The Glass Spare Read online

  Ada shook his head again, his dark hair spilling over his forehead.

  “Is he in Messalin? Cannolay? Is he still alive?”

  He only went on playing with the rope bear, not even bothering to look up.

  “What about your grandparents?” Wil pressed.

  Ada regarded her with a puckered, curious expression. His blank eyes said he’d never heard that word, much less considered the possibility that his mother might have parents of her own.

  “Who else takes care of you?”

  “Loom.”

  “There’s no one else?”

  Ada didn’t answer, which was, in itself, an answer.

  Somewhere in this exchange, Wil’s adrenaline had died down. Now all she felt was resignation. “There’s no one else,” she echoed. Doubtless, Ada was a wanderer, but for all the people he had seen, he belonged only to one.

  Ada crawled forward and tried to get into Wil’s lap, and she moved away from him. “No,” she said, sharply. “You can’t do that. You can’t ever do that.”

  She saw Zay in the fierce look Ada gave her just then. He had given her the gift of his trust and acceptance, and she had thrown it back at him. There weren’t many left in the world who would accept a monster like her, and he seemed to know it.

  She slumped forward, her fingers tangling in her hair. Ada had no one in the world, save his mother and Loom. She tried to think. There were sometimes orphanages near port towns, her brother had told her, to house the children so frequently abandoned during times of famine or war. And perhaps she could pay one of them to keep Ada safe—just for a little while, until she found Pahn and returned for him.

  Ada dropped onto his side and let himself tumble with the rocking of the ship, breathing out a little giggle as the motion took him. Wil didn’t know if he was too innocent to be wary of her, or if her week on this ship had made her an automatic presence in his tiny world, or if, for some inexplicable reason, he just liked her. But he couldn’t have guessed at the plans she was trying to rationalize.

  She hated herself for considering leaving him alone in an orphanage full of strangers, his mother nowhere to be seen. But as horrible as it would be for Ada, it would be even more so for Zay, who was a different thing entirely when she tended to her son. She would do anything to reach him. Swim the seas to have him back.

  Even if Zay had poisoned her with her own sleep serum, even if she was brash and wholly unpleasant, Wil could take no pleasure in separating her from her child. In truth, she admired her ferocity. She imagined her own mother would have been the same way if she had raised her children as wanderers in such a treacherous world, rather than in a castle.

  Wil lay on her stomach, chin propped by her gloved fist. “There must be some way I can return you unnoticed,” she said. Ada didn’t know what this meant, nor did he care, and Wil laughed at the fun he seemed to be having.

  By nightfall, Wil had already begun steering for Loom’s uncharted island. Ada was mercifully cooperative for most of the venture, especially when she sliced an apple into thin coins for him—something her nanny had done when Wil was small. He stuck them to his cheeks, and covered his eyes with them, exhausting all the ways he could entertain himself before eating them. The ship was home to him, as was the sea, and Wil carried about entertaining him as though nothing was amiss.

  It wasn’t until sunset that Ada stood before the circular window in the control room and began to whimper. Maybe he thought his mother was out there buried in the waves, Wil supposed.

  “Ada.” She slid from the stool and knelt on the floor behind him. “Your mother is on the island waiting for you, and we’ll be there soon.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her, tears pooling in the divot of his upper lip.

  She thought of her own mother before she could brace herself for the weight of such sadness. And she began to hum—if only to drown the image out—one of her mother’s old shanty songs. The humming turned to singing, about a man who turned everything he touched to gold, until it had destroyed him.

  Ada’s sobs faded away as he listened. After that, she sang the one about the singing wolf, and the boy whose heart had been stolen from him so that he’d grown up with a stone in his chest, always listening for its beating.

  He didn’t try to climb into her lap that time. He had accepted the distance that had to remain between them.

  Somewhere in the fifth song, as the moon spread its broken light upon the dark sea, he drifted to sleep.

  Wil reached forward and swept her gloved hand through his feathery hair, watching the way it fell back into place, as though he were too perfect a thing to be rumpled.

  Though her castle had been full of children, she was the youngest one. She had never seen a child this small when they were sleeping, had never seen what a gift it was to be so young, in these quieter times when the eyelashes barely fluttered and the lips barely pursed, and all else was still. The sun had never burned his shoulders, and his hands didn’t know the calluses a sword hilt would give them. His muscles had never ached after a long day. How long was this window exactly? Too small to be remembered, she supposed. Eventually he would grow to be like the rest of the world, when imperfection and scars and regrets became inevitable.

  She had the fleeting thought that this calm could last forever, if only she could find a way to hold on to it. Maybe that was a thought mothers had.

  Wil had never thought about being a mother herself. It had always been something faraway to decide upon, when she was older. There had always been too much that she wanted to do first. And now, nothing viable could grow in her cursed body anyway, even if she had all the time in the world. There was no faraway someday.

  “You won’t remember today,” Wil whispered to him, as he tilted his face into her gloved palm. “But I want you to know that I will.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  WIL WOKE ADA ONCE THE island was in sight. Even in the darkness, she could see the broken castle like a scar against the night sky. It gave off no light. There were no signs of life on the island at all, and Wil wondered if Zay had gone to the mainland to find a boat. Maybe they’d already left. But then Wil saw the billowing of smoke from one of the castle’s chimneys. Relief flooded her. Returning Ada to an empty island would have been an entirely different sort of problem.

  She pressed the button that anchored the ship as they reached the shore. She had counted the twenty-five seconds it took for the anchor to retract. It would add to her escape time, but she could manage it if she moved fast.

  Ada followed her like a loyal gosling, giddy to know that he was once again home. He’d made a little song out of the word mama, which he sang at a near whisper.

  Ada didn’t need help descending the ship’s ladder—he’d been climbing that most of his life—and he bounded ahead of her, paddling easily through the shallow water and already running by the time he’d leaped onto the sand.

  “Wait,” she whispered, and he spun to face her.

  “Ada, you know where home is, right?”

  Bouncing and chewing on his finger, he pointed to the castle.

  “Then run home,” she told him. “Run really fast, okay? Don’t stop for anything.”

  Whether Ada truly comprehended or whether he just happened to have the same idea, Wil couldn’t be sure. Either way he raced for the castle.

  He would be safe now, she knew. Her own fate was less certain until she could get out of here. She hoisted herself onto the ladder, climbing as fast as the shifting ropes would allow. She would only need a minute more, maybe less, and then she could be gone.

  She ventured one last look after Ada, but he was already long gone.

  She barely registered the searing, whistling breath of a sound, before the hurled dagger landed in her calf.

  It tore easily through her flesh, grating the bone. Her spine went rigid with pain even before her mind could register it.

  Someone was screaming. The stars spun, and her body hit the sea with a hard splash. Water
rushed into her open mouth and she could taste her own blood in it as she pushed herself to the surface, reeling, hazy.

  Arms scooped her up from the water, and she knew that it would be Loom even before she heard his breathy chuckle. “You’re all right. I’ve got you.”

  She glared at him. “Seems to be your only goal in life these days, getting me.” She wrested out of his arms, landing back in the shallows with a splash and trudging up onto the shore.

  Dizzy, she sat at the water’s edge and drew her leg up to inspect the damage.

  The satin was already bled through, dripping from a tear in the fabric. The knife—or whatever had shredded her—was gone, leaving a fierce crescendo of pain in its stead.

  She hooked her fingers into the tear at her pant leg and ripped it apart, trying to fashion it into a bandage. Her arms were trembling from a pain the rest of her couldn’t seem to register, and she commanded herself to be steady.

  “Here.” Loom’s voice, and then his hands taking over the task for her. She watched as he fashioned the scraps around the black wound. Watched, too, how the blood seeped through uninhibited, covering her skin and his.

  His hands were slick with it, so dark, as though he’d reached into the night sky, and its innards had clung to his skin.

  “I brought him back,” Wil snapped. “You didn’t have to throw a knife at me.”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  Zay emerged behind him. She was clutching Ada to her chest. Her eyes were ablaze, her lips pressed tight.

  The night grew darker. She heard a strange, rough wind, and realized it was her own rapid and shallow breathing.

  “Hey.” Loom’s voice was loud, and Wil realized that she was no longer on her feet and somehow the ground was under her back. Loom grasped her chin, searching her gaze. The image of him blurred and doubled. “Look at me,” he demanded. But her eyes wouldn’t focus.

  He lifted her again. “Hells, Zay, she’s bleeding out. You struck her artery.”

  “She struck mine,” Zay replied.

  Wil couldn’t make out Loom’s shouted response; it sounded underwater. She struggled to free herself from his grasp. “I can walk,” she insisted. But her feet never seemed to reach the sand. The pair of them went on arguing, Zay’s tone one of indifference, and Loom’s of fury.

  In a blink she was on the hard floor, beside a burning fire. She lay on her stomach, the wound at the back of her calf facing up. She pushed herself upright by her elbows and saw her own skin, pale as bone, as sweat and seawater splashed from her forehead in heavy drops. To stay conscious, she watched the bottles and pouches Loom wielded.

  A liquid hissed when it touched her flesh, and with that sound she knew what he was planning. He was going to disinfect the wound, and then he was going to cauterize it.

  Zay and Loom had been arguing, but their voices felt miles away, until Loom told her, “Just go away, then, if you’re determined to be useless.”

  “Fine.”

  Ahead of them, Zay started up the stairs, petting Ada’s hair, her kisses to the crown of his head making him cackle. “You smell like apples,” she told him. She did not look back.

  Wil wadded the cuff of her sleeve between her teeth. “Don’t give me any warning before you do it.”

  He didn’t warn her. He pressed the burning blade to her skin, and the cry Wil let out was not her own. It was the stunned wail her mother had made on the night she learned that her children were dead.

  Several short, sharp compressions later, it was done. Loom tried to give her something for the pain, but she refused it. She hated the fog that had clouded her senses the last time. She hated how vulnerable it left her.

  She was lolling though still conscious after her skin had been welded shut. The pain filled her vision with roiling stars, and she was certain that she had lost a few moments of herself, but the crescendo of it had passed, and eventually, she was able to pull herself upright and lean against the wall.

  “Who is she to you?” she asked Loom, who was sitting across from her. The firelight burnished his skin, made his eyes as jeweled as the things she touched. He was so infuriatingly lovely.

  “What are you talking about?” he said, and Wil realized he must have thought her delirious.

  “Zay.”

  A smile melted some of the edge from his expression. “There isn’t a word for what we are to each other. I should know. I speak quite a few languages.”

  Wil was breathing hard. She closed her eyes in a long blink. “Ada’s lucky to have someone willing to throw knives on his behalf,” she said.

  “You brought him back unharmed,” Loom said. “So she merely threw one of my knives. Not her jeweler’s knife. That one would have gone clean through the bone. Really, I think she’s starting to like you.”

  Wil laughed. It came out as little more than a breath. The room was turning blurry again. “I’m glad.”

  She must have lost consciousness, because the next thing she knew, she was being laid onto the satin sheets of a bed. The window was open from her earlier escape, the sound of the rustling sea taunting her with the freedom she’d had for a few precious hours. She would still be out there, if not for her nettling conscience, which she cursed just then. It was a weakness her father would have hated her for. He would be right. Zay and Loom had held her captive on that very ship against her will, and she owed them no loyalty. She could have kept Ada as their penance, shown them just what it meant to take someone away from their life.

  But she had brought him back. Whole and happy and unharmed. She did not know whether this made her weaker than her captors, or stronger.

  “Sleep on your stomach,” Loom said. “It’ll hurt less.”

  Her body sank into the softness of the mattress and her traitorous eyes felt heavy, but she didn’t close them.

  “That was an impressive escape, right up until you were thwarted by a two-year-old.” He was fitting a thin sheet over her, leaving her leg uncovered. “Zay was set to steal a ship off the mainland to go after you, but I knew you’d bring him back.”

  “Are you an oracle as well as a prince?”

  “No.” He leaned over her and peeled the damp hair away from her face; his fingertips sweeping the back of her neck evoked a warm flutter in her chest. “I’m just observant.”

  He was gone for a few minutes, and when he returned he pressed a cold wet leaf to her forehead, and another to her cheek. They clung to her skin. “What is that?” Her voice felt too close, as though she’d spoken into her own skull.

  “Lyster. It’s for fevers.”

  “You know every plant, don’t you?” She rested her cheek against her forearm. “Every root, every tree of this place.”

  “Yes.” His voice was a warm song. “And every breath and every heartbeat too.”

  Without meaning to, she smiled. It was so quiet here, so calm. The satin glided against her with each menial shift.

  When he stood to leave, she reached out and grabbed his wrist.

  Just as there was something in her blood that made her deadly, there was something else that called to him, something that she could bury when her defenses were strong, but not tonight. Not while darkness burned away the edges of the world, and she could hear the absence of all that she’d lost, and she had never felt so alone.

  Again she felt his fingers move through her hair.

  Outside, the ocean shifted and rustled like millions of sheets of paper. She drifted to sleep, listening to their indecipherable stories.

  The shrill cry of a gull woke her.

  Wil opened her eyes to find that she’d spent the night facing the open window; the sky was cloudy and dark with a coming rain. Her head was cradled in her arms, and when she stretched, a stabbing pain cut her movement short. It shot up the length of her spine, down her arms, into her fingertips. It momentarily paralyzed her lungs, her heart.

  Loom had made good on his promise not to give her anything for the pain, and now with some bitterness she wished she hadn’t
been so stubborn.

  Laboriously, she looked over her shoulder at her leg. She was still wearing the torn and bloody trousers, severed at the knee on one side. A cloth was draped over the wound, fragrant with something sweet and minty that did nothing to mask the stench of burned flesh.

  She braced herself and sat upright, drawing her knee to her chest. Metallic stars swam a funnel around her vision.

  The cloth fell to the sheets, and she picked it up, inspecting it. She could identify the mintlemint by smell, and serlot oil with its sandy little seeds—common for mixing poultices and pastes—but the rest was foreign to her.

  She made herself look at the wound, where the purpled shadow of Loom’s dagger ran vertically down the back of her leg, like a seam on a doll. Loom had touched the blade to her skin in four rapid spurts, but each time had been in the exact same spot, and he had angled the blade along the grain, which would reduce the scarring greatly. She could see his attention to detail in that burning outline. Even Gerdie would be impressed, and he should know best; he had been tasked with repairing her all their lives.

  “Morning.” Loom was standing in the doorway, amusement in his slight smile. He held up a tray with an ornate crystal cup and a pitcher. “I thought you’d be thirsty.”

  “You left my window open,” she mumbled, and pushed herself upright.

  He put the glass in her hands. “You want to escape? Give it a try. I’ll give you a five-minute head start.”

  “Chivalrous.” She drank the water greedily, some of it spilling and dripping from her chin. She had never been so thirsty.

  Loom sat on the edge of the mattress, just as the first rumble of thunder sounded outside. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I should be a day closer to finding Pahn instead of stuck here.” She handed the emptied glass back to Loom.

  He glanced at her leg, then to the cloth now lying on the mattress beside it. “I predict you’ll be up and back at it in no time. Which is a good thing, because we’re going to Messalin tomorrow.”

  Wil stared at him. “It really means that much to you.”