She hadn’t taken a single hit. Even so grossly outnumbered, Owen was too quick with his sword, and on his watch, no one touched her.
But by the time they made it back to the castle, an angry bruise was darkening his jaw.
“Here.” Wil had taken his hands and pulled him onto the cushioned stool at her dressing table. Copying what her mother had taught her, she dabbed concealer over the mark and patted it down with powder. They looked nothing alike, as features went, but their skin was the same color—fair, turned golden by sun.
Owen sat patiently for all this and smirked when Wil stood back to admire her handiwork. “Thanks, Monster.”
She’d been quite proud of herself, she remembered.
Now, she expertly traced the mark at her collarbone with concealer. She selected a brown dress with pink strings lacing the corseted waist, and capped sleeves with a ruffled trim that would cover the scrapes on her shoulder.
She even brushed her long hair and braided the top half of it into a dark crown around her head.
There. She looked the part of a princess again. Her mother would worry regardless—she was forever and brutally frightened that her children would be taken from her—but at least Wil wouldn’t give her cause.
But before she descended the stairs for breakfast, she stood before the mirror at her dressing table, considering.
Odd that she still looked the same, she thought. Slight, unassuming. No one would see this monstrous thing inside her. The horrible thing she had done the night before. She could almost believe it hadn’t happened.
She moved to the arched diamond-pane window and pushed it open. She reached out into the morning air and plucked an ivy leaf from one of the tendrils that grew along the stone. She held it in her palm.
There it sat, fleshy and green. She stroked it with her fingertip, curious. Nothing happened, and she began to wonder if last night had been a dream.
A noise in the hallway startled her. Baren’s muffled voice as he shouted at some hapless servant who had crossed him.
She looked to the doorway and her heart began to pound. If her second-eldest brother was looking for a war this morning, she would be his target. He held a special disdain for her in particular. He always had.
The sudden shift of weight in her hand drew her eyes back to the ivy leaf. Keeping rhythm with the increasing beat of her heart, it had turned to emerald.
Wil walked to the breakfast table with deliberate slowness that could be mistaken for grace. She conjured memories of those dreadful comportment lessons, during which she would fritter hours of her precious time on this earth pacing the ballroom with a stack of dusty books on her head.
Steady, she told her heart.
In the dining room, a window of stained glass reached to three stories high, painting the morning light in a myriad of colors. It was a fractured mural of the world, as though someone had shattered a map and glued together what pieces could be saved. Dirigibles and gas balloons drifted over broken islands, sparkling octagons and triangles of a green and blue and gold ocean. Towers with windows full of light stretched over distant cityscapes. Ships rocked and drifted between them, never reaching their destinations.
The window was one of the few things in the castle that wasn’t ancient. A wedding gift from the king to his queen. A piece of the world she so loved, a world she had chosen to leave behind when she fell in love with a young king and let him steal her away.
Beneath the window, at the far end of the dining table, the king and queen sat side by side, like porcelain figurines.
All three of Wil’s brothers were already seated, and from her father’s impatient expression, they had been waiting for her to join them. Trays of toast and waffles beside bowls of softened butter, peanut butter, jam, and chocolate sprinkles sat untouched on the table. The tea had already been poured.
With an apologetic curtsy to her parents, she took her seat. She afforded Gerdie a glance from across the table. Though his hair was arranged into shiny blond waves and he was dressed in a neat, pressed, buttonned shirt, she could see how tired he was, and she knew that he had spent much of the night in his lab on her account.
Wil turned her attention to her mother, whose blue eyes were beaming with excitement. She was looking at Owen. “So,” she said, as a trio of servants began laying covered dishes before them. “Now that we’re all together, tell us who you’ve chosen as your bride.”
“Ah—yes.” Owen’s voice drew everyone’s attention. His cheeks were flushed, and Wil felt something like happiness persisting in her muddled heart. He looked utterly smitten.
“Her name is Addney,” he said, slathering butter onto a slice of bread and then flattening sprinkles over it with the backside of his spoon.
“Oh yes, with those lovely dark eyes, and so tall,” the queen said. “Not a princess but from an affluent family in Cannolay. She’s quite a beauty, isn’t she? Think of the children you’ll have.”
“Mother, please. We aren’t quite there.”
“It’s a fine choice, and a wise one,” King Hein said, as though Owen had ever truly had a choice. Of all the girls at the party, of course he had chosen one from the Southern Isles, as their father had wanted. He would spend the rest of his life here, because he was heir, and his days of wandering the world were ending.
A servant leaned past Wil to lay a platter of fruit on the table, and Wil flinched from her. The queen cast her a curious glance.
Baren sat slouched in his chair, rolling some imaginary piece of lint between his thumb and middle finger. Wil saw the brief, stabbing glare he cast at Owen.
No one regarded him.
Baren had grown up in the shadow of Arrod’s heir. And though they resembled each other quite closely, he was not nearly so wise, or clever, or strong. When Gerdie and Wil were born, in rapid succession, Baren had expected them to take his place as the unwanted spares. Particularly Wil, the runt of a daughter at the end of a royal line, who had nearly killed the queen the day she was born.
Baren had been a terror for most of Wil’s life. Wil supposed their contention began on the day that she was born. Growing up in Owen’s shadow, Baren had never been a favorite of their father’s. And then came Wil—a girl. A girl who should have been spinning in dresses and curling her hair. She was the only thing, Baren had thought, more useless than himself. The only one he could overpower. And yet she had surpassed him.
“Wilhelmina.” The queen’s gentle voice broke Wil out of a trance she didn’t realize she’d fallen into.
“Yes, Mother?”
“You haven’t touched your breakfast. Are you feeling all right?”
“Oh.” She straightened her posture, forced a smile. “Yes. Sorry.” She picked up her fork, using it to slice the toast in half. Sprinkles scattered across her plate. “So, Owen, when do we get to meet this bride of yours?”
“A September wedding will be fitting,” the king answered.
“September is only next week,” the queen lamented, the only one who could ever get away with questioning his authority. “Are you certain that’s enough time?”
“I wish we had the luxury of time,” the king said. “The sooner the better. Owen agrees with me.”
Owen smiled. “Of course.”
But Wil knew her brother. He had peripatetic blood. He breathed the open sea like air. And he was going to give it up for a girl with whom he’d danced for just one night.
The conversation turned to wedding plans, and Wil was grateful when the meal was over. Before her instructors could find her, she slipped through the castle gates. She did this with such certainty and purpose that the guards gave her polite nods.
Still nursing her injured rib, she took her time walking to the nomad camp.
Only to find wheel tracks in the mud, and the lingering scent of old fires in the damp morning air.
Gone. Already.
Her heart sank.
The sky rumbled with distant thunder. Had the approaching storm forced them to move on
?
There’s something ugly in you. Something vicious.
Wil stooped to brush her fingertips along the blades of grass. Her lashes fluttered and her vision sharpened, and she could taste the coming storm like coffee on her tongue. The world was at once frightening and fierce and so beautiful she couldn’t stand it.
SEVEN
IT RAINED FOR A WEEK straight. Summer was dying with fanfare—lightning filled the dreary castle walls, and thunder shook the windows.
Even in the rain, Wil ran barefoot through the oval garden until her adrenaline was rushing in her ears, and she experimented with the autumn leaves and used the data goggles to identify what she’d caused. The yellow maples turned to topaz, and sometimes the blades of grass were tourmalines. She swatted a fly and it fell to the ground with a hard thud, a tiny new amethyst.
She was fascinated to discover that some of the red leaves became rubies, when she was especially out of breath from her run, but other times they were garnet, when she was beginning to calm down.
And when she allowed herself to consider the man she had killed, she realized that she had seen him through a sheen of terror and violence, red like rage, not just his own against her, but her rage against him as well.
When she was finished, she always scoured the grass for blades of emeralds and then threw her handiwork into the rapids. In the evenings, she reported her findings to Gerdie, and together they pored through his books and potions looking for explanations.
They had concluded three things:
This power came out of her whenever her heart was racing.
It affected living things, but not objects.
It did not affect things that were dying, or already dead. When she touched the bowl of grapes in the servant’s kitchen that had been long since plucked from their source, nothing happened. The same for the dead housefly she’d found on her window ledge.
In desperation, Gerdie mixed a potion from cacao powder, grayroot, and crushed arterleaves. “It keeps things from crystallizing in the cauldron. Maybe it will also keep you from crystallizing things,” he’d said, wincing sympathetically as she drank the bitter liquid down.
But all it did was make her nauseous. She was sitting on the bench in his lab, chewing on ginger to ease her stomach. She slumped against the wall. “It isn’t going away,” she said. “Papa is going to find out, Gerdie. I can’t refuse to run his errands. He’s going to send me into the market one day, and I’m going to turn some vendor into diamonds, and—”
“Papa is not going to find out.” Gerdie’s voice was firm. “He can’t. We’ll make this go away.”
She looked at him. The potion had made her so sickly pale that her eyes appeared black against her skin. Her shoulders dropped. “How?”
“I don’t know.” He swallowed. “But I haven’t met a challenge I can’t solve yet.”
“Do you think it’s a curse?” she said. “Do you think what that woman said—”
“Stop that,” Gerdie said. “There are no such things as curses. There’s an explanation for this, and we’ll find it. Crystals don’t just appear magically in the earth; there’s a scientific process. There’s always a scientific process.”
“Not this time,” she muttered, swallowing the last of the ginger.
She had ignited his stubbornness with that. She saw it on his face, the way his chin jutted, one brow lowering. “Everything in the universe was thought to be magic once, before we came to understand it. We thought the stars were magic, but they aren’t, are they? They’re just hydrogen and helium and light traveling through space.”
Wil closed her eyes in a long blink, not wanting to argue. It was senseless trying to counter her brother anyway. He remembered every word from every book he’d read, stored every thought he’d ever had, and he lived to call upon them.
And what was her argument anyway? She didn’t have the words to explain this sudden change. It had been a week, and she was finding that her body craved the strange rush that moved through her when she turned things to stone. If she resisted for so much as a day, she felt weary, ill. She didn’t merely possess this strange new power, she had realized with horror. She needed it.
She hadn’t told her brother that part.
“I’m going to bed,” she told him. “It’s getting late. You should too.” She nodded to his cauldron, currently bubbling with some new creation in progress. “There are more explosions when you operate that thing while you’re sleep deprived.”
He frowned at her, but didn’t say anything as she stood and headed up the stairs.
From the grand entryway, Wil saw the faint orange light coming from the dining room. She followed it, and found Owen seated at his place at the table, papers spread out beside the light of an electric lantern.
“Hey,” she said.
His elbow was on the table, his slender fingers bunched in his hair. He afforded her a fleeting glance. “Up late again, Little Monster?”
She knelt on the chair across from him and leaned over the table. “What are you doing?”
“Papa is gone until Monday, meeting with military forces in Southern Arrod, and I’m stuck signing off on some logistical stuff.”
“Let me help. I can forge Papa’s signature.”
“Is that so?” He slid a blank sheet of paper and the ink and quill across the table. He watched as she wrote King Hein of the Royal House of Heidle in bold, elegant strokes.
“Very close,” Owen said. “But see there? You added too much of a flourish to the Hs. Your instructors taught you a more feminine technique.”
“Story of my life,” she muttered, and began again. If she left her upbringing entirely to her instructors, her life would be nothing but poise and billowing skirts, her brain puddling in her skull.
The queen was the one who insisted Wil learn all these gentle sensibilities and pretty things. It wasn’t because she believed her daughter didn’t have a mind, but because she feared the trouble that mind would cause her, Wil knew.
Wil did like pretty things. She liked dresses and braids and her silk pillows. But they were a disguise she wore, same as anything else.
Lightning filled the room, and Owen turned to look at the stained glass window and all its pieces of the world.
Wil followed his gaze. Those brief glances of the world were why Owen had chosen to work here. After the wedding, he wouldn’t be traveling as much, if at all.
“I’ve heard rumors that Southern Arrod has telephones now,” she said. “Is it true?”
“It is, in fact,” Owen said. “They’ve run wires along street posts. Not that Papa will have anything to do with them.”
“He’ll have to, eventually,” Wil said. “You can’t stop technology.”
Wil had heard of telephones for the better part of a decade. She had even seen one, once; it had been a prototype being carted around the port by a traveling salesman. The salesman’s venture was wasted on Northern Arrod, though. King Hein was deeply untrusting of voices being carried through wires, as though a wire could break open and all his plans and secrets would be spilled out into the ether for anyone to hear.
Owen went back to his signatures. “You underestimate Papa’s stoutness regarding these matters.”
Wil knew that her father would never come to trust things like telephones; he would look past all the good they might have brought and find all the ways they left the kingdom vulnerable. Gerdie was like him in that way, relying on ancient sciences, and chemicals, herbs, and alchemy rather than machines.
“Fine then.” She shrugged. “If the technology won’t come to me, I’ll go to it.”
Owen smirked without raising his head. “When you’re out exploring the world?”
“You’ll still have me as your spy,” she offered. “I’ll be your eyes and ears in the world. It’s only a matter of time before Papa sends me overseas anyway, now that I’m nearly sixteen and you’ll be here more. Even Mother can’t stop him.”
He laughed. “Is that meant to p
ut my mind at ease?”
Wil watched as he signed their father’s name in swirling, elegant calligraphy. He didn’t speak of the things that burdened him—he was like their father that way—but Wil could see it, especially in the way he sighed as he reached for a new stack of papers.
“I’ve noticed more guards than usual,” Wil said. “New rotations, too.”
Her brother smiled without looking up from his work. “Are they making it difficult for you to sneak off undetected?”
She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “It would take more than a few extra guards.”
“Just remember everything I taught you. Never leave this castle unarmed.”
She bristled at his concern. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not a child, you know.”
He looked as though he had something to say to that, but he held back. Choosing battles was a talent of his.
“Owen?” she said, after a long silence. “Do you remember your first kill?”
“Fifteen years ago, in Brayshire,” he said. “I was with Papa, and marauders tried to hijack a cargo ship bound for Grief, carrying medical supplies. The ship was accepting fares, and one of the hijackers was holding a child at knifepoint. So I shot him.”
He said this with a nonchalant detachment that Wil might not have understood a week ago but understood now. If someone were to ask her about the man she had killed, she would speak of him the same way. Facts and reason. The rest frightened her too much to contend with.
Fifteen years ago. “You were much younger than I am now,” she said, softly.
He glanced up from his paperwork and studied her. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
She opened her mouth to speak, and a boom shook the castle walls, much louder and angrier than the thunder. The smell of burned metal filled the air, and she was on her feet and through the servants’ kitchen before she knew she had moved, Owen on her heels. She threw open the door to her brother’s lab and was greeted by rolling plumes of black smoke. “Gerdie!”