The Cursed Sea Read online

  “Why?” Wil said. “Why was I cursed?”

  The queen shook her head. “I don’t know. But in the weeks before we lost you and Owen, I knew something had changed.”

  Wil looked straight ahead, at her painted white desk. There was an ornithology book, still open, at its center beside an askew chair, waiting for her to sit in the amber glow of the blown-glass lamp and return to reading about spawnlings.

  This tiny piece of the world that had once belonged to her now felt more like a memorial to a dead girl.

  Without a word she stood and walked to the window. It stuck, as it always did, and she forced it open with the heel of her hand. The queen turned to watch as Wil reached along the castle’s outer wall. It didn’t take her long to find a tendril of ivy. Heart beating fast from the anticipation, she plucked a leaf and presented it to her mother.

  The change was slower this time; there was a dull throb of pain, like her curse had to wrestle its way out of her. But in one final bloom, the ivy hardened to emerald.

  Sweat beaded Wil’s brow from the strain, and this concerned her. Her curse had never been a conscious effort before.

  The queen stared at it. She could see the lines of her daughter’s palm through the stone. She was watching still as Wil’s hand shook and the shiver shot up her arm and spread throughout. She saw the fierce change in her daughter’s eyes, the way they brightened and glazed at the same time.

  “It was an accident.” It was as though someone else were speaking the words. “I didn’t want Owen to come after me. He was always trying to protect me when he should have just let me go.”

  The queen understood now what the king must have done to hide this truth from her. She did not ask, now, for the details of her son’s final moments. Later, she would have to. She would have to know what had happened to her son, so that his death could be a part of her the way that his life was a part of her.

  But for now, she fixed her attention on her living child. Her daughter. She put her arms around her.

  Wil shook with a sob. Her face was hot with tears. She was alive—despite everything, alive. Death had never been a match for this one. The emerald fell to the floor and Wil tried to back away. “You can’t touch me. I’ll kill you, too.”

  The queen tightened her grasp. “No one tells me I can’t hold my daughter,” she said.

  “You can’t.” Wil’s voice was pleading.

  But the queen didn’t let go, and it frightened Wil that her mother loved her so much that she would risk death just to hold her. It reminded her of Owen that night by the rapids. He’d stared at her with defiance, so sure of his decision.

  Wil twisted from her mother’s grasp. Her mother loved her too much to let go, and Wil loved her mother too much to stay in her arms.

  “Please,” she whispered. “I couldn’t stand it if I hurt you.”

  The queen’s sad expression said that Wil had already hurt her by disappearing, to be taken for dead.

  “I’m sorry.” Wil wanted to say more, but tears threatened and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to hold them in if she tried to list all the things she was sorry for.

  There was a strange heaviness in her blood, as though her curse was trying to surge forward. And then it receded. Later, she would experiment with the ivy. Perhaps it was just exhaustion from the travel and the confrontation with Baren.

  The queen was twirling the ribbon of her nightgown. Three twists. Untwist. Three twists.

  Wil told her mother about Loom, though she left out the part about his being a prince, but included his passion for helping the South nonetheless. She told of everything that had happened until it all came back to Loom, whose every heartbeat was now fated to her hands.

  By the end of her tale, Wil had changed into a nightgown the queen drew from her closet. Though she hadn’t been gone for very long, it no longer fit her as it once had. The sleeves were too short. The hem no longer covered her knees. She had spent so much time in billowing satin trousers, loose in the Lavean fashion, it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d gotten any taller.

  Her bed still felt the same, though, as she sank into it.

  The queen sat beside her, smoothing back Wil’s hair as she had done when Wil was a child. “You’ve grown,” the queen said at last. “I thought the chance to see you grow had been stolen from me.”

  Wil looked up at her. “I was a coward not to come back and tell you the truth.”

  The back of the queen’s hand trailed down Wil’s cheek. “I’ve seen my share of truths.” She looked toward the door and back. “We’ll keep this from Baren. If he were to know about this curse, I fear what he would have you do.”

  Wil’s head rolled against the pillow. “Owen doesn’t deserve for his death to be covered up.”

  “Owen would want it this way,” the queen said. “I know well what he wanted for you. He and I argued many times on your behalf.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Wil said. Her throat went dry. “Why should you argue about me?”

  “He wanted to bring you along sometimes when he traveled. He said your mind was like an animal held in captivity, rattling the cage. I didn’t want to see how right he was.”

  The sentiment embedded itself into her heart.

  “I don’t know who anyone is in death,” the queen said, “but I knew my son in life. And he would not want you to suffer more than you have. He always fought for you.”

  “Thank you,” Wil whispered. She realized just in that moment how much she had needed for someone to tell her that.

  “I don’t know who would curse you,” the queen said. “But I suspect the punishment wasn’t for you to suffer, but me.”

  Wil studied her mother’s face. The queen knew so much about the world; surely she’d met marvelers and seen the effects of their curses firsthand. The king had wanted his bride to have an easy life, a happy one. He’d outfitted her with pretty things and given her gardens to tend and children to love. But Wil had always seen who her mother was underneath all of that. She saw that they were the same.

  “Who would want you to suffer?” Wil asked.

  The queen swept a hand across Wil’s brow. “I don’t know, heart. Truly I don’t. But birth curses are never about the child who was born with the curse.”

  Three

  WIL DID NOT SLEEP, AS her mother had insisted.

  Instead, she sat at the edge of her bed with the dagger at her thigh, the guns in their holsters at either hip. She was waiting until she was sure her mother and Baren had gone to bed before she made her move.

  She had not wanted to remain in this chamber at all, had wanted to begin her search for answers immediately. But the queen had insisted that nights in this castle had become unsafe, and that this pursuit was one for the morning. Wil had not understood. She no longer understood anything about this place that had once been her home. Something was very wrong with it. Even her power seemed to suffer. The ivy leaf she’d crystallized before bed had only turned halfway, leaving a dull ache in her chest.

  It wasn’t just the absence of Owen and her father, or all the covered mirrors in the halls. It was something dark that had blotted out the sky over the entire kingdom.

  Despite her mother’s warning, Wil had to find Gerdie. Her worry for him surpassed her fear over what he might do when he learned she was alive. He was one who needed complete answers, and she would have to tell him everything. The whole awful, bloody truth of it.

  Mustering her courage, she rose from her bed. It was outfitted with fresh linens, she noted. Even when she had been presumed dead, her mother had sent for a servant to outfit Wil’s bed in winter sheets.

  She looked at the carved clock hanging on the wall across from her bed, its patient ticking growing louder the more she became aware of it. She imagined her mother coming in weekly to wind it, even as she’d believed her daughter to be dead.

  Her mother had no superstition about clocks, barely regarded them at all. And upon considering this, Wil realized her mother h
ad kept the clock in this room ticking simply because she had missed her. Because having that small, steady sound in this room was the next best thing to a heartbeat. Despite its weeks of being empty, her chamber still felt like a place that belonged to the living. Made vulnerable by her half-sleeping state, Wil felt heartsick with guilt for what she had put her mother through.

  She slipped out of bed. The thoughts followed her. What had happened to her father? Where was her brother? What above all burning hells was happening to Baren?

  Nagging as these questions were, their answers would not be the thing to save Loom’s life. To pay Pahn’s ransom she needed answers, and there was one person to whom she could always turn for those: Gerdie.

  Still in her nightgown, she moved to her chamber door and opened it. Her mother sat in a carved chair in the hallway, her cheek rested on her fist, asleep. There was a tangle of yarn in her lap, and something partially knitted. Wil had always known her mother to have busy hands, but she could not recall ever once seeing her with yarn.

  Had her mother camped out to protect her from Baren? Or had she meant to protect the rest of the castle from Wil?

  Wil didn’t wake her, but trod lightly across the flagstones of the hallway, toward Gerdie’s chamber.

  She was just about to turn the knob when she heard the motion behind her. She crouched, dodging a sword that meant to remove the head from her shoulders. In one fast motion she threw off her coat and drew a gun. Baren swung for her again and she curled her knees and somersaulted past his legs. She was up on her feet again before he turned to face her.

  He had never been much with weapons, but even so, he had improved. She wouldn’t have heard him coming if not for his hard breathing echoing throughout the halls.

  She held her gun in two hands, steady as her gaze. She would not shoot to kill, no matter what he might try next, she told herself. She couldn’t do that to their mother. Not again.

  But Baren lowered his sword. He laughed. A distracted, anxious laugh. His eyes gleamed dark with the madness of that sound.

  Wil narrowed her eyes. They stood in silence for a long moment. Neither of them moved. And then Wil whispered, “What’s happened to you?”

  She did not lower her gun.

  “You’ve been a plague since the day you were born,” he said.

  If only he had been the one to catch her the night she fell from the wall instead of Owen. It was an ugly thought, and it startled her to know she meant it. To know that she and her brother were matched in their hatred for each other. To know they had this much in common.

  He let the sword fall from his hand. It clattered against the stone. He looked at it lying beside him. When he raised his eyes to her again, there was a snarl on his mouth, and his voice was a rasp. “I will have to kill you myself.”

  She fired a shot even before he had moved. It was no matter. It didn’t stop him. Blood trailed from the wound in his bicep as he reached for her. She moved to take a step back, but he anticipated it, hooking her ankle with his foot, so that she toppled to the ground with him over her.

  The gun flew out of her hands, skidding across the floor. Her wrists were pinned under his, his knee crushing into her stomach, making her breaths come in rasped, strained howls.

  The shortage of air made her struggle even as she told herself not to give Baren the satisfaction. He pressed his weight into her as he leaned closer. In a few seconds, he would be dead from her touch. He would be dead, and her mother would find his ruby corpse and see for herself what a monster her daughter was.

  Baren’s face was over hers, so near that his features blurred. “You,” he panted, furious and quiet, “were never meant to come into this world.”

  Wil waited for the crackle of gemstone. She waited for his grasp on her wrists to slacken. But he didn’t let up, and her lungs protested how little air they were able to draw under his weight.

  He drew one hand away from her wrist and punched her in the mouth. She felt the full weight of it, and then she tasted blood.

  Gathering her strength, she twisted her hips and shoulders in tandem and used her freed arm to throw him off of her. But he had grown stronger, and for once, she felt how small she was under his broad frame. There was the sense that he could snap her spine in two if he had a mind for it.

  She betrayed her bewilderment, and he grinned.

  Then from somewhere far away there was the sound of footsteps, heavy and running. A blur of motion and blond hair, and Baren was thrown off her.

  Gasping in the air she’d lost, Wil staggered to her feet, grabbing Baren’s dropped sword as she did.

  Gerdie had Baren pinned to the wall, a dagger at his throat. As her vision sharpened, Wil saw the familiar pattern of the blade. The dagger—its blade simple and sharp and gleaming—had belonged to Owen.

  Baren held his hands up, but there was no fear in his eyes. He was wheezing, until the sound turned into laughter. “Can you not simply be gone?” he said to Wil. He slapped his hand to his forehead, grasping his own skull so tightly his fingers turned white. “I can no longer remember a time before you were born. Before you condemned us all.”

  Wil might have wanted to know what he meant by that, if she hadn’t been so confused by the rise and fall of his chest, the way he continued to live even after he had been so close to her. It couldn’t be their shared blood; that hadn’t spared Owen.

  The sound of footsteps made all three siblings turn their heads. Their mother was running toward them, her gold nightgown bunched in her fists. She came to a stop and knelt to retrieve the gun that had slid across the floor, its barrel still facing her children.

  Gerdie eased up on Baren only once his mother had retrieved the gun. Slowly, he returned the dagger to its hilt. He must have been sleeping, for that was the only time he removed his leg braces and monocle, all of which were absent now. As his adrenaline began to die down and his ragged breathing slowed, she saw the tremble in his left leg.

  He hadn’t looked at her once. Both her brothers were turned on their mother. Baren’s arms were shaking. Blood oozed from his wound, stained his frilled white tunic. Wil could taste her own blood in her mouth, feel the sting of her split lip.

  But if the scene was half as frightful as Wil suspected, the queen’s eyes didn’t show it. She touched Baren’s arm. He hissed in pain and flinched away. The bullet had merely grazed him; Wil knew this because that had been her intention, and she could also see a crack in a wall stone where the bullet struck it.

  “You will need to let me clean that so it doesn’t get infected,” the queen told him. “You can’t afford to fall ill, not now with so much at stake.”

  Baren turned his stare on Wil. “I need to rid this castle of its ghosts.”

  “Come with me.” The queen wrapped her arm around him and began to lead him off. When Baren’s attention was on the hallway ahead, the queen reached behind her back, pressing the gun firmly into Wil’s hands.

  Wil was afraid to turn to Gerdie. She could sense his eyes on her now. Tallim powder and smoke all about him like an apparition. It was a sour, smoky, familiar smell. The smell of weapons, of war. Of home.

  She made herself look at him.

  His expression was wild, bewildered, as though she were a cauldron explosion. Those, at least, he could come to understand.

  “Gerdie?” It was a cracked whisper.

  He flinched as though the sound of her voice could kill him. She could hear the sudden haste of his breaths. His eyes—his bright, curious, brilliant eyes—were now guarded in a way never before directed at her.

  For a moment they stood facing each other, the echo of their breaths in the stone hallway confirming that they were both alive and whole.

  Maybe she was unwelcome now, Wil thought. Maybe after hearing of her and Owen’s deaths, Gerdie had thrown himself into his work, reinventing himself as he invented things forged of steel and potion and powder, and now he no longer considered himself her brother.

  Gerdie’s jaw tightened, and
in that small gesture he became familiar to her again. She recognized the change in his eyes, the way they always grew fiercer when he was fighting back tears. A wave of sorrow and something else—relief?—crested in his features.

  “Where have you been?” he rasped. “Burning hells, Wil. Where have you been?”

  Four

  GERDIE SAT ON THE EDGE of his bed, working a salve into his aching calves.

  Wil was perched at the hearth, prodding life into the dying fire. In this way, things were as they had always been. The room was warm and quiet, all her brother’s things neatly tucked into their shelves and drawers.

  Outside, it had begun to rain. The wind skewed it sideways, and drops fell against the windows like desperate hands trying to beat their way inside.

  With her eyes still on the fire, Wil began to speak. She told her brother what really happened that night. She told him about the blood squeezing from Owen’s skin before it turned crystal. She told him about the shards in his hair, and the weight of him collapsing against her, and the moment she felt him stop breathing.

  Gerdie didn’t say a word to stop her, and so she went on, until she had told him about Loom, the boy to whom she had become inextricably fated. As ever, she confided in her brother more than she had with her mother, sparing no detail.

  She took some comfort in Gerdie’s predictable inclination to listen. He’d moved to sit beside her, the light from the fire causing his monocle to gleam when he turned his head just so.

  Moments earlier, he had seemed like a stranger, but then, even that had not been so. He had recognized her the moment he saw her, even before her return could have possibly made sense. Gerdie wanted an explanation for her return from the dead, yes, but an explanation was not required before he’d moved to save her from Baren’s attack. Not as much had changed between them as Wil had feared.