THE ESTHERPETALS GAVE WIL A sleep that was mercifully free of dreams. She awoke with a sense that she had blinked and everything from the night before had just disappeared.
The mirror said otherwise. She sat at her dressing table and selected a pale pink lipstick to hide the cut on her bottom lip.
Covering the signs of battle was easy enough; she’d mastered that when her father first began sending her to the underground market, when she was ten. The king couldn’t trust his men to acquire his illegal imports—every man would turn on his king for a price—and the daughter who looked nothing like royalty was his greatest resource.
For the king, having children had been a matter of strategy; he might have had a dozen more, if Wil’s birth hadn’t nearly been the death of the queen. Children could be primed into soldiers, and their loyalty was more easily earned—or so the king believed. He kept his children well guarded, an act which may have been mistaken for love if one hadn’t met him. The guards, soldiers, and servants were well acquainted with the royal children, but most never left the castle proper, and those who did knew to keep all the castle’s secrets quiet under penalty of death.
When Wil turned ten, the king impatiently thrust her into the world to do his bidding. Owen had been with her, but they were outnumbered two to one when they discovered the imported metal merely plated, and things went sour. “Stay alert and be everywhere,” Owen had whispered, as they stood back-to-back, enemies closing them in. “Remember what I taught you.”
She hadn’t taken a single hit. Even so grossly outnumbered, Owen was too quick with his sword, and on his watch, no one touched her.
But by the time they made it back to the castle, an angry bruise was darkening his jaw.
“Here.” Wil had taken his hands and pulled him onto the cushioned stool at her dressing table. Copying what her mother had taught her, she dabbed concealer over the mark and patted it down with powder. They looked nothing alike, as features went, but their skin was the same color—fair, turned golden by sun.
Owen sat patiently for all this and smirked when Wil stood back to admire her handiwork. “Thanks, Monster.”
She’d been quite proud of herself, she remembered.
Now, she expertly traced the mark at her collarbone with concealer. She selected a brown dress with pink strings lacing the corseted waist, and capped sleeves with a ruffled trim that would cover the scrapes on her shoulder.
She even brushed her long hair and braided the top half of it into a dark crown around her head.
There. She looked the part of a princess again. Her mother would worry regardless—she was forever and brutally frightened that her children would be taken from her—but at least Wil wouldn’t give her cause.
But before she descended the stairs for breakfast, she stood before the mirror at her dressing table, considering.
Odd that she still looked the same, she thought. Slight, unassuming. No one would see this monstrous thing inside her. The horrible thing she had done the night before. She could almost believe it hadn’t happened.
She moved to the arched diamond-pane window and pushed it open. She reached out into the morning air and plucked an ivy leaf from one of the tendrils that grew along the stone. She held it in her palm.
There it sat, fleshy and green. She stroked it with her fingertip, curious. Nothing happened, and she began to wonder if last night had been a dream.
A noise in the hallway startled her. Baren’s muffled voice as he shouted at some hapless servant who had crossed him.
She looked to the doorway and her heart began to pound. If her second-eldest brother was looking for a war this morning, she would be his target. He held a special disdain for her in particular. He always had.
The sudden shift of weight in her hand drew her eyes back to the ivy leaf. Keeping rhythm with the increasing beat of her heart, it had turned to emerald.
Wil walked to the breakfast table with deliberate slowness that could be mistaken for grace. She conjured memories of those dreadful comportment lessons, during which she would fritter hours of her precious time on this earth pacing the ballroom with a stack of dusty books on her head.
Steady, she told her heart.
In the dining room, a window of stained glass reached to three stories high, painting the morning light in a myriad of colors. It was a fractured mural of the world, as though someone had shattered a map and glued together what pieces could be saved. Dirigibles and gas balloons drifted over broken islands, sparkling octagons and triangles of a green and blue and gold ocean. Towers with windows full of light stretched over distant cityscapes. Ships rocked and drifted between them, never reaching their destinations.
The window was one of the few things in the castle that wasn’t ancient. A wedding gift from the king to his queen. A piece of the world she so loved, a world she had chosen to leave behind when she fell in love with a young king and let him steal her away.
Beneath the window, at the far end of the dining table, the king and queen sat side by side, like porcelain figurines.
All three of Wil’s brothers were already seated, and from her father’s impatient expression, they had been waiting for her to join them. Trays of toast and waffles beside bowls of softened butter, peanut butter, jam, and chocolate sprinkles sat untouched on the table. The tea had already been poured.
With an apologetic curtsy to her parents, she took her seat. She afforded Gerdie a glance from across the table. Though his hair was arranged into shiny blond waves and he was dressed in a neat, pressed, buttonned shirt, she could see how tired he was, and she knew that he had spent much of the night in his lab on her account.
Wil turned her attention to her mother, whose blue eyes were beaming with excitement. She was looking at Owen. “So,” she said, as a trio of servants began laying covered dishes before them. “Now that we’re all together, tell us who you’ve chosen as your bride.”
“Ah—yes.” Owen’s voice drew everyone’s attention. His cheeks were flushed, and Wil felt something like happiness persisting in her muddled heart. He looked utterly smitten.
“Her name is Addney,” he said, slathering butter onto a slice of bread and then flattening sprinkles over it with the backside of his spoon.
“Oh yes, with those lovely dark eyes, and so tall,” the queen said. “Not a princess but from an affluent family in Cannolay. She’s quite a beauty, isn’t she? Think of the children you’ll have.”
“Mother, please. We aren’t quite there.”
“It’s a fine choice, and a wise one,” King Hein said, as though Owen had ever truly had a choice. Of all the girls at the party, of course he had chosen one from the Southern Isles, as their father had wanted. He would spend the rest of his life here, because he was heir, and his days of wandering the world were ending.
A servant leaned past Wil to lay a platter of fruit on the table, and Wil flinched from her. The queen cast her a curious glance.
Baren sat slouched in his chair, rolling some imaginary piece of lint between his thumb and middle finger. Wil saw the brief, stabbing glare he cast at Owen.
No one regarded him.
Baren had grown up in the shadow of Arrod’s heir. And though they resembled each other quite closely, he was not nearly so wise, or clever, or strong. When Gerdie and Wil were born, in rapid succession, Baren had expected them to take his place as the unwanted spares. Particularly Wil, the runt of a daughter at the end of a royal line, who had nearly killed the queen the day she was born.
Baren had been a terror for most of Wil’s life. Wil supposed their contention began on the day that she was born. Growing up in Owen’s shadow, Baren had never been a favorite of their father’s. And then came Wil—a girl. A girl who should have been spinning in dresses and curling her hair. She was the only thing, Baren had thought, more useless than himself. The only one he could overpower. And yet she had surpassed him.
“Wilhelmina.” The queen’s gentle voice broke Wil out of a trance she didn’t realize she’d fallen into.
“Yes, Mother?”
“You haven’t touched your breakfast. Are you feeling all right?”
“Oh.” She straightened her posture, forced a smile. “Yes. Sorry.” She picked up her fork, using it to slice the toast in half. Sprinkles scattered across her plate. “So, Owen, when do we get to meet this bride of yours?”
“A September wedding will be fitting,” the king answered.
“September is only next week,” the queen lamented, the only one who could ever get away with questioning his authority. “Are you certain that’s enough time?”
“I wish we had the luxury of time,” the king said. “The sooner the better. Owen agrees with me.”
Owen smiled. “Of course.”
But Wil knew her brother. He had peripatetic blood. He breathed the open sea like air. And he was going to give it up for a girl with whom he’d danced for just one night.
The conversation turned to wedding plans, and Wil was grateful when the meal was over. Before her instructors could find her, she slipped through the castle gates. She did this with such certainty and purpose that the guards gave her polite nods.
Still nursing her injured rib, she took her time walking to the nomad camp.
Only to find wheel tracks in the mud, and the lingering scent of old fires in the damp morning air.
Gone. Already.
Her heart sank.
The sky rumbled with distant thunder. Had the approaching storm forced them to move on?
There’s something ugly in you. Something vicious.
Wil stooped to brush her fingertips along the blades of grass. Her lashes fluttered and her vision sharpened, and she could taste the coming storm like coffee on her tongue. The world was at once frightening and fierce and so beautiful she couldn’t stand it.