She gritted her teeth against a wave of pain at her core. It wasn’t really the inevitable carnage, or even the worry, and it certainly wasn’t the gentle rocking of the sea. Something was changing in her, pushing from the underside of her ribs, trying to splinter her bones to burst free. Something new that wasn’t there before.
It had all started when she met Loom, the only living thing in the world she knew to be immune to her touch.
Zay picked up on her uneasiness. “I’ve got smelling salts if you faint.” Her voice was only a little bit taunting.
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll destroy you, you know,” Zay said. “If you hurt him. So I hope you’re not planning something.”
This was meant to scare her, Wil supposed. But the sentiment made Zay seem less menacing. More sincere. Though Zay was married to Loom, and though that marriage was merely political, she loved him in a way that ran as deep as bone marrow. The way that Wil loved her brothers—the one living, and the one dead—enough to row into a city that was burning against the black sky.
“I understand,” she said.
“Yes. I somehow believe that you do.” Zay narrowed her eyes, suspicious. “You know, there’s something about you I never noticed before, but the shadows really catch it now.”
Wil looked at her. “What?”
“I saw the queen of Arrod once, when I was a little girl. She had a distinct chin and soft cheeks, a lot like yours. You look like her. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Wil would have given anything just then to see her mother’s face. She didn’t know that she ever would again.
“No,” she said, and it was the truth. She studied Zay for any sign that this was a trick, but the thought of the queen already seemed gone from Zay’s mind when she looked over her shoulder at the city burning in the distance.
The lights of Cannolay were that much closer now. They had to pass Messalin to reach the capital, and they stayed in the dark waters away from the lights’ reach. It would be so easy to disappear forever in the darkness here. Even the moon’s glow no longer touched them.
When they finally reached Cannolay, it was far from any buildings, but the smoke had thickened the air nonetheless.
The boat crashed into the rocks, and once they were on their feet, Zay dragged it ashore. “Try not to talk to anyone,” Zay said. “Last thing I need is someone overhearing your accent and gutting us up on a laundry line. Your kind isn’t exactly welcome here. Especially now.”
Silence would be more welcome than conversation, Wil thought, and followed Zay into the darkness.
It was a wonder that the Southern Isles were so well known for their medicinal plants. Wil had only been here a short while, but in that time she’d seen little more than dirt, sand, and rocks.
The rocks crested after what seemed to be an eternity of climbing, and all at once the city came into view.
Zay raised her head into a breeze that moved the wild hair from her cheeks. “See down there?” She nodded into the blackness. “It’s the Red River. They call it that because the minerals along the bottom look like rust. It’s a main water source. If there’s going to be another attack, it’ll likely hit there.”
Zay was just like Loom, Wil thought. She still cared for this city, even after it had cast her away. She was still eager to climb these rocks in the veil of moonlight and offer what small salvation she could give.
“Zay?” Wil stood beside her. “Something happened to Loom when we went to Messalin, didn’t it? Something about that place makes him ill.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. You make the secrets spill from his tongue the way that gems spill from your fingertips.”
“So I was right then. What is it about that place?”
Zay shook her head, began climbing down. “That’s something you’ll have to take up with him. I’m not in the business of divulging secrets.”
They moved in darkness down the embankment, and by the time they’d reached the bottom, Wil could hear the gentle rush of water.
“Watch where you step down here,” Zay said as they reached the ground. “There’s a lot of vegetation. Try not to crystallize anything. Most of these are medicinal and they’re of more use to people as they are.”
Wil couldn’t watch anything; it was so dark that she could scarcely make out Zay’s form in the moonlight.
“Stop.” A voice came booming across the darkness, and Zay went rigid.
“What?” Wil whispered. “Who is that?”
“The king’s finest.” She grabbed Wil’s gloved hand. “Come on.” She took off running for the embankment, Wil keeping even pace.
Wil’s heart was racing and she ambled in the blackness, trying not to touch Zay with her bare skin, which was a challenge until they reached the jagged rocks and Zay at last released her hand.
“Under the command of King Zinil of the Royal House of Raisius, you are ordered to stop!” The voice was accompanied by the clatter of swords.
“Don’t say a word,” Zay whispered fiercely. There was no panic in her voice, but somehow Wil knew that Zay was frightened. The way she also knew that they had been caught.
The commotion of swords and footfalls was as close as her next breath. Wil felt a strong hand grasp her arm and move to tear her away from the rocks.
She closed her eyes to the inevitable crackle of skin turning to stone.
THIRTY
THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME Wil heard one of her victims cry out. He was fighting it, she realized, his muscles bulging, jaw clenched. He had probably been fighting all his life. But the most seasoned warrior in the world was no match for this. The persistent ruby did not negotiate, did not argue, and within seconds the man was dead.
Torchlight filled the temperate air, and all the guards ran and fell to a stop before the one who had been unfortunate enough to grab her. She could feel their horror and their trepidation, heavy as the humid air. They didn’t know what she was, but all at once they knew she wasn’t human.
Wil was not even horrified by the sight of his ruby eyes with their raised pinpricks of irises. Not even sickened. He looked just as she expected, glimmering brilliantly in the light of the moon. Her skin bloomed with gooseflesh. She could taste the froth of the sea water churning on the shore.
Zay was pulling her back onto the wall by the gloved arm. Wil snapped back to attention. She tore her eyes away from the dead man and hurried up the rocks. Another kill. Owen flashed through her mind, the way he’d slaughtered the assassins that came to kill him. It wasn’t cruel if it was necessary. That’s what he would tell her.
She moved fast. If there was one thing in the world her muscles would never forget, it was climbing walls.
There was the sound of something cutting through the air, then the wet sound of steel burrowing into flesh. Zay cried in pain, small rocks crumbling away from her as her grip slackened.
There was no time to inspect the damage. Wil extended her gloved hand and was just able to grab her by the sleeve. “Come on. I can pull you the rest of the way.”
Zay wrenched herself out of her grasp. The rocks under her feet were red with blood. “Leave. They won’t kill me. Take the boat back.”
“No. Take my hand.”
“You really are useless,” Zay seethed.
The guards were coming out of their stupor and had begun climbing after them. As one of them grabbed Wil by the hair, someone called out, “Harm her and I’ll castrate you myself.” It was a girl’s voice.
The guards had already gotten Zay. She was slung over one of their shoulders, hissing mad, blood pouring from her right ankle.
The guard who had Wil was afraid to touch her, wisely so, and continued to tug on her hair like he was reining a horse. Before this curse, she would have been able to fight him off her, but now to touch meant to kill, and she restrained herself.
They were shrouded in a dome of torchlight now. At the center was the ruby soldier, his hands formed into claws, his mouth frozen in a defia
nt snarl.
Wil waited for the guilt to come, but it didn’t. She felt nothing for this man she had destroyed.
At the heart of the guards stood a single girl, small in stature, perhaps younger than Wil. The lean muscles in her arms cast shadows against the dancing flame. A slender silver tattoo trailed down her left arm, glimmering in the warm brown of her skin. It was of some scaled, fanged creature whose teeth clamped around her wrist.
Without bothering to look, the girl reached out and plucked the dagger embedded in Zay’s ankle, and Zay screamed.
The girl wiped the blade against her thigh, leaving red streaks on the sapphire blue satin of her short trousers, before returning the dagger to its holster at her hip. There were more blades of various sizes resting in a strap across her chest. Dotted along her left hip were vials of liquid in bright colors. Poisons, no doubt. Perhaps they weren’t all lethal, but meant to incapacitate.
The girl raised her focus to Wil. There was something familiar in her dark amber eyes, and Wil knew immediately that this was the girl whose clothes she had been wearing. The intensity of her gaze. Unmistakable. When she cocked her head, Wil could see another tattoo wrapped around her throat, in silver ink rather than black. The pattern was familiar—thorny vines bearing the Southern royal crest of a heart impaled by blades.
This was Espel. Loom’s sister.
Zay let out a moan. Her head was lolling as she hung over the guard’s shoulder, and Wil feared she would die. She was scarcely conscious when the guard dropped her onto the sand.
Wil wanted to go to her and stop the bleeding. But there were guards surrounding her, and a princess with many knives and precision aim was staring her down.
“Hells,” Espel said, as she looked at Wil’s gloves and then at her face. “What are you?”
“I heard her speak, Your Highness. She’s from the North.” A girl in a silver satin robe emerged from the shadows beyond the torchlight. She was tall and slender, and her eyes were cold like her voice. Her accent told Wil that Lavean wasn’t her first language—she was from one of the Eastern countries. If her accent hadn’t given her away, her tawny skin and black hair would have. She maintained a protective stance, hand on the hilt of her sword. Could this be the princess’s guard from Loom’s story? The traumatized orphan who had been handed a weapon and told to fight for her life all those years ago?
Espel gave no indication she was listening. She reached over her shoulder, and Wil expected her to draw yet another knife, but she only pulled the long rope of her hair away from her neck, letting the breeze cool her skin. She was sweating, dark stains of it marring her satin tunic. She smelled of a city on fire.
She nodded at the gasping heap that was Zay. “Someone tend to the Traitor’s wife. I want her alive.” She waved her arm over the length of the ruby corpse. “And break this into pieces and get it into a sack. I don’t want anyone to be seen carrying gemstones back to the palace.”
The guards, with bewildered eyes, set about this task of shattering the ruby, stomping the arms with their boots and removing his clothes.
Wil’s own bones ached at the sound.
Espel’s gaze had yet to leave Wil.
She had a sharp chin, but a soft face. Her cheeks were round and smooth, her eyes dark and eerily kind the way that Loom’s eyes were kind; perhaps they did not know to whom they belonged. She so resembled her brother. What had it been like for them, Wil wondered, to grow up alongside each other, looking so much alike and yet being raised as enemies? The boy with all his secrets, determined to save his kingdom, and the girl who was lauded for killing her mother.
Wil had thought, when Loom first told her of Espel, that it couldn’t possibly be an infant’s fault what happened to her mother. Now, watching the shiver of excitement that rose through the princess as the severed ruby hand caught the torchlight, she wasn’t so sure.
“She must be a marveler, Your Highness,” the girl said.
Running would not end well, Wil knew. She could escape the guards, but not a thrown knife. And Espel’s blades were coated in something. Zay had gone unconscious.
The gemstones grated against each other as the guards threw them into a burlap sack; they moved hastily, as though touching the crystallized limbs would subject them to the same fate.
Espel canted her head. “If you came here with the Traitor’s wife, that means the Traitor sent you.”
Wil didn’t have a chance to reply. The girl in the silver robe moved like an apparition, her sleeves moving about her like cursive being scrawled against the dark sky. Her long black hair was tied into a braid that disappeared under her robe.
Something swept across the backs of Wil’s ankles, knocking her to the sand.
The girl in the silver robe was knelt beside her, a length of chain in her hands. She stretched it across Wil’s throat, pinning her in place.
Wil did not attempt to move. Her heart had other ideas, beating against her chest and trying to be free of her prone body. She focused on breathing. Don’t struggle, she told herself. She knew that she did not have the advantage now. Escape would have to come later, and in order to escape later, she would need to survive this.
You’re everywhere, she reminded herself. She couldn’t move, but she could observe. Guards had finished packaging the severed body and were scouring the sand for remnants. There was nothing around them. The city was a solid ten minutes by foot, Wil remembered, and in a state of chaos. Nobody would be coming here, except for a princess and her guard who had been out looking for invaders.
For all the years Wil had spent learning to fight, her only lesson on surviving a hostage situation had come from her father. He never explained how he knew so much on the matter, but she remembered his eyes as he sat in his throne, studying her the way a sculptor would regard something he’d decided to glaze to perfection when it would be easier to throw it into the fire. He had not expected his daughter to be of any use to him, yet somehow she had redeemed herself, and he wanted to protect her.
“First things first,” he had said, “speak in questions. Give your captor a reason to be intrigued by you.”
“The Traitor.” Wil echoed the words of Espel, who stood over her. “You mean your brother, don’t you?”
Espel’s face morphed into a sweet smile. A child’s smile, with a wicked gleam, as small and as sharp as the glints of fire in her eyes. “When a snake slithers free of its egg, does it call anyone its sister?”
She crouched beside Wil and traced a finger along the length of her steel glove.
“Your Highness.” The girl in the silver robe’s tone was pleading. Espel ignored her and lifted Wil’s hand in both of her own, probing the palm and each finger, as though they could provide an explanation.
The chain tightened across Wil’s throat.
The look on Espel’s face just then was an echo of her brother’s. Her lips were pursed curiously, her lashes burdening her eyes. It was a cruel trick of the light that she could have all his mannerisms and nothing else. She was his image reflected in a window, vague and fading. A familiar stranger.
It was a cruel trick, also, that Espel’s face made Wil miss Loom. Made her wish he were standing in his sister’s place now. He should be here while the kingdom he so loved was burning.
“Shackle her wrists,” Espel told the guards. “The gloves will protect you. But if you harm her, I’ll make sure you die nonetheless.”
It took the guards several minutes to work out just what to do with a prisoner whose touch would turn them to stone. The girl in the silver robe never eased up on the chain for a second, even after the guards had shackled Wil’s wrists to her ankles, leaving her painfully arched. They laid her on a piece of driftwood barely wide enough to hold her, and two of the men hoisted her up.
It was a luxury compared to Zay, who was slung, unconscious and bleeding, over a guard’s shoulder. Wil listened hard to make sure she was still breathing.
“We’ll move through the mountain’s channel and head str
aight for the dungeons,” the girl in the silver robe was ordering them. “Put out those torches. No one is to see us.”
Once the last torch was extinguished, the darkness was near absolute. Wil could just barely make out the city in the far distance, billowing with smoke against a starry and oblivious sky. She took in what details she could. They were walking alongside a mountain.
Wil conjured up a memory of her brother’s atlas. The cities surrounding Cannolay all ran parallel to pieces of one large mountain that peaked in Cannolay and formed the palace itself. Messalin was to the east of where they had arrived at the shore, and they were moving in the opposite direction, which meant they were being taken to the palace. And for a moment, just a moment, they rounded a corner and she saw it in the distance. The palace was a beacon. Its lights burned on into the night, unafraid as it kept watch over its city. It sloped up toward the sky on the face of a mountain, all stone that had been smoothed into spires and columns, each window and archway trimmed in marble and gold.
Loom had said the palace was a gift from the emperor of the East a hundred years ago, and that appeared to be true. The palace, while a perfect extension of Cannolay’s mountains, also bore carved statues and patterns on its pillars that resembled the things Wil had seen in Owen’s books. She couldn’t help but let the horror of her situation subside as she stared at it. No photo could do it justice. Its face burned bright against the night sky like a star carved of stone.
Then the stars were blotted out, and the air went damp and sour. For a moment, Wil could almost believe that she had lost consciousness—her body was already numb from her restraints—but then a guard lit another torch, and she realized that they were inside a narrow channel carved into the mountain.
It was quiet now, save for the shuffling of boots. The girl in the silver robe headed the party, while Espel kept up the rear. The princess said nothing, but Wil could feel her eyes boring into her. Curious. Conniving.