Somewhere in all of this, Loom was using one of Masalee’s daggers to cut scraps from Masalee’s robe and then setting them aside to use as bandages.
“Do you have any saline?” Loom asked. Espel blinked at him, her mind processing the words several seconds after she heard them. Saline. Of course, to irrigate the wound and stave off infection.
Do not panic, she reminded herself as she drew the vial from her belt.
Loom moved deftly, pouring the solution over the gaping hole in Masalee’s chest, carefully tracing it so that the liquid dribbled back out of the wound, flushing it clean.
It wasn’t just about stopping the bleeding. Holes could be patched, but infection was the lethal part.
Espel knew all this. But still, she watched on, useless as her brother plastered wayleaves over the dampness. Espel could smell the tang of blood and the burning menthol of the plant, and she felt sick. This was not merely blood; this was the shreds of the girl she loved. This was death, hovering over their heads with fingers outstretched to steal her away.
“I need your thread,” Loom told her. He would have been carrying his own, had she not stripped him of all his weapons and vials and tools when she took him captive. They were always prepared, both of them, for anything. But even as Espel did as he instructed, and even though Masalee was not the only dying body to ever lie before her, she felt unprepared for this. Her father had struck Masalee out of revenge; she broke his heart with her betrayal, and so he in turn broke hers. How had he known? She had been so careful to hide her heart. She had been everything he had demanded. Cold. Solitary. Ferocious and cruel. She had disowned her brother, frightened her tutors, frightened herself. And still he had found it. The one thing that she wanted for herself. The one person in this world to look at her and see a girl, not a monster.
Espel cleaned the drying blood and Loom pierced Masalee’s skin with his needle and thread, pulling it taut. Somehow they had come to an unspoken understanding that he should be the one tasked with this. The needle pierced the spot on Masalee’s chest where Espel had so often laid her head.
Masalee’s breathing was labored and quick; her brows knotted and she began to struggle for consciousness, but she settled when Espel poured a careful measure of sleep serum into her mouth.
Loom worked at stitching the wound and Espel could hear it each time the needle punctured Masalee’s skin.
Blood, Espel had seen. She knew the smell of it, the way it hid itself in her hair and under her nails so that the bathwater bloomed with red clouds.
As a child she had trained herself not to be bothered by it. But she saw Masalee in every bit of it now. She saw the smiles that went from soft to wicked when they were alone. She saw her hands, callused and small and strong, grasping the hilt of her sword when she assessed a room. She saw something precious being spilled.
When the most gruesome of it was through, Loom gingerly wiped the wound clean.
Masalee’s chest was still rising and falling.
Espel felt as though a piece of herself had just been repaired as well. Something broken that had been bleeding for years.
She looked at her brother.
“We should get her belowdecks,” Loom said with trepidation, and it occurred to Espel that he was asking for her permission.
She stared at him. His face was solemn and eager. Masalee’s blood was smeared across his arms.
Espel nodded her assent, and Loom gathered Masalee up. He was so gentle with her, taking care to tuck her head against his chest, covering her exposed skin with the shreds of her robe.
Neither of them spoke as they made their way to Espel’s bunk. Espel drew back the blankets, and Loom set Masalee down. Her body was limp and heavy; Espel had never seen her this way. The girl she knew was all muscle, always rigid unless they were alone, ready to strike. Even her lips—soft and small—were always in a tight line. She could hear the flutter of a bird’s wing from across the garden, could reach into the sea and catch a fish with precision. She was always grasping at a sword hilt. She was tall and proud and strong. She was everything that mattered.
“When you change her clothes, try not to lift her too much,” Loom said, pulling Espel out of her thoughts. “Those stitches pull easily.”
“I know,” she snapped, her habitual edge returning before she could stop it.
“She might take a fever,” Loom went on with patience. “I’ll bring you some lyster just in case.”
Masalee’s fingers were knotted in Espel’s, and Espel wondered when this had happened. She had never dared to let her brother see that she was capable of caring for anyone; it was the same as admitting that she had cared for many people, for many things, all her life. For her mother and her kingdom and for him. For the children they’d been forced to kill on that sweltering afternoon Masalee became her guard, and the bodies lost in the darklead explosion. It was too much, and she forced it out of her mind. She focused on the girl who lay before her.
Sweat beaded Masalee’s skin. Her lips and lashes twitched. The night would yield no promises—Espel knew that—but Masalee could make fire from stone. She could control hearts and still an ocean current. And she could fight her way to morning.
Loom moved for the door and Espel caught his wrist. Both of them were bloody and wan. She could feel how frail his curse had made him; she could feel how much the palace had slowly drained him of his vigor, even from here. And she could sense his confusion that she had gone through all this trouble to help him, the brother she had disowned all those months ago. The brother she had never shown even a drop of kindness.
“Why did you help her?” Espel asked. Her voice was hoarse and stripped of all its pretense.
“Because I understand,” he said. “Our father tried to take away someone I love, too.”
He gave her a small smile, as though their startling loyalty to each other was the most natural thing in the world. As though it had always been there. Maybe—Espel considered—it had.
With that, it felt as though the world was being set back on its axis again.
Loom left the lyster plant on the bedside table with a bowl of water, and he didn’t linger.
Once he had gone, Espel rested her head on the pillow and kissed Masalee’s feverish temple. It was a hard kiss. A steady one that Masalee would feel even in the grave of her darkest dreams.
They were children when they met, both of them gasping in the summer heat, drenched in sweat. Bodies were strewn around them. Lives that Espel and her brother had been forced to take. The blood of an orphaned boy was splattered across Espel’s face and she could feel the weight of it on her lips.
She had been tired, and she had marveled that she still had the strength to maintain her stance, because her insides felt shaky and weak.
Masalee was battered by exhaustion, filthy, her hair a tangled mess. But she did not look frightened. She lunged forward with a scream unlike anything Espel had ever heard—even in combat.
They were fighting for their lives, both of them, and somehow Masalee gained the upper hand. Whether she wanted to live or was merely unwilling to lose, Espel couldn’t tell. She still didn’t know, even now.
She remembered being pinned on her back, stunned by the strength of this untrained orphan who looked as though she hadn’t eaten for weeks. She felt every bit of her fire, her anger, her hatred. Espel realized in that moment that she was not alone in feeling these things.
She could have outmaneuvered Masalee. She could have twisted and rolled on top of her and strangled her. But she didn’t. She wanted this girl to be the one who lived, because this girl was the only one to understand her.
If Masalee were to leave this world, there would be no one left to believe that there was any good in her, the wicked girl who killed her own mother on her way out. She would be nothing but a girl fighting for her life until the day she died, the taste of blood on her lips.
Eighteen
EXHAUSTION HAD NOT STOLEN ZAY’S ferocity. There was grit even to he
r sadness.
Wil sat by the control panel while Zay paced the length of the room. After a sizable tantrum, Ada had finally fallen asleep slumped against his mother’s chest. Now, Zay was the one in need of comfort. She kissed his hair and bounced him gently as she moved.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Zay said, after Wil had finished the story. “Killing Espel would have been too merciful for him. He wanted her to suffer.”
“Did you know?” Wil asked. “That she’s in love with her guard?”
“I’d assumed she had a barbed boulder where her heart should be,” Zay said. “So, no. But Loom was the same way in the palace unless we were behind closed doors.”
Wil could not imagine Loom playing the part of cold and emotionless for very long. He was so filled with words and ideas and emotions, all of them brimming over. When he learned who she was, he turned away. Wil had been so certain he was lost to her forever, but now she wondered how much of it had been playing a part.
“They were what they had to be,” Wil said.
“I still think she’ll try to murder us all if we let our guard down,” Zay said. “Best to sleep with an eye open.” But she had not seen the way Espel fell to her knees. She did not see the desperation when she kissed Masalee. Espel knew how to play a part, but that had not been a role. That had been Espel, truly Espel, when all her armor had fallen to her feet and turned to dust.
“I don’t care who you are, you know,” Zay said. She was sitting now on the ledge of the porthole that stretched nearly floor to ceiling.
The words, coming from Zay, meant more to her than she could have known before she heard them. Wil stared past her, at the sunlight lazily burning the surface of the Ancient Sea.
“It’s a relief, actually,” Zay went on. “Now I can pinpoint why I never trusted you.”
While Loom had looked at Wil through the shroud of both their curses, Zay had seen Wil clearly. Wil couldn’t fault Zay for not trusting her; she didn’t deserve trust.
“You were trying to protect Loom,” Wil said. “I understood.”
“That boy,” Zay grumbled, shifting Ada in her arms. “How did he seem, up on the deck? We were too close to the palace. I know we were.”
“However he’s feeling, he’s trying to shrug it off,” Wil said. “It isn’t nearly as bad as it was the last time. He was still on his feet.”
“How were his eyes? Glassy?”
“Not very.”
Zay stared ahead for a moment, anger and worry wrestling in her features. The injustice of what King Zinil had done to someone she loved. It wasn’t enough that Loom had been cast away; now the thing he loved would kill him if he came too close.
“Why didn’t you tell us the truth, though?” Zay went on, changing the topic back to something she could bear. Her tone was softer now. She drew Ada closer to her chest as he slept. “Did you think we would kill you?” There was some playfulness to her tone, but it wasn’t entirely in jest.
“No,” Wil said. “I wanted to protect my family. I know what my father has done. But my family aren’t monsters. My brother is—” She paused. “He’s brilliant, and kind. He wants to save the world, not dominate or destroy it. And Owen—”
Here she stopped speaking. She had thought, after all these weeks, that his loss would cease to consume her so entirely. She had hoped to draw strength from her memories of him, and the gentle, near-imperceptible whisper of his presence she felt when she was in open waters. But if it had been a hundred years since losing him, it had still only been a day.
Zay drew one of her legs onto the ledge. “What really happened to him?” she asked, with the gentle coo of a patient mother trying to dislodge a splinter.
“Owen is dead.” Wil made herself say it. “If he had just—let go of me, he would still be here, and I’d be the dead one.”
She tried never to relive that night by the rapids. Owen wouldn’t want her to. There’s no point, he would say. No point turning to something that can’t be changed and letting it interfere with what’s left to be done. And thanks to Owen, she had a lifetime left of things to do.
If he hadn’t come for her that night, if he’d ignored the nettling premonition that something terrible was going to happen to his kid sister, she may have even made it across. She didn’t believe it, though. She believed that she would have fallen in. Her mind would have been a frenzy of panic at first, and then, she supposed, a resigned sort of calm. The burning in her lungs would have faded. Her vision would have tunneled, and she would have gathered the most relevant scraps from her life like dying flowers. She would have seen her mother especially, and then her brothers. She would have wished full lives for all of them. She would have felt how certainly and brutally she loved them. And then she would have left.
Zay didn’t ask anything further, and when Wil finally worked up the courage to look at her, she saw sympathy in her light brown eyes. Not pity or the detached remorse of a stranger who has just been told a sad story, but the look of a girl who understood this pain. Wil had the thought that Zay might have even walked over and embraced her if the contact wouldn’t have turned her to stone.
When the door opened, they both started, lost as they had been in their thoughts.
Loom stood at the threshold with water dripping from his freshly scoured arms. He still smelled of blood and sweat. His eyes were weary and dark from the toll his own curse had taken on him.
The last time he’d been in Cannolay, it nearly cost him his life. This time, he’d at least remained on a ship in the sea. He looked as though he would recover. Wil wouldn’t be put at ease until she saw the light in his eyes again, though. Right now they were dull and heavy lidded.
“It doesn’t look good,” he announced in a tired, hoarse voice. “But if she manages to survive the night, she’ll have a chance.”
Zay looked between Wil and Loom, each of whom was staring at the floor. She stood. “I should put Ada to bed.” As she squeezed past Loom in the doorway, she patted his shoulder.
Wil swiveled in the captain’s chair and studied the controls with renewed interest. Zay had set them on a northern course, and now the tiny gray blip of their vessel was trailing through a tiny screen of blue. Zay didn’t know where they were meant to be going, only that they needed to move fast. Now there was a sheet of electric blue between Loom and his palace, and Espel, for the first time, was on his side of it.
“How much of it was true?” Loom asked. His voice was quiet. He was still standing in the doorway, as though he hadn’t yet decided whether he would stay. He let out a rueful laugh. “Was anything true?”
Wil drew her brows. She made herself look at him. “Everything I told you was true.”
“Lying by omission is still lying.”
“All right,” she conceded. “I won’t pretend I’m not a liar. I’m a good liar.” For the duration of her captivity on this ship, all she had wanted was to speak to him. To have him throw the full force of his anger at her and be done with it. To know whether there was anything left between them to salvage. But suddenly his scrutiny made her angry. Who was this boy to begrudge her her secrets? This boy who had tricked her, dragged her into his conquest, and then made her fall in love with him? She was angry with him for wanting so much, and angry with herself for wanting to give it to him even now. Angry with herself for wanting him to pull her into his arms and hold her the way his brief touch on the deck had implied. Angry with her cursed heart and everything else that had led to her wanting to kiss this enemy prince.
“How can I trust anything that you tell me?” Loom said. “How can I ever know?”
“Is trust easy for anyone?” Wil answered coolly. “It wasn’t easy to go along with you at every turn, Loom. Sometimes I felt like I was betraying my family.”
“Because you were,” he blurted. “We’re enemies.”
The words hit her like a slap, and Loom seemed to realize it the instant he’d said them. Enemies. Never mind everything they had been through together. Never mi
nd all the things he had said to her. Loom’s easy faith in her had not only reminded her that she was still human, but given her the promise that she would still be human tomorrow, and in ten years, and in fifty. That this curse would not turn her into the monster she feared becoming.
“You really believe that we’re enemies?” Wil’s voice came out as a whisper.
He stared off to the side. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t know. After everything, he didn’t know. She stood, shoving him roughly out of her way as she exited the control room. “Come and find me if you ever figure it out,” she said.
She went to the deck and spent more than an hour pressed to the railing that separated her from the water, brooding.
Belowdecks, Espel kept vigil over Masalee. Zay sang to Ada as he dreamed. They did these things easily because they knew with such certainty to whom they belonged.
Wil used to belong somewhere. For all the tumult in her family, she had always been theirs, and they had been hers. She’d freely flitted in and out of Owen’s chamber as she pleased, stealing little pieces of his adventures for as long as she pleased. Gerdie invited her into his laboratory, but more than that, he invited her into his mind—a place so sacred to him that he sometimes retreated there for days. And her mother had always loved her with a fierce loyalty of which most living things were incapable, Wil was certain.
And her father—he had lied to her about who she was. About what she was. Loom hadn’t been right to think that telling a lie was the same as committing a wrong. Sometimes lying to someone was the only way to love them.
She fought the desire to tell Loom about Aleen now. To not present the story of her curse and her slaughtered aunt to him like a bloody, desperate offering to prove that she was capable of being honest. Before, she had wanted to give him all of herself. Now, after what he’d said, she wanted to lock him out of her world completely. It wasn’t just that he had called them enemies. It was that he said it with uncertainty, as though she meant nothing to him. Wil was no longer Wil. She was just some unfathomable princess from a warring kingdom, no more and no less.
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