WIL WOKE ADA ONCE THE island was in sight. Even in the darkness, she could see the broken castle like a scar against the night sky. It gave off no light. There were no signs of life on the island at all, and Wil wondered if Zay had gone to the mainland to find a boat. Maybe they’d already left. But then Wil saw the billowing of smoke from one of the castle’s chimneys. Relief flooded her. Returning Ada to an empty island would have been an entirely different sort of problem.
She pressed the button that anchored the ship as they reached the shore. She had counted the twenty-five seconds it took for the anchor to retract. It would add to her escape time, but she could manage it if she moved fast.
Ada followed her like a loyal gosling, giddy to know that he was once again home. He’d made a little song out of the word mama, which he sang at a near whisper.
Ada didn’t need help descending the ship’s ladder—he’d been climbing that most of his life—and he bounded ahead of her, paddling easily through the shallow water and already running by the time he’d leaped onto the sand.
“Wait,” she whispered, and he spun to face her.
“Ada, you know where home is, right?”
Bouncing and chewing on his finger, he pointed to the castle.
“Then run home,” she told him. “Run really fast, okay? Don’t stop for anything.”
Whether Ada truly comprehended or whether he just happened to have the same idea, Wil couldn’t be sure. Either way he raced for the castle.
He would be safe now, she knew. Her own fate was less certain until she could get out of here. She hoisted herself onto the ladder, climbing as fast as the shifting ropes would allow. She would only need a minute more, maybe less, and then she could be gone.
She ventured one last look after Ada, but he was already long gone.
She barely registered the searing, whistling breath of a sound, before the hurled dagger landed in her calf.
It tore easily through her flesh, grating the bone. Her spine went rigid with pain even before her mind could register it.
Someone was screaming. The stars spun, and her body hit the sea with a hard splash. Water rushed into her open mouth and she could taste her own blood in it as she pushed herself to the surface, reeling, hazy.
Arms scooped her up from the water, and she knew that it would be Loom even before she heard his breathy chuckle. “You’re all right. I’ve got you.”
She glared at him. “Seems to be your only goal in life these days, getting me.” She wrested out of his arms, landing back in the shallows with a splash and trudging up onto the shore.
Dizzy, she sat at the water’s edge and drew her leg up to inspect the damage.
The satin was already bled through, dripping from a tear in the fabric. The knife—or whatever had shredded her—was gone, leaving a fierce crescendo of pain in its stead.
She hooked her fingers into the tear at her pant leg and ripped it apart, trying to fashion it into a bandage. Her arms were trembling from a pain the rest of her couldn’t seem to register, and she commanded herself to be steady.
“Here.” Loom’s voice, and then his hands taking over the task for her. She watched as he fashioned the scraps around the black wound. Watched, too, how the blood seeped through uninhibited, covering her skin and his.
His hands were slick with it, so dark, as though he’d reached into the night sky, and its innards had clung to his skin.
“I brought him back,” Wil snapped. “You didn’t have to throw a knife at me.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
Zay emerged behind him. She was clutching Ada to her chest. Her eyes were ablaze, her lips pressed tight.
The night grew darker. She heard a strange, rough wind, and realized it was her own rapid and shallow breathing.
“Hey.” Loom’s voice was loud, and Wil realized that she was no longer on her feet and somehow the ground was under her back. Loom grasped her chin, searching her gaze. The image of him blurred and doubled. “Look at me,” he demanded. But her eyes wouldn’t focus.
He lifted her again. “Hells, Zay, she’s bleeding out. You struck her artery.”
“She struck mine,” Zay replied.
Wil couldn’t make out Loom’s shouted response; it sounded underwater. She struggled to free herself from his grasp. “I can walk,” she insisted. But her feet never seemed to reach the sand. The pair of them went on arguing, Zay’s tone one of indifference, and Loom’s of fury.
In a blink she was on the hard floor, beside a burning fire. She lay on her stomach, the wound at the back of her calf facing up. She pushed herself upright by her elbows and saw her own skin, pale as bone, as sweat and seawater splashed from her forehead in heavy drops. To stay conscious, she watched the bottles and pouches Loom wielded.
A liquid hissed when it touched her flesh, and with that sound she knew what he was planning. He was going to disinfect the wound, and then he was going to cauterize it.
Zay and Loom had been arguing, but their voices felt miles away, until Loom told her, “Just go away, then, if you’re determined to be useless.”
“Fine.”
Ahead of them, Zay started up the stairs, petting Ada’s hair, her kisses to the crown of his head making him cackle. “You smell like apples,” she told him. She did not look back.
Wil wadded the cuff of her sleeve between her teeth. “Don’t give me any warning before you do it.”
He didn’t warn her. He pressed the burning blade to her skin, and the cry Wil let out was not her own. It was the stunned wail her mother had made on the night she learned that her children were dead.
Several short, sharp compressions later, it was done. Loom tried to give her something for the pain, but she refused it. She hated the fog that had clouded her senses the last time. She hated how vulnerable it left her.
She was lolling though still conscious after her skin had been welded shut. The pain filled her vision with roiling stars, and she was certain that she had lost a few moments of herself, but the crescendo of it had passed, and eventually, she was able to pull herself upright and lean against the wall.
“Who is she to you?” she asked Loom, who was sitting across from her. The firelight burnished his skin, made his eyes as jeweled as the things she touched. He was so infuriatingly lovely.
“What are you talking about?” he said, and Wil realized he must have thought her delirious.
“Zay.”
A smile melted some of the edge from his expression. “There isn’t a word for what we are to each other. I should know. I speak quite a few languages.”
Wil was breathing hard. She closed her eyes in a long blink. “Ada’s lucky to have someone willing to throw knives on his behalf,” she said.
“You brought him back unharmed,” Loom said. “So she merely threw one of my knives. Not her jeweler’s knife. That one would have gone clean through the bone. Really, I think she’s starting to like you.”
Wil laughed. It came out as little more than a breath. The room was turning blurry again. “I’m glad.”
She must have lost consciousness, because the next thing she knew, she was being laid onto the satin sheets of a bed. The window was open from her earlier escape, the sound of the rustling sea taunting her with the freedom she’d had for a few precious hours. She would still be out there, if not for her nettling conscience, which she cursed just then. It was a weakness her father would have hated her for. He would be right. Zay and Loom had held her captive on that very ship against her will, and she owed them no loyalty. She could have kept Ada as their penance, shown them just what it meant to take someone away from their life.
But she had brought him back. Whole and happy and unharmed. She did not know whether this made her weaker than her captors, or stronger.
“Sleep on your stomach,” Loom said. “It’ll hurt less.”
Her body sank into the softness of the mattress and her traitorous eyes felt heavy, but she didn’t close them.
“That was an impressive escape, right up until you were thwarted by a two-year-old.” He was fitting a thin sheet over her, leaving her leg uncovered. “Zay was set to steal a ship off the mainland to go after you, but I knew you’d bring him back.”
“Are you an oracle as well as a prince?”
“No.” He leaned over her and peeled the damp hair away from her face; his fingertips sweeping the back of her neck evoked a warm flutter in her chest. “I’m just observant.”
He was gone for a few minutes, and when he returned he pressed a cold wet leaf to her forehead, and another to her cheek. They clung to her skin. “What is that?” Her voice felt too close, as though she’d spoken into her own skull.
“Lyster. It’s for fevers.”
“You know every plant, don’t you?” She rested her cheek against her forearm. “Every root, every tree of this place.”
“Yes.” His voice was a warm song. “And every breath and every heartbeat too.”
Without meaning to, she smiled. It was so quiet here, so calm. The satin glided against her with each menial shift.
When he stood to leave, she reached out and grabbed his wrist.
Just as there was something in her blood that made her deadly, there was something else that called to him, something that she could bury when her defenses were strong, but not tonight. Not while darkness burned away the edges of the world, and she could hear the absence of all that she’d lost, and she had never felt so alone.
Again she felt his fingers move through her hair.
Outside, the ocean shifted and rustled like millions of sheets of paper. She drifted to sleep, listening to their indecipherable stories.
The shrill cry of a gull woke her.
Wil opened her eyes to find that she’d spent the night facing the open window; the sky was cloudy and dark with a coming rain. Her head was cradled in her arms, and when she stretched, a stabbing pain cut her movement short. It shot up the length of her spine, down her arms, into her fingertips. It momentarily paralyzed her lungs, her heart.
Loom had made good on his promise not to give her anything for the pain, and now with some bitterness she wished she hadn’t been so stubborn.
Laboriously, she looked over her shoulder at her leg. She was still wearing the torn and bloody trousers, severed at the knee on one side. A cloth was draped over the wound, fragrant with something sweet and minty that did nothing to mask the stench of burned flesh.
She braced herself and sat upright, drawing her knee to her chest. Metallic stars swam a funnel around her vision.
The cloth fell to the sheets, and she picked it up, inspecting it. She could identify the mintlemint by smell, and serlot oil with its sandy little seeds—common for mixing poultices and pastes—but the rest was foreign to her.
She made herself look at the wound, where the purpled shadow of Loom’s dagger ran vertically down the back of her leg, like a seam on a doll. Loom had touched the blade to her skin in four rapid spurts, but each time had been in the exact same spot, and he had angled the blade along the grain, which would reduce the scarring greatly. She could see his attention to detail in that burning outline. Even Gerdie would be impressed, and he should know best; he had been tasked with repairing her all their lives.
“Morning.” Loom was standing in the doorway, amusement in his slight smile. He held up a tray with an ornate crystal cup and a pitcher. “I thought you’d be thirsty.”
“You left my window open,” she mumbled, and pushed herself upright.
He put the glass in her hands. “You want to escape? Give it a try. I’ll give you a five-minute head start.”
“Chivalrous.” She drank the water greedily, some of it spilling and dripping from her chin. She had never been so thirsty.
Loom sat on the edge of the mattress, just as the first rumble of thunder sounded outside. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I should be a day closer to finding Pahn instead of stuck here.” She handed the emptied glass back to Loom.
He glanced at her leg, then to the cloth now lying on the mattress beside it. “I predict you’ll be up and back at it in no time. Which is a good thing, because we’re going to Messalin tomorrow.”
Wil stared at him. “It really means that much to you.”
“I thought that should be obvious.”
“No,” Wil said. “Your kingdom, I mean. You really would do anything to try and save it.”
He folded the cloth and set it on the nightstand. “That place—it’s in my blood.”
“It’s in your father’s blood, too,” Wil pointed out, her tone gentle. “Maybe he’s got his own plan for it.”
“My father cares only for his pride,” Loom said. “A kingdom is more than a mass of land. It’s more than imports and exports. There are people living—dying—in the shadows of a mountain palace where my father spends his days giving orders to servants and grooming my sister to be just like him.” He was talking faster now, as though the words were a flood he had been holding in. “I can’t explain it; I know you’re not from my world, that you should have no reason to care, but I know you’ll understand if I can show you. I know it.”
“Because you have a sense about me.” Wil rested her elbow to the knee of her good leg, offering a sympathetic smile. “Even if I were exactly as you hoped and dreamed, I can’t work miracles. I can’t fix a kingdom. That sort of thing takes generations. Resources. Council. It will take more than just a banished prince and a girl with a curse.”
Loom shrugged. “Prove me wrong, then.”
“Suppose I do just that,” Wil said. “Will you still take me to Pahn?”
“I always honor my word.” After a beat, he offered his hand.
Wil stared at it a moment, and then she took it in hers, offering a firm shake to confirm their deal.
“You’ll still take me at my word after I stole your ship?” Wil withdrew her hand, pretending she didn’t want to savor the warmth of his grasp. It had been so long since she could touch any living thing without fear. She still didn’t trust this odd immunity of Loom’s, though every muscle within her remembered how it had felt when he scooped her out of the water. Even through the pain and the anger, even though his glibness had infuriated her, just knowing that someone could still touch her made her feel like she was still a part of this world. She was still human.
“It could have been a clean getaway,” Loom said. “You could have turned Ada to diamond, then chopped him into bits and sold the shards to pay your way. That’s what Zay kept screaming you would do.”
“She really thought I would do that?”
“Try to understand, most people in her life have betrayed her. She can be . . . wary.”
“Same could be said for you,” Wil told him.
“I’m profusely wary,” he said, though his easy grin spoke to the contrary. “Especially of you. And perhaps it will be my downfall, but I’m glad our paths crossed.”
“Wish I could say the same,” Wil mumbled, and averted her eyes so they wouldn’t betray her lie.
It was quiet for a while, and then Loom said, “Wil?”
“Yes?”
“What is it, exactly, you are expecting Pahn to do for you?”
“I thought that was obvious. I want him to tell me why this is happening to me, and how to be rid of it.” She studied his grim expression. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those who doesn’t believe marvelers are legitimate.”
“I don’t need to believe anything,” Loom said. “I have seen for myself and I know full well what marvelers can do. But—there will be a cost.”
“I’ll pay it.”
His laugh was caustic. “You don’t know what it will be.”
Wil shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” Whatever the cost, it wouldn’t be more than what this curse had already cost her. Though she braced herself for it, the reminder of her family knocked her off guard. The way that Owen had stared at her as he died, as though he had always known he would one day give his life for hers. And her father casting her away. Her mother back at the castle covering the mirrors and whispering mourning songs. Gerdie, whom she could never face again unless she were fixed.
She raised her chin, hoping that Loom had not been able to read any of this on her face.
He didn’t say another word.