The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  “I love you,” she told him, for the very first and the very last time. She never would have said such a thing if he were awake. He might have said it back, and she did not want him to love her. Everyone who loved her was cursed.

  Her mind felt too full, spinning and buzzing and reminding her of all her worries. She had to get out of this castle. She had to find a way to the woman in the cavern and seek answers. There was no promise that this woman would be willing to help her, but Wil had to try. As far as she knew, the old woman was the only marveler in the kingdom besides Baren; who else was there to ask about a curse?

  Besides, if she busied herself, Loom would not seem so far away. Thoughts of her father’s death and what had happened to him would not make her feel so powerless.

  She moved through the castle, silent and keeping to the shadows—there was a wealth of those now, with no sconces lit on the walls, and no servants moving about with electric lanterns in hand. It was late morning, and this once would have meant noise and life.

  Wil wore her dagger and guns sheathed to her hips and thigh, anticipating Baren’s next attack. But no attack came. Perhaps her mother had managed to calm him, if such a thing were possible.

  She reached the oval garden’s partially frozen fountain when a retching sound stopped her. It had come from somewhere behind the rosebush.

  It happened a second time, more violent than the first, and ended with a pained splutter of vomit hitting grass.

  The figure spat into the dirt before shuffling out into the clearing. Bright winter moonlight in its cloudless sky lit the figure’s face.

  “Addney?” Wil whispered.

  Even ill as she looked, Owen’s bride was beautiful, swathed in a fur-lined suede coat. Her dark eyes were glassy with tears. Her hair lay over one shoulder, longer than Wil remembered, and her brown skin was awash with sweat, her cheeks flushed.

  Addney lowered herself wearily onto the bench. “So it’s true, then,” she said, expressionless. “You’re alive.”

  Wil took a step back. “I—”

  “All I wished to know, when I heard the news, was if you had returned alone.” Addney stared through the fountain.

  “If you’re sick, we ought to get you inside,” Wil said, steeling herself against Addney’s words. Again, she had taken Owen away from his wife. “This weather can’t be good for you.” It was Addney’s first Northern winter, which would be a shock for her, given the South’s perpetual summer climate.

  Addney shook her head. “There are servants in the house. King Baren insists. He thinks I’m too stupid to know that they’re spies.”

  The house. Addney was living alone in the house that had been built for Owen.

  Wil sat on the bench beside Addney, maintaining a careful distance. “Let me do something,” she said. Addney wouldn’t know how much Wil meant those words, how much she wanted to fix. “Can I bring you anything? Some water, or I could start a fire. I’m quite good at—”

  “It will pass,” Addney said. “The worst of it is gone by noon.”

  The world stilled around them. Wil heard her own raspy whisper, the words coming out as she understood. “You’re pregnant.”

  Addney closed her eyes in a grimace, warding off another wave of nausea. “The queen has wisely advised me to conceal it from the king, a task which will be difficult in months to come—even for someone as dim as he is.” She cast Wil a withering stare. “If I may speak so frankly about your brother.”

  “Does anyone know about this, besides my mother?” Wil asked.

  “Gerhard,” Addney said. “The first morning I was ill, he heard me and brought a cup of hot water with lemon to settle my stomach. He was . . . very kind. It was the first time I felt any sense of belonging to this place since Owen’s death.”

  Owen’s death. Addney said the words, trying to make them sound as though they didn’t tear her world in two. Wil felt a sense of longing to be in Addney’s presence. Here was the woman her brother had loved, and even if Owen was no longer here, his love for her still was. Addney wore that love the way she wore the moonlight on her skin.

  Wil reached a gloved hand and laid it on Addney’s knee, with great caution.

  To her surprise, Addney gripped it. Her eyes were focused on the stone wall that bordered the castle, barely visible through the brush. “You were trying to get out there, weren’t you? But you won’t be able to with the king’s guards.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” Wil said.

  “I don’t know what King Baren has done with your father’s guards,” Addney said. “They vanished. I can’t imagine how he would have killed so many guards and servants so quickly and without a trace, but I suspect whatever he has done with them is worse.”

  Baren. He might kill them all if he had a mind to, Wil thought. Now that he was king, he could do this without consequence.

  But Addney was carrying the rightful heir to the kingdom. In just a few months’ time, Owen’s child would steal the throne away from Baren, who would never relinquish it.

  “You have to leave this place,” Wil said. “Once Baren finds out—”

  “I have tried.” Addney’s voice was fierce. “The guards have orders to kill anyone who tries to leave or enter that wall.”

  “That’s what they’ll have you think,” Wil said. “But I know how to get around them.”

  Addney’s words, though, turned out not to be an exaggeration.

  Wil scaled the stone wall and heard the click of several guns before she’d so much as pulled himself up onto the ledge. She looked down at the unfamiliar faces several yards below. Her father’s guards had rarely caught her sneaking out against the king’s wishes, but when they did, they wouldn’t have dared train their weapons on her. Her father had men beheaded for smaller offenses.

  But these were not her father’s guards.

  She swung one leg and then the other over the outer side of the wall, letting them dangle as she sat. Beyond the guards, she could see the thick trees that stretched on for miles. Dead and dying with winter, they still clung to enough foliage to conceal her if she were to run. And beyond those trees, the ocean. And beyond that ocean, Loom.

  Suddenly the guards seemed inconsequential. Just a row of men and guns and swords. They couldn’t trap her here.

  She pushed forward and began her descent.

  Eight

  THE FIRST BULLET HIT THE wall and ricocheted back, searing the stone. Wil didn’t stop moving. A fast enough target was not a target at all. She was in flight, her body finding footholds faster than she could think to command it. She and this wall were old friends; they knew the shape of each other.

  Two-thirds of the way down, a bullet shot past her head, burning her cheek with its heat. She felt another bite at the heel of her boot.

  She jumped, and the world became a blur of branches and snow and steel. The ground came up fast and she braced her arms, tumbling into a somersault and gaining forward momentum. She came up running. Behind her there was shouting, and she thought she could hear Addney.

  The bullets did not follow her into the woods. The commands being called out were far, far away. Baren had authorized his guards to kill on sight, but he had not authorized them to leave their posts.

  It wouldn’t be long before Baren found out what had happened. Soon there would be soldiers combing every foot of this place, and if they found her, not even the queen would be able to save her this time. Not when Baren had already made the decision to kill her, and there was no one in this kingdom to stop him.

  It didn’t matter, Wil told herself. In the grand expanse of sky and sea and land that stood between her and Loom, Baren was nothing. He was smaller than his guards had seemed when Wil sat high atop the wall. He was smaller than their bullets. Smaller than a winter bird up in the cloudy Arrod sky.

  Mud from the morning’s rain coated her hands and knees. This had been the thing to save her landing, Wil realized. She had a frenzied memory of sliding through it before pushing to her
feet. That momentum carried her until the castle was long out of sight, and then she doubled to catch her breath.

  Her vision swam. Her heart stabbed at her ribs.

  Focus, she reminded herself. You aren’t trapped by your body. You are wind. You are everywhere.

  She made her way toward the abandoned train tunnel, moving at a slower clip, forcing herself to keep a less punishing pace. Gerdie was right; she was no use to anyone if she collapsed from exhaustion.

  When she arrived at the tunnel, it seemed far less menacing in the daylight. The sun was stealing through breaks in the clouds, giving a somber but crisp light to the world.

  She walked several yards into the cavern, stopping where the daylight no longer touched the ground. Here, her blood turned cold. The hair at the back of her neck rose. Her skin prickled.

  The air held a different current here. “I know you’re here, whoever you are,” Wil said. “I’m not going to leave, so you may as well come out.”

  The next gust of wind pushed into the tunnel, filling Wil’s clothes, her hair, her throat with bitter winter cold. It set the branches and the leaves whispering, and the snow scurrying about in a panic.

  The figure of an old woman emerged from the shadows of the cavern, towering over Wil. Her hair was visible first—long, thin wisps of gold that trailed halfway to the ground. And then her eyes, searingly bright and blue.

  The wind stole into the tunnel, startling the leaves and causing them to swirl at the old woman’s boots.

  Wil had come to learn that marvelers carried an energy about them. It was subdued when they had a mind to hide it, but other times it was certain as the sound of breathing. This energy now was much like the energy Pahn had emitted when he healed Loom. A low, steady, keening little pitch that one would miss if one didn’t know to listen for it.

  The old woman was staring at her, and for a moment there was astonishment in her eyes. And then—nothing. Her face turned heavy lidded and impassive. “The princess who rose from the dead has come to see me,” she said.

  Wil might have felt fear a day ago, but the adrenaline from her escape was still coursing through her. She kept her posture steady, her expression neutral, the same way she would when dealing with vendors in the underground marketplace of the Port Capital. “You know that I’m alive,” she said.

  “Yes,” the old woman said. “You smell like a living thing. No limbs tearing from their sockets. Eyes aren’t decaying.”

  The woman reached forward and touched Wil’s chin as though to inspect her. Her eyes changed immediately, flashing bright. It was an oddly gentle touch that reminded Wil of the way her mother had stroked her forehead when singing her to sleep. “You are certainly alive,” the old woman said, “but not for much longer.”

  The words might have made Wil fearful if she’d had time for such a thing. Instead, she felt anxious. Loom returned to her thoughts with more clarity than this dreary cavern or the mud that caked between her fingers. She wasn’t going to die. She was going to return to him.

  “It’s a birth curse,” Wil said, her voice steady.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” the old woman said. “Not with your family.”

  “My family?” Wil echoed hollowly. “What do you know about my family?” Her father had been known throughout the kingdom, as had Owen. From Port Capital gossip, Wil knew her father’s decisions were not always popular ones, whereas Owen fulfilled his role as a lovable figurehead who could quell any tensions with his easy nature. But the rest of her family had been a deliberate enigma. Wil, her brothers, even the queen were the subjects of fabrications and rumors at best. The world knew nothing about any of them.

  But this woman, this stranger, had the air of one who knew things the rest of the world did not. Wil began to worry over what Baren might have told her, and for what purpose.

  The old woman leaned closer. Her breath was sweet and hot on Wil’s skin. “Does blood ooze from the mortar between all those ancient stones? Do dead things whisper to you royals as you sleep?”

  It took all Wil’s resistance not to move away. “Of course not,” she said. “Dead things don’t come back.”

  “You did,” the old woman said.

  “I wasn’t dead.” Wil’s adrenaline was waning. She felt tired, defeated. The distance between her castle and Pahn’s cabin, which had seemed possible and clear moments earlier, now felt a lifetime away.

  She didn’t allow herself to give in to her sudden exhaustion. She didn’t trust that it wasn’t an illusion. This woman was a marveler, and marvelers were never to be trusted, Loom had said.

  “You will die before this week is through,” the old woman said. She released Wil’s chin and canted her head to assess her. “Your heart will be the first to go. But not entirely. It will beat just enough to keep you alive. The lungs will be last. There will be just enough oxygen in your brain for you to feel every moment of yourself dying.”

  Marvelers lie, Wil reminded herself. But it didn’t feel like a lie. The world had already begun to go dull around her. Her fingers had been numb since she’d awoken from her fitful sleep, and that numbness was spreading like snake venom up her arms and toward her heart.

  “Death isn’t my only option,” Wil said. “You’re going to propose some solution.”

  “Leaving the kingdom would be a solution,” the old woman said. “In a kingdom that isn’t cursed, your strength will return. But you won’t leave. You’re rooted here. The real question is why.”

  “Because I don’t have what I’ve come for,” Wil said. She rubbed her muddy hands against her trousers, trying to clear the caked dirt from her skin before she reached for the paper in her pocket.

  Wil unfolded the portrait and held it up. She tried to conjure up some sort of explanation for why she had come here, some rational plea that this bit of paper and charcoal meant something to her, and that she was coming to a marveler to help her sort it out.

  But when Wil saw the change in the old woman’s face, she stopped herself.

  The old woman held up a hand as though she meant to take the paper from Wil’s grasp. Instead, she lowered her arm to her side once more and said, “Where did you get this?” Her voice was hoarse.

  It was the first genuine reaction this old woman had shown to Wil’s presence, and Wil scrutinized it. That look in the old woman’s eyes—this portrait meant something to her. This bit of paper with the image of a girl who looked like Wil had caught her off guard, though Wil herself had not. Perhaps she would not have to bargain with the old woman. Perhaps the old woman would be the one to bargain with her.

  Wil folded the paper and returned it to her pocket. The air shifted around her, making the skin of her arms swell with gooseflesh under her sleeves. “It bled out from the walls of my castle,” she said.

  They stared at each other for a long moment, Wil and this strange old woman who spoke with Northern Arrod’s distinct accent and yet did not seem to belong to this kingdom at all. Did not seem to belong anywhere.

  “What do you plan to do with that portrait?” the old woman said.

  “I intend to burn it,” Wil lied. She had always been a smooth liar, and even in her waning state, her ability to haggle with seedy vendors was as strong as ever. And a vendor was all this marveler was; like everyone, she had a price. “My brother says that if you burn a portrait, the spirit of the subject will come to you in a dream. The girl in this portrait has the answer to my question, and as I see it, that’s the only way to ask her.”

  The old woman lunged for Wil so fast that Wil barely dodged the blow. The woman was screaming now—a low, animal howl that shot through the air like a blade. She grabbed for Wil’s neck, and Wil dodged. But even with the old woman standing more than a yard away, Wil felt the air getting thinner. Her throat felt tight, as though someone had pulled a rope tight around it. She took in a feeble, whistled breath before the air was stolen from her entirely.

  Dully she was aware of the old woman hovering behind her as she clawed at the
cavern wall, staggering, trying to reach the oval of light that marked the entrance.

  “I told him to kill you because you need to die,” the old woman hissed. “You, and your entire family. This curse needs to die with all of you.”

  Wil’s legs gave way. Even when she hit the ground, she struggled. Her lungs burned. Her body bucked and twisted, begging her to breathe. She reached for the dagger at her thigh. She didn’t know what she would do with it—the old woman was out of reach. She was miles away.

  But the darkness was flooding her vision and her fingers were heavy and slack. She couldn’t hold on to her life, much less anything else.

  From far away, she felt the old woman reaching into the pocket of her tunic to retrieve the portrait.

  A surge of strength came through Wil then. Just a last bit as it made its way out of her body forever. She grasped her dagger and sliced upward, digging into flesh.

  Air flooded back into her throat, stolen by her lungs in a painful, stabbing gasp that made her convulse. She crawled backward, coughing, moving all her limbs to shake feeling back into her muscles.

  The old woman didn’t make a sound. She couldn’t. Not with the bleeding gash Wil had torn across her throat.

  Wil didn’t stay to watch the old woman die. She ran the entire way back to the castle, her heart stabbing at her with every step.

  She doubled to catch her breath when the castle was in sight. The world spun and tilted. Her breaths were ragged and loud.

  The old woman may have been deceitful, but what she’d said about Wil dying if she stayed in this kingdom was true. Wil pressed her forehead against the trunk of a massive oak tree before her, trying to get her bearings. “Turn to stone,” she whispered. “Please, please just turn.”

  A hand tightened around her wrist, yanking her to attention.

  When Wil raised her head, she saw Baren standing before her. His eyes were dark and frantic, his mouth puckered. He looked like he had when he was younger and on the verge of tears. Wil had never seen her second-eldest brother cry, but she had seen him fight the urge away many times.