The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  No. Wil didn’t believe that, if only for what King Zinil had done to Masalee. In trying to take away the girl his daughter loved, King Zinil had lost his daughter forever. Wil knew little else about the Southern princess, but she knew that.

  The castle was not a long walk from the Port Capital, and for all the hundreds of times Wil had made this trek home, she had never once imagined that the prince of her nation’s enemy kingdom would be beside her for it.

  Loom was silent. He had a way of making his energy scarce when he wanted to. She could barely even sense him moving.

  In contrast, her own strides were heavy now. Twigs snapped under her boots. Leaves rustled and crunched.

  It had snowed the night before, and a thin sheet of white covered everything.

  More than half of Northern Arrod was forest. Beyond the Port Capital, there were cities clustered with miles of trees between them. Arrod was so big; it was the largest land mass in the world, and Wil didn’t know how she would ever account for all of it. She didn’t know what the rest of the kingdom looked like. If it was untouched, or if it was as demolished as the Port Capital. If Owen were here, he wouldn’t be traveling in the direction of the castle. He would be in the Port Capital, digging up survivors and lining up the dead so their remains at least could be returned to their families. He would have men combing every city, every home. He would find a way to bring everyone across the Southern Arrod border, which was far enough inland that homes had basements where people could seek refuge.

  But Wil was not the heir. She was not as noble as her brother. She was selfish. She cared only about her own family.

  The castle appeared in the distance, and it was still standing. But there was no relief in this fact. The gates were torn from their hinges as though they’d been broken by enemy forces. The iron bars were bent. One gate lay useless on the ground while the other still clung by a single hinge, waving feebly like a hand reaching up for help.

  Wil broke into a run. Around her, the castle’s gardens were still intact. Flowers and hedges sleeping under the snow. Whoever had been here hadn’t bothered to destroy useless things like the queen’s beloved garden or some late-blooming pear and apple trees. Whoever had been here had made a clean path through the snow, right up the castle’s steps. Wil stopped here.

  The castle doors had appeared to be closed from a distance, but now she could see that one was ajar, revealing a sliver of the darkness inside.

  She was breathing hard. The world was gray and dark and hollow.

  The castle was so big. How had she never realized that before now? Tall enough to blot out the sky when she looked up. With dozens of rooms, walls that made everything echo. Passageways that existed within the walls, filled with staircases and sconces, where she and her brother used to play when they were small. It was a wonder they had never gotten lost. Wil felt certain that if she stepped inside this castle, she would never find her way back out of it.

  “Wil?” Loom said from beside her.

  She moved forward. Her steps were slow. Her legs felt heavy. If King Zinil and Pahn awaited her on the other side of this door, flanked by dozens of armed guards with swords and guns trained on her, she would welcome it. But what she feared was far worse.

  The door creaked when she pushed it open. Sunlight filtered into the foyer through windows framed by snow. She didn’t call out for her mother or Gerdie or even Baren. The castle had come under attack, and if they were able to flee, then they would have done so. If they were still here, they were dead.

  For all her hurry to get here, Wil suddenly found herself incapable of moving at any degree of speed. Her boots were whisper soft against the stone floor. It seemed impossible that her chamber and all her things were at the top of the staircase before her. It seemed impossible that anyone had ever lived here.

  She moved toward the servants’ kitchen. Loom stayed beside her. He had drawn daggers now, bracing for an attack. One of them had to be on the offensive; Wil knew that her own shock was leaving her vulnerable.

  She stopped at the door to Gerdie’s lab. It was closed, though not locked. The red bulb, which indicated her brother was at work and not to be disturbed, was flickering erratically, casting a loud, pattering buzz like flies trapped under a glass.

  “Don’t follow me,” Wil told Loom as she moved forward.

  “Wil, I—”

  “Don’t follow me.” She said it again, louder that time, and he backed off. Whatever awaited at the bottom of these stairs was for her and only her. Gerdie hated it when anyone else entered his lab. She pushed open the door and took the first step down. The basement’s only window was coated in ash and scarcely let in any light. She unhooked the electric lantern mounted along the wall and switched it on. Its blue-white light formed a protective sphere around her as she moved. One step. Then the next.

  She stopped on the final step, her boot hovering over the floor. But she didn’t move. There was Gerdie, lying in a heap beside his metal table, on which some gummy pink liquid had spilled from its flask and pooled.

  His monocle and leg braces were gone. His skin was ashen, his lips bruised blue. Blood congealed at his slashed throat.

  His chest was also slashed, severing his shirt clean in half at a diagonal, all the buttons still neatly buttoned, his gray vest still fitted over his shoulders. The ruffles of his collar and sleeves were brown with old blood.

  The entire world turned into a scream.

  Loom bounded down the stairs, blade at the ready, and Wil realized that the scream had come from her. Loom tried to touch her and she threw his hand violently away and scrambled forward.

  She knelt before her brother. This wasn’t possible. This wasn’t real. But she could smell the blood. He was dead. She touched him and he didn’t turn to stone.

  As she pressed her palm to her brother’s cold cheek, she realized that she was probing for some sign that this was one of his alchemized corpses. A trick. She hoped to feel leather. But what she felt was skin. The hard slope of a cheekbone. His jaw. Him.

  She shook her head, arguing against words that hadn’t been spoken. Pleading with something that had offered no bargain. “No.” It was a strained, tearful word, though she was sure that she wasn’t crying. “No.”

  Loom tried to haul her to her feet. Her knees buckled. Her grandfather drove his blade through Aleen’s heart, cursing them all before they even existed. Her grandmother threw herself into the sea. But all of them had died along with Aleen that night. Wil, Owen, Gerdie, Baren, the king and queen. This was in their blood. This had all been planned. Her grandfather had wanted to destroy them. All because his wife had taken a lover.

  Loom tugged at her again. She screamed. The world was a frenzy. It was a storm and she couldn’t see through it. She couldn’t walk or breathe or speak. Loom didn’t let go of her. He made her walk up the stairs, dragging her much of the way, and once they had reached the servants’ kitchen again, he grabbed her shoulders.

  “We can’t stay here,” he said. “My father is coming for you.”

  “I don’t care,” Wil said. Her vision was wet and blurred.

  “I care,” Loom said.

  “I have to find my mother,” Wil said. Dazed, she moved for the door that led back into the foyer. She knew that if Gerdie was dead, her mother would be as well. But she didn’t move upstairs for her mother’s chamber. Instead, she found herself going in the direction of the throne room. Her footsteps thundered. Baren. She had the horrible thought that he had done this in a fit of delusion and that it hadn’t been King Zinil at all.

  But when she burst through the high arched doors of the throne room, that theory quickly ended. There was Baren, dead on his throne, bearing the same wounds as his brother.

  Twenty-Five

  WIL WAS GOING TO KILL King Zinil. This thought emerged through her shock. She clung to it through the fog of her stunned grief.

  It was a hollow mantra that brought no solace, but it kept her standing, and that was all she could hope fo
r.

  Her head throbbed with that persistent ache she’d felt the last time she was in Northern Arrod. The kingdom was still cursed. When she grabbed at her mother’s rosebushes, they didn’t turn to stone.

  “How is Arrod still cursed?” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” Loom said.

  “Arrod was cursed when I returned. I thought Baren was the reason for it, but he’s dead.” She spoke this like simple fact, forcing away the enormity of it. She didn’t know how long her strength would last before she fell apart, and she wouldn’t squander it.

  Loom stared at the rosebushes, considering this.

  “We need to find Espel,” he said.

  Espel. The name had meant something to Wil several minutes ago, but now it was just another hollow sound in a world of hollow sounds. She turned to face the castle, offering it one final chance to appear as she remembered it.

  But the castle, like all of Arrod, was gray and dead.

  Loom had to pull on Wil to get her moving. She hated him for it.

  “We have to find out if Southern Arrod is safe,” she blurted. King Zinil knew to kill her family, but he had no reason to care about Addney, the late prince’s widow, seemingly useless, since as a widow she had no claim to the throne.

  As long as Addney was alive, there was something. There was hope.

  “I’m sure it is,” Loom said. “There’s not much down there worth attacking, is there? All their power comes from Northern Arrod.”

  They were deep into the woods before Wil had the cognizance to realize she was walking back to the Port Capital. Wake up, she told herself. But nothing made sense. Everything was dead and useless and gray. Her entire family. Dead. The thought fell through her without taking root.

  “You need to be present right now,” Loom said. “This is still your kingdom, and you’re all it has left. Wil, look at me.”

  She didn’t. She walked faster, her face pointed stubbornly forward.

  “Wil!” He moved ahead of her, blocking her path. Softer, he said, “Wil. You’re Arrod’s queen.”

  He said them. The words she had been trying desperately not to hear. The words she had never in her life expected to be true. For an instant she imagined herself sitting on the throne, and in that instant she understood why her father had been so cold. He had not been heartless. He had been haunted.

  “Queen,” she laughed. It was a bitter, ugly sound. “I have no army. No people. No defense against an invasion. What sort of queen is that?”

  “You have people,” Loom said. “There are entire cities that likely haven’t been hit. If you don’t have an army, you assemble one.”

  A cursed princess turned queen, trying to save a cursed kingdom. She shoved him roughly out of her way.

  She stopped walking. Something caught her attention, cradled in the roots of a towering oak tree. A circular piece of glass, framed by copper, with three metal loops meant to accommodate leather straps.

  She dropped to her knees. Her hand hovered over it at first, afraid to touch it. And then she cradled it in both hands.

  “What is it?” Loom asked.

  “A monocle,” Wil said. She held it up, as though this should have made sense to him. “It belongs to my brother. He’s blind in his left eye without it.” Not that it mattered much to Gerdie, unless he was in his lab, trying to decipher his own small, elegant handwriting.

  “What’s it doing out here?” Loom asked.

  Wil stared at it. Her own distorted reflection stared back at her, trapped in a scrap of daylight. Gerdie could have been trying to flee, but then why would his body be all the way back at the castle? And without its straps, the monocle itself would be of little use to him. He wouldn’t have left those behind.

  He would, however, know that she frequented this path because it was the shortest distance between the castle and the Port Capital. Had he hoped to meet her here? Had he been alive after the initial attack and hoped for her to return? Was it a warning?

  “It’s a message,” Wil said. “It has to be.” She looked to Loom. “Gerdie has never done anything without a reason. He’s never careless. He doesn’t lose anything.”

  Loom was kind enough not to point out that she was still referring to her brother as though he were alive.

  “Or it’s a trap,” Loom said. “My father could be trying to lure you.”

  Wil shook her head. “How would your father know to leave this where I’d find it? My brother knows all the paths I take. He knows. This means something.”

  She stood and began pacing through the trees, along her familiar path. Soon she could hear the river in the distance. This far from the rapids, the water was calm. She ran for the water and stopped at its edge.

  Loom was humoring her, she knew. He might have even pitied her. But he did not know Gerdie’s genius. When she stepped onto a rock embedded into the mud beneath the water, Loom said, “What are you doing?”

  “Going across,” she said. “There are wanderer camps nearby. Maybe some are still here. Maybe he wanted me to go to them.”

  Loom followed her, if only because he knew she couldn’t be stopped. In some bizarre twist of events, the prince from her enemy kingdom was in Northern Arrod, protecting his enemy queen.

  Queen. Another hollow, meaningless word that fell through her.

  She made her footfalls lighter, trying once again to be stealthy and silent as she moved in the direction of the wanderer camp that had been here the night of Owen’s party.

  As she moved, she drew her dagger. She hated herself for this small bit of instinct. Despite everything, she wanted to live. She was willing to go on even if her family could not. It was comforting and a betrayal at once, the way her body still geared for a fight no matter what she had endured. Owen would be proud to know she had retained the years of training he’d given her.

  The wanderer camp, if it was still here, was only a few yards ahead.

  Wil stopped, her senses on alert. The way that Loom pressed his back to hers said he had heard it, too. Something moving, light as wind, through the trees.

  Everything went still. There were no winter birds, Wil realized now. There had been no life in the kingdom at all. She was just about to say this when the blast hit.

  Wil saw the smoke before she heard whatever had caused it. Her ears rang. Her vision filled with thick, heavy smoke. Loom was no longer pressed against her—was he calling for her? She could hear nothing but a shrill, keening whine.

  Something grabbed her arm and she spun on her heel, her knife making contact with skin. But it was undeterred by her blade. Through the smoke she saw the blur of a rich blue robe, embroidered with gold thread. A robe? She tried to land a kick to her assailant, but whoever it was moved with a force she couldn’t combat, and she hit the ground hard. Her back slammed against the jutting roots of a tree and she gasped to catch her breath.

  Through the haze she saw him. Pahn. He stood over her, his boot to her stomach. Fire burned around them in patches, casting hard shadows on his face.

  She couldn’t move. It was as though invisible arms held her wrists and ankles. Instinctively, she tried to slip free, the way she would if it were a body holding her in place. But there was no escape.

  The flames weren’t giving off any heat. The smoke moved around Pahn, leaving him in a clearing.

  This was marvelry. A paper-thin illusion, like the one Masalee threw over their ship.

  “What do you want?” Wil spat. “My curse? Have it. Look around and see what it’s brought me.”

  “Haven’t you heard the news?” Pahn said. “You’re the queen of Arrod.”

  Again, Wil heard those words and again she didn’t believe them.

  “You seem disappointed by the title,” Pahn continued. “That’s good. It won’t be yours for very long.” He raised his arms in a grand sweeping gesture toward the kingdom, and Wil felt the pressure on her wrists and ankles tighten. “All this is soon to become the property of King Zinil. Perhaps, if you beg, he’l
l let you keep Arrod’s name. The same won’t be true for your life.”

  A figure blurred through the smoke, and just as Pahn turned his head, Espel’s dagger tore through the air and struck him in the throat.

  No blood came from the wound. The pressure that had been holding Wil in place dissipated, and Pahn disappeared into the smoke.

  Espel reached out a hand and tugged Wil to her feet. “We have to get you back to the ship,” Espel said. “Masalee can hide us there. Pahn will be back for you.”

  “Where’s Loom?” Wil said. The smoke and flames were beginning to disappear.

  The forest was empty.

  Twenty-Six

  LOOM AWOKE TO THE SOUND of rushing water.

  He opened his eyes and clutched at his throbbing head, certain his hand would come back covered in blood. There was no blood.

  “This is where it happened,” Pahn said. Loom sat bolt upright at the sound of his voice. Pahn stood at the edge of the river, through which water sped and churned and spat. He nodded ahead to a slab of rock that acted as a sort of makeshift bridge. “According to the gossip in Arrod’s streets, at least. This is where Prince Owen of the Royal House of Heidle was rumored to have drowned trying to save his little sister. We know that story isn’t entirely true, though, is it? Still, maybe this is his final resting place.”

  Loom, guarded, rose to his feet, untrusting. He looked to the water, and he imagined what the world would be if Wil had truly drowned here. If her curse had died and been buried like a secret beneath the water. He wouldn’t know to mourn her, and yet still something told him that he would. He would feel her absence in the world. Maybe he had always felt it. All those moments spent desperate and longing without a destination for his restless heart, without reprieve, had really just been her absence.

  “She’s going to make a terrible queen,” Pahn said. “You know that.”

  Did he know that? The Wil he knew was fierce and brave. Impulsive, but compassionate. She was overzealous, but deliberate. Brutal, but kind. She could not observe pain without taking a small bit of that pain and folding it into her own heart, making it a part of herself.