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.
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,” Gerdie 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.
Wil was grateful for the small distraction when the servants brought in trays of food. Glazed chicken in a bed of orange shavings, carrots, asparagus and potatoes sprinkled with barley, tiny silver bowls of gravy and melted butter. Since the sudden emergence of her powers, Wil’s appetite had been fickle, but she filled her plate regardless.
“Perhaps they will come in handy tonight,” the king said. “A passenger ship arrived this afternoon from Brayshire. I’ve heard a rumor that there may be a Southern spy among them.”
Owen spoke up immediately. “Papa, she isn’t ready for that. She’s never dealt with foreign spies, and if there is a spy, and he were to find out who she is, she would be taken hostage. Or—”
“Nonsense,” the king said. “Rumors about the princess of Arrod change like the tide, but not a single one of them has come close to the truth.”
Wil knew what he meant by that. There were rumors that the princess of Arrod was attending prestigious boarding schools, or sailing the world, or locked away in a tower safe from the eyes of suitors. But these tales all had one thing in common: the princess of Arrod looked just like her parents and brothers, with their blue eyes and gold hair.
She did resemble the king a little, if one had a keen eye. So many of her expressions mirrored his, particularly when she was pensive or exasperated. But no one ever looked at her long enough to notice these things when she was beyond the castle wall, because she was quite good at making herself invisible.
The queen laid her hand on her husband’s arm. As ever, her presence was gentle but strong. But Wil saw the way her lips quivered before she brought them to the king’s ear and whispered something. It was a protest, Wil knew, for her mother would never argue with him where others could hear it.
The king leaned against her to listen, his eyes softening near imperceptibly, the way they always did for his queen. Whatever she said may have been enough to sway him. It usually was.
“Papa.” Wil raised her voice, cutting off her mother’s hushed words. “I’ll do it.”
She felt Owen’s and Gerdie’s cutting stares, but she kept her eyes on her father. He had never tasked her with anything this important before. Gaining intelligence on a foreign spy in a time of impending war would increase her worth to this kingdom by degrees. And if she could do this, soon he would be sending her out into the world for sure, months sooner than she’d anticipated. Then she could find Pahn and be rid of this power for good.
“Please,” she said. “I want to do this for you. For Arrod.”
Her father’s proud expression was tarnished by her mother’s paling complexion.
“Wouldn’t you rather send me, Papa?” Baren spoke up. “I could wear a disguise—”
“Don’t be a fool,” the king said, with a flourish of his hand. “Your sister is a disguise. The most valuable one we have.”
Without looking at him, Wil could feel Baren’s eyes going dark and narrow. Another reminder that even she had a purpose.
After dinner, Gerdie moved to his laboratory and beckoned Wil to follow.
He stood over his worktable, twisting the hilt of her dagger apart so that he could refill it with sleep serum.
“Thanks,” Wil said, affording a small bit of contrition in the wake of his obvious disapproval. She was running her fingertip along the open page of his notebook.
He glared at her. It was a look she had pretended to ignore throughout the duration of the meal, but now its edge was sharper.
“Whatever you want to say to me, just come out with it.”
He sheathed the dagger and handed it back to her. “It wouldn’t make a difference. You never listen.”
“Is this an attempt to make me feel guilty?” Wil said. “Because I’m losing time even as we stand here. Lecture me after I’ve returned.”
“I’ll never understand the things that call to you,” he said. “Becoming a wanderer. The water. Your incessant desire to make Papa value you. He’s never going to, can’t you see that? You are nothing to him. We are nothing to him.”
Wil adjusted the sheath to her thigh, tugging it roughly into place. She did not look at him. She did not want him to see that he was right, and that the thing she so wanted was the thing she would never have, even as she pursued it.
“However Papa feels about my worth as a daughter doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t need his love. I only need his trust. He’ll use me as a spy—you’ve said so yourself. So I’ll be the best spy. I’ll be better than any of his men, and ten times more reliable because we share blood, and soon, he will send me out into the world.”
“Out into the world for what purpose?” he pressed. “So you can employ magicians to cure you with potions made of bubbling soap and snake oil?”
She paced past him, toward the stairs. She was so angry, she pressed her lips tight to keep from saying any of a hundred things she would regret later. She was tired of her brother’s logic, his lectures on the science of things. This was not a broken bone or a fractured collarbone or a fever carried over from a foreign land. He could not master it as he had so many other things. The thing that had overtaken her belonged to no one but her, and though she hated it, it was her possession. Only she had the right to speak to what it was, and what it could do, and how she could be rid of it.
“You don’t know everything,” was all that she said. She slammed the door behind her.
A short while later, Wil was making her way through the thick of the woods, wearing a pair of dark trousers and a gray tunic that had once belonged to Gerdie before he’d outgrown it. She had also helped herself to a pair of his platinum guns and a leather holster to go around her waist. On her way out, she had avoided her mother, who had begun tapping the walls and breathing in her compulsive numerical patterns.
Whenever the queen felt helpless, it compelled her to do things in multiples of threes and fives.
The queen believed that those numbers held the universe in balance somehow. That if she did not count correctly, if she did not step in time, some tragedy would befall her children. That when Owen set sail on one of his diplomatic affairs, the ship would never return and it would be because she hadn’t shown that she loved him enough.
The bitter guilt of being the cause of her mother’s worry followed her out into the chilly September night.
She had slipped down the halls and over the stone wall before her mother could find her. She couldn’t risk an embrace, the three inevitable kisses to her forehead.
Her father’s source indicated that the ship’s fares would be headed into a village five miles inland from the Port Capital—a small, bustling strip of taverns and hotels, mostly. Wil had been there before. Working class. Modest. Low crime, although the occasional rowdy sailor could raise trouble after a few too many at the tavern. And the taverns would be what she checked first.
There was a main road that led straight through, but, per her father’s instructions, Wil took the roundabout way through the woods. The leaves were gleaming, slick with recent rain. She followed the sounds of the river eastward, and then walked alongside the water until she reached the rapids.
Here, alone in the darkness, her worry caught up with her.
There was a natural bridge in the form of a rock wall, under which the water passed on its way back to the sea. The water seemed angered by its presence, churning and hissing and pushing against it, producing a thick froth. And unless she wanted to swim in the frigid shallows and walk a mile out of her way, Wil had to cross that wall.
This was where she and Gerdie had hauled the dead vendor, and as the memory began to surface, Wil fought it back. She couldn’t afford to allow him into her head now.
Another memory appeared in its place. She had crossed over these waters twice before—once to the other side, and once back—when she was a child and Baren had dared her. He had wanted her to fall in, and she’d known it. Here, the water wouldn’t have merely drowned her. It would have devoured her. No one—not even the king and all his soldiers and guards—would have been able to recover her body.
That was why she’d accepted the dare. She wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much Baren wished it were so. The entire time she edged along, he’d shouted that she was the useless spare, that she should just let go. How proud she was to land on her feet before him.
How fitting that she was back here now, trying to prove her worth again.
She was ashamed of the time she wasted standing there now. Forcing herself into action, she removed one glove, then the other, folding them and stowing them in her rawhide bag.
She set one foot on the rock wall. It was rich with crevices, bits of mica winking at her like a thousand pairs of eyes in the starlight.
She hoisted herself up, and her fingers found something to hold on to. There. Not difficult. A child could do this.
The water spat at her boots.
“You’re wind,” she whispered. “You’re everywhere.”
She lifted herself higher, and imagined that she was floating above the river. Above the woods. The rapids were nothing from such a height. They were a babbling drunken argument on some noisy street—nothing that should matter to her.
A snapping sound ripped her back down to earth, and her fingers tightened on the rock face. Her head whipped to the right. A figure was moving through the trees, strands of gold curls gleaming in the darkness.
Owen.
She charged forward with renewed fervor. She was nearly halfway across now—or so she told herself. Her heart was hurling itself against her chest like a violent prisoner in a cell, but her face didn’t betray any of that. She couldn’t show fear. She couldn’t be afraid. Not if she wanted to be worth anything in her family.
“Monster,” he called after her.
“Go away,” she said.
She looked at him. His arms were at his sides, his shoulders lax. He was trying so hard not to press his authority on her. He was actually pleading. “Wil, please. Don’t be an idiot.”
When was the last time he’d called her by her name? When was the last time he’d said “please”—to anyone?
“I can’t have you in my head right now,” she said. She had to shout over the water. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Let me talk to Papa about sending you overseas if that’s what you want,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. King Zinil’s spies are ruthless. Papa has threatened war. The entire South hates our family right now. If one of them found out who you are, you would be—” He was breathing hard, Wil realized. Something he’d just imagined had frightened him. “I wouldn’t forgive myself.”
She wanted to give in, if only to erase that horrified look from his face. But something refused to let her. That eight-year-old girl with gritted teeth and a fluttering stomach, fighting to prove her place as the scrawny daughter in a royal line.
“You don’t have to protect me,” she said.
He said something else, but she had willed herself not to hear it, and in the next instant he was climbing after her. She hastened her speed, hoisting her boots from foothold to foothold.
But she and Owen were matched wit for wit, stubborn heart for stubborn heart. He had always liked to tell her they were the same.
“Just listen,” he said. They were both dead center now. Owen had no fear of this rock wall—he’d ventured it a hundred times, knew it like the back of his hand. He knew the entire kingdom, and so much of the world beyond. “Mother is beside herself. She pleaded with Papa, and he’s coming to stop you.”
“What?” Wil said, her fear lost to her anger. “You didn’t try to stop him? How could you let him come after me like I’m a child?”
“Maybe he realized what he’s asking of you,” Owen said. “He treats you as though you’re disposable—”
“That’s why I have to do this,” she cried, pressing her body close to the rock to maintain her concept of space. The action stirred a lingering pain in her healing rib. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a spare. You couldn’t. Papa has always given you the world. The rest of us have to fight for glimpses of it.”
The words hurt him, and she saw it on his face. Because she had just pitted herself against him, drawn a bold line that turned them into rivals. But she couldn’t take them back. She had meant them. She went on, and Owen stayed stubbornly beside her.
She breathed through her frustration.
Her boot slipped on the drenched rock face. She heard herself scream before she could stop it, a sound that didn’t even belong to her, a sound that held all the fear she’d been storing in her chest.
She couldn’t regain her footing. Her vision was frenzied and moving fast, as though she were spiraling off the edge of the earth itself. For an awful moment she thought she had fallen completely, and she expected the water to fill her lungs.
But something was holding her.
“Breathe,” Owen was telling her. He had her collar bunched in his fist, somehow managing not to touch her.
“Let go of me.” Her voice was just another version of her scream. Shrill, foreign.
“It’s okay,” he was saying, calm for the both of them. “Lift your left leg; there’s a foothold right by it. You’ve got this.”
Her arms were burning, and she realized with dulled horror that her hands and Owen’s grasp on her collar were the only things keeping her from certain death.
Tears stung her eyes, making further chaos of her vision. Panic. She never panicked. “I’m not moving until you let go.” She sobbed. Later she would curse herself for that sob, she made a note.
He released her collar, like he was agreeing to a hostage negotiation.
She held her breath for a beat, then drew it in through her nose, held it, let it go through her open mouth. She worked to draw her left leg up, relying on her core, ignoring the stabs of protest from her rib.
But if her mind was prepared to ignore that pain, her body wasn’t. Her arms shook, fingers went numb, and when she fell away from the rock face, there wasn’t even time for her to scream.
An arm wrapped around her waist, drawing her up from the water that sloshed greedily for her dangling feet. A force. Motion. And then she was lying on her side in the damp grass, shaking. New hunks of emerald bit at her through her clothes.
Owen was knelt beside her.
“No.” Her voice was hoarse. “Owen, no.” The next sob to leave her was a violent one. She pushed herself upright and then to her feet. She staggered back.
He stood to face her. For a moment they were the only things breathing in all the woods of Northern Arrod. He was twenty-five years old. And he was fifteen. And he was holding her over his shoulders to show her their kingdom. And he was pulling her up from the rapids. He was a million moments—an entire lifetime—all at once.
He was staring her down with that same defiance he’d always had. The persistent haughtiness of a someday king.
But they both saw the glint of diamond at his fingertip, and they knew that Arrod would never have him as its ruler.