Chapter Twenty-Two

Twenty-Two

Ebul unfurled like a war banner, all sun-scorched hills and gravelly soil. What tenacious blooms remained in the tulip fields waved against dry, golden fields. The few settlements they passed were small, the people hard-eyed and thin as they watched the Prinzessin pass. Here, Lorelei thought, was the royal family’s legacy.

As they sailed, Adelheid stood at the bow like a figurehead, her eyes set against the rising sun. She cut an imposing silhouette, her broad shoulders draped in a cloak of white and her yellow hair woven severely around her temples like a diadem. Johann trailed her, her ever-present shadow. Heike wandered the ship like a sleepwalker. At the very least, her hostility toward Lorelei had abated. They circled around each other almost apologetically.

According to Johann, Ludwig’s fever had broken at last and his breathing came easier. It seemed there was nothing to be done for the bark that had grown on his neck. Each time Johann attempted to chip it off, the wound wept sap and scabbed over with cork. No doubt when he awoke—assuming Adelheid let him off this ship alive—he would delight in conducting some botanical study of himself.

Sylvia, Lorelei had not seen at all. It was better that way.

They dropped anchor where the river opened into the Little Sea. Four islands crested from its waters like the sleek coils of a lindworm. For the first time in nearly two weeks, the engine fell silent and the smokestacks sighed out one last stream of exhaust. By some miracle, they had made it just in time.

Lorelei climbed to the observation deck and waited. Over the hours, the sun died slowly. It bled its light into the sea and stained the sky with striated bands of orange and purple. When it finally dipped beneath the horizon, it left the sky in complete, obliterating darkness. Her breath quickened with anticipation. The new moon hovered above her, outlined faintly in silver.

In the distance, the mist billowed. Then, the fifth island appeared.

She could almost convince herself she’d imagined it. It was a flicker of shadow, then a silhouette, then an imposing mass leering out of the gloom. The Vanishing Isle looked exactly as it had in her vision: like a bad omen.

She curled her fingers around the railing and leaned over the edge. Pain shot through her palms, chased by a crawling numbness along the inside of her arm. Yesterday, she’d dared to ask Johann if the mobility in her hands would recover, and the look he’d given her was almost affronted. There’s no guarantee with injuries like this.

She had tried to make her peace with it, mostly by refusing to think of it at all. Even if she survived this ordeal, she’d never properly hold a pen again. What that meant for her career did not bear dwelling on. It was a fitting enough punishment for what she’d done.

Dark shapes moved sinuously beneath the water. Every now and again, she caught a glimpse of a finned tail, a flash of iridescent scales, or solid black eyes. None of them had sung, but something about them, weaving in and out of sight, made her consider diving in to pursue them. The others had opted—perhaps wisely—to remain inside, safe behind their wards and thick ash-wood doors. Lorelei wore iron around her neck, on her cufflinks, and on all the buttons of her heavy greatcoat. As soon as the ship made landfall, the true danger would begin. Until then, she wanted to feel the wind against her face. She wanted to be alone.

As they drew closer to the Vanishing Isle, her skin prickled with unease. The air hung heavy and impossibly still, as though the entire island began holding its breath the moment they laid eyes on it. The bottom of the boat scraped rock, and the gangplank thunked ominously into the muddy shallows.

It was time to finish this.

The remains of their party gathered on the deck, grim-faced and weary in the dark. A group of deckhands worked to drag the Prinzessin into the shallows and tether her to the shore. If the legends held true, the island would vanish again in the light of dawn. Lorelei had no doubt they’d be here longer than that, and she did not want to have to swim when they left—or track down a new ship. Assuming, of course, they could leave before it reappeared God-knew-where next month. They’d stocked up on supplies in case its magic trapped them here. The weight of Lorelei’s heavy pack bit painfully into her shoulders.

“Well, then,” Lorelei said. “Let’s go.”

She led their trudge down the gangplank. As Lorelei made her way onto the shore, faint glimmers in the water snagged at her attention. She resolutely ignored them. Something about the way the water eddied here sounded suspiciously like laughter.

Heike stepped off next, clutching the silver charm around her throat with a white-knuckled pressure. Adelheid followed close behind, surveying their surroundings warily. Last was Johann, dragging Sylvia along like a willful horse.

Her wrists were bound behind her with coarse rope. Lorelei hated it, the unnecessary brutality of that knot. Most of all, she hated how battered Sylvia looked, with her ruined hair and the bruises mottling the side of her face. Despite her wounds, Sylvia carried herself with prideful defiance, her shoulders drawn back and her chin held high. Just then, Sylvia raised her eyes to Lorelei’s. The hatred burning within them struck her with force. She tore her gaze away.

Your fault, your fault, your fault.

The chorus of her ghosts’ voices were painfully loud and horribly urgent. She bit down on the desire to tell them exactly what she thought of them. She needed no assistance to punish herself.

Heike ducked beneath the heavy limb of a tree with a look of vague disgust. It dripped with round, peculiar fruits that had fissured to reveal a seam of rather noxious blue within. The flesh glittered with concentrated aether. Lorelei hated that her first thought was to wonder what would happen if she took a bite.

God help her. Dead or alive, Sylvia would never let her go.

“So,” Heike said. “Where to?”

Sylvia spoke without hesitation. Her voice rasped from disuse—or perhaps overuse. “First, we’ll need to find a river. If the Ursprung is here, all we need to do is follow it upstream to its source.”

No one objected, and with that, they set off in silence.

Johann and Sylvia headed up the group. He clutched her lead in one hand and her strange fey lantern in the other. They walked until they found a narrow stream, its surface glittering like broken glass in the dark.

This place unsettled Lorelei. It brimmed with magic like a glass overfilled. Aether shivered through the fog and puddled in the water. It unfurled through the veins of every leaf. It sparkled in the air and set the world aglow with its strange, wondrous light. The entire island seemed aware, watchful and waiting for their next move.

After what felt like hours, Sylvia stopped dead. “Wait. Look there.”

Lorelei strained to see through the dark. No more than a few meters away, those vague, tantalizing shapes Lorelei had seen beneath the Little Sea were rising from the river. Nixies dragged themselves onto rocks to bathe in the light of the stars. One inspected the shine of its lethally pointed nails, while another draped its tail across a sleek river stone, enticing as a woman lying over a chaise lounge. They regarded the group with those horrible reptilian eyes.

Instinctual terror seized hold of Lorelei. “This is far too dangerous. Find another way.”

“There is no other way,” Sylvia replied. “Do you want my help, or don’t you?”

“Lorelei has a point,” Heike said airily. “Why should we trust you not to drown us?”

“Please,” Sylvia muttered, somewhere between exhausted and exasperated. “I don’t have a death wish. Even if I made it out of these bonds and incapacitated you, your crew would detain me the moment I stepped foot on the Prinzessin .”

Heike hardly seemed appeased.

“It is dangerous to follow the river,” Sylvia conceded. “However, those nixies don’t strike me as aggressive, by their body language. They’re curious about us.” She took a considering pause. “However, that can change quickly if they perceive us as a threat.”

Johann did not take his eyes off the nixies. “Who has silver they can part with?”

Adelheid looked expectantly at Heike, who was wearing a capelet fringed with delicate silver scales.

“Seriously?” Heike groaned. “This is brand-new.”

Adelheid’s non-expression deepened. With a long-suffering sigh, Heike yanked a few pieces of silver off the hem and placed them in Johann’s waiting palm. Her capelet chimed and shimmered with her every movement.

“What do you intend to do with those?” Lorelei asked warily.

He closed his fist around his new cache of silver. “We can purify the water and corral them.”

“Don’t!” Sylvia’s eyes went round. “It’s monstrous to treat them that way.”

“I, for one, would prefer not to be eaten,” Heike countered. She did not look up, too consumed with prodding at the loose thread on her capelet. “Do you have a better plan?”

“It’s certainly possible to earn their trust over the course of several days, maybe weeks…”

“Do it,” Adelheid said impatiently.

Without hesitation, Johann hurled a scale into the water. It tumbled through the air, flashing white and silver, then cut through the surface of the river like a knife. It took only a moment before the nixies recoiled. Their gills flared. They rent at their hair. And then, they shrieked.

The sound scraped against the very marrow of Lorelei’s bones. In a frenzy, the nixies dove into the river and swam upstream. As the last one disappeared into the current, it struck Lorelei that they had done something they couldn’t take back. She imagined the metal leaching into the water like poison.

Johann watched the scene unfold with a self-satisfied smile and turned away only when Adelheid took him by the shoulder. He was no better than a child burning ants beneath a magnifying glass.

Sylvia’s eyes glimmered with anger—and something like sadness, too. When she caught Lorelei looking, her expression shuttered. It stung more than she expected.

“I suppose we are proceeding like brutes, then,” Lorelei said. “Shall we?”

Adelheid, Johann, and Heike pulled ahead while Sylvia dragged her feet. Her fraying lead line trailed limply behind her like a sorry wedding train. Lorelei had half a mind to pick it up, if only so she wouldn’t trip over it or go on looking like a soldier on a death march. After a moment, she thought better of it. Sylvia would resent it, and Lorelei had no desire to incur any more of her rage. Once, a part of her might have relished how spectacularly low she had fallen—might even have mocked her for it. Now, it felt like watching a hawk with its wings clipped.

They walked side by side in silence. At first, Lorelei thought Sylvia would have enough self-restraint—or spite, perhaps—to remain silent. But in the end, she spoke.

“Why?”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

“You know very well what I mean. After everything, after…”

She trailed off, and what Sylvia left unspoken gutted Lorelei. It hurt to breathe. Too many memories crowded too close to the surface. Snowflakes caught in Sylvia’s moonlit hair. Her eyes as molten as quicksilver. The pale blue of her lips when Lorelei pulled her from freezing waters. The exultant delight of her laughter on the back of the mara. Sylvia, for one, glorious moment, entirely hers.

It all seemed so far away now.

Now, Sylvia’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “How could you?”

What could she possibly say to that? After all this time, perhaps she’d finally succeeded in becoming what everyone suspected she was. Disloyal and conniving and self-serving. A dog eager to bow and scrape for anyone, so long as it would stave off the blow. “My hands were tied.”

Sylvia laughed bitterly, the irony clearly not lost on her. “You’re a coward.”

Yes, I am. More than you could ever know.

“Not all of us can afford to have principles.”

Johann looked back at them with a scowl that said, I’m watching.

Lorelei knocked into Sylvia’s shoulder as she shoved past her.

The thick moss growing along the riverbank muffled their footsteps, but the burble of the current—and the occasional snapping twig or shrill cry of a bird—offered some respite from the grim silence. Unlike the fathomless dark of the Vereist, the water here was as transparent as glass. Aether settled over its surface like a slick of oil, iridescent and shimmering beneath the glow of their lanterns. Here and there, she caught slivers of the ghosts’ haunted eyes: peering out at her through the latticework of leaves and the pebbled depths of the water.

Lorelei shuddered. The sooner they got off this island, the better.

As they walked, Johann tossed whatever iron or silver he could find into the water at every juncture: beads pulled from Heike’s gown, coins plucked from his own wallet, even a medal he’d found discarded at the bottom of his pack. Sylvia winced at every plink of metal.

They traveled until they were too exhausted to go any farther. Once they set up camp, Lorelei huddled close to the fire. Shrugging off her greatcoat and rolling her shirtsleeves to her elbows made the heat somewhat bearable. It was a humid night, close enough to be smothering, but the light kept the ghosts at bay. They hovered just outside its sphere, the wide moons of their eyes blinking in and out of focus.

Lorelei watched the flames dance until movement on the outskirts of camp caught her attention. Johann had shoved Sylvia to the ground at the gnarled base of a yew tree and was now fastening the ropes binding her around its trunk.

“Must you?” Sylvia asked. “I assure you I’m not plotting my escape.”

He did not reply.

“I’m thirsty,” Sylvia said, more imperiously than Lorelei might have in her circumstances.

“Are you?” Johann asked with a sharp edge of amusement. He uncorked his waterskin and, with a startling cruelty, poured it onto her head.

Sylvia gasped, blinking through the water running down her face. With that same proud fire in her voice, she gritted out, “Thank you.”

Johann stared at the waterskin for a long moment, as if he just realized what he’d done. Without another word, he turned and retired to his tent.

A horrible feeling curdled within Lorelei, and her fingers twitched around some impotent, murderous impulse. God, she despised him. More than anything, she wished she had the power to hurt him in a way that mattered. She had half a mind to shake Adelheid awake and demand she leash her dog. But it wouldn’t do Sylvia any good. She sat slumped against the tree with water trickling down her chin. It was pathetic. Lorelei could not leave her there unattended.

She rummaged through her bag until she found her own waterskin. As quietly as she could, she approached Sylvia. The fire barely reached her here. Only the faintest light—and none of its warmth—whispered over the leaves, bathing Sylvia’s features in gold.

Lorelei crouched by her side and uncorked her waterskin with her teeth. “Here.”

“I won’t fall for the same trick twice,” Sylvia said sulfurically. “Or perhaps you’ve poisoned it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If I wanted to kill you, you would not see it coming.” Sylvia didn’t rise to the bait. It was almost disappointing. The sweat cooled uncomfortably on the back of her neck. “You’re cooperative. Johann is being needlessly cruel.”

“How reassuring to know you’d aid them the moment I stop being cooperative.”

Patience had never been Lorelei’s strong suit. Even now, when she knew that she should be groveling at Sylvia’s feet for forgiveness, she felt dangerously on the brink of pouring the water down her throat and throttling her with the empty canteen. It would make both their lives easier if she simply accepted her kindness. But when Lorelei drank in the raw hurt in Sylvia’s eyes, all her irritation drained from her in a rush. Both of them whittled down to their most vulnerable, their most spiteful…

She did not want this anymore. How had she ever wanted it?

“I find I’ve little spirit left to hurt you,” Lorelei said, “unless you asked it of me.”

Sylvia’s breath caught. “Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not,” Lorelei said quietly. “Just drink it, von Wolff. Your pride isn’t worth your life.”

It looked like it cost her something when she nodded her assent. Lorelei raised the waterskin to her lips. She drank as if Lorelei would snatch it away from her at any moment. When she drew back, struggling to catch a breath, a rivulet of water ran down the line of her jaw.

Lorelei wanted to dab it away with her handkerchief. She wanted to tend to her wounds, to work the knots from her hair and braid it as she once had on that Albisch mountaintop. She wanted to kiss her again, tenderly first, then with all the hunger she had not yet burned out of herself. She wanted and wanted and wanted, so much and so deeply she feared her greed was boundless when it came to Sylvia von Wolff. And yet, she had ensured she would never have her again. Sometimes, she despised herself. Most of the time, really.

“You could lead everyone astray,” Lorelei said. “It would be simple.”

“To what end? I meant what I said earlier. If I die, all of you will die with me. That isn’t what I want.”

“They would deserve it.” Especially me. She hesitated. “I’m sorry. If I’d seen any other option at the time…”

“It is late for that.” Sylvia let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “But here I am, ready to forgive you. What a fool I am.”

It felt like a benediction, one wholly undeserved.

“Let me earn it.” The words spilled from her without thinking. “This isn’t over yet.”

“How can you say that?” Sylvia asked brokenly. “It’s hopeless. If you truly mean that you had no choice, then you and I are prisoners. Even if we survive this, Wilhelm will punish me for Ziegler’s murder—and Albe for what my mother has done. There’s nothing I can do to stop any of it.”

If there was anything to be said of Sylvia von Wolff, it was that she was unfailingly, infuriatingly optimistic. Lorelei hardly recognized her now. She looked utterly defeated, battered and curled in on herself. Of all things, it made Lorelei furious. “You disgust me.”

Sylvia’s eyes turned flinty. “I? Disgust you ?”

Yes, fight me, she thought. Fight back.

“You are Sylvia von Wolff,” she hissed. “That name means something, or have you forgotten? Do you really intend to lie here and die like a beaten cur?”

“And what would you have me do? You have taken every option from me.” She turned away sharply. “Go away, Lorelei. I want to rest.”

Lorelei obeyed, fuming. As much as she craved the oblivion of sleep, it would not come easy with her blood pounding like this. She stalked to the river. Once she finished refilling her canteen and splashing her face with water, she peered down at her wavering reflection. She looked gaunt and exhausted, but for the first time in weeks, she felt truly alive.

Her mind had begun to work again.

As a Yeva, two principles had been instilled in her since birth. On one hand, survival. On the other, justice. When she’d been backed into a corner, they’d seemed irreconcilable. At the time, casting her lot with Adelheid had seemed the prudent decision—the only decision. But she had no guarantees in these nobles’ games, no leverage, and even if Adelheid kept her word, the power she held over Lorelei would be a poison slowly killing her for the rest of her life. To know her freedom and her mind were not her own was the most agonizing sort of death she could imagine.

She had been enduring it for years already.

The night was staggeringly clear. The water reflected the stars overhead. They unfurled across the surface like glimmering skeins of fabric. Beneath the captured image of the sky, she saw something oddly familiar.

Half-buried beneath smooth river stones was one of Johann’s iron coins. Before she could think better of it, she pulled off her glove and plunged her hand into the water. The cold was an agonizing sort of bliss, like pressing ice to a burn. Her fingers clumsily scraped the silt, kicking up clouds of mud in the water. It was a struggle to close her fingers around the coin, and she felt a pathetic sort of triumph when she finally managed to take hold of it. She held it aloft, dripping and gilded in celestial light.

A sleek gray head emerged from the water.

Lorelei’s breath stuttered with surprise. The nixie watched her with barely restrained hostility—but when it noticed the coin in her hand, its black eyes softened with reluctant curiosity. Its lips parted to reveal a startling row of serrated teeth.

It would be so very easy for this beast to drown her now. But it remained entirely still, as if waiting to see what Lorelei would do next. She held the nixie’s gaze steadily as she tucked the coin into her pocket. The nixie looked almost approving.

No, she thought. Grateful.

It slipped beneath the surface and disappeared.

This certainly wasn’t over yet. A plan took shape foggily. Sylvia was right. The two of them were effectively prisoners, and as Johann had soundly proven, they were outclassed. Alone, they had no chance at escaping. But there were still allies to be made.

If she had to drag Sylvia kicking and screaming out of despair, she would. She would not allow her to surrender.