Subduing the captain was easy. He was no fighter. Wil had him on his back in an instant, her knees locked around his waist, hands pinning his wrists at either side of his head.
He stared up at her in bewilderment. The edge of the glass pressed against his wrist. In one sweep, she could end him. She needed to end him.
The last thing she should have done was look into his eyes. But she had done it, and now she saw that he was young, probably her own age. He was breathing hard, filled with adrenaline. If her heart were working, all this would be easy for once. This boy would be dead and she would not have to spill his blood. She could blame it on her curse, rather than on herself.
They stared at each other. His hands flopped helplessly under her grasp.
Hells. She was a coward.
When she shoved him into the utility closet and barricaded the door with his own chair, the captain did not put up a fight. He had seen the monster inside of Wil, and he seemed grateful enough that the human in her won out just long enough to spare him.
Lights flashing, sirens crying at a dizzying volume, she made her way down the hall again. Espel’s cabin would be at the far end, near the staircase where it would be easiest to escape to the deck.
Would Espel be in her cabin, waiting for her assailant so that she could use the small space to her own advantage, or would she move to the deck and take her chances with her back to the open water?
All Wil could do was guess. She ran up the stairs. If Espel wasn’t here yet, she would be soon.
Masalee was on her the instant Wil reached the deck, taking her down with a sweep across her ankles, pinning her wrists. Before Masalee was able to straddle her waist, though, Wil drew her knees up and landed a hard kick to her torso.
Masalee was off her and Wil wasted no time rolling out of the way of the punch being swung at her.
Her body should have been filled with adrenaline, but that peculiar sluggishness persisted. She could feel her curse buried in her blood, trying to break free.
She staggered to her feet. Something sharp cut the tendon of her ankle and she screamed. The sound was stolen away by the sirens. She fell hard onto her back, hitting her head on the planks. There was a flash of white, then a weight on her chest. Masalee was on top of her, bits of loose hair spilling in rivers around her face as she leaned forward.
Bulbs lining the perimeter of the deck flickered and flared to life. The air was electric with marvelry. Masalee’s eyes were bright with it, and in them Wil saw the little girl who had bested even the princess of the Southern Isles in a battle to the death. She saw why Masalee wore the silver robe of Espel’s highest guard.
Masalee’s lips were pressed tight, and Wil’s heart drummed in response to their near-imperceptible straining.
It was her.
Masalee was the one controlling Wil’s heart and subduing her power. Her face glimmered with sweat. Heavy drops of it fell onto Wil’s cheeks and lips. Wil tried to draw up her knees and kick her away, but her muscles felt rubbery. Her lungs struggled to draw air. If Masalee had been controlling Wil’s heart when she was nearby, it had been a fraction of what she could truly do, and now she held every muscle and vein under her command.
Wil clenched her jaw and met the high guard’s stare.
“I knew that if I waited, you would give me a reason,” Masalee rasped. Her cheeks were flushed. She was alight with power.
As though on a gust of wind, all the lights went out. The sirens ceased. There was only the cold, unforgiving darkness of the sea.
Masalee was trying to slow Wil’s heart further, to render her unconscious.
Wil fought it. She found the unwanted current in her blood and pushed against it. Teeth gritted, she strained and gasped. But she was a body drowning in a riptide. Any motion she made to save herself only used up oxygen and strength. She felt herself beginning to sink.
“That’s enough.” Espel’s voice. And with that, Wil realized that Masalee had not been trying to subdue her. She had been killing her, squeezing her lungs and constricting her heart.
The pressure eased up just enough for Wil to draw in a gasp of air. She would not struggle, nor would she betray her frustration at being so easily controlled. She would not give Espel the satisfaction of having won.
Espel knelt beside her. The lights surrounding the deck flickered to a dim half-life, revealing the princess’s soft, pretty features. Masalee was all fury.
“Let go of her,” Espel told Masalee.
She had to say it twice more before Masalee seemed to hear. “Your Highness, I cannot. I will not leave you at the mercy of this—this thing.”
“You will,” Espel barked, her dulcet tone suddenly going low and sharp. “Or you will swim the rest of the way home.”
Masalee pressed hard into Wil’s wrists, her jaw tight, none of her rage at all quelled. And then she let go and stood, grabbing her bloody sword and wiping it clean on her robe before sheathing it.
Wil didn’t dare move; now was not the time to attempt another attack. She had just destroyed any chance of earning Espel’s trust in the hopes that she could kill her. It had backfired horribly, and she would need to formulate a better plan.
Espel and Masalee had a conversation in glances. It was a language only they spoke, and with a look of absolute disdain, Masalee dropped to her knees and began unrolling the fabric at Wil’s ankle.
Wil felt her skin fusing back together at Masalee’s light touch, the torn veins and tendons reconnecting. There was pain and then the tingling relief of fresh skin.
“There,” Espel said. Her voice was sweet again. It was eerie, Wil thought, how sincere Espel sounded. Not at all taunting. She held out a hand, and Wil took it.
Growing up in a castle of brothers, Wil was used to being the smallest person in a room. But Espel was smaller. She was short and solid with muscle. Silver tattoos gleamed against her skin, the lines appearing in glimpses as she moved against the ship’s light.
This was the reclusive only princess of the Southern Isles. One of the world’s few mysteries. In certain slants of light, she was a mirror image of her brother: the same heavy lashes, soft lips, round cheeks. But then she shifted just slightly and became a creature all her own, belonging to no one, having emerged into this world from some hidden springs from which no other living thing would be strong enough to survive. Her own mother hadn’t been strong enough.
“Find whatever guards are still living and tell them to bring me the collateral,” Espel told Masalee.
Masalee understood whatever this meant and she was gone in a swish of her silver robe. Even in her absence, Masalee protected Espel. The vise around Wil’s heart tightened.
Wil’s stomach clenched. She felt nauseous and dizzy from the strange current subduing her heart. Even as Masalee left her presence, it persisted. Wil had known Masalee was a marveler since the night she’d healed Zay’s torn skin. But she had not known she was so adept at hiding the full force of her strength.
Espel and her guard had that in common, Wil supposed.
A cry pierced the air. It was loud, and somehow more shrill than the alarms had been. Wil’s breath hitched. She knew that inconsolable cry, had listened to it nearly every night she’d spent on Loom’s ship.
A guard emerged from the staircase, holding Ada unceremoniously under his arm like a sack of grain. Even in the dim, Wil could see how red Ada’s face was, shiny with tears. He was crying for his mother, who was being dragged up the stairs by Masalee, just out of the reach of his flailing, open hands.
Zay watched her son, her mouth pressed tightly shut, her chest heaving. It was a silent, palpable rage. There was a dagger to her throat keeping her in place, but it appeared that her heart, too, was in a vise.
Wil betrayed nothing. She was trying to summon her heart to beat faster through her sluggish blood. She wanted to kill Espel; she wanted the last of her blood to leak out between fragments of crystal. She wanted to kill every guard on this ship.
The silent man
held Ada under the arms and hoisted him over the water, as if to throw him in.
Zay turned into something wild. Somehow she had managed to throw the dagger from Masalee’s hands, and now she struggled, willing to tear her arms away from her body to free herself from Masalee’s grasp.
Ada was whimpering in Lavean and reaching for his mother. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t come for him.
This was a negotiation tactic. Wil knew this.
But no terms came. Espel gave the command with a curt nod, and the guard threw Ada overboard.
Wil heard his body hit the sea. The water was black and frigid, and it swallowed him immediately.
Zay screamed. And then she came undone, crying out words that Wil did not allow herself to listen to. Ada was the only thing in the world that could break her, and Espel knew that. But Espel did not know how to break Wil, and Wil would never show her.
“My father will meet with you,” Espel told Wil, raising her voice to be heard over Zay’s hysterics. “And you will make the journey without killing any more of my guards.”
In the time it had taken for Ada to fall, Wil thought of her brothers and of her parents and of Arrod itself. She thought of Addney, and the child in her womb who would rule over all of it. Cooperating with King Zinil would give him the power to destroy them, just as easily as a boy in a hungry sea.
She would never betray her family. But Espel was not the only one who knew how to deceive, and so when Espel said “Do we have an understanding?” Wil said “Yes.”
Espel’s expression didn’t change. She nodded to the guard holding Zay, and he let her go. Zay charged for the railing and bounded over it in a blur.
Wil held her breath until she heard the splash of bodies surfacing in the water, and Ada’s cries once again filled the night, loud enough to stir all the souls in the Ancient Sea.
She didn’t let her relief show. She wouldn’t give Espel that.
“We don’t have to be enemies,” Espel said, taking Wil’s hands in both of hers. The gesture was a cruel mockery of friendship. “We can be allies. You’re more powerful than you know, Wil Heidle. We can save the world.”
At that, Wil felt hope for the first time since her capture. She would never have Espel’s trust, but she had something more valuable. She had her respect.
Fourteen
THE DREAM BEGAN IN WIL’S chamber. Only it was not her chamber. Rather than white lace, the canopy was wrapped by little stars cut from bits of metal, strung together with twine. The entire room was pretty in that way: lacking frills, but displaying a talent for turning broken things into beautiful ones. There was a model of a windmill on the wall where Wil’s grandfather clock would one day stand. Its rusted blades were painted a light blue, and they turned, moaning a song as a night breeze came through the open window.
Aleen knelt beside the bed, easing a loose stone from the wall. Once it had come away, she folded the portrait of herself and hid it under the stone.
She wasn’t only hiding the portrait from her parents, but also from Hein himself, who had a tendency to create beautiful things, later decide they were not beautiful, and destroy them.
All she had wanted from him for her sixteenth birthday was a portrait. A forbidden likeness of herself. She often coveted the portraits drawn by artists in the Port Capital and wondered what it would be like to see her own face sketched from nothing but charcoal and paper. Her brother had done a beautiful job, and she hated to hide the drawing, but it would never survive otherwise.
Down the hall, something crashed, hard. The windmill creaked again, as though in warning.
The world broke into a riot of shards. Fragments of screams through darkness between trees.
Wil saw the silhouette of a woman moving into the arms of a man. She heard their eager lovemaking while her vision swam with bits of sunlight reflected from a metal wind chime in a window. She heard a heartbeat drumming in a womb.
And then she saw Aleen standing in her blue nightgown in the grass beneath the moon. She was beyond the castle walls, and something lurked in the dark forest ahead of her. The same something that had lurked behind the door in last night’s dream. Aleen should have run, but she didn’t seem to know this. She took one step toward the darkness, and above her, the moon disappeared.
Wil came awake, once again tasting the blood the old woman had thrown at her.
Her heart was pounding.
She sat up with a hand to her chest. Adrenaline surged through her, hot and wild and familiar. There was a tray beside her door. Wil crawled to it and lifted the silver cover. There was a luxurious Lavean breakfast of rice and pheasant, drizzled with jasmine. Beside that, a crystal tureen filled with wildflowers whose roots still clung to them. Masalee must have deduced that controlling Wil’s curse for too long was detrimental to Wil’s strength, and for whatever purpose, Espel wanted Wil to remain strong.
The flowers crystallized in bursts of emerald and ruby, and just enough gold to betray her thoughts of Loom. Creating gold did not hurt as it once had, which Wil found to be a cruel sort of irony, because loving him felt more painful than ever.
Still, she refused to let that love render her useless. She ate her entire meal, showered, and dressed in a pair of gold satin trousers and a matching tunic. And then she sat on the bed and plotted the possible ways to murder the Southern king and his daughter.
All the plans fell apart, thwarted by some consideration or other. Once her anger had subsided, she realized that it was not her right to kill them. It was not her battle to fight. That honor belonged to Loom.
Loom, who was trapped somewhere on this ship, hating her. She couldn’t feel his nearness; he had hidden himself from her. Killed her off in his cursed heart.
It was for the best, she told herself. This lie they’d shared for all these weeks could never have lasted. Even their love itself had been a lie, an illusion of their curses. Wil knew that in her mind, and one day, if she worked hard enough, she would know it in her heart as well.
She did not owe Loom her heart anyway. She owed him her alliance, and nothing would change that. She would make sure that once he had claimed the throne, the North and the South became allies and this war came to an end. In that way, he would always have her.
There was plenty of time to plot and to scheme and to rebuke the idea of love. No one came to Wil’s cabin for hours. Sometimes she thought she could hear Ada crying. Not the keening wail of peril, but the discontented mewling of a child who only wanted his mother.
This, too, was Wil’s fault.
It surprised her to realize that the thought of Zay’s certain and justifiable hatred toward her brought its own pain. By now, Zay was surely just as lost to her as Loom was.
The door to her cabin opened, mercifully pulling her out of her thoughts. Her heart began to slow, and when she looked up, there was Espel in the doorway, bearing a tray in her hands and a leather satchel over her shoulder.
Espel closed the door behind her, entombing them both in the small space. But Masalee was nearby. Wil could sense her.
Espel deposited the leather satchel on the bed beside Wil. “I wanted to return some of the things you left behind at the palace.”
Wil lifted the flap. Waiting inside were her guns and dagger and sheaths and her steel gloves, all bunched together. The data goggles rested atop everything like eyes staring up at her, welcoming her back into her world of familiar things.
She was glad to see them, though they felt like relics from another lifetime now.
Espel nodded to the data goggles. “Do you know how those work?”
“They’re powered by sunlight,” Wil said.
“Sunlight, yes,” Espel said. “But in order for the data to be correct, it’s updated constantly. There are checkpoints all over the world, in the posts that generate electricity. The data refreshes itself and leaves a history of all the places you’ve been. It stores the things you’ve looked at and read about.”
Owen had told her this, W
il remembered.
“My brother has told you how soulless I am, I’m sure,” Espel said. Loom had never called Espel soulless, but Espel had labored to present herself that way. “But did he ever tell you how much I love electrical things?” Espel went on. “Telephones and lanterns. I love taking things apart and finding what makes them work.” She nodded toward the goggles. “I took those apart, too. It was like climbing behind your eyes and looking at all the things you’d seen. I couldn’t see images, of course, but I could read the data.”
Wil gripped the leather strap of her goggles, but she didn’t know why. Espel wasn’t going to steal them. She’d already gotten whatever she’d wanted from them.
“In the data I saw fascinating things, Wil. I saw flowers that grow wild and still bloom in the Northern winters. A trove of illegal powders and potions. I saw the royal garden tended by the Northern queen. Heidle family documents. Documents signed by the king.”
So many of those things had belonged to Owen. They had been his goggles, before she took them the way that she had always taken things from him. And he should have been the one standing here now, defending his kingdom. Protecting its secrets. But it was only her.
“That’s how you found out about me,” Wil said. She was numb to it now. She had been so careful to hide her past, but it hadn’t been enough.
“From the first time I laid eyes on you, I saw a girl made of secrets,” Espel said. “Even now, I’m sure I don’t know the half of them.”
She didn’t know about Addney. Wil took some comfort in that, at least. Wil had spent all day calculating her moves. Fighting Espel with brute strength hadn’t worked. Earning her friendship may well have been impossible. And trust? Espel was far too smart for that. But Wil had her respect. And with her identity as the Northern princess revealed, she could create some measure of solidarity.
“What’s going to happen to Loom once we reach the Southern Isles?” Wil said, careful to keep her tone dispassionate. No emotion, only logic. “He can’t set foot in the palace without dying.”
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