ON THE EVENING OF OWEN’S twenty-fifth birthday, the castle grounds were filled with life and strangers.
Wil sat on the wall where she could see the kingdom entering the gate and carrying all manner of grandiose things.
She also noted more guards standing along the wall’s perimeter. Yesterday, she had narrowly evaded one on her way into the city, unable to predict the new tumult of their rotations.
Beside her, Gerdie was struggling to position his left leg before him. His bones always gave him trouble when the weather was humid.
“Oh, Gerdie, look,” Wil gasped. “Is that a mermaid fountain? It is! It’s so gloriously tacky.”
“Wonderful,” he muttered. “We’d better go before someone sees the king’s failure spying on the heir’s glorious party.”
Wil’s head snapped to him. “Are you still sulking about that? Papa sent me away, too, you know. To buy perfume, no less.”
“The less you are seen by the kingdom, the more he can use you as a spy,” Gerdie reminded her. “He doesn’t want anyone to see me because he’s ashamed of me.”
“Hey.” She inched in front of him and stared until he met her gaze. They looked nothing alike, save for the sharpness of their chins. But they were part of a set just the same. “Do not welcome Papa into your head. You know better.”
Her brows were drawn, jaw set. This was the way she had looked at him when they were small, and he whispered on his sickbed that he was dying. He had said it only once, and she had hit him. Sometimes he could still feel the spot on his arm pulsing when she glared at him.
It hadn’t been the last time his sister would bruise him. She was a ruthless sparring opponent, always a move ahead, always at his back before he could follow. But when they were on the same side of a fight, they worked in effortless tandem, as though they were limbs of a shared mind. With the exception of Owen’s training sessions, Gerdie had never been in a fight that didn’t involve his sister; peril of any sort only seemed to find him when she was present.
Gerdie didn’t want to admit it—he was awful with emotions—but her solidarity made him feel better.
He looked past her shoulder, to the parade of brass instruments and carts of imported food being wheeled in through the gate. “We should go,” was all he said.
Though Wil was the one who climbed the stone wall a dozen times a day to escape her instructors, and was always the fastest of her siblings, today she could just barely keep up with her brother as they descended the outer wall, he was so eager to get away.
Gerdie watched her place one foot gingerly on the ground before the other. “It’s been two weeks,” he said. “Is that rib still hurting?”
“The mintlemint leaves have been helping.” She charged forward, brushing off his concern. “Come on. I heard some chatter in the Port Capital that there were some wanderers headed east of the river.”
“When did you go back to the Port Capital?” Gerdie asked, keeping pace beside her. “You made an enemy when you stole that tallim. You should be avoiding the city until at least next month, when the vendors leave with the exports.”
“I didn’t want to steal it,” Wil said. “I am not the one who chose to do things the hard way. Anyway, he’s probably forgotten all about me by now.”
“Didn’t you also set two of his slaves free?”
In the waning sunlight, Wil answered him with a wicked smile. Gerdie laughed, despite everything. “You just can’t resist causing trouble, can you?”
“I don’t cause it. It just . . . seems to find me.”
They trudged through nearly a mile of woods before they heard the sounds of distant song. Wil grabbed Gerdie’s arm, stilling him, ceasing the croak and groan of his braces.
“And with his touch of gold
Of gold!—
He was cursed with what his god foretold. . . .”
Lyrics they knew well; their mother often sang about the Gold King as she milled about, and it had been one of the many lullabies she’d used to soothe them to sleep as children.
“Sounds like they’re straight ahead,” Gerdie said.
The sky was going dark now, stars beginning to burn bright against it. Now would be the time that wanderers ceased their traveling and began to set up camp. The warm summer air already smelled of wood fire.
As they drew closer and the songs grew louder, Wil began to recognize their accents. Overwhelmingly Southern Arrod, but others with various Eastern inflections. And some Brayshire.
Wil drew the voices in like air. Her stomach fluttered in that sick, dreamy way, both painful and longing.
Wil’s mother had once upon a time wandered the world herself, with sand bejeweling the slender bones of her ankles. And even as a queen, she was wild in her billowing gowns, barefoot when she roamed the gardens, her fingertips callused, her skin bronzed by the sun. She kept secrets in her mouth like chocolates. With that mouth she had once smiled at a young king, and he swept her up and spun her in diamonds and made her his queen.
The princes gave little thought to the songs their mother hummed or who she had been before she was their mother. But Wil often felt that she was a wanderers’ daughter. That if the king of Arrod had not been the one to steal her mother’s heart, she would have been born out under the shimmering stars. She would have been lulled to sleep by the crackling of fire, atop a pillow of crisp grass and cool earth.
Gerdie caught her swooning and bumped her shoulder. “Maybe you should just run off with them.”
“You could come with me,” she replied. “I’ve seen the way you can alchemize glass and paperclips to look like diamonds and chains for Mother. I’m sure your skills would be quite profitable.” She elevated her chin, proud of her idea. “We could be rich.”
“We’re already rich.”
She narrowed her eyes. “All logic; no imagination. Can’t you just play along for once?” But they were laughing now, both of their moods lifting the way they always seemed to when they were free of the castle.
The wanderers had set up their camp about a half mile from any neighboring towns, but already the camp was thrumming with people who had come to be wooed by the mysterious things for sale in the glowing tents. Scarves spun from silkbug strands, smooth stones purportedly capable of healing afflictions of the body and mind.
Gerdie averted his eyes from the vendors of miracle cures, the good humor fading from his face. He clenched his jaw. “What is it?” Wil said. “Are your legs hurting again? Is it too damp?”
“No.” He snapped out of his thoughts. “I’m fine.”
She tugged him onward. “Come on, then. The perfumes have to be this way. I can smell them.”
They wove between dancing women and giggling, shrieking children. Some men were sitting cross-legged in a circle, whittling chunks of wood into toy trains and soldiers and stars.
Wil stopped before a caravan whose cracks and crevices were aglow with the light of the lantern inside. The tiny door swung open just as she’d raised her fist to knock.
A young woman stood before them, with honey-colored hair tied into a thick, burdening braid that rested on one shoulder and trailed past her waist. Her eyes were big and icy blue. Her fair skin was warmed by the lantern light. The smile she gave them was an embrace.
“I remember you from last year, wasn’t it?” she said to Wil, in her wispy Brayshire accent. “You bought all those bottles of jesseray.”
Wil felt warm at the idea that such a beautiful woman might remember her. “For my mother,” she said.
The woman stepped aside to let them in, her slender arm holding the door open as they ducked inside.
The caravan was small as a closet, and a silk cloth hung over the lantern, swathing the space in a pink glow. The walls were lined with shelves that housed hundreds of tiny glass bottles secured by leather straps.
In a corner was an elderly woman with silver hair pulled back into a tight bun, her eyes the same haunting blue as the young woman’s. She was hunched over a mortar and pestle, grinding petals and oils, trickling them into a jar.
Gerdie studied the bottles with wary curiosity. His eyes watered, and Wil could tell he was trying to hold back a coughing fit. The rabid cacophony of smells enchanted Wil, but they only aggravated Gerdie’s already-fragile lungs.
“You could wait outside,” Wil whispered. He shook his head.
“How many bottles did you want this time, lovely?” the girl asked.
Wil raised the flap of her rawhide bag. “Four should be enough. One for each season.”
The girl winked when the bottles and geldstuk exchanged hands. “Jesseray chooses whom it favors, you know. The scent changes when it touches the body,” she said. “I bet your mother is very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Wil said, mesmerized by the gleam of the bottles, the small music they made as they touched each other. She wrapped each one in cloth before tucking it away.
Not all of it was for her mother. Wil intended to keep one for herself, to spray it into the air sometimes and pretend she was someplace where wild jesseray blossoms grew in a smattering of colors.
Gerdie nudged her. It was just a subtle enough gesture to get her attention. She raised her eyes and realized that the old woman was staring at her. “I’ve seen you before,” she said. Her voice sounded surprisingly young.
“Yes, Gram, she’s come back for more of your perfume.”
“No.” With great difficulty, the old woman brought herself to her feet. She was scarcely taller than Wil, and when she leaned her face in close, Wil could smell the mint on her breath and skin. “When you were just a baby. Your mother brought you to me. She told me you were dying and she asked for my help.”
Gerdie grabbed Wil’s wrist. He tugged at her, but she was rooted there. “She did?”
“But you weren’t dying,” the old woman said. “You were marked, but not for death.”
“Wil,” Gerdie said. “Let’s go.”
Wil ignored him. “I was sick,” she said. “When I was born.”
“No.” The old woman shook her head. “You were never sick. It was far worse than that.”
All the smells and colors within the caravan suddenly took on a sinister persona.
“What was it?” Wil asked hoarsely.
“Darkness in your blood.” The old woman’s eyes flickered to Wil’s chest, right where her scar lay hidden beneath the green bibbing of her dress. “There’s something ugly in you. Something vicious.”
“Grandma,” the young woman cried, at the same time Gerdie pushed open the door.
“Enough.” The fury in Gerdie’s voice made Wil flinch. Stunned, she let him pull her back out into the sticky night air. “Can we go now?” he said, even as he was stomping to the outskirts of the camp, Wil following in a daze. “Do you have everything Papa wanted you to get?”
His biting tone only added to Wil’s unease. Unconsciously she brought her palm between her breasts, feeling oddly exposed. Had the woman known about her birthmark?
“She was a marveler,” Wil said, reasoning with herself. “She must have been.”
“Wil, listen to me.” Gerdie turned to her. “Marvelers are swindlers. Spells and curses are nonsense. Magic is a fairy tale. And Mother—she gives these things too much weight.” Sadness in his voice at that last bit.
Wil stopped walking. The distant light from the camp set up by the wanderers still shone halos on her boots.
“But she knew.” Her voice was small. “She knew about me.”
“No.” Gerdie’s voice was stern. “She didn’t. It’s a trick. They say these things to anyone who will listen. If you’d stuck around a moment longer, she would have tried to sell you some magical potion to fix this ‘darkness in your blood.’”
Wil rested her hand against her bag, feeling the bottles tucked safely away. Pieces of the world were contained in those bottles, diluted by drops of the sea. In the silence between breaths of wind, she could hear them whispering.
She couldn’t help believing in what so many people who wandered the world described, despite her brother’s logic. Despite her own logic.
No one knew for sure where the first marveler originated, but they existed the world over. They were especially prevalent in the West, where most travelers ventured, and in the East, the world’s hub of electrical technology. Wil had heard of some people turning to them in Arrod, out of desperation—when a sick child was beyond the capabilities of medicine, for instance. But many, like Gerdie, considered marvelry a junk science.
“We still have a few hours, at least, before the party lets up,” Gerdie said. He was trying to change the subject, but the placating softness of his tone irritated her.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m hungry anyway.” But she was lying. Her stomach was filled with perfumes and the old woman’s words. The distant songs and giggles and murmurs of the camp had climbed under her skin, raising gooseflesh. She wanted to fall back into it. She wanted to run off into the world with the troupe and never, never return.
She began pacing for the Port Capital, whose electric street lanterns were shining in the distance, combating the stars. There was a different kind of energy in the city. Maybe it would cleanse her of this dread and anticipation.
Without another word, they knew where to go.
There was a seasonal tavern that sat on the roof of what had once been an ancient church, but was now the Bank of the World. In the warmer seasons, when it was open, the tavern had the best view of the city and the water. Over the stone ledge, the clock still ticked and chimed the hour in unison with the towers.
When Wil was seven and Gerdie was eight, this place became a sort of sanctuary for them. After two years in the throes of his fever, Gerdie’s lungs had finally strengthened enough for the crisp outdoor air. He was still staggering and falling over his braces, and one afternoon, Owen had taken him here, Wil tagging protectively along as she always did back then. Owen had knelt before Gerdie and met his eyes. “There’s an elevator that will take you to the tavern,” he said. “And there’s a stairwell with five flights that leads to the same place. You pick how we get there.”
It had taken more than an hour, but he’d done it, shoving Wil off when she tried to steady him. The next time was easier. And soon he was following Wil up the stone wall, relying heavily on his core and his arms, memorizing the footholds that saved him if he fumbled.
The tower resembled all the other buildings in the city, but it was alive. It welcomed them.
They had a table by the edge, where the ticking thrummed in the stone floor. But tonight, even the salty sea breeze couldn’t clear the jesseray from Wil’s lungs.
There’s something ugly in you. Something vicious.
“Wil.”
From Gerdie’s tone, Wil knew that it was not his first attempt to get her attention. She blinked owlishly at him. “Hm?”
“You aren’t eating.”
She stared at the assortment of tiny fruit custards she’d ordered. “Guess I don’t have an appetite after all.”
“I don’t know what it is about people who wander the world that they get in your head like this,” he said. “Every time. You deal with crooks and cons by trade, and yet, because you want to join them, you hang on their every word.”
“People who wander aren’t necessarily cons,” Wil said.
“Everyone is a con,” Gerdie said.
Wil pointed her fork at him. “If everyone is a con, then nobody is.”
“You know what I mean.” Gerdie sighed. “Everyone is dishonest. We lie to our father. I don’t tell him about the paralytics and poisons I put in weapons. You listen to street gossip and spy for Owen.”
“That is different,” Wil said, and scraped a forkful of baked raspberries, which she popped into her mouth defiantly. “Everything we do is for the good of our kingdom. Papa would do too much harm if he knew how powerful your weapons truly were; he’d force you to mass-produce them in your cauldron, even if it killed you. He’s too greedy, and bloodshed means nothing to him. And Owen uses my information to secretly build up foreign relations for when he’s king.”
They talked in low voices, despite being surrounded by mostly empty tables. Everyone in the kingdom would know Owen by the sight of him; their father had been priming him to follow in his footsteps from the time Owen could crawl.
But no one in the kingdom would recognize the three spares: Baren, who at twenty-three years old had already failed to live up to the king’s hopes of making him his high guard, with his lack of combat skills and erratic temperament; Gerdie, who was only of any use to the king at his cauldron; and Wil, the daughter the king only regarded when he needed a spy. Rather than being seen, the spares were gossiped about.
“I just—” Gerdie frowned at her. “I worry about you.”
He didn’t have to finish the thought. Wil knew: he worried that she would become like their mother.
She bristled. “Where should we go next? We’ll have a few hours.”
“Let’s just go home,” Gerdie said. “Everyone will be in the ballroom. We can slip by in the shadows. I have work to get back to anyway.”
Wil rested her chin on the backs of her interlaced fingers. “I can’t wait to see these paralysis bullets you keep talking about.”
“Hope you never have to use one,” Gerdie said, but his eyes flashed to match his excited grin. “But I am rather proud of them.”
They descended the tower and wound their way through the crowd. The Port Capital was still thriving at this hour. Restaurants were turning on their electric lanterns, bars were opening, and along the city’s edge, boats were lit up with strings of party lights. Wil was mindful not to stare at them. Not with Gerdie already scrutinizing her wanderlust.
Gerdie was the one to stop them walking. The portrait studio—a small storefront wedged between a toy shop and a shoemaker—had strung a new set of photos in its window. They were small, square cuts of shining paper that glinted in the moonlight, pinned by wooden clips to a length of twine.
The photographs were sepia, the subjects in each of them smiling cautiously, as though they’d been afraid the camera might steal their happiness away if they showed too much.
“What do you suppose it’s like sitting for a photograph?” Wil asked.
“Tedious,” Gerdie said. “I’ve heard it takes several seconds, and if you so much as blink, you’ll ruin it.”
“I wish I could have one of the small ones that they put in lockets,” Wil said.
Gerdie looked away from the portraits to afford her a glance. “Of what?”
“Myself.” She puffed her chest. “So that when I’m old, I’ll remember what I used to look like.”
He laughed. “That is the most conceited thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
As they left the city behind them and headed into the thick of the trees, Wil forced her tone to be light. Maybe if she could convince her brother that she was no longer troubled by the old woman’s words, it would be true. “What do you suppose Owen’s bride will be like?”
She’d just gotten the words out, and in the next instant, an arm was wrapped against her throat, pinning her back against someone’s massive chest. Someone’s hot breath filled her ear, and the grasp tightened.
She dropped her weight, twisted right, and maneuvered her leg behind her assailant’s, knocking him down with a kick to the back of his knee. She moved to punch while he was down, but he was on his feet again before she could land the blow.
In the ribbons of moonlight that bled down through the trees, Wil saw him: a gleaming bald head, sharp ears, and a cluster of muscles. Fear poisoned her rush of adrenaline.
The tallim vendor.
He came at her again, swinging for her chest. She ducked, and the flare of pain in her ribs caused her to hitch. She just managed to stumble out of the way and see the man punch the open air.
Beside her, the click of a gun. Gerdie fired a shot, and even in the darkness, his aim was perfect. The bullet tore through the man’s upper arm. Gerdie always went for the arm. He didn’t want to kill him. Though he had shot to incapacitate more than once, he had never killed anyone.
“Go.” Wil shoved her brother toward a patch of darkness where the trees were thick. “He won’t see where the shots are coming from,” she said. But Gerdie knew what she meant—this was her fight, not his—and he stubbornly didn’t move. He wasn’t going to allow her to protect him.
He fired another shot, but he didn’t know this man the way Wil did. This man was a freak of nature. She grabbed her dagger and twisted the hilt, but before she could slash him, he’d landed a punch to her fractured rib. He knew exactly where she was vulnerable, must have felt it crack that day when they’d fought.
All the air went out of her. She staggered back and then she was down on one knee, still clutching the hilt and sucking loud, hoarse breaths that didn’t seem to fill her lungs. The pain filled her with the color red. Then blackness. Her head lolled.
A hand grabbed her by the wrist and ripped her to her feet. Gerdie. “Stay awake,” he commanded, pushing her against a slender tree. She clung to the trunk and made herself breathe. Her bag fell from her shoulder, and, somewhere miles and miles away, Wil heard the bottles of jesseray perfume clattering together through their cloths.
By now the man understood that he would have to do away with the boy if he wanted his revenge on the girl. He clutched Gerdie’s wrist in an iron grip and twisted, trying to wrest the gun from his hand. Gerdie was ready for it; he raised his arm and clutched the man’s wrist with his free hand, twisting his hips in an effort to break free.
The man’s grip only tightened. He moved for a punch to the face. Gerdie veered right, but he wasn’t quick enough and took the blow to his temple. He staggered, his grip on his gun never waning. He kicked his right leg—his strongest side—using his braces to lock it straight and land a blow to the man’s knee. That got him to slacken his grip. The full weight of bone and muscle and metal gave the kick a punishing force.
Before the man could come at Gerdie again, Wil swept low and slashed her dagger through the back of his calf, just above the line of his boot.
The man roared.
Gerdie stole the moment to fire another shot, this time to the man’s clavicle, eliciting a grunt and a line of blood. The man punched Gerdie in the chest, knocking him to the ground. He turned on Wil. His knee came at her stomach so hard that when she blinked, she was on her back and staring straight up at the stars.
She was beyond whatever pain wracked her body. All she could feel was her own trembling. A sour taste in her mouth and burning in her throat told her that she had momentarily been unconscious, vomited.
Then the stars were obstructed by the man’s silhouette.
“Think you can steal from me.” The words came through his teeth. Wil could see the shining white of them, and nothing else. Something was keeping her body from getting enough air. Something heavy pressed into her chest. A knee, she thought dazedly. When the man spoke again, all she heard was wind. Wind through trees. Wind filling her head, setting a flurry of gleaming insects in flight before her eyes.
And somewhere very, very far away, a gunshot. Her brother would be shooting to kill now, but with the man so close to her, she didn’t know if Gerdie could get a clear shot without risking her life too.
Feebly, she clutched at the man’s arms. She was trying to bring her hands to his face, to jam her thumbs in his eyes, but she didn’t have the strength.
If she could get her legs out from under him, she might still have a chance. But her legs were gone. Disappeared. And the rest of her was following.
The man was going to kill her, she realized. She was going to die for a tin of tallim and a thousand geldstuk. Such useless little things.
“Wil . . .” Her brother’s voice broke through the rushing wind for just a second. He sounded so frantic, like a hurricane was sucking him away.
Run, she wanted to say to him. Mother can’t lose us both.
Then—Wil’s eyes snapped open before she realized she’d closed them. The weight that had been killing her was gone—miraculously gone.
She gasped hungrily as air was granted passage back into her lungs. Realizing she was no longer under the man’s grasp, she kicked herself backward and away from him.
He was crawling in the grass, retching.
Had Gerdie shot him in the lung? It was her best guess. He must have been desperate enough to go for the kill, she thought, as her body began to rematerialize from its numbness.
Then she saw her brother sitting stunned a couple of yards away, breathing hard, as though he’d been thrown there and had the wind knocked out of him. The gun was still in his slack hand, and he exchanged a bewildered look with Wil.
He didn’t cause this.
Then what?
There was a crackling sound, like glass, and at first Wil thought she was hallucinating, that she was still not getting enough air, or that the feeble moonlight was playing tricks on her eyes. That was the only explanation when the vendor’s hands, clutching the ground, turned to ruby-red glass. He turned his head to her accusingly, as though she were responsible (was she responsible?), and then his eyes became red glass, and his fat tongue, and his lips, and his neck. Blood leaked between the fine cracks as his skin broke like splintering wood and turned to stone.
It seemed like an eternity before it was through. At last, he fell onto his back, glimmering like precious stone, and dead. Worse than dead. Beyond it. Something that had been living moments earlier was now a thing that could never have been alive at all.
Wil felt something biting into her hands, and looked down to see that the grass beneath her had hardened into slivers of emerald. She heard her ragged gasps, felt the drum of her heartbeat, and knew by these things that she wasn’t dreaming, or dead.
From east of the river, she could hear wanderers at their campfire singing about the cursed king with the golden touch.