The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  She missed Northern waters. She missed winter, and snow, and crystals of ice on her windows. Strange that she would feel this homesickness now of all times. But when she first left home, Owen’s death had rendered her too numb to feel anything beyond her own guilt and sadness.

  When she’d met Loom, in an unanticipated twist of fate, he became her ally. He became an anchor.

  Getting wistful about him wouldn’t help, Wil reminded herself. She would never be his enemy, as he had put it, but she would no longer indulge this illusion of love. That’s all it was. An illusion. A curse.

  When she slept, she saw Aleen’s body laid out in the grass. Her eyelids had shifted, revealing the dark, lifeless pools of her eyes.

  The queen screamed, and she didn’t stop screaming. Not really. Even when the queen went silent, that scream was still inside her, muting out all else.

  The king had the audacity to return to his castle. He locked himself in his throne room for days.

  The queen did not sleep. She did not speak. In her head, her own scream turned into Aleen’s. Both of them being murdered over and again.

  The guards did not stop the queen when she moved past the castle gate. They bowed, offered to escort her wherever she was going—barefoot, in her nightclothes, hours before sunup. She ignored them. Dead eyed and somnambulating, she disappeared between the trees.

  In the morning, the ocean tossed her body against the stone wall that separated the water from the Port Capital, as though it was returning a rejected offering.

  Wil awoke with the queen’s screams in her mouth. Hands were grasping her shoulders. She had propelled herself upright, gasping.

  “Hey.” Loom’s whisper silenced the frenzy. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” He touched her forehead, her cheek. He swept the hair from her face.

  She couldn’t see him at first, and then her eyes adjusted to the moonlight and she saw his eyes, dark and blinking.

  His thumb pressed at the hollow of her throat, where her pulse thudded wild.

  “You sounded like you were trying to scream,” he whispered.

  “It wasn’t my scream,” she said, still delirious. For a moment she thought they were in Northern Arrod and that her grandmother’s body would crash into their boat. She anticipated, with dread, the soft thunk. She could hear how cruel and small and wet the sound would be.

  But there was no death. There were no bodies. Aleen and her mother were long since passed. It was just Loom.

  She eased herself back against the pillows. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. He knelt beside the bed and laid his head on his folded arms. It may have been the darkness deceiving her, but Wil could see the Loom she knew just then. No guard. No coldness.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  She hesitated. When she’d set out for Pahn’s cabin, she had meant to tell him what she had learned about her curse. She had hoped he would have the answers somehow. He would help her to navigate this horrible thing she had inherited.

  But now she realized he couldn’t.

  No one could.

  She stared languidly at Loom. “You should go back to bed.”

  “Wil.” He wound so much frustration into that single word. Somehow he had loaded her name, a single syllable, with all the things he hadn’t said since learning her true identity. She felt all of it rushing out of him at once.

  “Hells.” It was unlike Loom to be so ineloquent. She relished that she was the cause. Pretending to hate her had not worked, but he had convinced her that he didn’t care about her at all. Since he’d turned away from her that horrible day on the deck, she’d felt cast out of his orbit. Loom had a passion for everything—for his dead mother and his ruthless little sister and his tempestuous wife and a toddler who wasn’t his. For the tiniest sprig to blossom out from the boulders of Cannolay’s mountains. But he had jettisoned her away. She had felt less than even his kingdom’s foliage.

  “You called us enemies,” Wil said. Her voice was cool, but the recant flustered her.

  “I—” Loom’s voice caught. His fingers laced together in the same desperate sort of way Wil had seen in vendor slaves pleading for their lives. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Wil said nothing.

  “My father has done awful things,” Loom went on. “And you never confused his wrongs for mine. Not a single time.”

  Wil pushed herself upright. “Why would I? You have enough wrongs of your own.” It was an unfair jab, and she knew it. Loom had fought harder for his kingdom than anyone; he cared about every bit of it. He’d even cared about her. But she was too wounded to say she was sorry.

  He glared up at her, the whites of his eyes shining against the dark. “I get it, Wil. I shouldn’t blame you for what your father has done. For what your family has done.”

  “My family isn’t what you think,” Wil said. “My brother Gerdie is the most honest, the most loyal, the most good of us. And Owen—” She made herself go on. “This war wouldn’t have even started if he were still with us. He would have been the king Arrod needs. And my mother truly was a wanderer, Loom. She had no mind to be a queen, but she couldn’t help that she fell in love with a king.”

  “I understand the sentiment,” Loom mumbled.

  Wil crossed her arms. “I love my family,” she said, guarding her tone, careful not to let her softness show—not because she wanted to hide that part of herself from Loom, but because he hadn’t earned it back. “I was only trying to protect them.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me?” Loom sat on the edge of the bed. She turned her face away from him, and he tilted her chin. “Hey. Were you?”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Maybe I would have just left one night while you were sleeping. If you had your kingdom back, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “How could you say that? How could you think it wouldn’t matter if you just disappeared?”

  Wil didn’t want to say anything. She didn’t want to breathe. She didn’t want to do anything that might make him realize their sudden closeness and pull away.

  It did matter. That’s what she wanted to tell him. But what came out was, “You matter. You matter to me.”

  He pushed forward and kissed her. She exhaled into his mouth. His familiar, warm mouth that she had not allowed herself to miss while they were apart.

  He tugged on her arm. And with that small, gentle act, she felt herself drawn to him. Again. Always. She had felt his pull from halfway across the world and through all the spirits in the Ancient Sea.

  She slid down until her stomach was pressed to his, her hands at either side of his head. The dark curtain of her hair fell over her shoulder and shadowed his face. He looked at her hair, and then at her.

  He raised his head to kiss her again. Her hands clenched into fists against the mattress and then slackened. All of her went soft, and weak, and eager.

  She thought of what he had told her on the cliff overlooking the electric city, windmills spinning and winking at them as they gleamed. I love you. The words played over in her mind until she wasn’t sure whether they were his or her own. Her knees around his hips and his fingers touching her jaw, uncertain at first, then rising up to her hair. He wasn’t just touching her, but winding himself around and around her, until she could not remember what she had been before this curse. Could not remember that she had ever wanted to be rid of it. All she wanted was this sudden feeling of belonging, of being wanted, of wanting.

  He was beautiful, she thought. He had always been beautiful, but it had changed now into something that made her greedy. Something that hurt even as she craved it. Something that made everything wrong and everything make sense.

  Her heart—her cursed, insolent heart—beat at his command. He traced his knuckles down her arm and her nerves fluttered and followed, her skin rose with gooseflesh. She felt warm where he touched her and cold where he’d been.

  She dipped her head down for another kiss. She wanted
him. Needed him.

  No. She drew back as if emerging from water. She once again heard the creaking of the ship as it rocked and drifted in the dark waters.

  He didn’t need her. Curses made liars of hearts, which weren’t especially prone to telling the truth as it was.

  She sat with her legs around his waist. This was how it had been that day on the deck, when they were strangers to each other and she’d held a blade to his throat. She still held that blade to him. He still fell under her command. She still couldn’t let him go. Why couldn’t she let him go?

  “What is it?” Loom’s voice was sleepy with desire. His sudden concern only made her want him all the more. His hands opened, fingers outstretched at either side of him, as though he was trying to prove that he could stop touching her if that was what she wanted.

  “I don’t want us to lie to each other anymore,” she said.

  He sat up, causing her to slide back against his hips. “Are you going to tell me you’re the princess of another kingdom now, too?”

  “I’m talking about this.” She gestured to her heart, and then his. “Pahn said that cursed hearts are drawn to one another. That’s what this is.”

  “Is that what’s bothering you?” He reached out his hands, and despite all reason she took them.

  “You don’t sound surprised,” she ventured, uncertain.

  “I told you, I know a lot about curses.” He squeezed her hands, and something within her fluttered.

  “Then you’ve known this whole time that it’s a lie,” Wil said. “All of it.”

  “It isn’t a lie.” His brows drew together. “Of course it isn’t. Wil—how could you believe that?”

  “Because it isn’t real.” She saw the sudden hurt in his eyes, but she kept going. She kept going because if she didn’t say it now, she would never have the courage to say it at all. “You would never fall in love with a girl who turns things to stone. It’s monstrous. You look at me as though I’m some sort of wonder, and you don’t see the horror of it. You don’t see my curse for what it really is.”

  “I see your curse,” he said. “And I see you. How dare you tell me that I don’t? I see blood and fight and fire. I see the way your eyes change when your mind is someplace far. I see the way you laugh, like it’s a confession you’re giving up. I see how desperately you love your family even though you’ve hardly said a word about them before tonight.” He sounded so honest. He looked so honest. “I see all of what you show me and some of what you don’t.” His voice softened. “And if you don’t love me, then fine. But you don’t get to tell me that I don’t know what I feel.”

  When she looked away from him, she felt something rip. Some artery or muscle or maybe time itself. Something that could no longer be mended. She should have told him that she didn’t love him, but the words wouldn’t come.

  She disentangled herself and sat on the end of the bed, away from him. “Tell yourself whatever you need to.”

  His stunned silence filled the cabin. Neither of them moved for a long time, and then he stood, smoothing the ruffled satin of his trousers.

  “You’re right,” he said. “You are a good liar. You’ve managed to fool yourself.”

  “Wait.” She stood and paced after him as he went for the door. “This morning you wanted nothing to do with me because I’d lied to you. Now you’re mad that I’m telling you the truth?”

  “I may not always know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Hells, I’ll admit that you turn my brain upside down and make my heart beat sideways. But I know curses, and you’re not a curse to me.”

  He pulled the door open and stormed off before she could say something to prove him wrong.

  Twenty-One

  WIL AWOKE WITH HER HEART beating erratically. It slowed for long seconds and then burst into fits.

  She supposed this was Masalee’s doing. She lay still in bed, staring at the ceiling, and focused. Masalee’s presence was a dull, throbbing, invasive thing in her blood. It was gentle but forceful at once.

  Wil found the source of the marvelry like the beat of a drum echoing through her blood, sending ripples. She pushed back, gently at first, casting the sensation away from her heart like a paper boat on a soft breeze. She pushed until it was gone.

  She wondered if Masalee had any control over her marvelry now, or if it was shooting out of her as she thrashed and dreamed. When Gerdie was in the throes of his fever, he often muttered fragments of equations and chemical properties.

  For now, the force of the marvelry had stopped, but as Wil went about the routine of showering and brushing her teeth, she experimented with her heartbeat. It refused to listen to her, but sometimes—just for a fraction of a second—she could feel the curse’s claws wrapped around her valves and arteries. She could push against it. And then it all collapsed around her, and her heart once again became traitorous. Masalee hadn’t controlled Wil’s heart on the night Wil was taken hostage in Cannolay, but then, Masalee didn’t do a thing unless Espel commanded it. And Espel was one who thought carefully about every move. Wil suspected that Espel didn’t want to reveal Masalee’s power to Wil right away; as it was, she had described Masalee’s powers as barely competent, when they were profound.

  She made her way to the kitchen. Loom and Zay were huddled on either side of the table, so close that the crowns of their heads nearly touched. Loom looked up when Wil entered, and whatever secret thing existed between him and his wife disappeared.

  It hadn’t been this rigid even when they were strangers, Wil thought. Of course, then she had been too busy plotting to overtake his ship and maybe throw him overboard for good measure.

  “Hi,” she said. Had she ever bothered with a hello when it came to him? It seemed they always met when they were desperate. There was always something to be done, something that needed saving. There were always wounds that wouldn’t stop bleeding or cities that wouldn’t stop burning.

  Ada was crawling under the table, trying to befriend a long-legged spider that kept awkwardly ambling just out of his grasp.

  “You came up with a good plan,” Zay said by way of greeting. “There’s only the matter of what to do with Espel.” She lowered her voice when she said her name, as though it was something to never be uttered.

  “She wants to be queen,” Loom said. “I want to be king. We’ve both been disowned, but if we returned, my father would still want to murder me and reinstate her.”

  “I assumed that the plan was to kill him,” Wil said, hopping up onto the counter and skinning a banana.

  “It is,” Loom said. “If I kill him, the kingdom will be mine. His guards will swear loyalty to me.”

  “That sounds like enough of a plan to me,” Wil said.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Espel can be competitive,” Zay said, scooping a giggling Ada into her arms. “Soon enough, she’s going to come out of her cabin, and we need to have something to tell her.”

  “You want to lie to her?” Wil was looking at Loom.

  He hesitated, as he always seemed to when it came to his sister. For him, it was in irreconcilable balance. He had no mother and may as well have had no father. The only blood he truly had was a sister who had been raised to rival him. They were mirror opposites, matched blow for blow, equally skilled, equally frightened of what it might mean for them to care for each other.

  “If she knows I plan to kill our father, I wouldn’t put it past her to kill me and take the kingdom for herself.” Loom said this with renewed steel. It was the truth. Whether or not he wanted to betray his sister was not as important as the logic behind it.

  “What are we going to tell her?” Wil asked.

  Here Loom averted his eyes. He looked at his steepled fingers. “I’m going to fight her for it,” he said. “And I’m going to win.”

  “It doesn’t seem like Espel to admit defeat,” Wil challenged. “She’ll want a duel to the death, or not at all.”

  “No she won’t.” Loom’s voice was soft. “She’s stub
born, and she might have once been stubborn enough to die, but not now, with Masalee to consider. If she dies, there will be no one to stop me from selling Masalee off to the highest bidder. There’s no shortage of kingdoms in need of a marveler that strong.”

  “You would never do that,” Wil said.

  “It doesn’t matter what I would do,” Loom said. “Only what Espel thinks I would do. Espel and I will duel for the kingdom. She’ll agree because she believes she’ll win. But when she loses, she’ll concede.”

  “And if she wins?” Wil said.

  Loom shrugged. “Then this will all be a lot easier.”

  “What would stop her from killing you?” Wil said. Loom was a skilled fighter, but Espel was skilled and cunning. Unpredictable. Even now, Wil was trying to sort out whether Espel truly panicked on the ship with her father, or if it had been her plan to betray him all along.

  Zay crossed her arms and looked to Loom. “It’s entirely possible she’ll try that.”

  Loom smiled at Wil. It was the sort of sleepy, cocky smile that lured her heart to him every time. “Then I hope you’ll avenge me. Bring guns. My sister is a crafty one, as you’ve pointed out.”

  “I’m being serious,” Wil snapped. “We can’t trust her. I never thought I’d be in a position to remind you of that.”

  “There’s no need to remind me,” Loom said, pushing himself to his feet. “I may not know the life story of everyone on this ship, but I’m well aware of Espel’s.”

  There was thunder in his steps as he moved past her and made his exit.

  For the rest of the weeklong journey to the Western Isles, Wil barely encountered Loom, and when she did, it was always with the guarded politeness of strangers. It irritated her, but she could find no way to break it.

  Some nights, she dreamed of Aleen. Other nights, she dreamed of nothing at all. Wil found herself grateful for Espel’s presence on the ship at night. The Southern princess had proven to be a relentless insomniac. Once everyone had retired to their cabins for the night, and after even Ada had ceased his nightly mewling, Wil would hear Espel pacing up and down the hall, foraging in the kitchen, and tending to Masalee.