Chapter Five

Five

A woman stood in the doorway with a delicate iron candlestick clutched in her hand. The flame dancing on its wick cast her face in a sallow glow. With her thin white shift and long white hair, she looked like something out of Lorelei’s most tormented dreams. Another ghost—or else a wiederg?nger had found her. When they scented death or grief in the air, they swarmed like sharks to a spill of blood, wearing the faces of the dead.

“Get out.” Lorelei staggered toward her and filled the doorway with her height. Ghost or not, no one could come into this room. No one could lay eyes on Ziegler in this state. She needed time to think, to process. She needed…

With clinical detachment, Lorelei registered that she was being pulled out of the war room and lowered to the ground. She slid to a heap on the hallway floor, folding in on herself. It felt as though she were trapped behind glass with no way to break free. On the other side, the world was strangely distorted, something she could see but not touch. The ghost’s lips were moving, but Lorelei couldn’t make sense of what she was saying.

“Lorelei!” The sound of her name jolted her back to her senses. “Breathe.”

She did—or at least she tried. Every rattling breath she drew was agony. Through her delirium, Lorelei at last recognized that it was Sylvia holding her shoulders steady. Shame, hot and relentless, seared through her. Of all people to see her like this, to witness how humiliatingly fragile she truly was, of course it was her . Her own death would be a blessing now. She wanted to drive her fist through the wall, to dip her power into the river and overturn the entire boat with the force of her rage. All those years ago, she had been too much of a coward to protect the ones she loved. This time, she had been too late.

Nothing would ever change.

“Close the door,” Lorelei snapped. “She’ll hear you.”

The dead’s souls lingered. To speak of their passing where they could hear was the highest form of disrespect she could imagine. She felt hysterical clinging to Yevanisch tradition now, but it was all she had to hold on to.

Sylvia did as she was asked without fuss. When she returned, she knelt in front of Lorelei and procured a handkerchief from somewhere on her person. Lorelei took it from her with trembling fingers and dabbed at the tears drying on her face. It was a tidily folded slip of plum silk trimmed in lace, as excessively frilly as Sylvia’s nightgown. It smelled—like Sylvia did, of course —of rose water and lemon cake. That one ridiculous detail managed to ground Lorelei. She breathed in steadily until the fog in her mind began to dissipate and the world around her felt more solid.

There were no ghosts here tonight.

When she dared to look up at Sylvia again, the concern glimmering in Sylvia’s pale eyes stunned her. The thick band of scar tissue on her cheek seemed to shine with fresh blood in the candlelight. “Lorelei, will you tell me what happened?”

A part of her wanted to close her eyes and pretend the last ten minutes had never happened. Another more animal part of her wanted to snatch the candlestick sitting beside them and bash in Sylvia’s skull, to replace one problem with another. But there was no escape from this nightmare. Ziegler was dead, and Lorelei had been found alone with her body. There was no explanation she could offer Sylvia that would incriminate her less.

“I fear I am not in my right mind,” she rasped. “I don’t want to talk.”

“You’re never in your right mind,” Sylvia said, not unkindly. “Tell me.”

“Ziegler is…” Saying it aloud would make it real; she didn’t know if she could bear it. “Ziegler is dead.”

“What do you mean she’s dead?” Sylvia’s voice was as loud as glass shattering in the quiet of the hallway.

“ Dead, von Wolff. For God’s sake.” Her voice sounded broken. Lorelei buried her face in her hands. Somehow, she couldn’t even muster the energy to be furious with Sylvia. “There is no hidden meaning.”

It did not seem possible.

Ziegler had survived everything her adventures had thrown at her. She had summited mountains in the thick of a blizzard and cut through jungles with jaguars stalking her at every turn. She had crossed deserts with a single canteen of water and all of her equipment strapped to her back. To Lorelei, she had been a god, untouchable and unimpeachable. But she had seen her broken body. She’d touched it.

She was really gone.

It felt like a star had winked out. What a banal death. What a waste. The pitiless brutality of it—the sheer injustice of it—stole Lorelei’s breath away. Not twelve hours ago, Ziegler had been incandescently alive, and had lied to her. Lorelei couldn’t even remember the last words she’d said to her. All she could remember now were all the things she wanted to accuse her of.

“What a tragedy.” Sylvia’s expression crumpled. “I’m so sorry you were the one to…”

The thorns around her heart tightened until she could scarcely see through her anger. After all these years, after every insult they’d traded, how dare Sylvia pretend to care about her? Lorelei wanted to throttle her. She wanted to repay her sympathy with cruelty. Anger, at least, was a balm to the rawness of her grief. But she was too tired to sharpen it into a blade, so she wound it around herself like armor.

As cold as a winter night, she replied, “Thank you.”

Sylvia hesitated. “You should get some rest. I can wake the others. They’ll want to know.”

A bolt of panic shot through her. Without thinking, she seized Sylvia by the elbow. “No!”

Both of them stared down at her hand. Lorelei slowly let go of her, flexing her fingers as though trying to work out a cramp. Sylvia, meanwhile, looked as though she’d been struck with a blunt object.

“I, ah, of course want to give you space to grieve,” Sylvia said weakly. “But I don’t think this is something we can keep from them for long.”

“Of course not. But you can’t tell them yet, and you certainly can’t do it on your own. Think for a moment, will you? If we don’t present a unified front, they’ll be suspicious.”

“Are you suggesting they’ll think one of us killed her?” As if something more fundamental dawned on her, she paled. “You’re suggesting one of our friends killed her.”

Our friends was perhaps an overstatement, but Lorelei would not press the point. “She was stabbed.”

“ What? ” Sylvia went deathly pale. “Why would someone do such a thing?”

“Wilhelm wants the Ursprung to secure his reign. The heir of every major province is here on this ship. Not everyone believes a unified Brunnestaad should exist—or that Wilhelm should be the one to rule it.” The righteous anger unspooling through her was intoxicating, a sweet poison chasing away her despair. “He’ll now also choose a queen from Albe—which will almost certainly be you. Perhaps someone resented that.”

Johann and Heike certainly did.

“As I recall,” Lorelei continued, “you weren’t thrilled at the prospect yourself.”

“No, but I would never—” An edge of desperate, affronted panic knifed into Sylvia’s voice. “What are you suggesting? You’re the one who found her. That means you’re the most suspicious of us.”

Lorelei had nothing to say to that. It was damningly true, but they were at a stalemate. “Calm yourself. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“I cannot believe even now you would be so…!” When Sylvia realized what Lorelei had said, all the fire bled out of her. “Huh?”

“I don’t believe it was you.” She was almost disappointed to admit it. But when she had turned Ziegler’s body over, it was still warm. Lorelei fought the panic that threatened to unmoor her from reality again.

Think, she scolded herself.

If the body was warm, the timing didn’t make sense. It seemed unlikely that Sylvia would murder Ziegler, return to her room, change her clothes, and return to the scene of the crime looking for all the world like she had just rolled out of bed. And even if she did, why circle back to confront Lorelei? Sylvia was smarter than that.

But it wasn’t just that. Lorelei knew, deep as marrow, that Sylvia was innocent. Her conviction needed no logic, only years of observing her. She knew Sylvia. Her tells and her fears. The way she wrote and how it exactly mirrored the overexuberant way she spoke. The way she took her tea—with a teeth-rotting amount of sugar—and her favorite color— amethyst , not purple—and the tenderest spots to dig the knife of her words. She was irritatingly forthright. When she was happy, she laughed. When she was sad, she wept. She wouldn’t know subtlety if it threw a dueling gauntlet at her feet.

No, Sylvia was not made for cold-blooded calculation. She was too loud, too earnest, too heroic. She had been a soldier, but Lorelei imagined she had done her duty romantically. Riding into battle astride a warhorse in gleaming armor. Dragging her comrades off the battlefield. Perhaps taking down an entire battalion with nothing but her saber and an improvised soliloquy about the inevitable tragedy of war. But the thought of her killing someone like this, in such an ignoble way…

It simply wasn’t in her nature.

“You’re not capable of it,” Lorelei said reluctantly.

“Neither are you, as much as you’d like people to believe otherwise.” Sylvia’s lips curled in an almost-fond smile. “I’ve seen what true monsters look like.”

To know Sylvia saw through her was almost too mortifying to bear. That old, petty part of Lorelei wanted to loom over her, to threaten her, to do anything and everything in her power to prove her wrong. But she was too exhausted to argue anymore. All she wanted was to be alone and to sleep for a decade. “Then I believe it’s in our best interests to vouch for each other.”

“Yes, you’re right.” She drew in a deep breath, as though steeling herself. “Just this once, I can find it in myself to speak to the quality of your character. It will take some effort, but I believe with enough preparation I can—”

“What are you talking about? No speeches will be necessary. We simply need to tell them we found her body together.”

“But that’s a lie!” Sylvia protested. “And frankly a difficult one to believe. What would you and I be doing together in the middle of the night?”

No, she would not dignify that with an answer. Something so horrible did not bear consideration. “A little white lie in the interest of protecting each other. It will be our secret. Surely your honor can withstand that.”

After a brief eternity, Sylvia threw up her hands. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

It sunk in then exactly what Lorelei had done. If anyone found out they were covering for each other, it would be far worse than the alternative. With this tenuous pact, she had put her life in Sylvia’s hands. And Sylvia had given hers to Lorelei in turn.

In the pale moonlight, with the fog pressing its fingers longingly against the glass, Sylvia still looked like a specter. Like something that might slip through Lorelei’s fingers if she held too tight.

Lorelei and Sylvia had gone door to door, collecting the rest of the crew until they stumbled out into the hallway, bleary-eyed and still in their nightshirts. Once she delivered the news, there fell a silence so complete, Lorelei wondered if they’d heard her at all.

And then chaos erupted.

“How?”

“When did this happen?”

“Where is she?”

Lorelei let their questions wash over her with a cool, cultivated detachment. Gas lamps burned dully in their sconces, softening the edges of the darkness. Dawn had only just begun to spread cautiously across the sky, like a pearl of blood dropped into water.

“We don’t have any answers yet,” Lorelei said, firmly enough to slice through the noise. “Von Wolff and I found her together ten minutes ago.”

Sylvia looked physically pained. Lorelei’s heart skipped as though she had missed a stair in the dark. For a moment, she wondered if she would back down and let Lorelei be caught in the lie. A thousand horrible futures spun out before her, all of them ending with her swinging on a gallows rope.

If Sylvia truly wanted to ruin her, it would take so little.

“Indeed,” Sylvia said. Lorelei nearly crumpled to the floor with relief. “We thought it would be best if we all discussed it together. It seems there was, ah…foul play involved.”

“Foul play?” Johann asked, interest clear in his voice. “You believe she was murdered?”

“There is a stab wound on the body,” Lorelei replied stiffly.

A tense hush fell over the group. Ludwig looked ill, but the others’ faces were entirely unreadable.

“Well, then,” Johann said. “Let me take a look.”

He fetched his medical case from his room. Once Johann rejoined them in the hall, Lorelei led them to the war room. In the hazy smear of daylight, the walk felt almost dreamlike. Inside, everything was exactly as she had left it. Ziegler’s body lay perfectly still, her skin beginning to swell and discolor where the fluids collected. Her eyes stared into vast emptiness. The spilled water lay glasslike on her desk and floorboards, mottled with blood. Lorelei found herself staring at the teacup on Ziegler’s desk—the one with the inlaid seashell and the handle fashioned in the shape of a coral. Ziegler had always chosen it because its gaudiness amused her. Distantly, Lorelei noted the damp breeze sighing through the open window—and Ziegler’s elwedritsche missing from its perch. It must have flown off after Ziegler died, the disloyal beast.

Good riddance.

No one spoke. She felt the horror spread through their group like winter’s chill unfurling. Heike, clinging to Adelheid’s arm, buried her face in her shoulder with a choked sob.

Lorelei thought she understood what grief was. That night twelve years ago had torn something out of her, something she’d never managed to sew shut. Through that wound, pieces of Aaron had slipped in. His fear of blood. The ripple of his shadow always stalking her through darkness. The echoing laughter of his murderers. By now, she was used to living with ghosts. And so, she hadn’t expected seeing Ziegler again to feel like nothing.

Johann’s expression didn’t change as he crouched beside Ziegler’s body. Closing his eyes, he extended his hands over the body. His fingers twitched, just barely, as though he were maneuvering a puppet on gossamer-fine strings. While most people possessed some aptitude for magic, only a rare few—those with the utmost precision of technique—could become medics. They studied for years, mastering the art of detecting any anomalies in the body’s fluids. Lorelei could not fathom it herself. The human body was primarily water; it all seemed an undifferentiated mass to her untrained senses.

“I’d estimate the time of death was around two in the morning.” Johann opened his eyes. A strange light filled them—something like intrigue. Disgust curdled Lorelei’s stomach. “There is fluid in her lungs. Blood, I suspect. The stab wound appears to be the cause of death. It is a clean cut, likely inflicted by a knife.”

“Human, then.” Adelheid’s lips pressed together in a bloodless line. “But the staff don’t have access to these rooms.”

Heike made an admirable effort to keep her voice disinterested. “What, are you suggesting one of us killed her?”

“That would be the most reasonable explanation,” said Johann.

“Now, let’s not be rash.” Ludwig held up his hands placatingly. “I’m sure there’s at least one other reasonable explanation.”

“Such as?” Johann asked. He fished a scalpel from his medical case and made a thin incision in Ziegler’s arm. Blood welled lazily to the surface, and he pressed a vial to the wound to collect it. Lorelei steadied herself against the wall at a sudden rush of light-headedness.

“You can’t be serious.” Heike laughed humorlessly. “I’ve known all of you since you were as high as my knee. No one here is a murderer.”

“Well,” Ludwig said weakly, “technically, that isn’t true.”

Sometimes, it was easy to forget that half of them—Adelheid, Johann, and Sylvia—had taken up arms for Wilhelm’s cause. Ludwig, a commoner by birth if not by title, had not been expected to fight. Heike had abstained “on principle.” Lorelei suspected that principle was self-preservation rather than any true pacifist sentiment. They did not train their children for battle in Sorvig like they did in Herzin or Ebul. It was a tiny, wealthy territory that valued a rapier wit over swordplay.

Neither Johann nor Adelheid flinched at Ludwig’s quibble, but Sylvia reacted bodily. Her shoulders bowed, and for a moment, her silver eyes went vacant. Lorelei hated it. The swift change—like a candle extinguished—discomfited her.

“Is it really murder if it’s war?” Heike jabbed a finger at him. “You be quiet. You’re not helping. And you”—here, she rounded on Johann—“are provoking people. Stop it.”

Johann corked the vial of blood and rose to his full height. His shadow cut the room in half. “Believe what you want to believe, but you can’t hide from the truth. You’ve been sheltered and spoiled in your lonely castle by the sea. You always have been.”

“Johann,” Adelheid hissed.

“How dare you.” Heike’s voice trembled with barely leashed anger. “You know that isn’t true.”

“The reality is,” he continued, undeterred, “everyone here had a reason to want Ingrid Ziegler dead.”

Sylvia bristled, her eyes ablaze with fury. “Be that as it may, only one of us has the capacity to act on it.”

At last, the cruel amusement drained from Johann’s eyes. The muscles in his jaw flexed as he leveled her with a flat stare.

Lorelei could not bear to listen to them discuss murder so callously any longer. A headache bloomed in her temples, and she felt dangerously on the brink of losing control of her power. “Enough!”

Everyone stopped talking at once. Slowly, Lorelei forced her fists to unclench.

Something bothered her about the scene—something she had not been able to place until now. “Ziegler wasn’t a particularly talented magic user. Why would someone stab her when they could drown her? It seems a more difficult way to go about it.”

Johann met Lorelei’s gaze with clear intent. “Perhaps they couldn’t.”

Lorelei felt the attention in the room shift to her. “Be careful of what you’re implying.”

“Johann,” Sylvia cut in, “I don’t want to accuse you of lying, but you and I both know this does not look like a stabbing.”

“There are some anomalies,” he said lowly, “but it is the simplest explanation.”

Adelheid’s expression darkened with understanding. “There’s hardly any blood—not in the room or on her body.”

“What are you all talking about?” Heike demanded, looking vaguely nauseated.

“Stabbing is…messy.” Sylvia winced. “The wound was likely inflicted after her heart stopped beating.” She approached the body and lifted her hand. Ziegler’s fingers were a mottled, bruise-like blue. “This pattern of discoloration typically indicates oxygen deprivation. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Johann gritted out. “That’s correct. I hadn’t noticed that.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Lorelei said dryly. Had he been trying to frame her? “So she drowned.”

“Perhaps,” Johann said begrudgingly. “I can’t determine exactly how she was killed yet. There are no contusions on the body, no signs of struggle. If she drowned, she didn’t fight it. People don’t surrender to death so easily.”

“The ward is missing from her door.” Adelheid ran her fingers along the wooden lintel. “If one of the wildeleute ensorcelled her, that would explain the lack of struggle.”

At the mention of her precious creatures, Sylvia perked up. “To my knowledge, there’s no wildeleute that could have done this. If it were a nixie, there would be no body. And alps suffocate their victims, but with their weight, not water. Besides, none of them would carry a knife.”

There was no doubt, then. Someone in this room had murdered Ingrid Ziegler.

“Then what are we doing standing here?” Heike cried. “One of us could be next! We need to get off this ship and go back home. Now.”

“No,” Lorelei snapped. “What we must do is act rationally, calmly . With Ziegler gone, I am the leader of the Ruhigburg Expedition. I will write to Wilhelm to seek his counsel. In the meantime, Johann, I want a thorough autopsy performed. Ludwig, I want analyses performed on blood samples to look for poisons. Heike and Adelheid, keep us on course. And von Wolff, replace the wards.”

For a moment, they stood gawping at her.

“You have your orders,” she said, surprising herself with the cold conviction in her voice. “Now go .”