She let Owen move past her, if only to eliminate the risk of touching him, and followed him into the darkness. At first she thought the blast had knocked out the electricity, but when she reached the bottom step, she realized the bulbs were merely covered in ash, damping much of the light.
Through the murk, she saw Gerdie’s blond hair, his pale skin as he lay slumped on the ground.
Awful flashbacks of his childhood illness raced through her. The mornings she’d found him crumpled on the floor, convulsing, or worse, lying still as death.
“Gerdie!”
She stood on the bench and forced the small window open with the heel of her hand. It wasn’t much, but it redirected some of the smoke, at least.
Owen was knelt before him, touching his face, the side of his neck, lifting his eyelid.
Wil hovered, afraid to get too close, fighting every instinct to help him up. Gerdie stirred and coughed, muttering something about shrapnel.
Owen sagged with relief. “We have to get you upstairs. You can’t be breathing this in. Your lungs.”
Nodding and coughing, Gerdie pulled himself up and let Owen help him hobble up the steps, Wil following and wringing her hands.
They made it all the way to Owen’s chamber, none of them uttering a word until the doors to both his bedroom and the antechamber were closed. Walls in this castle had ears.
Gerdie collapsed into the desk chair. A thick trickle of blood dribbled from his forehead, and he took the cloth that Wil offered him and dabbed at it.
“You nearly took us all out with that one,” Owen said. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, leaning forward. “Want to tell me just what the burning gods you were doing?”
“I was breaking down metals and crystals,” he said. “I’ve developed this new potion that should be able to separate them, and I thought I could use the cauldron’s heat, sort of like an oven—but—” He stopped speaking, but his mind was still turning out an explanation that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone but him anyway.
“Okay.” Owen rubbed his brows with his thumb and index finger. He looked so tired. “The two of you need to tell me what’s going on. The sneaking around. The secrecy. Wil, you’re in that lab every waking second, if you’re in this castle at all. And you ask me about my first kill, because why? You’re just collecting stories?”
Gerdie and Wil exchanged a hesitant look, which did nothing to ease Owen’s suspicions.
Then, making a decision, Wil removed the orange data goggles from the crown of her head. In her state of constant analysis, they had become a fixture there lately. She handed them to Owen.
Gerdie understood. He reached for the potted aloe plant on Owen’s shelf. He tore away a prickly leaf and held it out.
Her pulse still thrumming from the rush of disclosing her secret, she let him drop it into her palm, and she held it up for Owen to see.
The hardening began to form at the blade’s center, like a vein, and then it spread outward, until the entire thing was pure diamond.
“Burning gods,” Owen breathed. He watched as, without touching him, Wil dropped it into his palm for his scrutiny.
He turned the diamond leaf in his palm and brought it close to the goggles over his eyes. His lips moved as he read the text, and then he looked at Wil.
“This is real.”
She gripped at her nightgown, wresting the fabric anxiously in her fingers; a rush was fluttering through her blood; she could taste the ash and scorched air all the way down in the lab from up here. “Yes.”
Owen held the diamond up to the light, not quite believing. “How?”
Wil told him everything. The vendor she’d killed, what the old woman had said to her, all the things she had turned to precious stones, and Gerdie’s attempts to cure her.
When she was through telling it, she leaned back against one of his bookshelves and folded her arms. She stared at the ground. “I didn’t want to tell you. I thought maybe it was a fluke. A side effect from always handling those raw powders and chemicals I smuggle in, and that it would go away.”
“But any chemicals she’s handled, I have even more so,” Gerdie spoke up. “And nothing has ever happened to me, aside from a few burns and dizzy spells.”
“I think it’s a curse,” Wil said.
“Curses aren’t real,” Gerdie replied, irritated. This had become a common argument as of late.
“People don’t just turn things into stone,” she said. “When will you accept that not everything has a scientific—”
“Shut up, both of you,” Owen snapped. He looked at Wil. “If Papa were to find out about this, I don’t want to think about what that would mean. We’re about to go to war, and the wealth this would generate—the deaths this would cause . . .” He trailed off. His face had gone pale.
It made Wil feel horribly guilty. She took a step toward him. “Owen, I—”
“You would never see the light of day again.” He met her eyes. “I don’t know what exactly he would plan for you, but you could forget about being sent out into the world. You could forget about leaving this castle. He would lock you up here where he could use you.”
“Surely he wouldn’t take it that far,” Wil said. But her voice wavered.
“I know our father in a way that you never could,” Owen said. “Either of you.”
Wil stood dead center between her brothers, and she watched the way the diamond caught the light before Owen closed it in his fist. “You have to hide this,” he said.
“I’ve been throwing them in the rapids—”
“Not just this. All of it.” He drew a deep, steadying breath. After talk of war and being forced into marriage, this was the thing that shook his unshakable calm. “There’s a marveler by the name of Pahn. He’s the best the world has to offer. He’s worked for King Zinil for decades. If anyone will know what this is, it’s him.”
“King Zinil?” Wil said. “I didn’t think marvelry played much of a hand in the Southern kingdom.”
“I don’t think it does,” Owen said. “But nonetheless, there’s something about Pahn that the king finds useful.”
“But hasn’t the Southern Isles closed its borders?”
“He may not be there,” Owen said. “He goes where he’s needed. Often he goes into hiding—he has many enemies.”
“What sort of enemies?” Wil asked.
“Marvelry is a controversial thing,” Owen said. “Curses, spells, cures.”
“A marveler?” Gerdie balked. “Burning gods, that’s your solution? Why not a street magician?”
Owen gave him a cutting glare. “There’s more to the world than what you’ve read in your texts. You may be a genius, but you don’t know everything.”
“How do I find him, then?” Wil said, before the argument between her brothers could mount.
“I don’t know.” Owen opened his palm, staring at the red marks his grasp on the diamond had dug into his skin.
Wil stared off, considering her options, but Owen read her mind. “If you ran off to find Pahn yourself, Papa would be suspicious. I’ll see what I can find out. In the meantime—lie low.”
EIGHT
BY THE SECOND WEEK OF September, the rain had given way to a gray sky and sepia plumage, and winds that smelled like fire and trees.
Owen and Addney were wed without any fanfare, beneath a trellis woven with bright autumn blossoms. She had a beauty befitting an heir’s wife, the servants had murmured, with rich copper-brown skin, and long hair that swirled and curled at the edge like parchment held too close to the flame.
And so began the start of what would be a very long effort to merge two kingdoms.
The new house was still unfinished, and so Addney came to live in the castle. Wil would lie in bed and hear Addney and her brother whispering in the halls, laughing between kisses as they moved toward his chamber. And then the doors closed and there was silence, and Wil knew that some great change was underway.
For everyone but her.
&nb
sp; Her sixteenth birthday was fast approaching, and she had made no strides in ridding herself of her power.
One dreary morning, she climbed out of bed and unbuttoned her nightgown. It fell from her body and pooled at her ankles, and she stood before the mirror wearing nothing but the data goggles.
She stared at the orange-tinted girl in that mirror. Her tangle of dark hair, dark-brown eyes, sharp chin. The same girl she had been on the thousands of mornings before this one.
Her eyes roved down to her shoulders, and her jutting collarbone, and the hollow of her throat.
Lying between her breasts was the white birthmark that seemed to grow with her, faint and gleaming against the light.
She stared for so long that the left lens of the data goggles produced scientific text about her heart.
She focused on the wall until the words disappeared. When her eyes returned to the mirror, she found her hips, and her thighs. She had always known every detail of herself—the parts of her that were strong, the parts that left her vulnerable in a fight, the parts that only she laid eyes upon, and the muscles that sat under her skin like a hard rope. The data goggles could tell her about her reproductive system. They could tell her about her ligaments and bones. But they could not tell her what had changed within her, if it was a curse, a punishment, or the herbs ingested or the prayers muttered during pregnancy by her superstitious mother.
Something vicious.
All the goggles could tell her was what the textbooks said, and she wished she were that simple.
Then she dressed, brushed her hair and twisted it into a knot at the nape of her neck. She spent extra time making herself presentable this morning, selecting a silk blouse the color of cream and a long red skirt bejeweled by diamond roses—both handmade in Brayshire, a gift from her father on one of his diplomatic missions.
After weeks without a word spoken between them, her father had requested a meeting with her in his throne room. It was a section of the castle set apart from the living quarters, and invitations were rare, even for the king’s children.
For the first time in more than a year, Wil was greeted by her father’s guards at the heavy oak doors of his throne room, and they pulled them open for her.
She walked the long velvet rug that led to her father’s throne, her skin swathed in the light of ancient stained glass. Unlike the one in the dining room, these windows did not tell of pretty things. They were scenes from the centuries-old battle in which the Heidle legacy won the throne to Northern Arrod, and ultimately the half of the continent that would come to be known as Southern Arrod as well.
The window with the map of the world was her mother, but these battle scenes were decidedly her father. Somewhere, somehow, their two very different hearts convened. The love between the king and queen was one that Wil could never understand, but one that would be impossible for her to deny. She took an odd comfort in knowing that she and her brothers were not merely born to be soldiers for their father’s cause, as he would have them believe. That there was something human in the world’s most powerful king after all, something kind—and they were proof of it.
She stopped a perfect yard away from her father’s feet where he sat on his throne, and she dipped into a dutiful curtsy. “You asked for me.”
He dismissed the guards flanking him with a cant of his chin. Wil watched them go. Only after the doors were closed did her father lean forward. He studied her with something she could almost mistake for concern.
It made her uneasy. Had she betrayed something? Had he seen her in the gardens, turning things to stone? Noticed her rigid stride as her injuries slowly healed?
She stiffened her spine. “Is everything all right, Papa?”
“Have you had much opportunity to speak with Owen’s new bride?”
“Not much,” she said.
“She’s the daughter of the most affluent family I could find in that cesspool Cannolay,” the king said. “I would have preferred the princess herself. Would have been willing to wait until she was of marrying age. But King Zinil is beyond reasoning with.”
The Southern Isles had only one princess, about whom very little was known, because the kings held their spares close to their chests like a hand of cards—so her father liked to say. Wil knew only that the Southern princess was fifteen years old, and that no one who claimed to have seen her could prove as much.
“Nevertheless,” the king said, “I’d like you to keep an eye on Addney. Befriend her. Embrace her like a sister. Report back to me about anything you find suspicious.”
She wanted to ask if he had a reason to suspect Owen’s wife of treason. The thought that this woman might use her brother in some way, or worse, harm him, made her pulse quicken.
But she knew better than to question her father’s orders.
She nodded. “Yes, Papa.”
“Good.” The king straightened in his chair. “I know I can rely on you.”
That small bit of approval brought a smile to her lips, despite everything.
She left the throne room feeling hopeful. Befriending Addney was a small task. At the very least, a painless one. And her father trusted her. And trust led to overseas missions. He might even send her out to purchase something legal for once. She might be able to get a glimpse of the world and savor it, without being chased down dark alleys for the privilege.
Before succumbing to her morning lessons, she checked on Gerdie in his lab. In the interest of avoiding their father’s suspicions, he had been working on the flexible armor their father had been pestering him for. The night before, Wil saw him hauling a box of old leather coats and silk gloves down from the attic. He’d nearly bitten her head off when she offered to help. The fatigue and frustration were making him into a beast, and she’d told him as much before storming off.
Because of his mounting irritability, she knocked before she entered this time.
“Gerdie? I’m just checking you’re still alive down there.” She rested her back against the door. “Mother will be sad if you blow yourself to bits the week before your seventeenth birthday. You know she’s quite fond of you.”
A long silence, and then his quiet reply, “Well, don’t just stand there.”
She descended the stairs and found him at his cauldron, his eyes bright, shoulders raised. He gave her a grin. “You’re just in time. Here, I’ll let you do the honors.”
He handed her the pair of silver tongs he’d been holding.
Wil took them, blinking. He was actually letting her operate his cauldron? “You’re in a good mood.”
“Things just fell into place.”
Following his instruction, she leaned away from the wisps of purple steam and lowered the tongs into the bubbling brew.
Something within the cauldron stirred, as though magnetically drawn to her, and when she lifted the tongs again, an object was pinched between them. It looked like liquid metal.
Carefully, she brought it to the stone table to cool. Purple liquid dripped down, sizzling when it hit the stone floor.
“What is it?” she asked. The thing she had extracted from the cauldron was still emitting too much steam for her to get a proper look.
Beside her, Gerdie was smiling. “Flexible armor,” he said. “I’ve finally done it.” He took the tongs and gently prodded the heap of liquid metal, until Wil could see that it was not liquid at all. Rather, it was some bizarre combination of steel and silk, malleable but shining.
It was a pair of gloves, long enough to reach the elbow.
“I’m still working on the full body armor that Papa wants,” Gerdie said. “But these are for you.”
Wil looked at him, understanding.
“Your power has its limits,” Gerdie went on. “You said the grass doesn’t change under your feet when you’re wearing boots, right? So—”
“So, if I wear these, I’ll finally be able to hold things without destroying them. . . .” Wil’s voice trailed.
“I thought you’d sound happier,” Ger
die said. “I know it’s not a cure—yet—but it’s something.”
“I am happy,” she said. How to explain? These gloves brought her the hope of being somewhat normal again, and she and hope had fallen into a cruel dance of wits as of late.
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“What is it?” Gerdie said.
“I’m trying to lay the groundwork with Papa, so that he’ll send me away,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be able to find Pahn while I’m out there. If I can get to him quickly, and be back in time, Papa won’t ever have to know. I won’t give him any reason to be suspicious.”
Gerdie said nothing. He was biting back his argument against marvelers, and the notion of Wil venturing out into the world alone. They had both always known the day would come. She could never be happy living out a lifetime in one place.
When he did speak, all he said was, “Give me time to finish the paralysis bullets before you set off. I have a few other things in the queue as well. I’ll make sure you’re armed to the teeth. You’ll be invincible.”
Wil straightened her posture. “Maybe I already am.”
By evening, the gloves had cooled, and Wil was left marveling at the way they fit. They were practically weightless, thin as a second skin. But when she tested a kitchen knife against them, the blade bent, leaving not so much as a scratch on the gleaming surface of the gloves.
It was highly impressive, Wil had to admit, even by Gerdie’s scrupulous standards. And no doubt the metal and silk were infused with a myriad of powders and oils she’d retrieved for him.
Wil wore her gloves to the dinner table, and they caught the king’s eye immediately.
“Progress on the flexible armor front,” Wil told him, nodding to her brother. “I get to test the prototype.”
“It looks like—is that silk?” the queen said, reaching out to sweep her fingertips over the knuckles.
Wil flinched before she could stop it. The concern in her mother’s eyes cut through her, and she found it hard to breathe. She had never flinched away from her mother’s touch, the youngest child and the only one still patient enough to accept her affections. Every day, she seemed to lose some small piece of her normal life to this thing. Someday there would be nothing left.