The Cursed Sea

by Lauren DeStefano

  Wil may have been the last in a long line of spares, but no. She would not make a terrible queen.

  “Where is she?” Loom asked. A horrible feeling came over him now. He imagined Pahn subduing her. Pahn throwing her into the rapids. Her lungs filling up with water.

  “She’s hiding somewhere, I’m sure,” Pahn said. “Further proof that she would make a miserable queen.”

  “If you thought she would make a miserable queen,” Loom growled, “why did you kill her family?”

  Pahn blinked, as though this question surprised him.

  “I’m not the one who killed them. Your father’s men did that.”

  “Where is my father?” Loom demanded. “Why isn’t he here to face what he’s done?”

  “King Zinil is safe in his palace,” Pahn said. “I was sent to retrieve you.”

  “Retrieve me?” Loom echoed. Why would his father send for his banished, traitor son?

  “You are standing on what will soon be the property of the Royal House of Raisius, of which you will once again be the heir,” Pahn explained.

  The words sounded so strange that Loom could not react, even to balk at them.

  “Make no mistake,” Pahn said. “No matter what happens here, this kingdom will become Southern property. What I’m offering you is a chance at redemption. A way back into your father’s good graces.”

  “My father has no good graces,” Loom said.

  “Your father is a man of business. Bring him what he wants, and you’ll be reinstated as heir. This is your only chance to be a part of your kingdom once again. Wouldn’t you like to return home without your own palace acting as a poison?”

  “I’m sure you’re about to offer this to me at a reasonable price,” Loom said dryly.

  “The price is the girl’s heart,” Pahn said. “Carve it from her chest and bring it to me.”

  Loom’s own heart jolted with pain, as though Pahn’s words alone could stab him.

  Wil had been right. King Zinil wanted her cursed heart so that he could have her powers. The plan had been for Wil’s brother to alchemize a ruse, but Wil’s brother lay dead on the cold floor of a castle basement now.

  Pahn was searching Loom’s face for a reaction, but Loom offered none.

  “I’ll meet you here tonight, under the light of the full moon,” Pahn said. “Bring her to me then.” He smiled. It was a broad, ugly smile. “I know you think you love this girl. That’s how cursed hearts work. But if you expect to be worthy of your kingdom, you must love it above all else. That is real love.”

  Though he was in no position to pity anyone just then, Loom pitied Pahn. All his life, Pahn had been a towering presence in his life. As a child, Loom had thought Pahn to be the most powerful man in the world. Perhaps he even was. But that power had left him empty. He lived to serve his own power, to grow greater and stronger and destroy all who stood in his path. The word “love” sounded gray and meaningless on his tongue. Pahn would never know what it was to love a kingdom, or another living soul.

  Loom could use this to his own advantage, he realized. A man who didn’t understand love would believe that a banished prince would betray anyone to further his own needs. Pahn would believe that Loom would bring him Wil’s heart.

  Loom steeled himself.

  “We have a deal,” he said.

  Wil knew that her time in Arrod would be short. Already her muscles were taking on the familiar ache she’d felt the last time she lingered too long in her cursed kingdom, unable to turn things to stone.

  But she would not allow her mind to grow foggy. She would not allow herself to collapse into grief. She was at odds with her mind now, trying to convince herself that she hadn’t found her brothers dead in their castle, and that her mother was not surely nearby.

  She would not go to that awful place of grief again.

  She clutched her brother’s monocle. Her hands were shaking. Winds, where the hells was Loom?

  “He’ll come back,” Masalee said, as though she had been reading Wil’s thoughts. She unwound the blanket from her own shoulders and draped it over Wil’s.

  They were standing on the deck of the ship, masked by the illusion of water that kept them hidden. Wil wasn’t sure how Masalee was able to hold fast to her marvelry. She looked weary for it. Her warm, tawny skin had paled and sweat beaded her brow, but she still stood tall.

  Wil stared at the Port Capital. It was silent. Dead.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Where is everyone?” She had a horrible thought that some great force had swallowed the people of Arrod alive, and that whatever had taken them had taken Loom as well.

  Arrod had many cities, but they were spread out between densely packed wilderness that went on for miles and miles. Two-thirds of the kingdom was uninhabited, except by wanderers and cargo trains. Was it possible the entire kingdom had gone into hiding? Who would guide everyone? Certainly it couldn’t have been Baren, lost as he was in his own tormented mind. When she saw him last, he had scarcely seemed to notice there was a kingdom under his rule at all.

  Zay and Espel had gone to look for Loom, and Wil felt useless being left behind.

  She turned to Masalee, hopeful. “Could this all be an illusion?” she asked. “Could Arrod and my family be safe underneath this, while Pahn tries to break me with a lie?”

  Masalee’s expression was stoic as ever, but there was kindness to it sometimes, if one knew to look for it. “There’s no marveler energy,” she said. “If this were an illusion, I’d feel it here.” She pressed her palm to the center of her chest. “But this just feels like stillness and death.”

  Wil had learned that Masalee was a girl of few words, but when she spoke, it was always the truth.

  Still, it did not seem real.

  When something moved through the rubble, Wil jolted to attention. Loom emerged through the lingering ashes in the city air, and Wil scrambled down the side of the ship and ran to meet him.

  He was the only real thing in the kingdom just then. She threw her arms around him. “Where have you been?”

  His arms coiled around her; his hand pressed her head to his chest, and for just a moment, Wil felt as she had the night before. When all of the world would wait, and they were together and whole and safe.

  When he drew away, she felt the cold air rush between them. He was holding her shoulders now, and his grip tightened. His eyes were eager. “Your brother’s formula for alchemizing a body,” he said. “Do you remember what it was?”

  “It wasn’t a formula exactly,” Wil said. “More like a process that came together one piece at a time.”

  “Whatever you’d like to call it, then,” Loom said. “Can you do it?”

  “I don’t know.” Her words came out fast and uncertain. “I was always terrible at alchemy, but I helped him sometimes. I think—I think I could try to mimic his process.”

  “That’s all I can ask,” Loom said. “We need to get to his cauldron now. There isn’t any time to waste.”

  Twenty-Seven

  WIL COULD NOT RECONCILE THE strange castle that stood before her, standing tall against a gray winter sky. This was not the home she had always known, nor was it a piece of the world she had always known. It was nothing. It was a shell. A shell whose hallways and rooms vaguely resembled a place she had once frequented.

  When she reached the basement steps, Loom at one side, Espel and Zay at the other, she was expecting her brother’s body to be gone. She expected—she realized now—him to have gotten up and left, the way that living things did.

  But he was still there, forever slumped, blood frozen to his wounds, incapable of ever waking.

  Her vision tunneled. Her mind turned blank, like the thin coating of snow that concealed the kingdom just enough to make it appear empty.

  Zay was the first to move toward him. Loom followed suit, moving one arm behind Gerdie’s back and another under his bent knees to lift him.

  “No,” Wil cried, surprisi
ng herself. Her voice slapped loudly against the stone walls. She rushed forward and fell to her knees between her brother and Loom.

  “Wil,” he said gently. “We have to move him.”

  She was shaking her head, even though she couldn’t understand why. Her vision blurred with tears she had not summoned, much less expected. She heard her own voice creaking out a mantra of “No, no, no.”

  Zay stepped beside her and put an arm around her shoulders, gently drawing her away, until both of them faced the ribbon of light stealing in through the window.

  Wil slumped. “You can’t move him.” Her words were almost indecipherable through her sobs. “This is his lab. It’s all he has.”

  “Shh” was all Zay said as she folded her arms around her.

  Wil did not understand completely that she was crying, or that it was her body—not the earth—that was shaking. Someone with her voice was screaming, and the sound was muffled and scared.

  She had the thought that if Zay let go of her, she would fall into whatever gaping hole had swallowed her family, had swallowed her entire kingdom.

  “Don’t hurt him” was all Wil could think to say.

  “He won’t.” Zay kissed the crown of her head, and Wil didn’t know know if that small bit of affection came from pity or genuine friendship. “I promise, he won’t.”

  “There’s a garden surrounded by hedges shaped like an oval,” Wil said.

  “There’s no time to bury him,” Zay said.

  Wil nodded. “I know.”

  Loom said nothing, but Wil heard his footsteps moving up the stairs. His stride, so often anticipated, felt strange to her now. This was her brother’s sacred space. These were his things, labeled and neatly stored, awaiting the purposes that had been promised to them, and with him gone, anyone seemed like a stranger here.

  What would become of his things? That was all she could think.

  She was still sobbing when Loom returned, but Zay helped her to her feet. Through the sheen of her tears, the room was still familiar to her. She knew what all the bottles meant. She had collected most of the powders required to mix them. But even so, without her brother here, none of these pieces seemed capable of life.

  She cleared her throat, wiped her sleeve across her eyes. She retrieved the rag that had been thrown onto the floor in the struggle and used it to sop up the pink liquid that had congealed on the metal table. It was an anti-rusting agent used when forging metals. Nothing of value.

  Loom and Zay hovered at a distance, letting her get her bearings. She consulted the heavy leather journal by the table’s edge, turning through pages of handwritten notes until she found the formula her brother had used to make Addney’s corpse. None of his recipes were labeled. There was only a list of ingredients and vague instructions, but Wil remembered. She remembered the afternoon they’d spent extracting limbs from the cauldron steam until, bit by bit, they had a body.

  “Okay,” she finally said. Her voice was deceptively confident. Her head still felt muddled and hazy. “If you’re both willing to do exactly as I say, I think we can make this work.”

  Once the task was set in motion, Wil lost herself in it. The first attempt to make a hand failed; the leather scorched and broke into pieces. Five attempts and a dozen several silk scarves later, the first limb emerged from the cauldron victorious.

  There was an explosion when she attempted to make the torso. Bits of leather and ink splattered like gore on the table and the rusty overhead lamp. It smelled of burnt cloth and copper, and Wil closed her eyes and grasped the table edge as she composed herself. It was the smell that nearly did her in—the memory of how these small mishaps had wafted up the stairs a thousand times before.

  “Wil.” Loom didn’t dare to touch her. He was being as patient as he could, Wil knew.

  Wordlessly she reread her brother’s notes and tried again. The measurements weren’t exact, and she was left guessing what some of the odd squiggles on the page meant. She began again. Another string of failed attempts was her reward. And then, just as she was beginning to worry about their shortage of leather, a torso emerged, eerie without its head attached.

  Wil didn’t have the wherewithal to be disgusted. She felt nothing but determination, and she wondered if it would always be this way. She wondered if Gerdie’s death had been the final thing to break her, after everything else she’d lost. She couldn’t mourn both her brothers.

  Wil had always believed that she and Gerdie—as the youngest spares—would outlive their family. That someday, a hundred years into the distance, they would still have each other when everything else was gone.

  Later, she told herself. She would sort it out later. She repeated the word over and over in her head, until she was able to carry on.

  By the time Wil extracted the last limb, they were losing daylight. Loom retrieved the lantern and drew the shutters on the window to hide the light.

  Zay sat on the floor, carefully painting details onto fingernails and veins. She had a steady hand even as she worked in haste. Her neat, practiced attention to detail was indicative of a girl who had endured hours of formal handwriting lessons.

  The alchemized head produced several rounds of failures, but at last it emerged from the cauldron, ashen and sleeping and still.

  Wil’s stomach lurched. Disgust was the first feeling that had managed to reach her since she’d taken on this task. The head had long hair, fashioned from the silk threads of an old robe and some dark brown dye. The hair floated and tangled as it filled up with air.

  Wil nearly dropped the thing. Beside her, Loom didn’t falter, but he averted his eyes.

  When all the pieces were stitched together, the sight at last proved too much for Loom, who paced up the staircase as Wil and Zay began sewing the eyelashes in place.

  “It looks dead,” Wil fretted, gnawing on her lip.

  “Masalee will have to work her magic, I guess,” Zay said.

  Wil stared at the corpse. She couldn’t be sure it looked like her. If Gerdie were here, it would have turned out perfectly. And again Wil caught herself believing that her brother was elsewhere in the castle. She shook her head, forced herself to her feet, forced herself to wake up.

  “There isn’t much time before the sun sets,” Wil said.

  “Doesn’t look much like you,” Espel said, as the alchemized corpse was laid out on the deck of the ship and unrolled from the burlap that had been concealing it.

  “I can fix it,” Masalee offered.

  As Masalee set to work enchanting the thing, Wil wondered why she and Espel were doing so much to help them. If Loom was reinstated as heir, it would do nothing to help Espel. Espel must have believed there was something to gain by earning Loom’s good graces, even if she herself expected to be queen.

  Loom was pacing the length of the ship. His shoulders were raised, his strides feather silent but broad.

  Wil ran to catch up with him. He flinched when she touched his arm, lost as he’d been in his thoughts.

  “We don’t have to do this, you know.” She spoke quietly so that the others wouldn’t hear her.

  “What alternative would you propose?” he replied, his tone sour.

  “We could face Pahn,” she said. “Kill him ourselves.”

  “It would be nearly impossible,” Loom said. “I’ve seen men try to kill him. If he thinks there’s a risk, he creates an illusion of himself. That’s what he’ll do tonight. He’ll be expecting us to try something foolish.”

  “Killing him wouldn’t be foolish,” Wil said. She wanted him dead. For what he had done to Loom, but now more than ever for what he had done to her family.

  “He’s going to die,” Loom said. “But not tonight.”

  Wil pressed her back against the ship’s railing. “What are you planning?”

  “First, I’m going to kill my father,” he said. “For what he’s done to both our kingdoms. And then I’m going to kill Pahn. I’ll need Masalee’s help, so it’s important that we keep Espel on o
ur side.” He glanced across the ship to his sister, who knelt beside Masalee at the alchemized corpse. “As much as I’d like to believe she sees our father for what he truly is, and as much as I’d like to believe she’s on my side, I still don’t know.”

  “I don’t think she’s on anyone’s side but her own,” Wil said.

  Loom’s gaze was trained on his sister for a moment longer, and then he looked to Wil. He swept one finger through her hair, curling a lock of it around his knuckle.

  “Wil, if this doesn’t work, I want you to know—”

  She pressed her fingertips to his mouth to shush him. “This is going to work,” she said. “Trust me.”

  He turned, and his arms coiled around her and his hands knotted together at the small of her back.

  “I was taught to speak and write a dozen languages,” he said. “But there isn’t a word for what you mean to me.”

  She swept her hand through his hair and she kissed him. His lips were warm and soft. He was filled with life and with some brilliant promise that there could be life beyond this nightmare. Wil clung to that bit of hope. She needed it, or she would crumble to ash like everything else in this kingdom.

  His arms tightened around her. For just one moment, they ignored the dread of what awaited them. They ignored the kingdoms that were falling apart.

  They ignored their fear, and the path that would take them to Pahn, and the possibility that they would not live to see the morning sun—if the sun ever again rose over the Northern Isles at all.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for all this. If I hadn’t brought you with me that day in Brayshire, Pahn wouldn’t have known about your power and you wouldn’t be in danger.”

  “And where would you be?” Wil said. “Living in a broken castle with a view of a kingdom you couldn’t touch?”

  His expression was so broken.

  Wil didn’t like it. It felt too much like a good-bye.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If we survive this and you become king, you owe me a spot on your council. But if we all die and our kingdoms are annihilated by war, I’ll admit that I was wrong.”