GERDIE TRIED TO APPLY REASON.
The pathophysiology of drowning went like this: two conscious people who slipped underwater would first hold their breath. They would understand that the air existed above the surface and would try to get to it. They would struggle and fight. This would use up the oxygen that was stored in their bodies, rendering them unconscious in thirty to sixty seconds.
Even if their hearts stopped beating, the damage done within those sixty seconds would not be irreversible. The brain would be key. Without air, its cells would begin to die by the third minute. One hundred and eighty seconds, the same amount of time it took to grind grayroot and arterleaves with a mortar and pestle, add serlot oil, and deposit the potion into a cauldron, which is what Gerdie had been doing when it happened.
After the fourth minute, survival with functional brain recovery was unlikely. By the tenth minute, all cells within the brain would have ceased functioning, and both of those people who had gone into the river—one trying to save the other—would be dead.
Death was final. He could not reach into his cauldron and find what he had lost. Could not fashion tallim powder and bits of broken glass and gears into an heir and a spare. There were no pieces left to fix.
Drowned.
It made no sense.
Each time he descended the stairs to his laboratory, he succumbed to a new habit of standing before the small window that leaked bleary light into the space. The bottom of the window frame was five feet two inches from the floor. His sister had been exactly that height, filling up the space perfectly when she stood there, as she often did, out of the way of his cauldron. The top of his own head came to the middle of the glass. An even five feet eight inches. He compulsively rerecorded his measurement daily, worried about growing even a fraction taller. Worried about moving farther from his memory of Wil, which existed without portraits, without so much as a recording of her voice. He had nothing of her but a room of lifeless trinkets, and the space between a window and a dusty floor.
Owen and Wil died on a Wednesday, and when Wednesday came around for the first time since their deaths, he forced himself to move. He couldn’t bear that castle, with its black gossamer draped over the mirrors and beds and its persistent silence a moment longer.
It had even proved too much for Addney, who had taken to sleeping in the unfinished house where she and Owen had planned to live. She made herself scarce; Gerdie hadn’t even seen any servants going out to tend to her needs. Only the queen herself would venture out there, morning and night, with trays of food, and sometimes one of Owen’s books.
Climbing the stone wall was excruciating. The weather had been cold and damp, and that morning it had rained. His legs ached, and the pain radiated up his spine, charting a path that lanced through his brain and stabbed at his monocled eye. The vision in that eye was weaker today as well, partially blinded by the gleam of dampness everywhere, distorting everything like a camera lens that could not get its focus. But he didn’t mind. This pain, at least, he could do something for. Brighter lighting would improve his vision. For his leg, there were stretches and tonics and salves. So many solutions—however temporary or weak they may be—that he couldn’t believe he’d ever complained about them. He would give anything for all the hurt in life to be so fixable.
He knew that Wil had walked through the woods and climbed the rock wall over the rapids. He knew because she had told him that was her plan. But he was not half the climber his sister had been, so he crossed the river where it was calm and walked alongside it until he’d reached the spot where the water turned angry and violent.
He stared at it, taken all at once by his anger for this thing that had killed his brother and sister. Reason came back to him, this time uninvited. Their bodies were still pinned down there, it said. Even if he could go down and find them, he wouldn’t recognize what he recovered. After a week underwater, the skin begins to peel away from tissue.
The queen had ordered men to recover the bodies. Part of Gerdie had hoped that they would be able to do it. If he could have seen them while they were still whole, he might have believed they were gone. But the task was impossible, and when the men returned empty-handed, the queen’s scream was even worse than the first had been.
Still, now, he found himself looking for his sister’s long hair, as though he’d see it fluttering like a flag, and he could grab on and pull her back up. And then—what?
When he awoke from his trance, he knelt in the grass and began to rummage for gemstones. For footprints. Torn beads from Owen’s coat sleeves. Anything.
“You have to help me,” he whispered to them both. “I have to know what happened. I can’t live the rest of my life not knowing.”
The queen, in her despair, believed the story the king told her, but she didn’t know what Gerdie and Owen knew, about Wil’s deadly new power. All week he’d thought of what Owen had said.
I know our father in a way that you never could.
“Did Papa kill you?” He’d thought it for days, but this was the first time he said the words aloud. He could almost expect to look up and see Wil knelt beside him, rolling her eyes, saying, “You’re the genius. You figure it out.”
“Have you taken to muttering like a madman?” The voice that called to him from across the rapids was real, and it startled Gerdie. Baren stood on the other side of the water, clutching the hilt of the sword at his hip. In only a week’s time, he’d talked his way into becoming their father’s high guard, his triumph a slap against the miserable silence within the castle.
Gerdie betrayed nothing. He forced back the threat of something awful and overwhelming that began to stir within him. The realization that Baren was all he had left. He would not let his brother see him in mourning. He went back to searching the grass.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Baren went on. “But you won’t find anything. Papa said they never made it to the other side.”
Gerdie tried to ignore him. He thought about the trade nations and the cluster of Eastern islands. He thought about the Ancient Sea and the undead apparitions of the West. He thought of all the places Owen had been, and that Wil had longed to see. He thought about boarding a ship and leaving for one of those places—any of them.
“They’re dead, you know,” Baren said. He hated being ignored more than anything. “You’re not going to unearth them.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you?”
Gerdie looked up.
Baren’s straight blond hair had gone dull in the past few days. His eyes were ringed with gray lines. Strange, he almost appeared to be stricken by grief, though he had every reason to be happy. He finally had what he wanted. He was the heir.
“Are you seeing ghosts?” Baren asked. “At night—wet footprints in the hall, and voices whispering.”
Gerdie couldn’t tell if his brother was being sincere. It was cruel if it was a trick, but it wouldn’t be out of character. When Gerdie was ill, Baren loved to joke about a shadowed man roaming the gardens looking for a child’s soul to steal.
But then he noticed Baren’s hands. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Gerdie counted five times. It wasn’t like Baren to be compulsive, but he did it two more times.
Gerdie stood. “No.” His voice was guarded. “Ghosts aren’t real, Baren.”
“You don’t know everything, not everything,” Baren said.
The words lanced Gerdie’s chest. Those had been Wil’s final words to him, before she’d stomped up the stairs and out of his world forever. And she had been right.
“I’ve seen things,” Baren went on.
“What things?” Gerdie asked, even as he knew he’d regret playing along.
“Our sister.” Baren sounded nervous at that, as though Wil could be spying on them from the trees. “She comes to my room late at night, dripping water on the floor, her hair full of dead things. She sits in the chair by my bed and she doesn’t let me sleep.”
Gerdie knew this had to be a lie. If ghosts were real, Wil wouldn’t bother with the likes of Baren. She wouldn’t even go to their mother, he suspected, for fear of triggering her compulsions. She would go to him. She would rearrange his things, leave him clues she knew he could solve.
Even so, he asked, “What does she say?”
“Nothing. She either can’t speak, or she won’t. I suspect she won’t. She wants me to suffer.”
“Perhaps you can call it even, then,” Gerdie said, dusting the grass from his trousers. He began walking for the calmer waters so he could cross, and Baren walked parallel to him.
“I thought you could talk to her for me,” Baren said. “Make her leave.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because she’ll listen to you,” Baren insisted. “And Owen. Owen knows what I’m thinking, but her.” He pulled at his hair. “She just stares and stares.”
“Say her name,” Gerdie said. He stopped, and they stood facing each other. “You’ve never liked saying it. How can I help you if you won’t even say her name?”
Baren balked at that. He laughed, but it was a distracted sort, and his eyes stared past his brother. After a long silence, he said, “She wasn’t even supposed to live, you know. Mother was in labor for days, screaming for days. A woman from a camp of wanderers came to see her. I remember her Brayshire accent. I heard her whisper to Mother, ‘This child inside you is cursed. She’ll cause you nothing but pain. You should let her drown in you.’”
Gerdie was breathless. “What did you say?”
“It’s true,” Baren said. “She’s cursed. She’s bad luck. You didn’t see her when she was born, but I did. I knew.” He shook his head. “Mother didn’t listen. She never has when it came to her.”
Gerdie’s arms were trembling. It wasn’t even anger. He couldn’t manage anger. Was too dazed and broken. Wil was not there to say something to this. She was not anywhere. Even what was left in the rapids wasn’t her anymore. It had been her, before she succumbed, before the water filled her lungs and her eyes and her hair. Now she only existed in words and in thoughts. And the words Baren had just said were too terrible.
Gerdie began walking at a faster clip. Baren kept up. “You know it’s true,” Baren went on.
Gerdie saw the vendor hardening into ruby, falling away and revealing Wil’s stunned expression. He saw the old woman from the wanderers’ camp.
Darkness in your blood. There’s something ugly in you. Something vicious.
His breath came shallow and quick. The world felt dull.
“You know,” Baren kept insisting. “She was supposed to die. A long time ago.”
Gerdie’s guns felt heavy in their holster. “Say that again, and I’ll have to console Mother as she mourns a third child.”
That silenced his brother, but it didn’t stop him from keeping pace, even as Gerdie moved faster.
When he reached the calmer shallows, he steadied himself before crossing a trail of stones.
Wil could have crossed here. Why hadn’t she crossed here?