IN THE MORNING, LOOM AND Wil headed for Messalin. A topical salve had lessened the pain in her leg, but deep within her bones it still ached. She didn’t let on. She didn’t want to delay this hapless venture, and she didn’t want Zay to have the satisfaction besides.
“Maybe you shouldn’t speak,” Loom said, as he led Wil to the tiny rowboat that bobbed along the shore.
“Excuse me?” She bypassed his extended hand and took a shaky step onto the boat.
“I don’t mean it that way. I just think it would be better if you . . . didn’t. At least, not in Messalin. Your pale skin won’t give you away—you could be from Brayshire, or parts of the West. But your Northern accent is unmistakable. They’ll only hear the voice of the enemy. It’s dangerous.”
Wil swept her long hair over one shoulder and gripped the edges of the boat as he used the oar to push them from land. “Suppose I talk like you,” she said in Lavean, taking on her best impression of his accent.
He laughed. He was easier with his smiles out here, away from Wanderer Country. It was far too hot for his coat in the South’s swampy heat, and he had covered his tattoos that morning with concealer Zay ground from cacao and sun oil. He was far less mysterious this way, Wil thought. Just a boy.
“That wasn’t a terrible impression,” he said.
“Well, what do you expect? I’ve had no one but you to listen to for the last week.” She was still imitating his inflections, and her careful pace stole some of the edge from her words.
“Practice punctuating your syllables,” he advised. “Up in Northern Arrod you let one word bleed into the next. Down here we enunciate.”
“Noted.”
As he rowed toward the mainland, she looked over her shoulder. Messalin was a dull scar on the horizon. She would never admit it to him, but she was excited to see what the Southern Isles were truly like, away from the sullen quarantine of Loom’s castle.
“How much do you know about the royal family in Arrod?” Loom said, breaking her out of her reverie.
She shrugged. Her heart began to race.
“You know about the three princes, surely, and the princess,” Loom said.
Wil’s grip on the edge of her seat tightened, and she willed their boat closer to its destination. “Yes,” she said.
“And you know the heir and the princess drowned,” Loom said, with the same detachment anyone would have when speaking of a distant kingdom. “The heir had married a woman from Cannolay. That right there was the first sign a war was imminent. He was forming an alliance. After his death, I wondered if she would return home, but she has proven to be a traitor.”
“Does she have to be a traitor for not returning?” Wil said, in her own tongue again. “Maybe she just loved him.”
“That isn’t how political marriages work,” Loom said. “Believe me. I know. Especially between different nations about to go to war. She was hoping to gain something from that alliance, as was the prince.”
She forced herself to look at him. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“To give you an idea of the chatter you’ll hear on the streets.” He pushed the oars forward with extra force. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ve upset you.”
She exhaled hard. “How long until we arrive?”
He stopped rowing, and the boat rocked helplessly at the whim of the waves.
“Tell me what I’ve done.”
The mainland sat silent in the distance, still too far to swim for it. Loom would surely dive in after her, and she still didn’t trust herself not to drown him for bringing her here.
“Just row.”
“I want to understand,” Loom said, his voice firm. She dared to look at him and his eyes were too serious, boring through her. If he gazed any harder, he would see through her skin, through her skull. He would see her memories and know what she had done.
“High winds.” Wil grasped the oars. “I’ll do it myself.”
She was able to row at nearly twice his speed. She wondered what it was that suddenly made him so soft.
She could not figure him out. He resorted to dirty tactics to have his way, and then he seemed to care how she felt about it.
She didn’t understand herself when she was around him, either.
He didn’t try to recover the oars until they were so close that the sounds of city chatter could be heard. There was the smell of roasted boar and poultry, heavily spiced and coaxing an appetite out of her. It competed with the sea air. She didn’t want to admit that she’d always been curious about Lavean food. She didn’t tell Loom that she wanted to know everything about the world, every little piece of it, or that she had dreamed of coming here. Loom didn’t deserve to know this. He didn’t deserve to know anything about her.
“We’ll want to head toward the mountains a bit,” Loom said. “There are children who will guard your boat from thieves if you pay them enough.”
“How do you know the children won’t steal your boat?” Wil asked. “Or sell it off?”
“Incentive,” Loom said. “If they recognize you, and they do what’s asked of them, they know you’ll pay a higher price for their loyalty the next time.”
As the boat jostled against the mainland, Wil felt a somber silence emanating out from the city, like a cloud eclipsing the sun.
The heat of late morning was magnified here, compounded by some persistent manmade smog that smelled of spices at one turn, and of something odious the next.
Wil recognized it all too well. During Gerdie’s frequent childhood illnesses, a parade of doctors and herbalists trailed to his bedroom. Wil would hover, spying, in the halls. She would breathe in the mists and medicines and the palpable sick, like death had come but could not find entry.
Sweetness mingled with the fear and the loss.
Sickness, she knew. It was an old, uninvited friend.
Wil hadn’t known what to expect of Messalin. In some regard, when she thought of new places, she always imagined that they would be a bit like her home. There would be gardens, and a clock tower to trill the passage of time. She expected, she realized with shame, traces of affluence.
Cannolay was affluent. She could see it sparkling in the distance, catching bits of the sun. But there would be none of that wealth here in Messalin. She climbed out of the boat, dodging a messy-haired young boy who offered up his hand, and tried to see the city that lay beyond a twist in the mountainside.
All she could make out from here was the flutter of faded sheets.
Loom struck a deal to ensure the boat’s safety, and then he moved to Wil’s side.
He leaned with his mouth close to her ear. His voice was a murmur that melted under her skin. “It isn’t safe for me to spend too much time on the streets. Someone may recognize me.” A cloak would only raise suspicions in this heat. “Stay near me. We’re going to visit a friend.”
The last friend she’d met had been his wife, and Wil was not put at ease.
“What do you need me to do?” Wil asked.
“Just watch,” he said. “You think I’m going to exploit you, but I brought you all this way to make you see.”
“I have a hard time believing that.”
“I have faith in you,” he said. “Once you’ve seen what I have, you’ll do what you think is right.”
What you think is right, she wanted to say.
After walking the short length of a dirt road, they found themselves at the heart of Messalin’s city proper.
Loom had not prepared her for the volume of the crowd. The entire population of the Southern Isles must have flocked to this small market. He grabbed her wrist and tugged her deftly between bodies through makeshift passageways, ensuring she didn’t so much as graze a shoulder.
Silver bangles sang from the wrists of women flitting past. Delicious meats lingered amid incense that burned to ward away sickness—Wil knew the latter firsthand.
They passed a vendor who was selling loaves of parmii, a sweet multigrain bread that Wil knew only from photos. Something about the sight of it comforted her, as though she had wandered into a page of Owen’s atlas.
“How are you feeling?” Loom’s breath disturbed the hair along her neck. “Anxious at all?”
“A little,” she confessed. “Crowds don’t bode well for me.”
“I can give you something for the adrenaline if you’d like.”
“No.” She couldn’t afford to have her senses dulled.
A moment later, she realized that she had wrapped her gloved arm around his, her body leaning into the safety that encompassed him. It was a tentative, wary closeness. She was still waiting for him to betray her, and she would be ready when he did.
For now, though, he provided an odd comfort.
The crowd relented as they walked on, and Wil at last felt as though she could breathe.
For the first time on this patch of land, there was grass, spreading up a hillside in brilliant luminescent green, dotted with strange gray blossoms that wrapped around lengths of rusted wire. The wires were bent into clumsy circles.
“What are those?” Wil asked. She was speaking Lavean in her best Southern accent.
It was safe to stop walking, for everyone passing by seemed to avoid the ground before this hillside.
“That’s where the dead are buried,” Loom said. “Those wires are passages for their souls to enter the afterlife. Only flowers the color of ash are permitted to grow there, to ward off any lingering spirits looking for color and life.”
Wil had never heard of such a thing. If it was in any of the books in the castle, she had never found it. But then, many of the pages had been torn out because of her mother’s superstitions, and it was very possible that they had been burned to ward off anything that made her uneasy.
It was so beautiful and sad, she thought. “Do you believe in it?” she asked.
“Your Northern Arrod is showing,” he said. “Belief is not a luxury that gets contemplated here. When it comes to death, it simply is.”
He started walking and she took a broad step to catch up. “But you must believe something.”
“Whatever I do or don’t believe isn’t important.”
It was the first time he seemed frightened of anything, and Wil was left to wonder. He stole touches from a girl whose heart could turn life to stone, and he navigated through that horrifying storm at sea without a batted lash, but a simple question about the afterlife and he was like a child afraid of the dark.
She decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. Death traditions were a grim topic in a city that didn’t need further help being grim.
Wil could see where it had once been pretty. Homes were carved out of the mountainside, against and atop one another, run over with flowers on vines.
Hanging from every cluster of mountain homes, and fluttering throughout the market, were cloth signs with hand-painted letters:
Long Live King Zinil. Long Live the Royal House of Raisius.
Loom said nothing about these. That musty scent of illness and incense lingered everywhere.
“How much farther?” she asked.
“Just at the end of this row here.” He looked at her. Reflexively she returned his gaze and was stricken by the sight of him. He seemed wilted, all at once, and tired where just moments earlier he had been vibrant. Something about this place drained the blood from his cheeks.
He stopped walking and pulled her against a stone wall, away from foot traffic. “The woman’s name is Rala. She’s a cousin of Zay’s. She’s the most fitting example of why these isles need your help.” He nodded to the mountains that climbed atop each other in the distance. “Any plant you can dream of is in those mountains. You could climb right up and take them. But these people, this kingdom—they don’t have the resources to process them into medicines anymore. The king barely holds that power himself. It’s right there, but it’s useless unless we can afford the equipment.”
“You’ve said as much before,” Wil said, unnerved by his desperation. Even if she hated his methods in dragging her here, she wished that she could help in the way he believed she could. She wished it were possible without endangering her secret and putting her entire family at risk.
“But now I’m going to show you.” He began walking again, and in a few strides they had arrived at a small house set apart from the others. It was carved in the mountainside and overrun with roots of competing trees. The door was ornately hand carved, painted bright green.
“Rala?” he called. When he opened the door, two small children darted past, chasing each other into the crowd and giggling.
Wil froze in place. There had already been something lingering in this city, but it was especially prevalent in this house. She would recognize it anywhere.
Gray Fever.
“Come on.” Loom was already ahead of her, in that dark single room with its sounds of rattled breathing.
Wil forced herself past the curtain. It brushed against her bare forearm, a musty caress.
The room was small and cluttered, with one large bed that took up nearly half the space. There was a washbasin stuffed with clothes to indicate that many children lived here, but there was only one child alone in the bed.
There was a woman sitting beside the bed, dabbing at the child’s damp face.
“Rala,” Loom said again, gently. “I’ve brought someone for you to meet. This is Wil.”
The woman’s eyes fell on Wil.
Her heart was racing so much she felt that words alone could turn everyone on this isle to ruby. She meant to say hello but what came out was, “Steam will help with his breathing. Boil a pot of water and tent a blanket over it. An hour a day, if he can sit up for that long.”
Rala offered the barest smile, first to her and then to Loom. “You’ve found a budding doctor, is that so? Does Zay approve?”
“Zay hates her,” Loom said, and some of the tension lifted with his easy tone. “That’s how I know she’s good for me.”
“I’m—not a doctor,” Wil said. “But I know someone who lived through Gray Fever.” She emphasized that word, lived. “It clung to him for a good two years or so, but he got better. There are all sorts of herbs you can try, and mint ground into a paste to open the air passages at night, but it’s best if you boil them and have him breathe in the steam. And you’ll want to give him lots of milk and eggs and organ meats, if you can. The riboflavin will help prevent vision loss.”
Long after Gray Fever had diminished the vision in Gerdie’s left eye, he’d researched everything about his illness, ever seeking answers for why things happened the way they did. The Gray Fever had eaten away at the riboflavin in his body, weakening his cornea, causing it to thin and his vision to blur. Now whenever he feared a relapse, he drank a putrid cocktail of milk, eggs, and organ meats. Wil couldn’t stand to be in the room when he downed it, but it did seem to work.
After she’d said the words, Wil noticed the eggshells discarded in a bowl at the foot of the bed, and she shrank back in embarrassment. Of course Rala would already know how to care for her child. Southern medicine had far more to offer than even the finest doctors in Arrod.
But Rala’s smile was patient nonetheless when she said, “Almonds have proven more effective than organ meats—and more palatable.”
“I’m sorry,” Wil said. “I didn’t mean—”
“You’ve managed to find one with a heart like yours,” Rala interrupted, speaking to Loom.
Wil felt her face going hot in her embarrassment. But her gaze fell back onto the child.
Gray Fever wasn’t highly contagious. It found the frail ones and sank its talons in. The other children were safe if their resistance was strong, but watching it take hold of someone they loved was its own affliction.
Looking at this sick child was like staring into the past. She wanted to go outside and pluck the gray flowers from the graves and turn them to diamonds.
“Wil isn’t all I’ve found.” Loom handed Rala a handful of ruby alber blossoms that Zay had cut into gemstones.
“Bits of a necklace I found on a ship,” Loom said. “But they’re real. Wil, could you let her see your data goggles?”
Wil handed them over. At least he was asking this time.
“It will be more than enough for you to afford to bring the herbs you’ve collected to Cannolay and have them processed into medicines,” he said.
Rala’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you.”
She tried to recall the howling winds the night of the storm, tried to remember how real her brother’s voice had sounded then. Tell me what to do, Owen. Try to stop this war? Is it even possible?
She looked at Loom. He crouched at the bedside and smoothed the child’s fevered brow with his thumb. He may have lied to her in the past, but he couldn’t fake this level of care. After years spent at a bedside in a room whose air was thick with death, she knew that devotion better than anyone.
This love he had for the kingdom changed him—or perhaps, Wil realized, she was seeing the real him for the first time. Here, he was not a scheming one-time prince. He was a king, in his own right, of broken things.
She cleared her throat. “We should go,” she told him. “You said it wasn’t safe to stay long.”
He stood. Rala took his hands in gratitude. As they said their good-byes, Wil hugged her stomach and stepped outside. The sun had moved higher against the sky, candying it bright blue with its light. Bits of the city glinted with minerals in the mountain stone. It looked nothing like the forgotten outskirts of the Port Capital, and yet this place reminded Wil of home.
The homes in Messalin were falling into disrepair just like the homes in the Port Capital’s outskirts. But their architecture was still lovingly upkept: carvings in doors and in the stone walls, not unlike Loom’s tattoos, and fresh coats of paint over rotting frames and panes.
They made their way back to the boat in silence. Between alleyways and over hillsides, she could see the famed mountain palace keeping vigil high at the heart of Cannolay.
It was so close. She could run for it now, cut through the cemetery and climb the iron fence that bordered the Southern capital. Loom was fast, but she moved like water, and he wouldn’t want to draw attention to himself. Once she was in Cannolay, there would be too much risk. Someone would recognize him and want to collect the bounty on his head. Sweat was already beginning to wash away the concealer over his tattoos, and he was tugging his collar to hide his inky crown.
From Cannolay, she could find some way out of here, surely. Hire a boat, or steal one. But then what? She was no closer to finding Pahn. Loom was the only one who knew where to find him, and besides that, he also knew about her power. There was no telling how else he might use it against her. No. She had given him her word, and she would keep it. She would play the part of an ally. But they were enemies, under all of it, and she needed to remember that.
Especially when she looked at him just then.
Though he should have been accustomed to the stifling heat, his face was flushed, his eyes glassy.
“Are you going to drop dead in the middle of the streets?”
He cut her a wicked smile. “And make things easy for you?”
“High winds forbid.” He stumbled, and reflexively she snared his elbow. “Loom? What is it?”
He waved her off. “The heat. I’ve been away for a while. I’ve forgotten how stifling it can be.”
Clearly a lie. Wil had lived her entire life in the far North, where it sometimes flurried in the summer, and this heat wasn’t affecting her nearly as much.
Loom plodded onward and straightened his posture. “The Heir to the Royal House of Heidle was quite the celebrity,” Loom said, and Wil felt her palms go slick with sweat inside her gloves. “I imagine you’ve met him?”
Wil shrugged. Her legs felt rubbery, going numb. She focused on the horizon.
“I met him once, a year ago,” Loom went on. “It was in the Western Isles—neutral territory agreed upon by both parties, and he’d come to ask for my sister’s hand in marriage.”
Wil stalled at that. He’d met her brother. She remembered their surroundings and lowered her voice to a whisper. “He wanted to marry the princess?”
“I don’t think it was his idea. He was his father’s errand boy, and so was I.”
“What happened?” Her throat felt dry.
“I rejected his proposal on behalf of the family. I was carrying out my father’s orders. My sister and I have never gotten along, but I’d sooner die than see her marry anyone from that vile Northern king’s family. Who knows what would happen to her? King Hein would probably keep her trapped in his castle as leverage. Threaten to kill her if we don’t meet his demands.”
Wil couldn’t argue this. It was exactly the sort of thing her father would do. But Owen—all this had happened a year ago. Wil tried to recall her brother’s ventures out into the world, but half the time he didn’t tell her where he was going, much less what he was doing, no matter how she’d nettled him. She did know her father had wanted a marriage alliance with the Southern princess, but she hadn’t known the steps he took to make it happen.
Loom went on. “As a show of good faith, Prince Owen had arrived in the Western Isles without reinforcements. That night, my father ordered that he be assassinated in his bed. Ten men crept into the prince’s bedroom. None crept back out.”
“He killed the assassins?”
“All of them. I saw the slaughter myself in the morning. By the looks of it, they never stood a chance. Blood on the ceiling. He was long gone by then. King Hein never tried to negotiate with us again. Any promises to open trade lines between our kingdoms became an impossibility. King Hein refuses to negotiate. He wants all or nothing, and he tried to use my sister—a child at the time—to establish a direct line to my family.”
She remembered now. It was a cold September over a year ago when Owen returned. He’d ruffled her sloppy ponytail as he passed her on the castle steps, and then he’d gone straight to his chamber and locked the doors. Nobody saw him for days. It had annoyed her when her knocks went unanswered.
Wil felt her heart sinking. She felt nauseous and weak. She was well aware of the horrors her father wrought as king. She knew that he had done his share to cause this devastation in the South, and within his own kingdom too.
But Owen—she knew Owen. She knew his heart. Over and again, she and Gerdie had readily betrayed their father for him, because he was going to be a good king, a just king.
Maybe there was no such thing. Owen must have known this, and it must have been a lonely realization. She felt a glimpse of that loneliness now, and it threatened to destroy her.
Oh, Owen. I wish you’d told me.
Loom narrowed his eyes at her, and Wil threw her defenses back up.
“And you went along with the assassination plan?” Wil said.
“I didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Loom said. “I was just following orders. Such is the life of an heir.” He said it with mock tragedy.
Wil said, “If there are more people in the Isles like Rala, people who know you, who would trust you, why not start your own army to overthrow your father?”
He laughed, and it irritated Wil how condescending it sounded. “It wouldn’t be as easy as it sounds.” They were back to the shoreline now. Loom paid the boy who had guarded the small rowboat, and Wil waited in tense silence. Once they were back out on the water, away from spying ears, Loom went on. “I need to buy alliances. Then kill the Northern royals. That’s the only way I’ll be able to redeem myself to my father. Once I have his trust and stand to inherit the kingdom again, I’ll kill him. Successfully this time.”
Wil steeled herself. You’re wind, she reminded herself. You are everywhere. She forced her mind out of this tiny rowboat. She saw her castle with its remaining princes, its king and queen. Her father was not always a reasonable man, but the Southern Isles had things he wanted. He would be open to negotiations. Baren was the heir, and her father had seen his efforts wasted on that one; he struggled where Owen had excelled; he wasn’t clever, nor was he reasonable, nor would his cocky demeanor make him any good at foreign relations. Her father would be open to communicating directly.
“You don’t have to kill them.” She spoke slowly, trying to feign detachment from the situation. “After I’ve gone to find Pahn, I think you should head to Northern Arrod. Talk to the king. It can be mutually beneficial.”
Loom shook his head. Sweat made the satin cling to his skin. His eyes were languid. He looked so tired, and Wil began to wonder if he’d caught something, but what contagion could be floating around Messalin that would affect him this quickly? Not Gray Fever; he appeared far too healthy to be vulnerable, and anyway it wouldn’t come on so suddenly. Whatever it was, he seemed determined to ignore it. “You don’t understand kings. Killing them is the only way to stop all this war.”
“Killing to stop the killing?” Wil said.
“The Northern king is already killing us,” Loom pressed. “He hijacked all our trade ships, did you know that? He released the captains but kept the wares for himself, and he refuses to trade until we give him our entire kingdom. Wil, he’s exiled us. Our hospitals are falling apart. We’re dying, and if he continues to breathe, all he needs to do is wait until we’re too weak to fight at all, and take us over.”
Wil knew that what he was saying was true, and still she refused to let him know it. Her family was not to blame for her father’s actions. Where Loom saw cold murderers, she saw a genius boy in his lab, a woman who sang her children to sleep, an heir who had wanted to change things, who had died to spare her life. “You would murder an entire royal line in the name of peace.” Wil folded her arms. “Sure, makes a lot of sense.”
“In the grand scheme of a greater good, their lives are nothing,” Loom said.
Wil barely knew what happened next. In a blink, she had taken him by the collar and hurled him into the water. He fell with a loud splash, and she was grasping the edges of the boat, trying to steady its violent rocking.
He bobbled up to the surface, spitting water. “Has it ever been suggested to you that you have a problem controlling your impulses?”
Jaw clenched, Wil grabbed the oars and propelled herself toward the island. He was struggling to keep up with her, but it was no use for all her fury as she rowed.
He disappeared under the water, and when he didn’t surface, she considered going after him. She scolded herself for having the thought. No. Let him drown. He deserved it, after everything.
Seconds went by. “Burning gods,” she cursed, and stilled the oars.
Before she could decide whether or not to go after him, his arm hooked over the side of the boat. Loom hoisted himself above the surface, gasping. Something was very wrong; she had seen him swim farther than this without effort before, but now he looked as though he could barely stay conscious.
“I didn’t realize you were such a fan of the royal family,” he gasped.
She glared at him as he struggled back onto the boat. They traveled the rest of the way in silence.
Zay was sitting on the beach, rubbing a frothy salve on Ada’s arms to protect his skin against the sun. When she saw the boat approaching, she stood and waded into the water to pull it ashore.
“You were gone too long,” she accused Loom, by way of greeting. “How was Rala?”
“The same,” Loom said, accepting her help guiding him onto the sand. He stumbled. “She asked after you and Ada, of course.”
Zay rubbed her fingertips against his neck, smudging the sweaty concealer. “Too long,” she said again. She cast a disdainful glance at Wil.
Zay was stunning in the daylight and all her fury, Wil thought, as she sat uneasy under her scrutiny. Her skin was shimmering with sweat; her haphazard hair was gathered high atop her head.
But where Zay had nothing but contempt for Wil, her little boy had fascination. He stood at the water’s edge watching her disembark from the rickety boat, and reached for the long curtain of Wil’s hair as it fell before her.
“No, no, Ada,” Zay said, catching his outstretched hand. “Don’t touch the witch; she’ll turn you into a rock, and I will be very sad. I’ll have to strangle her with the boat ties to have my revenge.”
Wil narrowed her eyes. “It sounds like you’ve already written the novel.”
“I’m hardly the only one who fantasizes about strangling your kind with boat ties,” Zay said coolly. “The fact that you’re a witch has nothing to do with it.”
“Enough.” Loom’s voice startled both girls, freezing them still. He turned on Zay. “You don’t talk to her like that.”
Shock washed over Zay’s eyes like a shadow. The shock quickly turned to anger, and she folded her arms. “You’re out of your head right now, ansoh.”
She was right, Wil thought. He pressed his palm to his temple, wincing. He sucked a breath through his teeth, and something within Wil lurched. She touched his forehead. Burning hot. “You need to rest,” she said. “You can’t die on me.” He raised his eyes to her. “Not until you’ve fulfilled your end of our bargain,” she added.
Zay let out an indignant huff and tugged Loom by the wrist. “There are some lyster leaves back at the castle. Let’s get your fever down.” She didn’t seem surprised by the state of him at all.
“What’s wrong with him?” Wil started to follow them, but Zay stopped her with a glare.
“He’ll be fine.”
“He doesn’t look—”
“Zay’s right,” Loom interrupted. “I don’t do well in this heat. I’ll feel better by tonight.”
Only he wasn’t. He didn’t come from his room even after the sun had gone down. Zay hovered in his doorway keeping constant vigil, as though she thought Wil would try to kill him in his sleep.
Wil wouldn’t, but it suited her just fine if they thought so.