WIL HAD NO MEMORY OF blacking out, but when she came to, the storm outside had turned furious.
The ship lilted in one direction, and she clawed at the floor.
It was cool and soft. Satin?
There was another jolt, and with it, she managed to open her eyes.
She was back in the cabin Zay had initially shown her to, lying on the bed. An electric lantern was swinging overhead, filling the space with dizzying shadows.
She rubbed a hand against her forehead. Her gloves were gone, and she sat up immediately at that. She patted at her hips, her thigh. The sheath and holsters were empty.
Her captors wouldn’t be able to shoot her with the guns, at least. Her brother made all his guns with a trick trigger so his own weapons couldn’t be used against him; it was so complex it had taken Wil several attempts to learn.
The gloves rested by her feet, a little rumpled, but upon inspection they weren’t damaged. Loom must have searched them for hidden weapons.
She fitted her data goggles over her eyes. At least they hadn’t taken this small piece of her old life from her after they’d rendered her unconscious. The goggles were harmless enough—a tourist trinket made of solar-powered glass and a leather strap. She blinked. The time glowed in the lower right lens. Midnight. It was a highly concentrated variant of sleep serum to have taken effect before she could put up a fight, and it lasted half as much time as more regulated doses used for a night’s rest.
Loom must have anticipated that she’d be waking up, because the door to the cabin opened, and he stood at the threshold.
“I did offer to disarm you the easy way,” he said, and closed the door behind him. He dragged the trunk from the corner of the room to her bedside and sat with an elbow resting on his knee. Wil had the fleeting thought that he could have locked her in the trunk instead, if he’d really wanted to incapacitate her. It was more than big enough.
Wil pushed herself upright. Her tongue felt like sandpaper, and her arms scarcely felt attached to her body. “Don’t sell them,” she said. “My weapons.”
“I wouldn’t,” Loom said. “They’re works of art. Where did you find them?”
She drew one knee to her chest, then the other, and extended each leg slowly, trying to shake free of the numbness. “They were gifts. If anything happens to them, you’ll fast learn I don’t need weapons to hurt you.”
He canted his chin. “I already believe you about that. Who taught you to fight?”
“That was also a gift,” she said.
When she was a child and ever sitting at an ailing Gerdie’s bedside, Owen had worried for her. “Come on, Monster.” He’d hoisted her up from the floor and carried her on his back. “Let’s go to the oval garden. I’ll show you how to shoot an arrow.”
He’d only meant to distract her from her worries for a few hours, but she’d shown so much interest in learning to fight that it became a ritual of theirs. Something to look forward to. Short-range weapons, long-range, hand-to-hand combat, how to bridge a size disadvantage, evasion tactics. Their mother hadn’t exactly approved.
The lantern light cast a warm glow on Loom’s skin. But his face was colder than it had been before. Guarded.
This was not the boy who’d stood before her in the woods, all gentleness and wonder. That boy had been a mirage. A persistent one that she had been a fool to fall for—however briefly.
Now, he was wearing a loose-fitting cotton tunic, the unbuttoned collar revealing the royal tattoo that made him her enemy.
She stared at him. “What did you do to get banished from your own kingdom?”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“I’m curious. Given your astonishing charm, it’s a mystery that anyone would want to get rid of you.”
He searched her eyes, matching her scrutiny. “I tried to kill my father.” He stood. The waves rocked the ship, but his stance hardly wavered. “You must be hungry. I’ll bring you something.”
When Loom returned, it was with a dehydrated packaged sea ration. Wil had seen them for sale at ports in anticipation of long journeys. He tossed it to her. A brick wrapped in metallic airtight packaging. It was still sealed, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been tampered with.
Wil turned it over in her hands, looking for puncture marks.
“Is the storm making you seasick?” Loom sat on the trunk again. Keeping guard, apparently. But there was no need for that, Wil thought. She wanted to escape, but the storm outside roiled the sea and she didn’t have a death wish.
“No.” She toyed with the packaging, but didn’t open it.
“I got sick for years before I grew accustomed to ships,” Loom said, arching an eyebrow. “I suppose you really are cut out for travel.”
“What kind of net was that?” Wil asked.
“An alchemized combination of sepra and jellyfish tentacles, among other things,” Loom said.
Jellyfish. Interesting. Sepra was a thin metal, cheap and fairly common. But Wil had never considered a living thing being used in alchemy. Gerdie had never mentioned it, at least.
“How did you cut through it?” Wil tentatively tore open the packaging of her sea ration. The smell of chemicals and something faintly like apples wafted out.
“Zay’s jeweler’s knife. It can cut through everything, even stone.”
“Alchemized?” Wil asked, intrigued despite the madness of her situation. It gave her hope that a part of her was still the girl she had once been, scaling the castle wall and acquiring her brother’s materials.
“Yes,” Loom said. “By some old flame of her mother’s in the East.”
Wil set the ration down and positioned herself to sit on the edge of the bed. Loom was wary of her, but she could sense that some part of him was still susceptible to reason. “Loom,” she said. “You must know that you can’t buy alliances with gemstones. Particularly ones that are rare in the South. Think how many suspicions that would raise. King Hein in particular would find some way to get spies into the country to find out how you’re doing it. Your people would be interrogated, tortured.”
Loom’s brows drew together at her words. He hadn’t expected to be challenged on his politics, she supposed.
“You’ve never been to Cannolay,” he finally said. “Or Messalin. Or any of the South’s more impoverished cities at all. Have you?”
Wil shook her head.
“If you had, you’d know that my father deserves to be dethroned for what he’s let his kingdom become. Fevers, disease, abject poverty—all because he refuses to form a single alliance with any of the trade nations. He’s too proud, and while he lives in the famed mountain palace, his people are the ones suffering.”
Wil thought of the rundown outskirts of the Port Capital in Northern Arrod. “I know—”
“No,” Loom said. “Until you’ve seen it, you don’t. You don’t know anything about kings, but I come from one. I’ve stood beside him as he’s destroyed his kingdom. I tried to kill him because there was no other way.”
“You want to kill your father. You want to kill the Northern royals. Is that your only plan?” Wil fired back. “Because if that’s all you’ve got, you aren’t going to make a better king yourself.”
“That’s how kingdoms work!” he cried.
“Yes,” Wil hissed. “And that’s why they’re such a mess.”
“I didn’t bring you along to be my adviser—”
“No. You ‘brought me along’ because you got overly zealous about something you know nothing about, and you are clinging to the idea that somehow I can fix your kingdom.” She said her next words slowly. “I can’t fix it.”
“You don’t even know what you’re capable of,” Loom muttered, looking to the tiny circular window. Water sloshed angrily against it.
The words cut deep, because Wil did know what she was capable of. She’d learned that night by the rapids. But she didn’t say that. He had taken her hostage—for now—but he wouldn’t truly have her. He wouldn’t know a shred about who she was. Once they had reached solid land, she would be gone.
Still, there was some truth to what he said. She didn’t know everything about her power. She didn’t know where it had come from, or why he wasn’t affected. If he was immune, perhaps others were as well.
She could see the tension in Loom’s jaw when she looked at him. “Can you really take me to Pahn?”
“I can tell you where he is,” Loom said. “But first, you have to help me. You have to see what the Southern Isles are like. I’m not asking you to kill my father and take the throne in his place. I’m just asking for a few diamonds, so I can acquire an ally to help me assassinate him.”
“For how long?” Wil asked.
“It’ll take us six days to get there,” Loom said. “And then I only need a week to show you why I need your help. After that, I know you’ll want to stay.”
“And what makes you so sure of that?”
“Because you won’t stand for injustices. I saw that in the market square.”
Injustice. He was a fine one to speak of such things.
Outside, the winds were screaming. The water was filled with voices.
She’d heard Owen in the Ancient Sea; she was sure of it.
What would you have me do?
If she couldn’t have him alive then she wanted a ghost, she wanted a chill, whispers in an angry sea. She wanted to know that he was somewhere. Anywhere. She had never believed in any sort of life after death, but now she understood why people did.
A flash of lightning was the only reply. If Gerdie were here now, he’d scold her for always being taken in by wild stories. He’d want her to come to a decision logically. Logic, she could do. She didn’t have Owen’s ghost to give her guidance, but she had been his sister for nearly sixteen years, and she had something better than a ghost. She had all the things he had taught her.
You’ll be the eyes of the kingdom when I’m on the throne. That was what he’d said.
It had been years since anyone from Arrod entered the Southern Isles. A member of the royal family would be foolish to even attempt it. But Wil was the palace spy, banished or not. She had an opportunity that even Owen would have coveted.
“I’m not going to agree to anything.” Wil sat back and folded her arms. “I’m not in the habit of bargaining with my captors.”
Loom smirked. “Had many captors, have you?”
“There have been—attempts,” Wil said. “But you’re the first to manage this much success. You should feel special.”
“I do, actually,” Loom said.
She still hadn’t ruled out the possibility of killing him if things got ugly.
Wanting to save a kingdom from its king, she understood—not that she could tell him so.
Though she knew his identity, she could sense there was more she had yet to learn. Things it would take more than a dagger to the throat to force out of him.
“Very well, then. Don’t agree to anything.” He stood. “I wouldn’t bother trying to break the lock. Zay made it herself.”
“She’s an alchemist?” Wil asked.
“A jeweler,” Loom said. He dug into the pocket of his cotton trousers and pulled out a handful of the rubies Wil had made from the alber blossoms. They were whittled down and made to look as though they’d fallen out of a setting.
Wil stared at them, surprised. This was the work of someone with care and patience; not what she had expected from Zay at all. “Who is she?” Wil asked. “Why is she helping you?”
Loom closed the gems in his fist and moved for the door. “Good night,” was all he said.