“DON’T TOUCH ME,” WIL CRIED when Gerdie began to crawl toward her. Somehow she knew that she would kill him if he did.
Her heart was throbbing on her tongue, in her ears, her chest. The stars were brighter, stabbing through the dark sky. Air was louder, the rustle of grass and leaves filling her, making her dizzy. Even her brother’s face was unnaturally sharp and clear.
Then, gradually, the rush within her receded as a tide being coaxed from the shore back into the sea. Her breathing slowed. Her body stopped shuddering with the force of her heartbeat.
The pain in her ribs came back and a cry escaped her.
Gerdie reached for her again and she recoiled. “Don’t.”
“I need to feel if the break is worse,” he insisted, his unrelenting logic a strange comfort in this madness. “You could develop a clot.”
“That’s what you’re worried about.” The hysterical laugh that came out of her surely belonged to someone else. Sweat was beading her brow. But when she looked at her hands, her skin wasn’t sickly or pale. It looked healthy, even more so than usual. Luminescent in the moonlight. She felt stronger than ever, invincible.
She forced her eyes to sweep the area until they landed on the man, lying several yards away on his back. His ruby-red eyes were staring at her even in death. Old blood dripped from the ruby’s edges onto the grass.
The red stone had completely taken over his head, his hands, and much of his arms before it receded into his hairy, tanned skin. He must have died before he could change completely, Wil found herself thinking, as though this should make sense. The ruby stopped spreading when his heart stopped beating. Through his crystallized chest, she could see the dark shadow of his heart.
Her breaths came in short, panicked gasps. Her heart kicked up a fury in her chest.
Gentle hands removed the orange data goggles that were resting on the crown of her head; Gerdie fitted them over his own eyes, overlapping his monocle.
Using Wil’s dagger, he cut the man’s shirt to inspect Wil’s gruesome handiwork. Wil made herself look. In the darkness, she could see organs, intestines, bones—all of it hardened into ruby.
“Look at that,” Gerdie breathed, more to himself than to his sister. He pressed his hand to the man’s chest. Through the ruby, the man’s heart was visible, all its chambers and arteries etched in fine detail. All of it crystallized.
Her brother looked at her, and his eyes flitted down to one side, and she could tell that he was reading the data goggles, as though they were offering some explanation for what had happened to her. What she had done.
“Wil.” She barely heard her brother calling for her. As she fought to catch her breath, more blades of grass hardened under her legs, her palms. This could not be real. She wanted to say those words out loud so that she could make them be true, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak.
Dead. Ruby. Dead.
“Wil.” Gerdie’s voice was firm. She looked at him.
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
When she did, Gerdie plucked a blade of grass and dropped it into her hand.
The change began immediately. The center hardened first, and then crept out to the edges, until the blade sat heavy in her palm.
Gerdie leaned close, and Wil could hear the quiet pitch of the data goggles churning out information about the gem. She saw her brother’s eyes moving as he read. Once, then again. He blinked the data away and looked at her.
“That’s pure emerald.” He sounded frightened and amazed, and it was hard to tell which was more prominent. He began plucking the hardened grass around her, inspecting them the same way. “Real,” he said. “All real.”
“He’s dead,” Wil whispered. She was staring at the man again.
“Can you stand?”
“I—” She swallowed hard, nodded. “I think so.”
“We’re right by the river,” he said. “If you can manage it, we should be able to drag him to the rapids. No one will find him there. He’ll be pinned down by the water.”
It was typical of her brother to focus on the details before dealing with the larger problem. This usually irritated her, but now she was grateful. Action allowed less time to panic.
Wil took a shaky breath and stood. “You take his shoulders. I’ll get his feet.” She didn’t want to see the man’s face, but as she hooked his boots under her arms she looked anyway. His ears and tongue and eyes were ruby.
The tip of his nose had also hardened into the gem, and despite himself, Gerdie leaned in for a closer look. The man’s nostrils were the pink flesh of a man who’d had a few too many to drink, but that skin receded into a stone such as would be found encrusted in a debutante’s ring. “Astounding,” Gerdie marveled to himself.
“Could you not?” The sight was nauseating her.
They took one step, and the pain from her ribs shot up her spine. She gasped.
“Wil?”
“I’m fine.” Only she wasn’t. With a touch, she had done something nightmarish, something she already knew could never be undone. And as the strange exhilaration of this new power began to fade, her broken rib flared with new pain.
“Here.” Gerdie’s voice was gentle. He lowered the ruby corpse, its limbs splintering and crackling as they bent. There was still some muscle and sinew that hadn’t crystallized. “We’ll drag him. Do you think you can manage that?”
She nodded, feeling as though she were moving in slow motion.
Grunting but wordless, they ambled toward the river.
From within the man’s boots there came a splintered sound like glass cracking apart and then its pieces rattling, and Wil knew that his feet had been affected too. She had killed this man. The crackle and creak of stone reminded her over and over.
She heard the chiming of the clock towers announcing midnight, and from that she knew that it had taken them more than half an hour to haul the man’s body to the river.
When they at last reached the water’s edge, Wil dropped to her knees, forcing Gerdie down with her as the man’s weight hit the ground.
She doubled over the water and shuddered like she was going to be sick, but nothing came.
The grass stuck to her sweaty palms. It wasn’t turning to stone. What had changed?
Her pulse was slow. She felt sluggish and nauseous.
“I think it happens when my heart is beating fast,” she mumbled. Her face in the river was a broken moon, the current tugging it off to one side.
“We have to get rid of him before someone finds him,” Gerdie said, ever insistent on finishing the task at hand. “If we can get him in the water, the current will do the rest.” His practical tone gave way to a moment of sympathy. “Come on. We’re so close.”
Wil forced herself to oblige. Together, they pushed the man forward. He hit the water with a hard splash. As Gerdie had promised, the current began drawing the man’s body toward the rapids.
Wil watched until he was gone.
“The tallim,” she said, after several long seconds. She turned to her brother, mind racing. “It spilled all over the floor that day I got it for you. It—I breathed it in. It was all over my hands. It must have been laced with something. That’s why this is happening.”
Gerdie positioned himself beside her, straightening his legs and struggling to find the least painful position. “The tallim wasn’t laced with fillers,” he said. “It was pure. I’d know. And I’ve gotten more than a lungful or two after tossing it into the cauldron.”
“Then what?” Wil said. Her breathing was starting to grow rapid again. Something bit into her knees, and she jumped to her feet, startled. The grass where she’d been sitting had turned hard and glimmering.
By the time the clock towers struck one, they’d gathered all the bits of emerald grass. They wrapped them in cloth and buried them in Wil’s bag. And then they began to walk home.
She did not walk close to her brother. The distance between them only added to the strangeness, only ignited her fear. This was not the first time their lives had been at risk. It was not the first time something frightening had happened, or strange. But they had always been able to hold each other up, fix the other’s wounds.
A mere touch from her would kill him. She knew this. Not only because of what she had just seen, but because she could feel it. There was something deadly inside her. It had melted into her blood, become a part of her, and it buzzed like the energy generated by the mills.
Though her brother had not uttered a word of complaint, his limp hadn’t gone unnoticed. A bruise was darkening his temple, half-covered by his waves of gold hair.
They had been walking in silence, but as the castle’s stone wall began to appear in the distance, Gerdie said, “Are we going to talk about this?”
Wil rubbed her temple. “Maybe if we don’t talk about it, it’ll just go away.”
“That was your first kill,” Gerdie said.
Wil concentrated on breathing. Going into another panic would only summon this newfound horror. She could still see the ruby corpse rolling into the river.
“Hey,” she said, trying to chase the thought away. “I’m sorry you got caught up in what happened back there. It wasn’t your fight.”
He looked at her for the first time since they’d gathered the emeralds.
“Yes it was. I get so mad at Papa, the way he uses us. The way he sends you out to do his bidding with no regard for the danger. But I’m no different.” The frustration showed on his face. “You never tell me half of what happens. You hide what you’re thinking so well, sometimes you even manage to hide it from yourself.”
Wil didn’t trust herself to reach out and grab his arm, so she said, “Stop.” He turned, and they stood facing each other. “You aren’t using me. I wanted you to have the tallim. I want you to have everything you need. Gerdie, Papa is trying to escalate this tension with the Southern Isles into a war. I don’t know what it’s going to mean, but I do know that the South doesn’t have alchemists like you. No one can make the things that you do.” She lowered her voice and leaned as close as she dared. “If it comes down to it, we can flee the kingdom. You, me, Mother, maybe Owen. We can overthrow Papa if we can’t make him see reason.”
Gerdie bristled, and she could see that he was flattered. “Your life isn’t a price I’m willing to pay for my materials,” he said. “That man was going to kill you. And you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
“You haven’t met very many people,” she laughed.
He grudgingly smiled. But it didn’t last long. “I’ll figure out what’s doing this to you. I will. In the meantime, you should lie low. No one can know about this.”
They both gave in to the illusion that things were still the same. They still looked the same, at least.
They still had each other.
Neither of them was in any shape to attempt climbing the wall, and without a word passed between them, they walked for the iron gate, where two guards were stationed.
“Prince Gerhard,” one of them said. “Princess Wilhelmina.” From his breathless tone, Wil gathered that she looked worse than she felt. She rubbed at the dry blood crusted on the corner of her mouth.
The guards moved to help them, but Gerdie brushed them off. “We’re fine,” he said. “We got a little too enthusiastic at a boat party we attended. Everyone was taking turns diving over the edge. You won’t tell our father, will you?”
“No, my lord. Of course I won’t.”
Of course he would. But Gerdie’s lie was spoken so smoothly that the king himself would believe it when the guards relayed it in the morning, and he’d think nothing of such benign antics.
They moved through the gate. When they’d walked past the oval garden, and the guards were out of sight, Wil’s shoulders dropped. Her pace slowed. She felt as though her rib was splintering with every step, peppering her with stabs of pain, flashes of red before her eyes.
In the distance, the ballroom throbbed with light and music like a glowing heart in the western field.
Gerdie stopped to look at it.
Wil stood beside him, resisting her usual instinct to rest her elbow on his shoulder. The lights touched his face the way music touched ears. It crept inside him, made him restless. He looked at those distant bodies twirling across the windows the way that Wil looked at the sea.
“I hear princesses are wretched,” Wil said in her most serious voice. “They pick things from their noses and hide them in their hair.”
Gerdie’s lips twitched, but he wouldn’t allow himself to smile.
Eventually, they made their way to the darkened castle, empty aside from the guards who greeted them at the door.
Gerdie moved toward the servants’ kitchen, which housed the door to his lab. “You’re really going to work?” Wil frowned at him. “Now?”
He took the bag from her shoulder, careful not to touch her. “I’m going to break down the emeralds. They pass for real with the data goggles, but there must be something else to them.”
“I wish you’d sleep first,” Wil said. She knew he hadn’t been doing much of that.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I wish for things too.” He turned for his lab.
The stone stairwell that led to Wil’s bedroom felt like a mile. She moved slowly, eyelids drooping. It wasn’t the fight with the vendor, or even her injuries that made her limbs feel so heavy and her mind so fogged.
When she’d turned the man to stone, it was the most alive she’d ever felt, all her blood rushing through her extremities like the raging rapids. Her vision had been sharp, everything glowing before her. The feeling came again when she turned the grass into emeralds by the river. Exhilaration. Terror. Life, as though she had always been sleeping and was now finally awake.
And now that the feeling had passed, her blood was no longer rushing. It felt thick, sluggish. Her eyes were sore, her bones and muscles aching.
Whatever had changed in her was affecting her entire body. And in the morning, there would be such a thing as worry. In the morning, she would have to face what she had done. She had ended a man’s life, and nearly lost her own, and put her brother at risk. She would have to face what had happened and what was happening to her, all of it.
But tonight, her mind had gone foggy and all of it felt far away. There was only her four-poster bed, netted with shimmering lace, and the warm, familiar sense that she was home, that she was safe now.
She let her dress fall to her ankles—green and lighter green, like the grass she had crystallized—and slipped into a nightgown. It was white. Like the blanket of snow that came each November, turning even the slums of the Port Capital into something empty and clean. She wanted to believe that this night could be so easily erased.
Just as she climbed into bed, there was a knock at her chamber door. “Wil?” Gerdie. “Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
He was holding the stone mortar. She could smell the spring sprigs and mintlemint, and the spicy sweetness of estherpetals—the key ingredient in his sleep serum.
“For the pain,” he said, as he sat on the edge of her bed.
Wil took the mortar into her hands and tilted it to her lips. She was not one for having her senses dulled by pain remedies, but her brother was a prodigy at mixing them, and she knew that she would awaken in the morning feeling restored, rather than in a persistent fog.
“Is it a dream serum?” she asked.
“No,” Gerdie said. “I could mix you one if you’d like. I thought you might prefer a dreamless sleep.”
“You know me so well.”
“Do you feel any different?” he asked. “Does anything hurt? Are you dizzy?”
“No,” Wil said. “Only tired.”
Her brother narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Tired, or exhausted?”
“Should there be any difference?”
“Tired is one thing,” Gerdie said. “But exhausted is how you’d feel after pushing a boulder up a hill.”
“Oh,” Wil said, settling back against her pillows. “Then yes. I’m exhausted.”
The sleep serum was already beginning to work. The entire world felt like a distant star, winking almost imperceptibly in an endless universe of black.
Her brother didn’t press for any more answers. At least not tonight. Tomorrow, they would both approach this with fervor, and the thought made Wil more exhausted still. She hoped, as her body grew warm with sleep, that by morning this would all have passed, even as she knew that this was just the beginning.
She closed her eyes and heard Gerdie still beside her. Looking at the clock and counting each breath she drew within a minute, she suspected, already analyzing her like something lying broken on his metal table.
For a moment, they were children again. He was small and burning with fever in a bed that threatened to swallow him. Wil was crawling up beside him, wiping his sweaty brow with her bare palm, telling him the story of the Gold King, and of the singing wolf, making up happier endings so he wouldn’t have such troubled dreams.
This was the way it had always been between them. The world tried to destroy them, but they kept each other alive.