Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

It took three days to reach the Prinzessin, where it lay in the river like a sleeping dragon, softly belching smoke. The relief Lorelei had felt upon seeing it vanished the instant she stepped onboard. She’d nearly forgotten the nauseating sway of the floor—and the repressive atmosphere was not helped by the crew, who had stared at Ludwig as though his curse were a catching thing.

Lorelei could not say she blamed them.

As soon as she scrubbed off the grime of the last two weeks in the washbasin, she shut herself in her room. The temptation to collapse into bed was almost too powerful to deny, but she could not afford to fall asleep. Instead, she paced restlessly. Water from her damp hair ran down the back of her neck and slipped into her collar like cold, searching fingers.

She would have to find Ziegler’s journal before the others caught on to her—or saw her rummaging through the professor’s belongings. She waited until her eyes burned with exhaustion, until she was certain everyone else had fallen asleep. Then, she tucked a tarnished vesta case into her waistcoat’s pocket and draped her greatcoat over the back of her chair.

Lorelei cracked open her bedroom door, and cool air sighed into the room. Before she could think too hard about what she was doing, she stepped out onto the balcony.

The dark closed in on her immediately, but the ambient light from the moon above and the crew’s lanterns below made it tolerable. She could see the massive paddle wheel dipping into the lightless waters of the Vereist. It turned inexorably, half of it eerily vanishing and reappearing as it churned the water to black froth.

There were two blessings she could count on. One, there was no direct line of sight from the deck. And two, there was no one to disturb her on this side of the ship. In a neat row were her room, then Ziegler’s, then Ludwig’s, and lastly, her destination: the war room. Through the ringing in her ears, she could make out the low drone of the crew’s voices filtering up from below.

Now or never.

The doors leading into the war room were enormous, inlaid with windows that reflected the pitiless black of the night. By some miracle, they were unlocked. As Lorelei slipped inside, the warding bells mounted on the lintel chimed breathlessly. She muffled them with her fist before easing the doors shut again. Just as they settled, Lorelei drew up short at a flicker of movement in the glass.

Ziegler’s face loomed just over her shoulder.

Lorelei gasped, whirling around. In her haste, she knocked a book off its perch. It landed with a resonant thud . The plush carpet barely muffled the sound.

Nothing was behind her, but she could feel Ziegler there, leering at her.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

Footsteps echoed just outside the war room. It was enough to rudely jolt Lorelei back into her body. She must have woken someone up. The dregs of her fear rooted her in place, but if she stood here gawking like a fool, she’d be found. She ducked behind the massive writing desk and did her best to quiet her panicked breathing.

The doors to the war room swung open. Lantern light spilled into the room, lapping at the toes of her boots. It was then she realized she’d left the book lying on the ground.

Careless. If she went down like this, she would never forgive herself.

“No, I didn’t hear anything at all,” Sylvia said, her voice overloud. As unconvincing as ever. Lorelei could have groaned aloud. “What do you think you heard?”

“It sounded like something fell,” Adelheid said skeptically.

A door’s hinges creaked as someone began rummaging through the closet on the other side of the room. Footsteps trod softly across the floorboards and stopped just in front of the desk. Lorelei held her breath.

After an agonizing moment, Sylvia said, “Nothing over here,” and slid the book underneath the desk with the toe of her boot.

“Strange.” Adelheid sounded puzzled. “I suppose it was nothing.”

“Perhaps there are ghosts on board,” Sylvia said conspiratorially.

Lorelei could practically hear Adelheid’s withering glare. “Perhaps.”

The latch of the door announced their departure. Lorelei counted ten seconds before she emerged. Complete, smothering darkness awaited her. She pulled the curtains shut over the glass doors, then withdrew her vesta case from its pocket and struck a match. The flame sparked into a long, ghostly taper, then sputtered. It traced the shape of the cluttered bookshelves and lacquered the massive table in the center of the room with a sickly glow. She lit the slumping candles on the desk and shook out her match. Smoke curled around her as she sat in the finely upholstered chair behind Ziegler’s desk.

I will find what you’ve kept from me.

Lorelei had known her mentor for the better part of twelve years. Once, she thought she knew Ziegler’s mind as well as she knew her own. Clearly, she hadn’t been thinking enough like her when she’d first stumbled into this room, blind with grief and exhaustion. If she hadn’t wanted anyone to find something she’d hidden, where would she have put it?

She opened a drawer and ran her gloved fingers along the inside, searching for a false bottom. Nothing. Clicking her tongue, she continued rummaging through the desk. She removed the drawers one by one and turned them over. She shone candlelight into the empty sockets that remained, searching for some sign of a trick door, a hidden compartment. It took only minutes to dissect it completely.

Next, she took to pulling books off the shelves and shaking them out. Her efforts produced little but a shower of pressed flowers and clouds of dust that made her eyes water. Leafing through the pages revealed nothing but a robust collection of texts on the cosmos and botany. By the time she was through with the room, she’d pried every stuffed and mounted beast from the wall, and the closet looked as though it had vomited its contents onto the ornate rug.

This was utterly, infuriatingly pointless.

Lorelei slumped into the desk chair and allowed it to swivel her in a slow circle. If there was nothing in this office, there could still be something in Ziegler’s room.

As soon as she set the war room to rights, Lorelei drew the curtains and peered out into the darkness. No lanterns. No sign of Sylvia or Adelheid. She took the opportunity to slip back onto the balcony. It creaked and settled with every footstep as she made her way toward Ziegler’s room.

She paused outside the door, but her arm suddenly felt too heavy to lift. Her emotions were already simmering too close to the surface, and the very thought of going in there made her feel ill. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t paw through Ziegler’s effects like a common thief. How much more disrespect could she pay her? She’d sunk her body in the river, for God’s sake. But she had come this far in pursuit of the truth. Perhaps uncovering it was the greatest honor she could pay Ziegler now.

She forced herself to enter.

Lorelei lit the candles. Although she’d never been in Ziegler’s quarters before, she found it suspiciously in order. Her mentor had always been a messy person, the chaos of her space a mirror of her mind. Someone—probably Ludwig—had certainly been in here to tidy up.

All the same, there were odds and ends that suggested someone had lived here, even for one night. Her inkpot lay on the desk, along with an open jar of salt and a mug of tea caked with dried leaves. It was as though she’d stepped away in the middle of writing a letter. At any moment, she might step through the door again and smile to see Lorelei standing there.

Lorelei blinked back the humiliating sting of tears and crouched beside the bed. She felt silly as she peered underneath, like a child checking for monsters. When that turned up nothing, she stripped off the sheets and tossed them into a heap in the corner. She lifted the mattress from its frame, then probed the edges for any misplaced stitches.

Nothing.

With a sigh of frustration, Lorelei dismantled the desk with the same harried precision she had the one in the war room. Inside, she found a drafted chapter of the fourth volume of Kosmos, Ziegler’s latest and most ambitious project, bound in a delicate white ribbon. At least her killer had a modicum of respect, to leave this untouched.

Shutting it back into the drawer, Lorelei flung open the closet door. She was greeted with the unwelcome sight of more outfits than Ziegler possibly could have worn over the course of the expedition. She unceremoniously began tossing garments onto the floor. Silk and finely painted cotton puddled at her feet. At last, she found a coat that struck her as unusually heavy—and was startled to realize that she recognized it. It was the same one Ziegler had worn on the night of the send-off ball. Draped over her arms, it looked like the shed skin of a serpent.

The temperature plummeted. Her breath plumed unsteadily in the cold.

From the darkest corner in the room, Lorelei swore she could feel those horrible eyes boring into her again. Her every muscle seized with primal terror. A wisp of silver slithered across her vision, but when she turned around, the room was still and empty.

“Leave me alone, damn you,” she muttered.

She laid the coat on the bed. Something sharp-edged had been stitched underneath the lining. With a sick feeling in her stomach, she retrieved a letter-opener from the desk and slit open the fabric. Nestled inside was a journal, bound in pristine leather and closed around a silk-ribbon bookmark.

This had to be it.

With trembling fingers, she opened the journal. The spine gave a satisfying crack , and although Lorelei knew Ziegler had been using it within the last month, it somehow felt ancient, like a fairy-tale witch’s spell book.

Upon first inspection, it contained nothing unusual: documentations of supplies Ziegler had requisitioned, reminders to herself on which work to delegate to Lorelei, absent-minded recordings of the weather. It was in the middle of these mundane entries that Lorelei found the jagged edge that fit perfectly against the sheet Ludwig had taken. What had he found so interesting? It was all so…ordinary.

Lorelei began thumbing through the pages more urgently. Halfway through the journal, Ziegler’s notes abruptly ended. What followed was nothing but blank pages marbled with water stains. The previous entries had been dated weeks prior to their departure, and Ziegler journaled daily. Why had she stopped ?

Unless she hadn’t.

Distantly, Lorelei remembered one of the first “science experiments”—or had she called it a magic trick?—Ziegler had conducted with her. All it required was heat, parchment, and lemon juice. She couldn’t possibly have…

Lorelei tore out a page and held it above the candle sputtering on the writing desk. Words began to appear on the parchment as though written by a ghostly hand. They glowed the color of burnished gold and blackened around the edges.

“You absolute madwoman,” Lorelei muttered, caught somewhere between disbelief and admiration. Ziegler had written all of these entries in invisible ink.

She’d printed each letter absurdly large and with exaggerated care, but her shorthand was barely comprehensible. Eventually, Lorelei managed to translate it: her initial speculations on the Ursprung’s location. Every passage was rendered in her trademark style, full of overblown lyricism and yearning.

Lorelei missed her terribly.

She tamped down that thought by ripping another page from the journal. Each one did little to sate her curiosity. They painted a straightforward picture of a woman she already knew, one with a flair for the dramatic and a love for life. She considered feeding them to the fire out of sheer frustration—until a peculiar abbreviation caught her eye.

Spoke again with AvW.

Lorelei waved the candle beneath the page with a newfound determination. With each word that appeared, her heart rate rocketed higher. The candle’s wax dribbled onto her gloves as she read.

Data suggest unlikely to find Source in Albe. However, evidence of high aetheric concentration in mountains should be enough to support A’s case.

The longer Lorelei stared at the pages, the more she willed it to make sense. Blood roared through her ears, drowning out everything else. Ziegler had known. Ziegler had known they were chasing the wrong spring, and she misled them. It was as good as her dying a second time.

After how hard they’d worked, after nearly a year of struggle and preparation, she’d thrown the truth away for the sake of Anja von Wolff’s politicking. And with Wilhelm’s reign so unstable, she’d all but abandoned the people of Brunnestaad to their fate. It seemed impossible to accept that she’d do something so utterly selfish—and so shortsighted.

But of course she would, Lorelei thought.

Wilhelm had kept her like a monkey on a leash for years. After this expedition, he never would have let her leave his sight again. This was an escape plan, no different from a wolf chewing off its own paw to free itself from a snare. Whether she fooled him or not, it didn’t matter. Ziegler had lived in Javenor for most of her life. She had friends and peers who wrote her hundreds upon hundreds of letters a year. If war came to Brunnestaad, the prison she so disdained, she had somewhere to run. What did it matter what happened to the rest of them?

Lorelei threw down the journal. Where there was smoke, there was fire. There was more to it than this.

With a newfound purpose, she tore apart Ziegler’s belongings once again. Stitched lovingly into another jacket’s lining was a handsome sum of cash, with documents promising more from the von Wolff coffers. Hidden in the sole of her favorite leather boots was a passport with a visa already stamped, valid from this month to the next five years. There was even a deed to a house tucked away in the charming seaside town where her influential Javenish friends lived.

Ziegler was a woman already long gone. In the last months of her life, she had thrown all of her principles away. And in doing so, she’d sealed her own death.

You damn fool.

Piece by piece, Lorelei put together what Ziegler had done. In exchange for Ziegler’s placing the fake Ursprung in Albe, Anja would fund her research for the rest of her life. A fair trade, Lorelei supposed, when Ziegler would all but hand Anja a narrative that would justify their rebellion. King Wilhelm, the thieving, conquering outsider, stealing magic from the good people of Albe in order to prop up his feeble reign. Such an insult could not be borne.

Under Ziegler’s instruction, Lorelei had sharpened her mind into a blade. Now she felt like a soldier come home from war. Confused and purposeless, with a weapon to turn nowhere but inward. She felt utterly na?ve and furious for it. This expedition was never an academic pursuit. It was nothing but a desperate scrabble for survival. Once, Lorelei had believed truth was the most powerful force in the world. Now she understood that none of what they did was as pure as Ziegler had led her to believe.

Seething beneath this pain was another terrible realization. Sylvia didn’t know what her mother had done—and now Lorelei had to tell her.