The Glass Spare Page 5

  “That’s pure emerald.” He sounded frightened and amazed, and it was hard to tell which was more prominent. He began plucking the hardened grass around her, inspecting them the same way. “Real,” he said. “All real.”

  “He’s dead,” Wil whispered. She was staring at the man again.

  “Can you stand?”

  “I—” She swallowed hard, nodded. “I think so.”

  “We’re right by the river,” he said. “If you can manage it, we should be able to drag him to the rapids. No one will find him there. He’ll be pinned down by the water.”

  It was typical of her brother to focus on the details before dealing with the larger problem. This usually irritated her, but now she was grateful. Action allowed less time to panic.

  Wil took a shaky breath and stood. “You take his shoulders. I’ll get his feet.” She didn’t want to see the man’s face, but as she hooked his boots under her arms she looked anyway. His ears and tongue and eyes were ruby.

  The tip of his nose had also hardened into the gem, and despite himself, Gerdie leaned in for a closer look. The man’s nostrils were the pink flesh of a man who’d had a few too many to drink, but that skin receded into a stone such as would be found encrusted in a debutante’s ring. “Astounding,” Gerdie marveled to himself.

  “Could you not?” The sight was nauseating her.

  They took one step, and the pain from her ribs shot up her spine. She gasped.

  “Wil?”

  “I’m fine.” Only she wasn’t. With a touch, she had done something nightmarish, something she already knew could never be undone. And as the strange exhilaration of this new power began to fade, her broken rib flared with new pain.

  “Here.” Gerdie’s voice was gentle. He lowered the ruby corpse, its limbs splintering and crackling as they bent. There was still some muscle and sinew that hadn’t crystallized. “We’ll drag him. Do you think you can manage that?”

  She nodded, feeling as though she were moving in slow motion.

  Grunting but wordless, they ambled toward the river.

  From within the man’s boots there came a splintered sound like glass cracking apart and then its pieces rattling, and Wil knew that his feet had been affected too. She had killed this man. The crackle and creak of stone reminded her over and over.

  She heard the chiming of the clock towers announcing midnight, and from that she knew that it had taken them more than half an hour to haul the man’s body to the river.

  When they at last reached the water’s edge, Wil dropped to her knees, forcing Gerdie down with her as the man’s weight hit the ground.

  She doubled over the water and shuddered like she was going to be sick, but nothing came.

  The grass stuck to her sweaty palms. It wasn’t turning to stone. What had changed?

  Her pulse was slow. She felt sluggish and nauseous.

  “I think it happens when my heart is beating fast,” she mumbled. Her face in the river was a broken moon, the current tugging it off to one side.

  “We have to get rid of him before someone finds him,” Gerdie said, ever insistent on finishing the task at hand. “If we can get him in the water, the current will do the rest.” His practical tone gave way to a moment of sympathy. “Come on. We’re so close.”

  Wil forced herself to oblige. Together, they pushed the man forward. He hit the water with a hard splash. As Gerdie had promised, the current began drawing the man’s body toward the rapids.

  Wil watched until he was gone.

  “The tallim,” she said, after several long seconds. She turned to her brother, mind racing. “It spilled all over the floor that day I got it for you. It—I breathed it in. It was all over my hands. It must have been laced with something. That’s why this is happening.”

  Gerdie positioned himself beside her, straightening his legs and struggling to find the least painful position. “The tallim wasn’t laced with fillers,” he said. “It was pure. I’d know. And I’ve gotten more than a lungful or two after tossing it into the cauldron.”

  “Then what?” Wil said. Her breathing was starting to grow rapid again. Something bit into her knees, and she jumped to her feet, startled. The grass where she’d been sitting had turned hard and glimmering.

  By the time the clock towers struck one, they’d gathered all the bits of emerald grass. They wrapped them in cloth and buried them in Wil’s bag. And then they began to walk home.

  She did not walk close to her brother. The distance between them only added to the strangeness, only ignited her fear. This was not the first time their lives had been at risk. It was not the first time something frightening had happened, or strange. But they had always been able to hold each other up, fix the other’s wounds.

  A mere touch from her would kill him. She knew this. Not only because of what she had just seen, but because she could feel it. There was something deadly inside her. It had melted into her blood, become a part of her, and it buzzed like the energy generated by the mills.

  Though her brother had not uttered a word of complaint, his limp hadn’t gone unnoticed. A bruise was darkening his temple, half-covered by his waves of gold hair.

  They had been walking in silence, but as the castle’s stone wall began to appear in the distance, Gerdie said, “Are we going to talk about this?”

  Wil rubbed her temple. “Maybe if we don’t talk about it, it’ll just go away.”

  “That was your first kill,” Gerdie said.

  Wil concentrated on breathing. Going into another panic would only summon this newfound horror. She could still see the ruby corpse rolling into the river.

  “Hey,” she said, trying to chase the thought away. “I’m sorry you got caught up in what happened back there. It wasn’t your fight.”

  He looked at her for the first time since they’d gathered the emeralds.

  “Yes it was. I get so mad at Papa, the way he uses us. The way he sends you out to do his bidding with no regard for the danger. But I’m no different.” The frustration showed on his face. “You never tell me half of what happens. You hide what you’re thinking so well, sometimes you even manage to hide it from yourself.”

  Wil didn’t trust herself to reach out and grab his arm, so she said, “Stop.” He turned, and they stood facing each other. “You aren’t using me. I wanted you to have the tallim. I want you to have everything you need. Gerdie, Papa is trying to escalate this tension with the Southern Isles into a war. I don’t know what it’s going to mean, but I do know that the South doesn’t have alchemists like you. No one can make the things that you do.” She lowered her voice and leaned as close as she dared. “If it comes down to it, we can flee the kingdom. You, me, Mother, maybe Owen. We can overthrow Papa if we can’t make him see reason.”

  Gerdie bristled, and she could see that he was flattered. “Your life isn’t a price I’m willing to pay for my materials,” he said. “That man was going to kill you. And you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

  “You haven’t met very many people,” she laughed.

  He grudgingly smiled. But it didn’t last long. “I’ll figure out what’s doing this to you. I will. In the meantime, you should lie low. No one can know about this.”

  They both gave in to the illusion that things were still the same. They still looked the same, at least.

  They still had each other.

  Neither of them was in any shape to attempt climbing the wall, and without a word passed between them, they walked for the iron gate, where two guards were stationed.

  “Prince Gerhard,” one of them said. “Princess Wilhelmina.” From his breathless tone, Wil gathered that she looked worse than she felt. She rubbed at the dry blood crusted on the corner of her mouth.

  The guards moved to help them, but Gerdie brushed them off. “We’re fine,” he said. “We got a little too enthusiastic at a boat party we attended. Everyone was taking turns diving over the edge. You won’t tell our father, will you?”

  “No, my lord. Of
course I won’t.”

  Of course he would. But Gerdie’s lie was spoken so smoothly that the king himself would believe it when the guards relayed it in the morning, and he’d think nothing of such benign antics.

  They moved through the gate. When they’d walked past the oval garden, and the guards were out of sight, Wil’s shoulders dropped. Her pace slowed. She felt as though her rib was splintering with every step, peppering her with stabs of pain, flashes of red before her eyes.

  In the distance, the ballroom throbbed with light and music like a glowing heart in the western field.

  Gerdie stopped to look at it.

  Wil stood beside him, resisting her usual instinct to rest her elbow on his shoulder. The lights touched his face the way music touched ears. It crept inside him, made him restless. He looked at those distant bodies twirling across the windows the way that Wil looked at the sea.

  “I hear princesses are wretched,” Wil said in her most serious voice. “They pick things from their noses and hide them in their hair.”

  Gerdie’s lips twitched, but he wouldn’t allow himself to smile.

  Eventually, they made their way to the darkened castle, empty aside from the guards who greeted them at the door.

  Gerdie moved toward the servants’ kitchen, which housed the door to his lab. “You’re really going to work?” Wil frowned at him. “Now?”

  He took the bag from her shoulder, careful not to touch her. “I’m going to break down the emeralds. They pass for real with the data goggles, but there must be something else to them.”

  “I wish you’d sleep first,” Wil said. She knew he hadn’t been doing much of that.

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “I wish for things too.” He turned for his lab.

  The stone stairwell that led to Wil’s bedroom felt like a mile. She moved slowly, eyelids drooping. It wasn’t the fight with the vendor, or even her injuries that made her limbs feel so heavy and her mind so fogged.

  When she’d turned the man to stone, it was the most alive she’d ever felt, all her blood rushing through her extremities like the raging rapids. Her vision had been sharp, everything glowing before her. The feeling came again when she turned the grass into emeralds by the river. Exhilaration. Terror. Life, as though she had always been sleeping and was now finally awake.

  And now that the feeling had passed, her blood was no longer rushing. It felt thick, sluggish. Her eyes were sore, her bones and muscles aching.

  Whatever had changed in her was affecting her entire body. And in the morning, there would be such a thing as worry. In the morning, she would have to face what she had done. She had ended a man’s life, and nearly lost her own, and put her brother at risk. She would have to face what had happened and what was happening to her, all of it.

  But tonight, her mind had gone foggy and all of it felt far away. There was only her four-poster bed, netted with shimmering lace, and the warm, familiar sense that she was home, that she was safe now.

  She let her dress fall to her ankles—green and lighter green, like the grass she had crystallized—and slipped into a nightgown. It was white. Like the blanket of snow that came each November, turning even the slums of the Port Capital into something empty and clean. She wanted to believe that this night could be so easily erased.

  Just as she climbed into bed, there was a knock at her chamber door. “Wil?” Gerdie. “Can I come in?”

  “Yes.”

  He was holding the stone mortar. She could smell the spring sprigs and mintlemint, and the spicy sweetness of estherpetals—the key ingredient in his sleep serum.

  “For the pain,” he said, as he sat on the edge of her bed.

  Wil took the mortar into her hands and tilted it to her lips. She was not one for having her senses dulled by pain remedies, but her brother was a prodigy at mixing them, and she knew that she would awaken in the morning feeling restored, rather than in a persistent fog.

  “Is it a dream serum?” she asked.

  “No,” Gerdie said. “I could mix you one if you’d like. I thought you might prefer a dreamless sleep.”

  “You know me so well.”

  “Do you feel any different?” he asked. “Does anything hurt? Are you dizzy?”

  “No,” Wil said. “Only tired.”

  Her brother narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Tired, or exhausted?”

  “Should there be any difference?”

  “Tired is one thing,” Gerdie said. “But exhausted is how you’d feel after pushing a boulder up a hill.”

  “Oh,” Wil said, settling back against her pillows. “Then yes. I’m exhausted.”

  The sleep serum was already beginning to work. The entire world felt like a distant star, winking almost imperceptibly in an endless universe of black.

  Her brother didn’t press for any more answers. At least not tonight. Tomorrow, they would both approach this with fervor, and the thought made Wil more exhausted still. She hoped, as her body grew warm with sleep, that by morning this would all have passed, even as she knew that this was just the beginning.

  She closed her eyes and heard Gerdie still beside her. Looking at the clock and counting each breath she drew within a minute, she suspected, already analyzing her like something lying broken on his metal table.

  For a moment, they were children again. He was small and burning with fever in a bed that threatened to swallow him. Wil was crawling up beside him, wiping his sweaty brow with her bare palm, telling him the story of the Gold King, and of the singing wolf, making up happier endings so he wouldn’t have such troubled dreams.

  This was the way it had always been between them. The world tried to destroy them, but they kept each other alive.

  FIVE

  THE QUEEN AWOKE BEFORE DAWN with a sense that something had been stolen from her. Something that had been dropped into the sea.

  This was not the first time she arose and haunted the castle at night, but her unrest was pointed this time; she knew that something was amiss.

  She moved down the halls and looked in on each of her children. In the darkness at the threshold of their individual chambers she held her own breath to hear them breathe, the sounds reinforcing the beat of her heart.

  There was Owen in his cavern of books, the electric lantern glowing at his bedside table, papers spread alongside his sleeping body. She moved to turn out the light, and kissed his crown of hair before she did. He was this nation’s future king, but still a boy when he slept.

  Then she looked in on Baren, the one who frightened her, snoring lightly in the blackness. Then Gerdie, who fretted and turned in his tangled sheets, his mind as busy as his cauldron even in sleep. His braces were propped against the wall by his bed, skeletal and waiting for soft flesh to give them life. It was a habit for her to touch his forehead, searching as ever for signs of illness. His cool skin against her hand was a relief.

  Last was Wilhelmina, a heap of lace and ribbon at the heart of a white canopy bed. Her arm was strewn over the edge of the mattress, and even in the moonlight the queen could see the bruises staining her wrist. She went to such lengths to hide her perilous endeavors, this one, and the queen knew that it was for her sake.

  Wil slept silent and still as death.

  The window was open, and a warm breeze made the canopy linens rise and fall. The queen moved to close it. Her daughter was too much like her—in love with the free air and always wanting it to touch her, as though she might reach out and grab two fistfuls of stars and breathe in their scent like flowers.

  Alone, the queen allowed herself to have the thought that was within her always. That her daughter was the thing she had wanted most in the world, the thing she’d fought death itself to have. After all those years of nervous compulsions and prayers and herbs and sons, she was granted her girl. And she loved her even more than the king, who was the flame in her chest, and the golden-haired sons who put the light in her eyes. It was a terrible joy and a terrible guilt—for she knew the dangers of loving anything in this world
where things were too easily destroyed.

  Her punishment for so greedily wanting a daughter was that she had been given one just like herself: a restless wanderer of a child who craved the world.

  In the moonlight she could see Wil’s face. In sleep, she was honest. There was no pretense painted on her skin like concealer. There was no softness to her expression. What was it she saw, in all that darkness? What trouble would greet her mind in the morning, before she laced herself into her dress and became a princess for her mother to see?

  The queen swept her hand across Wil’s brow and kissed her cheek. Once, twice, a third time, to keep the unrest in her heart at bay.

  SIX

  THE ESTHERPETALS GAVE WIL A sleep that was mercifully free of dreams. She awoke with a sense that she had blinked and everything from the night before had just disappeared.

  The mirror said otherwise. She sat at her dressing table and selected a pale pink lipstick to hide the cut on her bottom lip.

  Covering the signs of battle was easy enough; she’d mastered that when her father first began sending her to the underground market, when she was ten. The king couldn’t trust his men to acquire his illegal imports—every man would turn on his king for a price—and the daughter who looked nothing like royalty was his greatest resource.

  For the king, having children had been a matter of strategy; he might have had a dozen more, if Wil’s birth hadn’t nearly been the death of the queen. Children could be primed into soldiers, and their loyalty was more easily earned—or so the king believed. He kept his children well guarded, an act which may have been mistaken for love if one hadn’t met him. The guards, soldiers, and servants were well acquainted with the royal children, but most never left the castle proper, and those who did knew to keep all the castle’s secrets quiet under penalty of death.

  When Wil turned ten, the king impatiently thrust her into the world to do his bidding. Owen had been with her, but they were outnumbered two to one when they discovered the imported metal merely plated, and things went sour. “Stay alert and be everywhere,” Owen had whispered, as they stood back-to-back, enemies closing them in. “Remember what I taught you.”