HE STOOD FOR AS LONG as his body would let him, as the clear, merciless diamond hardened the veins in his arms, and paralyzed his lungs, and eventually, inevitably, took his heart.
Wil caught him when his knees buckled and he fell forward, already dead. She stumbled to the ground with him in her arms.
Even his hair had succumbed to it, brittle strands of diamond flaking off into the gold.
Someone was saying his name. Screaming it.
Her throat was raw.
“What have you done?” Another voice came from the other side of the churning river. She saw her father, standing tall against the darkness, for once not flanked by his guards.
In a blink, her father was on their side of the river. Wil didn’t even see him move.
He pulled Owen from her arms, cradling him in his lap. This must have been the way he’d held Owen when he was a child, Wil thought. She had never imagined Owen as a child. He had always been so proud, it never occurred to her that he had once been small. But here in death and moonlight, she saw that he was vulnerable. He had always been.
The king cupped his hands around the skin of Owen’s face, which had been spared, save for the smooth diamond that had frozen at the curves of his cheeks and a glittering smattering of lashes.
He looked like something that had been unearthed from snow.
The king squeezed his eyes shut. “I should have killed you long ago,” he told her. “And I still can’t bring myself to do it.”
Through her shock, Wil could hear in his voice that he had entertained the idea before. Did he know what she was capable of? Had he always? She was in no state to ask him. She was staring at Owen’s chest, willing it to rise with a breath.
“Both of you died here tonight,” the king said. “Leave this kingdom. If I see you again, I will slit your throat, like I should have on the day you were born.”
Wil could not feel her legs, but somehow she began to move.
The kingdom of Arrod did not yet know what it had lost tonight, but the sky knew. Clouds churned like hands searching for something they had dropped in murky waters. The air rustled the leaves, making sobbing sounds.
Wil did not realize, until she found herself far beyond the river, how far she had run.
She stopped to catch her breath when her lungs began to burn and her vision roiled with bursts of darkness. And here, the quiet elegy of the woods gave way to distant laughter in the Port Capital, its towers muttering the hour in their language of bells and gears.
Eleven o’clock. At ten o’clock, Owen had been alive and thriving, the rich blue veins in his arms fed by the beating of his red heart.
Wil’s own heart began to settle the longer she stood still, and through her haze she realized the injustice of this.
Walk, she told herself. If she lingered here between these trees even a moment longer, then she would never leave. She would lose her resolve and return pleading to her mother and crumple at her feet like a child. Her father would kill her for what she had done, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that her mother would know. Wil would rather her mother believed she were dead than know the truth. It would destroy her.
But Gerdie—
“Walk.” She said it aloud that time, and her legs obliged.
There would be no ships this late, but she had seen dirigibles take flight at all hours. The pilots kept erratic schedules, collecting fares to cover their own expenses as they flew wherever they needed to go.
She had been on dirigibles before, but only while they were grounded. Tonight, if she could find one that was departing, she would leave Northern Arrod for the first time in her life. There would be no coming back.
She didn’t break stride even as she opened her bag to count her money. Two thousand geldstuk. Because Northern Arrod was the leading kingdom, its currency was accepted worldwide, though its value depended on foreign exchange rates. Air travel was cheaper than sea; this would be more than enough to get her out of the kingdom with money to spare.
There was only one dirigible taking passengers. It was smaller than the others, and parchment brown with an open-concept gondola. A man stood at its door, clean shaven with a warm but cocky grin that reminded Wil, distantly, of Owen. She didn’t allow the thought to take root.
“Where are you headed?” she asked, her voice deceptively strong.
“Wanderer Country,” the man said. It was another word for Brayshire. It had earned this nickname due to its status as a place of congregation for people wandering the world. “It’s three hundred.”
Mutely, Wil paid him and stepped past. The gondola was nearly empty. On the far side there was a group of four young people, chattering. Wil forced their voices away, until the words were as distant as the stars shining in the graying sky.
Find Pahn, she reminded herself. He was the only hope she had left now.
The floor of the dirigible was a sepia map of the world, embellished with sea creatures poking out of the waves and towering ghostly creatures trudging through the pine trees of the Western Isles.
It appeared to be hand-painted, and it was a map that Wil knew well. She’d found a version of it folded on a piece of parchment in her mother’s things in the attic when she was a child.
There were no seats, only a long wooden railing that wrapped around the perimeter under the glassless windows. She clung to it and concentrated on breathing.
She did not immediately realize that they’d lifted off the ground, because all her organs were still set firmly down on Arrod soil. Her breath was down there too.
It took several moments for her to get her bearings, and when she did, she looked ahead and saw that the dirigible was rising higher and higher above the ocean.
Soon, she knew, her mother and brothers would hear that she was dead. She didn’t know what her father would tell them—perhaps that she and Owen had been swallowed up by the rapids.
The dirigible rose up and up, and Wil made herself let go of that castle and all the things inside it. They were not hers.
The princess of Arrod was dead.