Chapter Seven

Seven

Lorelei hardly slept. At night, the ship became a haunted place.

Her mind made ghosts of everything: the memory of Ziegler’s too-loud laughter; the image of the gallows rope that awaited her; the unbridled resentment in Sylvia’s pale eyes. All of them were a bitter reminder that she could not fail—not now. By the time the sun rose, she’d whittled the maudlin edge off her feelings and found clarity in her exhaustion. Wallowing would not save her, but action might.

The most sensible place to begin her investigation was with the weakest link—or at least the one most willing to talk.

Lorelei knocked on the door to the left of her own: Ludwig’s. When he answered, the first thing she noticed was his rumpled hair. The next: that he hadn’t finished doing up the intricate gold-wire buttons of his shirt. Clearly, he’d just woken up. It took all her strength to suppress the eldest-sister instinct to fuss at him for his dishabille. Honestly. It was the perfectly civilized hour of seven o’clock.

Ludwig looked up at her with something like pity. It made her skin crawl.

Before he offered anything as unwanted as condolences, she said, “I have a question for you.”

“Down to business,” he said. “No good mornings. I like it.”

She gave him an exasperated look but entered when he moved aside for her. As she brushed past him, the faint scent of pressed flowers washed over her.

Absently, she catalogued the room. Botanists did not require much equipment to do their work. His lacquered-iron vasculum—decorated by a landscape painter whose name she could not recall—was slung over the back of his desk chair. Equally useful for storing plant specimens and warning off wildeleute in the field, she noted. A lens with a carved mahogany handle rested atop a pile of books, alongside a veritable dragon hoard of scattered rings.

Lorelei had always suspected he felt the need to armor himself with wealth. It frustrated her endlessly. He hardly needed to prove himself to his insipid friends and their peers when his academic achievements spoke for themselves. Since he graduated two years ago, he’d identified over two hundred new species of plants, many of them with magical properties. She expected there were at least ten named after him at this point.

She made to sit on his desk chair, but he intercepted her rather urgently. “No, no. Take the bed. It’s far more comfortable.”

Skeptically, she perched on the edge of his bed. The springs groaned in the silence.

Ludwig put on his rings, then shuffled a haphazard pile of papers into a semblance of order. “Why do I feel like I’m in trouble?”

Lorelei hooked her ankle over her knee. “Why does Heike dislike von Wolff?”

He paused for a moment, then opened his desk drawer and tucked the papers inside. At last, he turned to her with an amused but wary smile. “You want gossip about my friends—before I’ve had coffee, no less? What do you take me for?”

“You don’t want me to answer that,” she replied wryly. “Just tell me what I want to know.”

Over the months they’d known each other, she’d come to associate him with the folktale “The Wolf and the Fox.” It was short but brutal, with a simple message: if you couldn’t be the strongest creature in the woods, you could be the slyest. If you were agreeable enough, you could call in favors like debts. You could persuade people into revealing their weaknesses and make them feel like they’d given you a gift. That was what made Ludwig dangerous. He had a face that begged to be trusted and a smile as sharp as a knife in the back.

“You’re a very intense person, you know.” The drawer clicked shut. “I really shouldn’t say anything.”

His tone indicated he fully intended to say something. By way of prompting him, she said, “Of course not.”

“But when we were about fifteen, Heike’s mother proposed a marriage suit to Sylvia’s mother.”

Of all the things she’d expected him to tell her, it was not that . “What?”

“I know.” His voice dropped conspiratorially. “Sylvia refused her, naturally. I still remember the letter she wrote me about it. It was like reading a novel. Oh, injustice! My cruel mother means to sell me like a prize cow at market, but I refuse to let her use me any longer. I am writing to petition you for shelter, Ludwig, for I know you are the only one on this earth who will understand. I am running away this very evening! ”

It had the air of a well-loved joke: just rehearsed enough. How many times had he read that letter—and how many times had the others giggled over it?

“How very reassuring to know von Wolff hasn’t changed at all in ten years.” Lorelei scoffed. “Heike holds a grudge against her, I take it.”

“She does.” Ludwig slumped into his desk chair. “Although Sylvia has tried many times to make things right between them.”

Lorelei frowned. “Surely, it’s no great loss to Heike. They would make a terrible match.”

“It was the principle of the thing. Heike…” He hesitated, as though he’d reached the limit of what he could share. “She has always wanted to leave home—by whatever means possible. Sylvia knew that. We all did.”

Of course Heike held a grudge. Sylvia had thwarted her—twice.

“She set her sights on Wilhelm after that,” Ludwig continued, “but he only has eyes for Adelheid. And surely, you’ve noticed—”

“Her and Adelheid.” Surely, everyone had noticed the lingering looks and the way they invented excuses to touch each other. It was exhausting to watch. “Yes.”

He snapped, then pointed at her as if to say exactly. “Needless to say, it’s made things complicated. And so, all of us will be subjected to their pining forevermore. Not that you would know anything about pining.”

Lorelei glowered. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Before he could reply, the ship lurched as if it struck a solid wall. Both of them jolted forward. The inkwell on his desk toppled over, and a few of his field books dropped thunderously onto the floor. A cursory glance out the window revealed no obstacles in their path, and the lack of screaming meant nothing horrible had dredged itself from the bottom of the Vereist. There was no other sensible explanation than incompetence.

“What was that?” Ludwig asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I intend to find out.”

Ludwig looked vaguely alarmed at her dark tone. “Why don’t I join you?”

With nothing better to redirect her frustration onto, she snapped, “You’re barely dressed.”

He shrugged.

Together, they made their way to the navigation room, dodging through the deckhands as they shouted at one another. She all but kicked in the door to the captain’s office. “Why have we stopped?”

The captain of the Prinzessin, Emma, stood beside the floor-to-ceiling windows, haloed in a mantle of dreary sunlight. She had a cloud of gray hair and a certain air of mystery that made everything she said sound vaguely like a portent of doom. “Lady Heike and Lady Adelheid blew in like a storm a few minutes ago.”

Of course. She should have expected as much. “Why?”

“Can’t agree on our course.” She took a drag of her pipe. “The river branches off just ahead. We could go straight through to Albe, or take a tributary through Herzin.”

As far as Lorelei was concerned, Herzin was best avoided.

All Herzisch Ursprung legends began with a man who ventures into the woods in search of power. Inevitably, he finds himself beset by monsters: a wolf whose voice echoes in his mind. Three men who promise gifts (almost always, these turn out to be curses) in exchange for a scrap of bread. A maiden who transforms into a serpent when he stops to aid her. Naturally, he slaughters them all. Most folktale heroes tended to outwit their foes, but the Herzisch ones had never met an enemy or a problem a solid punch couldn’t solve. Bloodshed and valor, of course, proved them a worthy vessel for the Ursprung’s power. The undeserving who waded into its depths simply perished.

“I will speak to them. Where are they now?”

Emma pointed one gnarled finger out the window. Heike and Adelheid stood nearly nose-to-nose at the stern of the ship, clearly in the midst of some argument. Adelheid’s face was frozen with the kind of calm that came from unshakable certainty. Heike had what Lorelei assumed was a map crumpled in one hand and a sextant clutched like a weapon in the other. A feeble attempt at intimidation, considering Adelheid had at least ten kilos of muscle on Heike and shoulders twice as wide.

Lorelei already felt exhausted.

Ludwig followed her out onto the deck. As they drew closer, Lorelei snapped, “Would you care to explain why my ship is stopped?”

“Oh, Lorelei! Just who I hoped to see.” Heike somehow managed to purr the entire sentence. She batted her eyelashes for good measure. “Be a dear and help me settle something, will you?”

“She will not,” Adelheid said, “because, unlike you, she has an ounce of sound judgment.”

Ludwig perched himself atop one of Adelheid’s mysterious dowsing instruments, as if settling in for a show.

Lorelei had half a mind to turn around and go back the way she came. “I will not be party to this nonsense. Fix this.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” Heike seized Lorelei by the elbow. “I’m certain that once you hear me—”

Adelheid cut in. “I have data to support my argument.”

“Data,” said Ludwig. “Now, that sounds compelling.”

Heike glared at the machine like she might kick it over with Ludwig still on it.

“I imagine I will regret asking,” said Lorelei, “but what is the problem?” When they both opened their mouths to speak, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “One at a time, if you please.”

Adelheid pursed her lips, clearly put out by having to appeal to Lorelei. “The concentration of aether along this stretch of the river is increasing at a rate that is, frankly, alarming. It would be wise to rechart our course.”

Heike threw her hands up exasperatedly. “Follow the aether, find the Ursprung. Isn’t that what Ziegler said? Honestly, I fail to see the issue here.”

“I’d expect the increase to be more gradual if we were heading toward the Ursprung. Spikes of magical activity like this typically correlate with”—here, her expression turned grim—“anomalies.”

“And what,” said Lorelei, “does that mean?”

Ludwig perked up, which never boded well. “There already have been anomalies. Last night, Johann said he saw a deer that had a woman’s face.”

“What?” Adelheid looked genuinely taken aback. “That’s absurd.”

“Ludwig, I’m disappointed.” Heike put a hand on her hip. “I cannot believe you would give that poor man another questionable mushroom after what happened last time.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” he protested. “I just pointed it out.”

Adelheid sighed, digging her fingers into her temples. “Let us not discuss it again. Experiencing it once was enough.”

“As fascinating as this conversation is…” Lorelei glared at them. “What anomalies?”

“Environmental changes,” Adelheid said, “or—”

“We all knew this was risky,” Heike said with an almost feverish insistence. “Going through Herzin will add days to our travel time. I, for one, do not want to be on this ship a moment longer than I have to be.”

“You are steering us directly into the largest aetheric hot spot I have encountered in my entire career,” Adelheid said lowly. “I do not know what we’ll find. That is what disturbs me.”

“Well, I know what we’ll find in Herzin.” Heike gave Lorelei a speaking gaze. It said, People who want you dead. She twisted a lock of hair around her finger. The dreary sunlight had washed it to the color of rust. “So, what will it be, Lorelei?”

Lorelei hesitated. “Tell Emma to keep on toward Albe.”

“Yes, sir.” Heike’s smile was pure triumph as she sauntered off to the navigation cabin.

Adelheid gave Lorelei a speaking gaze of her own. It said, Coward. It stung more than she expected.

Ludwig folded his hands beneath his chin. “You two have been bickering even more than usual lately. What’s that about?”

Adelheid shooed him off her machine. “You have other things to do, I trust?”

“As charming as ever.” Ludwig winked at her. “Goodbye.”

Adelheid did not acknowledge him. With a resigned frown, she knelt beside the machine and began to fuss with some stray wires. It was simpler than Lorelei expected it to be: a long glass tube affixed to a wooden base. Inside was a set of metal wires that forked like the branches of a tree.

Lorelei considered leaving her to her work, but she could not pass over an opportunity to speak to Adelheid without the others—especially Johann—looming.

“Will you show me how it works?” she asked.

Adelheid paused, clearly surprised, but did not glance up. “If you’d like.”

Cold prickled at the back of Lorelei’s neck. Then, a long shadow fell over her. Johann said, “Are you sure that’s wise?”

Lorelei whirled around to face him. “How long have you been standing there?”

His cold blue eyes bored into hers. “I’m always watching, Kaskel. You would do well to remember that.”

Adelheid regarded him with a touch of fond exasperation. “Peace, Johann.”

With one last, lingering look at Lorelei, he nodded and slipped away. Adelheid shook her head.

“He’s protective of you,” Lorelei said offhandedly.

“Yes. He thinks as ill of others as he does himself.” Adelheid turned a few dials without glancing up at her. “Are you well?”

“Exceedingly,” Lorelei said irritably.

When she closed her eyes, she could see Ziegler’s pale blue lips and the bloodshot whites of her eyes. She could still feel the boneless give of her arm when she turned her over. She drew in a long, slow breath, willing herself to stay rooted in her body. It had become too easy to desert herself, to be pulled back to the dark, close terror of that night.

Eager to divert the conversation away from her tenuous well-being, she asked, “Do you think ill of him?”

She winced as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Perhaps too direct.

“What a question.” Amusement skittered across Adelheid’s face. “But no. Not anymore. I used to despise him.”

Now, that was a surprise. In the last five years, Lorelei could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen Adelheid without Johann at her side. He was her unwieldy, sullen shadow, darkening every doorway she passed through and lapping up every word she spoke like honey. “Why?”

Adelheid looked at her as though the answer was obvious. “Even as a boy, he was cruel and petty. I suppose with time, I came to understand him. His father did not give him much choice in the matter.”

Adelheid settled onto the side of the boat. The grime on the deck seeped into her dress, and splinters in the wood snagged at the coarse weave, but she paid it no mind. She focused instead on unwinding a coil of wire and fed it slowly into the water. She had callused fingers and fine lines around her eyes from squinting into the sun. She was almost striking in her plainness: the rare kind of noblewoman who did what needed to be done herself.

“We were raised on the same tales of knights and fed the same stories about what it means to be a noble. But where I admired their chivalry, Johann was fixated on their valor. He liked the idea of slaying dragons, not protecting the people they tormented. When he was sent to war—to serve in my brother’s battalion, no less—I was furious. He was in it for the wrong reasons. He was always bored as a child. He wanted something to entertain him.”

War seemed an odd choice of diversion, but Lorelei refrained from commenting. “I didn’t realize he knew your brother.”

Adelheid brought up Alexander often enough, the same way one might evoke the name of a favored saint. Although Lorelei knew little of the specifics, she knew he had fallen in battle. Among Brunnestaaders—and especially among the nobility—it was the most honorable death there was.

“He does not like to talk about it,” she said stiffly. “But, yes, they knew each other. He swore Alexander an oath to protect me. It was apparently his dying wish. When he told me that, I punched him.”

“You…punched him.”

“I did.” A small smile tugged on her lips. “In any case, his protection was as unnecessary then as it is now. That is why he is here on this expedition, I suspect.”

“Would you rather him be elsewhere?”

“No,” Adelheid replied. “I love him dearly, and it is good for him to have something to do. He gets so restless. Now sit. I will show you how this works.”

Lorelei eased herself onto the deck beside her. She found herself reluctantly interested. Adelheid traveled often for fieldwork, so Lorelei had never learned from her directly.

“When the instrument detects magic, the wires inside will nod. The meter will then give you a number.” Adelheid tapped a glass circle on the base of the machine. It glinted like the face of a watch.

“That’s it?” Lorelei asked skeptically.

For the second time in five minutes, she got the sense that she had gravely disappointed Adelheid. She pressed a notebook into Lorelei’s hands and said witheringly, “It is a simple machine, but it requires some practice to interpret the data. Take notes.”

Lorelei watched the wires bob up and down, like a ship borne on a tide. Every now and again, a glimmer of blue light would ripple through the chamber of the machine, and Adelheid would make a little disapproving sound. There seemed to be no pattern Lorelei could discern. Adelheid read out a number every few seconds, and Lorelei would dutifully transcribe it. By the end of an hour, she had almost three full pages of numbers, five columns each. It seemed unlikely that this sequence of numbers would lead them to the Ursprung.

As she worked, she turned over their conversation. Johann was hateful and cruel, yes—but also loyal enough to keep an oath he swore to his friend’s dead brother. If he truly cared about things like honor and duty, would he betray Wilhelm, even if he disagreed with him? She supposed it all depended on whether he placed the demands of his god over the demands of his king.

“Johann is—”

“You have never shown any interest in us before today.” Adelheid’s polite tone and neutral expression betrayed nothing of her thoughts.

She knows.

Lorelei did her best not to react. “Surely I have. You are interesting people.”

“I’m not a fool, Lorelei. I am not as eloquent as Sylvia is, nor am I as sensitive as Heike.” She said eloquent and sensitive with the tone one might reserve for describing a wasting illness. “But I do know about loss. Grieve her, but do not let this become an obsession. It will sink you in the end.”

Lorelei stood abruptly and straightened the lapels of her greatcoat. Coldly, she said, “Thank you for the advice.”

Adelheid let her go without another word.

Lorelei slipped back into the cabin of the Prinzessin . An obsession. She wanted to scoff at it. But sometimes she believed she had been doomed to misery, like the victim of some fairy-tale curse. It was a devouring sort of sadness, the kind that did not grow lighter when you shared it. She had scrubbed through her life, searching for the root of it. If she spelled it out in black-and-white like one of her stories, perhaps it would all make sense.

Back in the days when wishes still held power, there was a cobbler who had three children. His youngest daughter was as joyful as daybreak after a long winter night and as warm as a summer breeze. His only son, the middle child, was the most beloved of the three: the sweetest mensch in the Ruhigburg Yevanverte, who knew everyone and their mother, too. And then, there was his irrepressible oldest daughter, who spent her days turning over stones to see what writhed beneath in the cold, dark earth.

Lorelei and her brother, Aaron, had been inseparable. He was nothing at all like her, the kind of child who begged to be allowed to tie off every box of shoes with a neat, fastidious bow. Who did everything that was asked of him with a smile. But as he grew older, he began to fear for his future. He had been apprenticed to the butcher. One day, they both watched as the butcher took the gleaming chalef and slaughtered a goat: a swift slice to the throat, blood waterfalling from its neck. Aaron had gone deathly pale as it crumpled to the ground, and Lorelei had to drag him outside when he fainted. She crouched beside him and dabbed the cold sweat from his brow until the color returned to his lips.

He’ll be so disappointed, he moaned. What am I going to do?

After weeks of needling, Lorelei had finally convinced him to come on an “expedition” with her, to the stretch of river their parents had forbidden her from visiting alone: where the wall of the Yevanverte blocked out the rest of the city and cast its long, long shadow. They had been walking home, their pockets full of specimens, when a group of men from Ruhigburg opened the gates, laughing and slurring. They shattered the glass windows of storefronts as they passed, sending brittle, sparkling sounds like rain echoing down the alleyways.

So much of that night was a blur. But she remembered the way the looks on their faces changed when they laid eyes on Aaron’s tzitzit—and again when they realized the two of them were alone. There was a hunger there, a terrifying pack-animal leer.

The look of men who realized they could do whatever they liked.

If you use magic, they’ll track you down, Aaron told her, his hand clasped in hers. Run.

More than anything, she remembered the sound of his scream, the sound of their jeers, the sound of his skull when it split. His blood spread over the cobblestones and shone like molten steel in the moonlight. She did what he said, in the end. She ran .

It was that moment that possessed her, that moment that haunted her. The cowardice of leaving him to his murderers, to go cold alone.

After Aaron’s death, Lorelei realized that there were hundreds and hundreds of ghosts in the Yevanverte. They rose from the floorboards as she stitched shoe leathers together. They pressed to the misty glass of her window as she tried to sleep. They chased her down the dark and winding alleys and leered at her from the rows and rows of stacked, colorful houses. Most of them were strangers, their eyes gleaming with cold, otherworldly light. Some of them, however, she recognized. A woman who’d lived in the house below them, walking the path toward the river every morning like a clockwork doll. A toddler who’d fallen ill some years ago, squalling through what sounded like fluid in his lungs. And worst of all: Aaron, his eyes wide, his skull concave, with blood unfurling around him like a horrible sunrise. Her parents hardly knew what to do with her, the daughter tormented by something they could not see.

And then she met Ziegler.

Day after day, for six long years, she had a carriage sent to bring Lorelei to her flat in the center of Ruhigburg. Day after day, she tutored her in the sciences and magic and sanded off the harshest edges of her accent. Day after day, Lorelei returned to the Yevanverte exhausted. And then finally, on her eighteenth birthday, Ziegler gave her a gift: a place she had secured for her at Ruhigburg University. Lorelei could still recall the shape of that joy, almost too sharp to hold on to.

She’d barely made it through her first week when she marched from campus to Ziegler’s flat in the city center and told her she planned to quit. Because the moment she opened her mouth, all of her classmates knew exactly what she was. Many of them had never met someone like her before, but they had heard enough stories from their nursemaids to know exactly what kind of monster she was. The Yeva in thorns. The Yeva buried and forgotten.

A perfect villain. A perfect victim.

Ziegler stared at her as though she had spoken Yevanisch. She could not understand it at all, the idea that something as mundane as cruelty could keep Lorelei from the pursuit of knowledge.

What? she’d said. You want to go back to your father’s house and make shoes for the rest of your life? Look me in the eyes and tell me you’d be happy. No, you can’t. You’d be miserable. You’d be wasting your potential.

Would it really have been a waste to have grown up among her own people? To not have had to cut off pieces of herself? Those questions tormented her now. Maybe she would have been content with the hand God dealt her, had that night twelve years ago never happened. Maybe she would have been simply the cobbler’s eldest daughter, stitching leathers and hiding her magic and dreaming of far-off places.

But games like that were as pointless as they were punishing. Lorelei would never know that version of herself. She would never know how much of this bitterness within her was innate and how much had been shaped by the inevitable cruelty of living. Her story had been written long ago, in indelible ink and blood.

There was no hope of changing it now.