WIL COULDN’T LIE STILL.
Since her banishment, she had slept on patches of dirt and in unfamiliar beds and on ships that jostled through the night. She had slept through the murmurs and the lovemaking and the eternal music of Wanderer Country. She had slept through nightmares that turned life to stone in her hands.
But she could not sleep in the silence of this castle. At night there was nothing but blackness, not even a ghost to stir the air.
Loom, visibly unwell, had gone to bed before sunset. And Zay had stolen herself and her child away to dote over him, which had suited Wil just fine at the time. But now she would have preferred even Zay’s scowling jabs to this nothingness.
She had promised herself that she wouldn’t think of home. The memories did not bring her company, and the absence of the castle’s life and noise made the night air that much cooler.
She tried not to worry for her brother, choosing instead to console herself by thinking of his determination. True, she had warded away death when he was ill, but he had been the one to so relentlessly claw his way back every time. His life was precious to him because he had fought for it.
He would be okay without her. Wil had to believe that.
Yet, still, when she closed her eyes, she saw him crumpled in grief on the floor of his lab. She saw his cauldron overrun with webs and dust. He had no one now. He was all alone with that genius mind of his, which fast took him to dark places when there was no one to reel him back.
Wil kicked away the satin and got out of bed. She couldn’t stay here. She needed stars.
She moved quickly through the castle, barefoot and without her gloves. That freedom was the greatest luxury this abandoned island could offer.
When she reached the water’s edge, she pressed herself against the sand and stared at the night sky, freckled with stars and all different shades of blue twisting into each other.
In the distance, she could see the dark shadow of Messalin, asleep across the water. Beyond that, Cannolay sat higher and brighter, with lights that never ceased.
Wil didn’t let herself think about who was awake in that city, and what attacks they might be planning against her kingdom. She positioned herself so that the city was no longer in view, and there was nothing but the stars to see.
She lay like that for nearly an hour, trying unconsciously to sync her breaths to the rolling of the waves.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Loom’s voice. She opened her eyes and saw him standing silver and lean under the electric moon.
“No.” She propped herself by her elbows, watching as he sat beside her. “How are you feeling?”
He smiled. It was a tired, sincere smile, and for once his face was not guarded by his relentless pretenses. “Nice of you to care.”
“Habit, I suppose,” Wil said. All her life, she’d had someone to look out for.
“I gathered as much.” Loom’s sincerity was the same now as it had been in Messalin, and Wil’s heart beat faster. She sat up, straightening her posture in an attempt to regain control of her body.
“Was it true?” Loom asked. “Did you really know someone with Gray Fever who lived?”
She hesitated. When she met Loom, it had been through a haze of grief and flame. From that melee emerged a stranger within herself—a girl with no past, who was ruthless and cold, who wanted this once-prince to suffer for what he had done to her. For what he wanted to do to her family.
But she was tired of that stranger. She was tired of being trapped in that fog of mourning. She wanted to tell him something true, some small piece that could make her human in his presence. Maybe he didn’t deserve it, after what he’d done to her, but she owed it to herself.
At last, she said, “My brother.” Her voice was soft. “I hadn’t thought there was any hope for him. He hadn’t opened his eyes for days. Even his skin and his hair smelled of death: like the dirt after a long rain.”
Loom canted his head. In his eyes, she saw gratitude burning as brightly as the moon reflected. “You have a brother.” Knowing she had told him something true, and because she had wanted to, he savored it. He knew something about her now.
She averted her gaze and touched the back of her hand to his forehead. His fever had gone down considerably, but she could still feel the lingering warmth of it, especially now against the cool night air. He leaned into her touch the same moment she withdrew.
“I can tell that you care about him,” Loom said. “From the way that you spoke about him to Rala. Your eyes changed, like I was looking at a memory of you projected.”
She stared past him, to the ocean that unfurled like blankets made of deep blue ink. She was afraid to look at him, afraid of what else he’d be able to read.
“What is that like?” he asked.
“What?” Wil asked.
“Trying to protect him.”
It was her turn to read his expression. The once-prince of the Southern Isles had only one sibling. A sister who was as elusive to the world as he was. She answered his question as a means of asking him a question of her own.
“Like a planet orbiting the sun,” she said. “Just the way it always was.”
Loom nodded to Wil’s outfit: silver satin trousers and a top to match, embellished with purple dragonflies with dragon scales. The clothes belonged to the princess, Wil knew, but Loom regarded them as though his sister were suddenly present.
“I was two when my mother died,” he said. “That was fifteen years ago. I don’t remember her at all. Maybe you’ve heard that royals don’t have portraits taken, so I have no way to memorialize her. Nothing but a handkerchief that I’m told she would dampen to soothe my fevers.”
Wil knew all about royal families and their fear of portraits. It was one of the few things upon which all the world leaders had agreed for centuries; revealing portraits and photographs of royal children was a safety risk, opening royal families up to kidnapping for negotiations and revenge.
She would never see Owen again, not even as fading colors on a canvas.
Loom went on. “She died just hours after bringing my sister into the world. I can’t see her face, but I can still see the servants running from her bed with bloody sheets in their arms as I hid under her dressing table.”
“That’s awful,” Wil said.
He smiled caustically. “My sister tells her enemies, ‘I killed my own dear mother; think what I’d do to you.’”
It sounded like something Baren might say, Wil thought, could he boast such a thing.
She thought of the look on Loom’s face after he’d picked her up from the sidewalk in the melee. Her blood on his shirt. His kindness.
“What’s her name?” she asked.
“Her name is Espel.”
“Like the root?”
Loom smiled. “You’ve heard of the world’s deadliest poison root? That’s impressive.”
Gerdie had been coveting that poison for years, wanting to use it in his weapons, but it was impossible to find. Extracted in small quantities, sanctioned only by the Southern king. Never exported.
“My father said she was a warrior from birth,” Loom went on. “But for a girl to become a warrior, she would have to work that much harder to be feared.”
“So he named her after a poison?”
“Not simply a poison,” Loom said. “A poison that many have died to acquire.”
Wil rubbed the satin between her thumb and index finger. There had only been two girls to wear this garment, and both of them had killed their blood.
“I was afforded the finest instructors and trainers when I was young,” he said. “But my father saw to Espel’s upbringing himself. He taught her how to poison a blade. He taught her how to kill an enemy before her approach was announced. I think it’s because he’s always feared her. She had already killed his wife. He wanted her loyalty so that she wouldn’t send him to the same fate.”
“Would she?” Wil asked.
“If it served her, perhaps,” Loom said. “I don’t know.”
“Would he kill her?” Wil couldn’t help her morbid interest.
“No,” Loom said with certainty. “He treasures her. She’s his legacy.”
Wil considered this.
“What about you?” Loom asked. “Where do you come from?”
“Northern Arrod. You already knew that.”
“Yes. But I suppose I was asking for you to tell me your story.”
“I don’t have one.”
“The girl who turns things to stone doesn’t have a story.” The wild playfulness in his eyes made her pulse quicken. “Will you at least tell me how you’re able to control it?”
“Control? I have no control over it at all. I’ll kill anyone that touches me.”
“Not me,” Loom said.
“No,” Wil said. “Not you. Although I’m not sure why that is.”
“Maybe it doesn’t affect people,” Loom suggested. “Maybe it’s just plants.”
Wil betrayed nothing. “It affects people.”
Loom was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I was given a sword from the time I could walk. My father prefers them to arrows and guns. He says blades require the most skill. He wanted my sister and me to be able to kill anyone who might harm us. He said the world was our enemy.”
She looked at him.
“The day I turned ten,” he continued, “my father received a passenger boat containing orphans from various countries in the Eastern Isles, but mostly Grief. A plague had swept through the country and there was no shortage of displaced children. Some were my age, most were older. There were at least twenty of them.
“My father called for Espel and me to come down to the southernmost garden. It was summer, and a hundred and fifteen degrees. He took away our swords and our daggers, and he handed them to the orphans. One at a time, he ordered us to fight them with our bare hands, while they tried to use our own weapons against us. ‘Fight to the death,’ he told us. ‘Kill them before they can draw your blood.’
“We killed them as fast as we could,” Loom said. “I wish I could say it was a fair fight, but most of them were fatigued by the heat, starving from the journey, and frightened. Eventually, my sister met her match in a little girl who didn’t look like much, but turned out to have a hell of a lot of fire in her. She had Espel on the ground in seconds, and she would have killed my sister if my father didn’t intervene.
“He pulled the girl up by her wrist, and he laughed and patted her shoulder, and he said, ‘Congratulations. You are now the captain of my daughter’s guard.’”
“What about you?” Wil said. “Who became captain of your guard?”
Loom smiled, and it was the saddest smile Wil had ever seen. “None of them. I haven’t met my match yet.”
If Loom had told this story to some other girl, she might not have believed him. She might have laughed and told him he ought to become a novelist, and surely no father would make his children do something so bloody and terrible. But Wil was the daughter of the Northern king, and she believed every word.
She reached across the sand and put her hand over his.
“You don’t have to tell me your story,” he said. “Not now, at least. But if you ever choose to tell me, I won’t judge you for any of it. I’m in no position to.”
She could feel the tentativeness in his fist under her hand. She could feel that he wanted to hold on to her in some way. When she looked at him in the moonlight, she could see the boy who had been forced to kill. She could see a prince.
Like her, there were things he wouldn’t say aloud. It wasn’t that he wanted to keep them secret, but rather that he wanted to keep them from drawing breath and devouring him alive.
“Does that frighten you?” Loom asked.
“No,” Wil said.
More than a thousand children died the same winter Gerdie caught Gray Fever. Wil didn’t know this until several years later, when Owen told her. In Wil, Owen saw a bit of himself, and as she got older, he began unveiling more of the kingdom’s darkest secrets to prepare her for what being a Heidle meant. What their legacy truly was. “Papa ordered chemists to sell a medication to families with sick children that year,” he’d said. “It was carried in shops and among street peddlers alike. But it was poison, Wil. He knew that the sick weren’t going to get better, and so he killed them off, to stop it from spreading.”
The words had sickened her, not only because of what they meant, but also because she didn’t doubt it. She had seen her father’s disregard for anyone who could not be of use to him. She hated the way her father had looked at Gerdie when he was at his most ill, as though his value would be determined by whether he could be fixed.
That was why she had always been so hard on Gerdie to stop talking about his aches and pains unless she was certain their father or Baren wouldn’t overhear him.
“It’s impossible to frighten me,” Wil told Loom. “I’m a monster, didn’t you know?”
“No, you aren’t,” he said. “I have met monsters.”
Loom thought the truths of his own kingdom would frighten her, but they didn’t. She was already well versed in the cruelty of kings. He saw that when he looked at her now, and when he reached to touch her face, it was with a fragile sort of curiosity. His fingertips asked what his lips didn’t. Who are you? Where did you come from?
She held her breath when his thumb traced her bottom lip.
In that deft little motion, he was nearly coaxing her secrets out of her. They began replaying in her mind. The first time she held a sword in her child hands, how with that first clumsy swing of the blade her eyes widened in astonishment, a secret power blooming open in her ribs. The dirigibles coasting in the stained glass window. The king who loved his children only because he loved the queen who gave them to him. The vendor pinning her down, crushing the life out of her. The distant whooshing of her brother’s bullets. Then that same power tumbling and breaking free. The crackle of gemstone.
Loom drew back.
His face changed. He was no longer looking at her, but at something behind her. The wonder in his face turned to horror.
She looked over her shoulder, and saw the faraway city of Cannolay, engulfed in flames.