No. Some distant part of her, fighting to breathe, knew that all this would be for nothing if she lost them.
But no time to worry about that. The man landed a punch to her jaw that filled her vision with gleaming metallic stars. Then her own gasps for air fell silent because his hand was clenched around her throat, cutting off her ragged attempts to breathe, making her lungs swell and burn. The stars in her vision multiplied and turned black. Her dagger had fallen into the endless dark at her periphery. His blood and saliva dripped onto her mouth.
She felt her mind going dull, her body drifting like thin swirls of sand in the ocean’s shallows.
She rocked her hips, twisting until she was able to draw her legs up between his solid arms, and with the last of her waning strength, she kicked his chin. It knocked him back just enough for her to slither out from under him, gasping. She struggled to her hands and knees and commanded herself to breathe.
As the stars cleared away, behind the hulking figure of the man who was already rising to his feet, Wil saw daylight. The door. Somehow it was open.
Her ears were ringing from the punch. She didn’t know if she could trust what she was seeing. She didn’t know if she was truly on her feet at all, or if this was some dream as she lay unconscious by the spilled tallim.
But then she heard a voice saying, “Go! He’ll kill you!”
The little girl. Wil saw three of the girl’s tiny silhouette in the doorframe before she blinked and they shifted back into one.
At last, the sleep serum took effect and the man fell to his stomach, his eyes glazed. Wil hoped it was a dream serum, and that the dream was an ugly one. In mixing his serums, her brother often infused them with photographs of things that could influence dreams. He was the only one in the world who could do it, Owen had said. And Owen would know—he’d seen the entire world and met its top alchemists. It was their family’s secret that Gerdie was the boy prodigy who surpassed them all.
Wil recovered her dagger, as well as the man’s, and began hastily scooping the tallim back into the tin. It burned her hands like hot coals. She did hate the powders especially—always some horror to them.
“Go,” the little girl pleaded. “He won’t be out long.”
Still a bit unsteady, Wil rose to her feet. Her knees were shaking. Adrenaline filled her like bees in her veins. As her lungs reacquainted themselves with the concept of breathing, she forced the fear away.
She stopped in the doorway to look at the little girl. “Go back to your brother,” she said. “He’ll be worried about you. Here.” She pressed the hilt of the man’s dagger into her palm. “If he comes back for you, stab his kidney. Do you know where that is?” She pointed to her own lower back in gesture. “Won’t matter how much bigger than you he is.” Next, she pressed the thousand geldstuk in the girl’s hand. More than enough for two passengers to board a ship bound anywhere.
The girl gave something like a smile. And then they were both gone. The girl, to the Port Capital, and Wil, to the line of familiar trees that were rustling on a summer breeze, waving her on as she ran home.
Her head was filled with wind and gleaming stars, but she didn’t allow herself to rest until the city was well out of sight.
The first time she’d been to the Port Capital, she had been six years old. She wasn’t supposed to leave the castle walls, but she had begged her brother. As heir, Owen could do whatever he wanted, and he had relented.
Immediately, she’d been in love with the gentle chaos of it. The people everywhere. The smells of food and sea and perfumes fighting to be the thing that enticed her.
Owen had been fifteen, his shoulders already haughty, his chin ever canted in the assured wisdom of a someday king. “Look,” he’d whispered to her as she clutched his hand. “This kingdom is ours. All of it.”
They weren’t dressed like royalty then. They’d made themselves unremarkable so that they’d be safe; their shared royal blood was their secret, and the idea had made Wil smug, excited, invincible.
He hoisted her onto his shoulders so that she could see everything at once, and the ocean shimmering on and on where the city stopped. She could see it all. “You’re not human,” he’d said. “You’re wind. Remember that. You’re everywhere.”
TWO
BY THE TIME WIL MADE it back from the Port Capital, her cheek was throbbing from the punch, but her vision had at last stopped tunneling.
There would be bruises. She would have to use the jar of concealer that sat among the assortment of glass bottles and brushes on her dressing table. She did this for her mother’s sake: played the part of a princess, with unmarred skin and no desires beyond comportment and calligraphy. The queen had resigned herself to Owen’s wanderlust, but Wil was precious to her.
Wil, the child who looked the least like her mother, was the one who most mirrored her own wanderer’s spirit. Wil’s restlessness could take her anywhere. Her beating heart longed for the sea that reached for her like fingers. It whispered promises to her as she slept. And one day she would succumb. The world would swallow her like a kite fluttering up into the sky.
Even though the queen didn’t speak of this fear, Wil knew it. She tried to hide her restlessness. She escaped the castle in secret, climbing the notches in the stone wall in the shadows where the ivy and brambles grew thick. The guards couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet about her comings and goings, and so she’d developed a skill for evading them.
There was a new rotation of guards when Wil reached the castle’s looming stone wall. Odd. That shouldn’t happen until the evening.
She lowered her data goggles over her eyes. They were one orange-tinted glass pane that covered both eyes, making the world look as though it were sunset. According to the time in the lower right lens, she had been gone for three hours, but her instructors wouldn’t betray her absence, afraid to admit to the queen that they had yet again lost track of their peripatetic charge.
The wall was fourteen yards high. Not nearly as tall as the castle looming within its perimeter, but high enough to obscure it from view of anyone passing by. The castle was nestled in the heart of a thick wood, broken only by trickling streams and small valleys, through which troupes of wanderers would often pass. The queen opened the windows when they did, letting their shanty songs fill the somber walls.
Skirting the guards, Wil began to climb the wall. Halfway up, she reached for an overhead stone and sucked in a breath at the sudden pain in her ribs. She paused to let the feeling subside, and then she moved again. Again, the pain returned, making her lightheaded. She tried to recall the details of her skirmish with the underground vendor. There was some vague recollection of a fist or a knee hitting that spot, but it had been when her body was too starved for oxygen for her to concentrate on anything but escape.
By the time she reached the top of the wall, the pain was radiating down to the balls of her feet. Tears were welling in her eyes.
She sat on the wide ledge of the wall for a long while, her hands pressed on the stones before her, breathing deep, testing the varying levels of pain as her chest moved. Only a bruise, she hoped. Not a break. A break would be harder to conceal. Wil kept most of her ventures a secret from her mother, but her father finding out about this errand would be the greater risk.
The king saw Gerdie’s prowess for alchemy early on. But Gerdie kept most of his weapons a secret. If enough of them were produced, they would end the world, he’d said.
In their father’s hands they would, at least.
To distract herself from the pain, Wil focused on a purple spawnling that had built its nest in a tangle of ivy, and the speckled violet eggs it had laid.
As she focused on the eggs, the goggles groaned and squeaked until at last the data appeared on one of the lenses:
Spawnling eggs. Indigenous to the North.
Wil blinked hard, prompting the data to scroll like a page turning.
. . . can have a vocabulary of five hundred words, and live up to one hundred year
s . . .
“Come down, Monster,” a voice called, and the data dissolved as she looked away from the nest.
She peered over the edge.
Owen. The fringe of his blond hair glowed in the hot August sun. “And are those my goggles?”
Wil raised them up to sit at the crown of her head. She was forever pilfering things from his chamber. She couldn’t help herself; he had been nearly everywhere and brought back the world in tiny bits and pieces, neatly arranged in drawers and wedged between his books.
“You’re back!” she said, smiling. “How was Southern Arrod? When did your train get in?” She envied her brother for the fact that he had ridden on several trains now, and she’d only seen them at a distance from the castle’s wall: lumbering black things whose rails glowed with blue electric light.
Owen narrowed his eyes at her. No doubt he was scrutinizing the outline of the tin showing through her bag, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. “I returned hours ago. Several poor instructors are off looking for you, you know.”
He was waiting for her to descend. She forced herself to move, and her core trembled at the pain. She kept her face turned away from him and gritted her teeth.
Owen’s gaze fell to the faint purple burns on her hands as soon as she set foot on the ground. “Tallim for Gerdie,” she explained, smoothing her hands on her skirt. “Nightmare stuff to handle.”
The beaded floral arrangement at her collar had torn, and now several of the beads had fallen away, shining like colorful insects in the grass at her feet.
Again she smiled, if only to get that worried look off his face. It didn’t work. Owen had taught her everything he knew about the world. What she was allowed to see of it, at least. But that look he gave her was an immovable rock in a churning stream.
“I saw workmen bringing a cement mixer this morning.” Wil changed the subject. “The guards let them in at the gate.”
“Nothing gets by you, does it?” His grin revealed a row of pristine white teeth. But Wil knew how to look closely. She saw that his eyes were too bright today. He was burdened.
He began pacing back toward the castle, and Wil knew to follow at his heels. The castle yard had ears. Though Baren was not much for wit or charm, he had a way of being everywhere. He materialized from shadowy places. His siblings didn’t include him in their unshakable trio, and so he’d learned to listen for the murmurings he wasn’t meant to hear.
Owen said nothing as they breezed up the stairwell and through the channels of stone and oak that led to his chamber.
Owen’s chamber was a stark source of brightness after the gloomy stone hallway. His wall was lined with books—so many that a track ladder was required to reach the second-story shelves. He had an insatiable desire to learn everything he could about the world and its people and its things. Even the windowsill had become a shelf, housing trinkets of his travels that caught the sunlight.
Wil sat in the chair at his desk, relishing in the relief the stillness did to ease the pain in her ribs. After Owen had closed the heavy wooden doors of his antechamber, she said, “Why are the workmen here for you?”
He fell onto the corner of his bed, his body at once a heap of bones. “Papa is building a house for me in the eastern field.”
“Why do you get a house?” Wil said. His chamber was already twice the size of her own.
“Because my twenty-fifth birthday is this month,” Owen said. “Papa thinks it’s long past time for me to choose a wife, and my condition was that I wanted out of the castle.”
Wil considered this, scrutinizing the worry that began to ebb through her at her brother’s announcement; their father favored Owen, but more than that, he needed him. Owen was always the one tasked with handling foreign relations, always being sent off to be the king’s eyes and ears in the world. That had always been more pressing than Owen marrying and producing an heir. No. If their father wanted Owen to marry, it had to be part of some strategy.
Owen’s grim face confirmed her fear.
“He needs you to marry for an alliance.” She rolled the chair across the floor until she reached him, the sound of wheels against oak making a loud scrape in the grand space. Her scuffed boots were toe-to-toe with his of pristine polished leather. She lowered her voice. “That’s it, isn’t it? Why do we need an alliance, Owen?”
Owen stood and retrieved a massive atlas from his desk. It fell onto his bed with a heavy sound, and he opened to a map of the Southern Isles. He rested his finger on the mountains of Cannolay, which sat in the largest of the cluster of tiny islands there. Cannolay was the Southern Isles’ capital city, which housed King Zinil of the Royal House of Raisius in what was lauded to be the world’s most extravagant palace. Vendors sold hunks of the mountain that led up to the palace, or what they claimed to be—in cheap jewelry settings.
“You remember Gerdie’s Gray Fever,” Owen said. “Mother sent for Cannolay’s finest healers, and they saved him when our own doctors couldn’t.”
Her jaw tightened at the memory of that awful fever. She had been five years old, Gerdie six, but the memory was vivid. The choked gasps and bloody cloths. The castle darkened by the covered windows.
Already in the first six years of his life, Gerdie had long been displaying signs that his brain was a thing of spectacular exception. Though they were only a year apart, he had far surpassed Wil in all their remedial work and he’d proven to have a mind for the chemistry of things. He was like their father that way; he found old sciences more reliable than new technologies; he preferred methods that were ancient and true over machines that broke down. The king had done away with the training cauldron and commissioned a proper one to be forged just for Gerdie. There was none other in the world, especially as the demand for alchemy had dwindled in the last several decades as digital technology fueled by wind and water began to take over.
Throughout his childhood, Gerdie hardly left the laboratory even as Wil whined and pleaded for him to come outside.
He had been occasionally troubled by little things like fevers that came and went, and he was always the last to recover when all the royal children fell ill with seasonal flus and colds. Then, one day, the Gray Fever came all at once and interrupted his plans, turning his extremities ashen and his face red, pulling him into a fitful sleep that lasted for weeks without reprieve. Wil had sat at the foot of his bed, worrying over all the thoughts that were trapped in his skull. She could feel her brother slipping away from himself, the Gray Fever taking all the things he would have gone on to become.
Thanks to the Lavean remedies of the South, he lived, and Wil had kept vigil over every relapse that would plague him over the years. And with each one, the same fear moved through her blood anew: that her brother had swindled death, and it would be back to collect him.
Yes. She knew about the Southern Isles and their miracle plants very well.
She stared at the page. “Is there talk of going to war with the Southern Isles?” she said, puzzled and pondering. She considered the new rotation of guards—was her father bracing for an attack? “I haven’t seen any of their ships among the imports for several weeks. The South is refusing to barter with us, isn’t it? Why?” It was no great loss, tradewise. Arrod had never dealt much with the Southern Isles, other than for the infrequent shipment of satins, or dried plants that only grew in its tropical climate, but even so, the absence had not gone unnoticed by Wil. Few things did.
“Because Papa wants to acquire their territory, the way our kingdom acquired Southern Arrod a hundred years ago,” Owen said. “The Southern Isles have the resources, but they aren’t wealthy like the North. Papa believes that if the two kingdoms can join, they can form an unstoppable alliance. King Zinil disagrees. He refuses to give over any of his islands, and he’s cutting off the rest of the world in defiance.”
The atlas sat open, the ink that traced the isles gleaming in a sunbeam. “If Papa acquired the Southern Isles, it would become part of our kingdom?”
“Yes,” Owen said. “All the islands would become the Cumulative Southernmost Arrod. You can appreciate King Zinil’s hesitation.”
Wil raised her eyes to her brother. “Surely there’s something between all and nothing.”
Owen smiled at her. “Try not to worry on it so much. Nothing has happened yet; it’s all talk. These sorts of things can take years.”
Frowning, she turned the page to see a bright spread of the South’s indigenous flora. “Will your bride be from the South, then?”
“I imagine Papa will invite the world’s leaders to my party. And tell me I’m free to pick.”
Owen wasn’t free to do anything these days, Wil knew. She hated to see her brother like this. Trapped. A someday king, bowing to the whims of their father.
He tapped her nose, shattering her troubled expression. “Don’t think on it too much, Monster. These aren’t your problems to sort. You’re fifteen.”
She hated when her brother pointed out her age, as though it should matter. By fifteen he had seen far more of the world and carried far more responsibilities than she would be trusted with. She sighed, frustrated, and the motion made her cringe in pain.
“Are you going to tell me what trouble you’ve gotten yourself into?” Owen asked, closing the atlas.
“It’s nothing,” Wil said. “Just danced with a vendor a bit.”
Owen opened his mouth to speak, but the floor shuddered with the force of a small explosion. A boom thundered the castle.
Wil closed her eyes in a long grimace. “I’d better go make sure Gerdie hasn’t just killed himself,” she said, standing, grateful for the diversion.
“Hey.” Owen’s voice stopped her as she reached the doorway. She spun to face him. “You have to be careful out there, Monster,” he said.
She smiled at that.
She left Owen’s chamber and breezed through the servants’ kitchen, down the narrow corridor that led to a tiny wooden door barely higher than her head. The red bulb above the door was lit, which meant that her brother was not to be disturbed.