She could see the tension in Loom’s jaw when she looked at him. “Can you really take me to Pahn?”
“I can tell you where he is,” Loom said. “But first, you have to help me. You have to see what the Southern Isles are like. I’m not asking you to kill my father and take the throne in his place. I’m just asking for a few diamonds, so I can acquire an ally to help me assassinate him.”
“For how long?” Wil asked.
“It’ll take us six days to get there,” Loom said. “And then I only need a week to show you why I need your help. After that, I know you’ll want to stay.”
“And what makes you so sure of that?”
“Because you won’t stand for injustices. I saw that in the market square.”
Injustice. He was a fine one to speak of such things.
Outside, the winds were screaming. The water was filled with voices.
She’d heard Owen in the Ancient Sea; she was sure of it.
What would you have me do?
If she couldn’t have him alive then she wanted a ghost, she wanted a chill, whispers in an angry sea. She wanted to know that he was somewhere. Anywhere. She had never believed in any sort of life after death, but now she understood why people did.
A flash of lightning was the only reply. If Gerdie were here now, he’d scold her for always being taken in by wild stories. He’d want her to come to a decision logically. Logic, she could do. She didn’t have Owen’s ghost to give her guidance, but she had been his sister for nearly sixteen years, and she had something better than a ghost. She had all the things he had taught her.
You’ll be the eyes of the kingdom when I’m on the throne. That was what he’d said.
It had been years since anyone from Arrod entered the Southern Isles. A member of the royal family would be foolish to even attempt it. But Wil was the palace spy, banished or not. She had an opportunity that even Owen would have coveted.
“I’m not going to agree to anything.” Wil sat back and folded her arms. “I’m not in the habit of bargaining with my captors.”
Loom smirked. “Had many captors, have you?”
“There have been—attempts,” Wil said. “But you’re the first to manage this much success. You should feel special.”
“I do, actually,” Loom said.
She still hadn’t ruled out the possibility of killing him if things got ugly.
Wanting to save a kingdom from its king, she understood—not that she could tell him so.
Though she knew his identity, she could sense there was more she had yet to learn. Things it would take more than a dagger to the throat to force out of him.
“Very well, then. Don’t agree to anything.” He stood. “I wouldn’t bother trying to break the lock. Zay made it herself.”
“She’s an alchemist?” Wil asked.
“A jeweler,” Loom said. He dug into the pocket of his cotton trousers and pulled out a handful of the rubies Wil had made from the alber blossoms. They were whittled down and made to look as though they’d fallen out of a setting.
Wil stared at them, surprised. This was the work of someone with care and patience; not what she had expected from Zay at all. “Who is she?” Wil asked. “Why is she helping you?”
Loom closed the gems in his fist and moved for the door. “Good night,” was all he said.
TWENTY
AFTER LOOM HAD GONE, WIL planned her next course of action. She didn’t know at which port this ship would arrive, so planning an escape route was a matter to be contended with upon arrival. But she did know that Zay wouldn’t risk touching her, and that Loom was immune somehow to her strange power. Unarmed, she would have to rely on raw wit and bare hands to fend him off. The element of surprise had always worked in her favor in such fights, and so she decided that she would work to earn his trust on this voyage, so that he wouldn’t see it coming when she made her escape. Not too much trust, not all at once. That would arouse too much suspicion. She would be just amenable enough to make him believe she was considering his offer.
Remnants of the sleep serum lingered in her blood, and eventually she drifted off.
The night brought fitful dreams. Her mother’s songs turned to wails of grief echoing between cavernous castle walls. The ocean storm drowned drifting funeral candles, disrupting the spirits of the dead, turning them ugly and vicious.
Wil fretted and thrashed, until the satin sheet was tangled around her legs.
She opened her eyes to complete darkness, so black and moonless she thought at first that she was still asleep. But then she heard the creak of the lantern swinging overhead. She rose to her knees on the mattress and reached for it. But turning the dial at its side did nothing. The power was out.
Her breath came in gasps. She had always hated the dark. It couldn’t be trusted. There was forever a candle burning somewhere in the castle because darkness invited death, the queen would say. It was the reason people who wandered the world spent their nights dancing and drinking by firelight, sleeping at dawn. It would be too easy for death to slip in unnoticed and reach right through their skin to steal their life away.
But this darkness was loaded with something vile and strange. Thousands of feather-light legs were crawling down the walls, rushing at her. She swatted at them when they brushed her cheek. They spilled into her gloves, and frantically she pulled them off, threw them away. It made no difference. The legs still came. She clawed at them. Clawed until her hair turned wet with their blood.
She could hear the pounding of her heart. She stood, grappling for the door. Locked. She pulled at the handle and felt along the frame, but it was smooth; the lock mechanism was on the outside. She kicked at it, pounded. She was too breathless to scream. She had not believed Loom could hate her this much, to lock her in a prison to be devoured by creatures that were filling up her sleeves and eyelashes.
The ship rocked sharply to one side, and she spilled to the floor. The creatures shrieked, their cry sounding suspiciously like the creak of the lantern. She drew her knees to her chest and made herself small. Morning would have to come, she told herself. There would be light again soon.
Over the sounds of the creatures and the wind, she heard something else. Footsteps running down the hall, and then her door coming open, spilling candlelight into the room.
“Wil?” Loom knelt on the ground before her. He was holding a lantern up between them, the orange glow sharpening the shadow of his jaw.
His skin was smooth, Wil noted. Nothing crawling on him. Nothing crawling anywhere. She inspected her hands. Nothing. She ran her fingers through her hair, tangled now from her struggle, but clean of any blood.
“Did you see something?” Loom asked. He was being oddly delicate with her. “When you woke up.”
“I couldn’t see anything,” Wil said, the shakiness of her voice surprising her. “I heard something crawling.”
She shivered.
“That brew of sleep serum can cause hallucinations sometimes. It was probably aggravated by the storm.” He was studying her again, and there was something in his expression—guilt? He frowned. “Are you all right?”
Fine question to ask after he’d taken her hostage and locked her in the dark, she thought. “Why is the power out?” she asked. Her voice sounded steady that time, but her heart was still in her throat.
“I had to disable the lights to conserve energy for the steering panel.” He held his arm out against the wall to brace himself for the next jolt, sensing it a moment before it came. “The battery in your lantern died out, and the dock wasn’t feeding it any electricity to recharge.”
Wil focused on his tattoos. Inky leaves with razor edges bloomed down the trellis of his veins. There was still the scab from where she’d cut him.
“You’ll feel better if you eat something,” he said. “The rations taste a bit like sand, but you get used to them. There are more in the galley.”
“You’re going to let me out of my prison cell?” Wil rose to her feet, using th
e wall to keep steady.
He regarded her with a flat gaze, as though to say he thought her assessment was dramatic. “If you want to try to swim away in this storm, I won’t stop you. Just don’t expect me to go in after you this time.”
She stooped to recover her gloves from where she’d thrown them. She didn’t put them on, only straightened them and laid them gently across the bed. Though they’d scraped against the impenetrable net, there wasn’t a single scuff to be found, and for just one second she thought to run down to the basement lab and tell her brother that these gloves were going to mean big things in the name of battle armor.
And then, worse than crawling creatures or dreary dreams, came the reminder of just how deeply she missed him.
Find Pahn.
All she had to do was humor Loom with this fool’s errand until the ship arrived at port. She could escape and resume her search for Pahn. Pahn would have the answers, and then, only then, would she have any right to contact her brother. She would tell him everything—the whole hideous truth of what had happened that night she and Owen supposedly drowned.
She steeled herself. No good could come from Loom reading her vulnerability plain on her face.
Loom led her down the narrow hallway toward the galley. From behind a closed door, Ada was crying while Zay worked to soothe him with a Lavean lullaby. Her voice was low and sweet, even melodic.
By appearance, Zay was not much older than Wil, but she carried herself like the vendors Wil encountered in the underground market. Scheming, guarded, battle-worn. And yet, she knew how to use her youth and beauty to her advantage, playing the part of an innocent young ship captain looking for fares. She wasn’t much of a fighter, true, but her duplicity made her as treacherous as the choppy waters scarred by flashes of white lightning outside.
And there was her loyalty to Loom, as mysterious as it was admirable. Also something to worry about.
But Wil’s wariness for Zay and Loom was mutual. Loom never turned his back to her once, even as he ushered her into the galley.
It was a small space, made smaller by the plants in metal baskets that were welded into the walls. Bright red leaves, purple vines, tiny speckled blossoms the likes of which she had never seen before. All of them were meticulously labeled in slanted calligraphy that reminded her of her own torturous hours of study.
Loom hooked the lantern to the ceiling. “Look at that,” he said, picking up a small metal crate that rested on the counter. “I guess Zay found some fresh fruit at the port.” He sat across from her at the small table bolted to the ground by the window. He looked at her as he pried open the lid. “Or will you crystallize these?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. They’ve been off the tree for too long.” Tentatively, she took an apple when he tilted the crate to her. She hadn’t touched the ration, and now her stomach ached with hunger.
“So there are rules to your gift after all,” Loom said, and bit into a pear.
Wil drew up a knee, watching him. His fingers were callused, knuckles marred by bruises and scars. His arms were covered by the loose sleeves of his tunic, and she remembered how those arms felt when he held her above the water—lean and solid as stone. The one-time heir to the Southern Isles had endured a lot. She believed that. Someone else, someone who hadn’t grown up in a royal family of their own, wouldn’t have.
Wil heard the rumors throughout Northern Arrod that the princes and princess of the Royal House of Heidle lived a life of excess and luxury. The princess with her long blond hair spent her days trying on dresses and flirting with servant boys. The princes had anything they desired and never had to work for it.
To belong to a royal family was to be a puppet whose image was mirrored onto thousands of tiny stages, each reflection dancing to a different tune as it suited the audience. But none of these images were the truth.
Making a decision, she said, “It isn’t a gift.”
Loom looked at her, inquisitive.
“What I have.” She peeled a bit of apple skin with her thumb. “It isn’t a gift. It’s a curse.”
“A curse is a very specific thing,” Loom said. “It isn’t just a means to describe bad fortune. Someone would have to place it on you.”
“I know that.” She couldn’t help the defensiveness of her tone; she had been raised on her mother’s tales and legends. “There was a woman who told me I have darkness in my blood. Something ugly and vicious.”
“Wanderers,” Loom echoed, with a sneer. “How exhausting it must be for them, to think every star in the sky exists to affect the course of their little lives.”
Wil bristled at that and bit into the apple.
“The world is filled with swindlers and cons,” Loom went on. “Anyone will offer to cure what ails you for a price.”
“I don’t need you to tell me about the world.”
“No?” He raised an eyebrow. Wil hated the elegance this gave his face. She hated that she found him so beautiful. “Because, while you don’t exactly strike me as a fool, only a fool would turn to Pahn for help.”
“You said yourself that your father uses him all the time,” Wil said.
“Yes,” Loom said. “My father, who is running his kingdom straight to the bottom of the sea, and who is the biggest fool I have ever known.”
“Now I know where you get it from,” Wil muttered into her next bite of apple.
She felt Loom’s fury at that. “One doesn’t have to be a king to make terrible decisions.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re selfish—”
“Selfish?” Wil spluttered. “Selfish! You expect me to throw this power around to suit your needs and you don’t know a thing about it.”
“I’m trying to,” he growled.
Trying. She hid her hands under the table. He made her so angry that she had started to tremble.
As though in solidarity, a hard wave smashed against the window, making her jump. She thought of her mother, tapping the stones in the castle walls in multiples of threes and fives, believing this would keep Owen and the king safe on their voyages. Wil would catch her, take her hands, and say, “Mother, let’s go have some tea,” or, “Tell me again about the Gold King”—anything to soothe her compulsions. But, whatever her mother was doing now, she was not wishing for her daughter’s safety on this treacherous voyage. Her daughter was already dead.
Loom was watching her, trying to see just what it was that had caused that moment of pain in her eyes.
TWENTY-ONE
ON THE SIXTH DAY OF October, the Southern Isles came into view. Wil was awake and lying backward on her bed so that she could watch them through her window.
Loom was under the unspoken impression that he could keep her here for a week. In one week exactly, she would turn sixteen. Loom had no way of knowing it, of course. Wil had nearly forgotten this herself.
She lowered her data goggles over her eyes, making everything orange. But through fog and distance, they could not tell her the names of any of the cities. The land was a faded purple mark against the sky, hardly real—markings an artist had tried to erase from a map.
The ship sailed alongside the isles without ever seeming to approach. Were they passing them entirely? Loom hadn’t been forthcoming about his plans, given that he was banished. Zay even less so. Zay kept her distance except to glare and grumble.
Even as Wil tried to plot her course of escape, the sight of land was a relief. After a week of crystallizing the leaves of small plants, her body was restless, begging her for a greater release, and the strain had taken its toll on her stamina. In the last leg of the trip she’d been listless, fighting to stay awake, forcing down rations that tasted more and more like glue.
With each bite of rations and overripe fruit, she thought of the photographs of Lavean delicacies in Owen’s encyclopedia. Roasted boar, seared gazelle, vegetables glazed in honey and clove oils, potatoes shredded, balled, and deep fried with herbs. She wished Loom could
have packed something like that.
She had used meals to her advantage, though. Loom had begun to let down his guard, mistaking her weariness for amenability. Maybe he didn’t trust her, but she could almost believe that he liked her, and that would make slipping away from him in a crowded port easier.
Watching the mountains through the fog, she was fantasizing about the South’s indigenous plants. Large fronds and earthy tubers fat as organs; the relief of crystallizing them would make her shiver as it rolled through her blood like a wave. She hated it as much as she craved it.
To busy herself, she slipped into fresh clothes—a set of deep-violet satins marred by gold vines. The wide collar slumped to the side, revealing her shoulder no matter how many times she tried to fit it back in place. There were trousers to match, with a drawstring waist and legs that billowed out and buried her bare feet. The closet was filled with beautiful satin trousers and matching tops, embellished with gleaming threads. As the ship rocked, they fell against each other like empty bodies. Reds and yellows and a blue more brilliant than the sea itself.
Then she made her way onto the deck. After the hallucinations brought on by the sleep serum, Loom had stopped locking the door, which caused a heated argument between him and Zay that went on for nearly an hour, until the shouting awoke Ada. It surprised Wil how readily Loom came to her defense. She had never been a hostage before, but she would have imagined that captors were ruthless. Or at the very least cold and calculating. But Loom seemed as though he were probing for a reason to trust her.
Since then, Wil had taken to roaming the ship when she thought the parts she wanted to investigate were empty. She’d counted more than a dozen hidden compartments in the walls—all of them locked in some way she couldn’t solve. She never found another lifeboat, but in the middle of the ocean an escape on a floating raft was just asking to die at sea. But it was nice to know the layout of his ship, so that she could steal it from him in her quest for Pahn, assuming she couldn’t find another way out of the Southern port.
She made her way to the deck. In Northern Arrod, the air would be chilly and dry this time of year, but the Southern Isles were a land of perpetual burning hot summer, and the sunlight was so pure and bright that it was blinding in its cloudless sky. She gathered her hair and twisted it at the nape of her neck.