IT HAD BEEN TOO MANY days, and the castle was far too silent. Much as Baren’s siblings had burdened him, their absence was more troubling. Silence was not the absence of presence—it was its own presence.
The morning that Baren met his sister for the first time, he had been eight years old. He followed his brother into their mother’s chambers, and there she sat in a beam of light, pale and smiling, her hair tangled and sweaty. She was as beautiful as ever, and it stood to reason that any daughter of hers would inherit such beauty.
Only, his new sister wasn’t beautiful. She was frightening. So pale her skin was like parchment paper concealing something uglier within her. He could see the hints of her bones. He could see fine purple lines in her cheeks, around her beady eyes.
Even the ever-cordial Owen scrunched his mouth at such a sight. “She looks like the undead monsters of the West.”
The queen had laughed. “She does not.”
“Can I hold her?” Owen asked.
The queen patted the space on the mattress beside her, and Owen climbed up, watching as the baby was transferred into his arms. He studied her face, carefully tracing her cheek, her bump of a nose, as though she were a broken bird he’d just found. “Hello, Monster.”
“Don’t you want to have a better look?” the queen asked Baren, who had backed against the wall.
“No,” Baren said. He didn’t need to look at his baby sister. He already saw how much his mother loved her. It was a different and more generous love than she had ever shown him. For that, he hated his sister more than he had ever hated anything, or ever would.
And now, not sixteen years later, the earth had opened up and water rushed through and pulled her under, and on her way down, she had pulled Owen with her. What would Owen have thought all those years ago, Baren wondered, if he knew the baby he held would grow to be the death of him?
But even though she was dead, Wil found her way back to the castle. She had been dead for six days the first time it happened. Baren was awoken in the still dark night by the sound of wet footsteps on the oak floor, getting closer. She sat in the chair by the window, where the waxing moon bathed her pale skin in blue, and she rocked the chair slowly forward and back.
Her hair was long and dark and dripping, and her eyes were as black as the empty space behind her. She was so real, even breathing—he thought—that he believed she had crawled her way out of the river, back to life, back to the world of beating hearts and blinking eyes.
She came back every night after that. She never spoke, only stared. He tried moving the chair, but the next night, she had dragged it back to the window. He broke the chair after that, grabbed it by its back and threw it against the wall until it was in splinters, which he then threw into the fireplace.
But it was no matter. The next night, when he awoke, Owen came to visit him instead. He stood over the bed, his perfect curls destroyed, tangled, and full of roots and river weeds. His blue eyes had gone dark, hemmed by deep gray bags that made him look dead.
“What do you want?” Baren finally asked. And Owen smiled. For a second, it was the kind, sweet smile that turned him into a boy. The smile the entire nation had loved. But then the smile spread, turned ugly. His lips parted and revealed blackened, rotted teeth. The smell of decay came from his mouth. He canted his head back and laughed, a sinister croak of a sound, so loud that Baren thought it would wake the entire castle. But no one came. No one heard it, and Baren knew that no one would ever believe him.
So Baren stopped sleeping. For two days, he staggered about the castle, swaying from wall to wall as though on a ship in stormy seas.
With no sense of direction, he opened the door to his brother’s lab.
When he found himself halfway down the stairs, where the chemical smells and the scorched air began to reach him, Gerdie raised his head. And Baren saw his little brother for perhaps the first time. He saw how alike they looked, and he saw that they were the only Heidle children left with life in their eyes. He saw the expectation on his brother’s face, the hope. And just as soon as that hope flared up, it was slaughtered and gone.
Baren realized what he had done. There was only one person who had ever barged into this place on a whim.
Gerdie looked back to his cauldron, as though embarrassed for having a thought so stupid as Wil being alive.
It didn’t make sense, Baren thought. It didn’t make sense that Wil would haunt him rather than the brother she had loved, the brother who would want to see her, even if she was dead, even if she was gruesome, even if she didn’t speak.
“What do you want?” Gerdie’s tone was dead. He sprinkled some gray powder into his cauldron and it flickered and flashed green, like lightning.
“You don’t sleep for days sometimes,” Baren said. His own voice sounded strange to him. “I know you can make potions to stay awake. As the heir, I’m ordering you to make one for me.”
Gerdie looked up at him. “Last I checked, the heir doesn’t give orders.”
After two days of stumbling half-awake, Baren moved fast. In a blink he had his brother pinned to the wall, a blade at his throat. Broken glass crunched under his feet, and some felled chemical hissed and fizzed against the stone. “You will take orders from me, little brother, or you will live to regret it.”
There was no fear on Gerdie’s face. There was nothing. Their sister had pulled him under the rapids as well. She was a curse, that girl, in life but especially in death.
Baren pressed the blade into his brother’s flesh, and with a slight motion, a line of blood appeared.
Gerdie’s eyes flicked to the blade. It was one he knew well. “If you’re going to kill me with Owen’s dagger, get on with it.” His voice was low, and Baren’s blood went cold at the sudden viciousness of it. “You want to be a king, and kings don’t waste time threatening their prey. Do it. Add another ghost to your menagerie.”
Baren shoved him, and his grasp on the hilt tightened. “Listen to me,” he seethed. He could hear his own teeth grinding. “As long as I’m awake, the dead stay dead.”
He saw something on his little brother’s face. Concern? No. Concern was reserved for those he loved, dwindling though that population was. Curiosity.
“You think they’re dead but they won’t stay dead.” Baren eased up on the blade but twisted his brother’s shirt in his fist. “This castle is haunted, Gerhard, and they won’t stop with me. They’ll come for you eventually too.”
“Let them come for me, then,” Gerdie said. Despite his calm tone, Baren could feel his brother’s heart pounding against his fist.
“They aren’t the same,” Baren insisted. “They’re wrong. They’re evil.”
Gerdie took a deep breath. He hadn’t made a move yet to free himself. “Ghosts aren’t real. If you’re seeing Wil and Owen, it’s just your own mind projecting your regrets.”
Baren had considered this. He had considered everything. When his sister and brother came to visit him, he would stare at them, blood cold, skin clammy, until they went away. After, he would lie awake, questioning what he had seen. But there were no regrets.
“I’m glad they’re dead—both of them,” Baren said, at last causing his brother to wince. “I have no regrets.”
“Then maybe,” Gerdie began, slowly, “that’s why you’re the only one who’s being haunted.”
Gerdie hated himself for entertaining his brother’s delusions. He hated himself for agreeing to keep vigil over Baren that night to prove that no ghosts would visit him.
But he was intrigued.
When Gerdie and Wil were children, Baren had taken great delight in tormenting them with his stories of apparitions come to take Gerdie’s soul when his Gray Fever flared up. It didn’t upset Gerdie so much as it infuriated Wil. Her eyes would go dark and her fists would clench, and she would thrum as though electric with her rage. Baren had fast learned that Gerdie was Wil’s weakness, and the opposite was also true. If Gerdie found himself the victim of Baren’s rage, Baren would snatch Wil by the wrist and dangle her from the open window, which was a game he could only play until Wil grew big enough to fight back, at which point he would barricade her door, or set one of her books on fire.
Even in death, Wil remained Gerdie’s weakness. Wil was dead. Wil was gone. Gerdie had taken to saying those words in his head each morning to remind himself, and still it did nothing to convince him. It defied logic, but he felt that somewhere her lungs were still filling up with air.
This feeling, he had learned, was worse than accepting the truth.
Baren could still be preying on the bond he shared with his sister. But why? There was no sport in it now. Gerdie was more interested in this than in the notion of ghosts. So, after the sun had set and the castle was quiet, he went to his brother’s chamber.
Baren was beginning to frighten him, truth be told. His eyes were lost in his gaunt face, their brightness gone. He was pale, almost sallow.
“What happened to your chair?” Gerdie asked, by way of greeting. When each of the royal children had been born, their father had commissioned rocking chairs from a carpenter in the city, with their names carved into the backing. Now Baren’s chair lay splintered and charred in the fireplace.
If Baren had heard the question, he didn’t acknowledge it. He hugged his arms—he looked so painfully thin—and drew back the rumpled blankets of his bed. “You’ll see. They’ll come.”
Troubled though Baren was, it didn’t take long for him to fall asleep. It was fitful. He muttered and stirred, his hair dark with sweat.
Once he was sure Baren wouldn’t awaken, Gerdie eased Owen’s dagger from his brother’s sheath and tucked it into his own.
For hours, he sat on the floor at the foot of his brother’s bed, a notebook resting against his thighs as he wrote formulas by the light of an electric lantern.
Somewhere within the bowels of the castle, a clock chimed the hour.
Odd, he thought. His mother had silenced every clock nearly a week ago. This was not among her superstitions; it was only that the castle had become so silent that the chiming made her flinch.
He listened to each of the four chimes, tracking the sound. It was coming from Wil’s room. He was sure of it.
Each of the Heidle children had a chiming clock, and Wil had been terrible about remembering to wind hers, he recalled. But even if she had wound it right before she died, it would have stopped days ago. Had it been ticking all this time? Had he failed to hear it, hiding away in his laboratory whenever it marked the hour?
Gerdie whispered, “If you’re really here, come and haunt me. Not him.”
The only answer was the October wind, whistling as it crept through the latched window.
He didn’t know when he drifted off to sleep, huddled over his notes. It was still dark when the creaking of a door startled him awake. Door, his mind emphasized too harshly. Not a ghost. A door.
“Gerhard?” his mother whispered. She moved to kneel before him. The battery in the lantern was dying, its light flickering and waning. “What are you doing in here?”
He wouldn’t dare tell his mother the truth. Ever the insomniac, now she slept even less. She moved about the castle at all hours, fidgeting and counting and making sure the mirrors were covered—all to sate her wanderer’s superstition that her children would come back to haunt them.
“I was worried about Baren,” he said.
The queen offered a weak smile. It heartened her to believe that the estranged brothers were getting along, that smile said. But without Owen and without Wil, she was incomplete, and no small happiness could account for it.
“Come on,” she said softly, and pulled him to his feet. “It’s late and you should be in bed.” She held his shoulders, and then she touched the side of his neck, where the blade had sliced him that afternoon. He had predicted that his mother would break down, that she would be too fragile to endure the loss of two children. But she had gotten stronger instead, and in his mother he had begun to see the free girl she had once been, before she was anyone’s mother, or anyone’s queen, when she had survived tragedies he would never know. He saw that side of her like bits of color refracted on the wall.
He wanted to ask her if she felt it too—that sense that Wil might walk through the door at any minute. That Owen still had something left to say. That there were no bodies to bury, and so there was a chance that none of this was real.
Without meaning to, without even realizing the words were in his head at all, he said, “I really thought they would come home.”