutiny. “I tried to kill my father.” He stood. The waves rocked the ship, but his stance hardly wavered. “You must be hungry. I’ll bring you something.”
When Loom returned, it was with a dehydrated packaged sea ration. Wil had seen them for sale at ports in anticipation of long journeys. He tossed it to her. A brick wrapped in metallic airtight packaging. It was still sealed, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been tampered with.
Wil turned it over in her hands, looking for puncture marks.
“Is the storm making you seasick?” Loom sat on the trunk again. Keeping guard, apparently. But there was no need for that, Wil thought. She wanted to escape, but the storm outside roiled the sea and she didn’t have a death wish.
“No.” She toyed with the packaging, but didn’t open it.
“I got sick for years before I grew accustomed to ships,” Loom said, arching an eyebrow. “I suppose you really are cut out for travel.”
“What kind of net was that?” Wil asked.
“An alchemized combination of sepra and jellyfish tentacles, among other things,” Loom said.
Jellyfish. Interesting. Sepra was a thin metal, cheap and fairly common. But Wil had never considered a living thing being used in alchemy. Gerdie had never mentioned it, at least.
“How did you cut through it?” Wil tentatively tore open the packaging of her sea ration. The smell of chemicals and something faintly like apples wafted out.
“Zay’s jeweler’s knife. It can cut through everything, even stone.”
“Alchemized?” Wil asked, intrigued despite the madness of her situation. It gave her hope that a part of her was still the girl she had once been, scaling the castle wall and acquiring her brother’s materials.
“Yes,” Loom said. “By some old flame of her mother’s in the East.”
Wil set the ration down and positioned herself to sit on the edge of the bed. Loom was wary of her, but she could sense that some part of him was still susceptible to reason. “Loom,” she said. “You must know that you can’t buy alliances with gemstones. Particularly ones that are rare in the South. Think how many suspicions that would raise. King Hein in particular would find some way to get spies into the country to find out how you’re doing it. Your people would be interrogated, tortured.”
Loom’s brows drew together at her words. He hadn’t expected to be challenged on his politics, she supposed. r />
“You’ve never been to Cannolay,” he finally said. “Or Messalin. Or any of the South’s more impoverished cities at all. Have you?”
Wil shook her head.
“If you had, you’d know that my father deserves to be dethroned for what he’s let his kingdom become. Fevers, disease, abject poverty—all because he refuses to form a single alliance with any of the trade nations. He’s too proud, and while he lives in the famed mountain palace, his people are the ones suffering.”
Wil thought of the rundown outskirts of the Port Capital in Northern Arrod. “I know—”
“No,” Loom said. “Until you’ve seen it, you don’t. You don’t know anything about kings, but I come from one. I’ve stood beside him as he’s destroyed his kingdom. I tried to kill him because there was no other way.”
“You want to kill your father. You want to kill the Northern royals. Is that your only plan?” Wil fired back. “Because if that’s all you’ve got, you aren’t going to make a better king yourself.”
“That’s how kingdoms work!” he cried.
“Yes,” Wil hissed. “And that’s why they’re such a mess.”
“I didn’t bring you along to be my adviser—”
“No. You ‘brought me along’ because you got overly zealous about something you know nothing about, and you are clinging to the idea that somehow I can fix your kingdom.” She said her next words slowly. “I can’t fix it.”
“You don’t even know what you’re capable of,” Loom muttered, looking to the tiny circular window. Water sloshed angrily against it.
The words cut deep, because Wil did know what she was capable of. She’d learned that night by the rapids. But she didn’t say that. He had taken her hostage—for now—but he wouldn’t truly have her. He wouldn’t know a shred about who she was. Once they had reached solid land, she would be gone.
Still, there was some truth to what he said. She didn’t know everything about her power. She didn’t know where it had come from, or why he wasn’t affected. If he was immune, perhaps others were as well.