Chapter Six

Hazy moonlight filtered between tall pine trees and the air—musty and sweet—cooled to a chill. Overhead, a bird’s wings clapped, causing a few pine needles to twirl through the air and land atop the crisp linen.

I set the basket down and touched the trunk of a tree, my fingertips catching on feathery bark and hardened sap. Trees. They didn’t grow in the Sanokes. I’d only ever seen pictures in books. How…?

I turned back, half expecting to find myself marooned in the forest, but the hall was still there, a yawning doorway to another world—a world with tile floors and damask wallpaper, separate and apart from this strange land unfurling in front of me.

“Augh!” a voice behind me said. “What are you doing?”

I whirled.

There was the stormy-handsome Vold from King Christian’s study, his shirt untucked, hair tussled, his mouth pulled into a frown.

“What are you doing?” I asked, snatching the basket off the ground.

All at once, the trees began to fold, shriveling and shrinking until they disappeared into pale whips of smoke he waved away with the back of his hand. And just like that, we stood in an ordinary bedroom, complete with a floral rug and a tufted settee. Moonlight poured in through windows as the ocean waves lapped below.

“Do people knock in the Sanok Isles?” He stalked toward the settee. “Because in Volgaard, people knock.”

My heart thundered. I pressed a hand to my waist to steady myself. “Why are you in a forest?”

He shot me a glare. “That’s none of your business. Why are you here?”

I could keep pressing about the forest, but— The Volds. They’re dangerous.

“I came to change your sheets.”

His jaw tensed. “Fine. Do it quickly.”

I carried the basket to the side of the bed and prepared to strip away the blankets, but his bed hadn’t been slept in. The blue duvet was still turned down, the sheets crisp, the warming pan nestled beneath the mattress.

I ran my fingers along the embroidered fringe and turned. “You didn’t—”

The settee was empty, and the room was still. The only reminder he’d ever set foot in the place was his traveling cloak and a handful of pine needles scattered across the floor.

Something poked my ribs. I groaned and rolled over, throwing the pillow over my head and smothering some of the gray light that filtered through the window. A freezing hand snagged the blankets and a finger jammed into the soft spot right above my—

I sat up and glared. “Stop trying to tickle me. It won’t work.”

Katrina merely smiled—a gesture that brought out her dimple—and held out a handful of stolen candies. “I want to hear more about the Volds.”

“I already told you,” I said, throwing the pillow over my head, “I don’t know how he got the forest in his bedroom.”

“Tell me again what he did with the map.”

“ Leavemealone .”

Katrina pinched my cheek. “Wake up, sleepy.” Then, in a saucy whisper, “Let’s go to the beach.”

I slapped her hand. “Go away. Take your contraband candies with you.” I hiked the quilt around my chin to make sure she got the message.

Katrina scrambled to the foot of my bed. The quilt tangled around my legs lifted ever so slowly. Then an ice-cold hand pinched my big toe, followed by another poke to the arch of my foot.

I kicked her. Hard.

“Ouch!” she said, clamping her hand around my ankle.

I kicked again. “I’m not sneaking out with you today. I have work.”

From the other side of the room, blankets rustled and someone grunted. I squinted through my lashes and caught a pebble-black pair of eyes.

“You’re being awfully loud.” Gretchen propped herself up onto her elbow, the corners of her mouth twitching into the lazy half-smile of a cat who’d just caught a mouse.

Katrina scrambled off her perch, wide-eyed and hunch-backed, nightgown clinging to her legs like a surrender flag. “Sorry,” she whispered. The sheets rustled as she slid into her own bed.

I twisted from one side to the other, boxed my pillow, flipped again. I shoved my arm under my head. There was a lump in my mattress, a ball as hard as a goose egg that punched against my shoulder blade. I tried to tamp it down, tried to let the sweet tug of sleep take me back…

A bird chirped. From somewhere, someone snored.

I cracked one eye open. There was Katrina, the slope of her shoulders, her back to me, her body still. Katrina lived for the morning hours—the trips to the bluffs, the beach, the time she could spend walking along a world washed of footprints, smoothed from sleep. And I knew better than to let myself be sucked into her schemes, I did, but her shoulders sagged and she lay so, so still.

“Fine,” I said, peeling off the blankets. “As long as we’re back before the queen wakes up.” Well before the queen woke up.

Katrina scrambled up, raked a hand through her hair, and pulled on her boots, skipping her stockings.

I tugged the goose-turd green sweater over my head. “And as long as you help me catch a starfish.”

Gray foam blew across the beach, tumbling over seaweed. Sand nipped at our ankles and water sprayed against basalt bluffs, a low and gentle roar. The air was salty and briny and cold.

“Do you think it’s magic?” Katrina asked. She’d walked out to the water’s edge, her silhouette ribboning pink and copper in the sand.

I picked up a broken shell and tossed it into the waves. If I let her, she’d talk about this ad nauseam. To some extent, she already had. “Dunno.”

“It would explain it,” she continued, dark hair whipping around her face in loose snaps. “But why come here? Why now?” She pursed her lips and squinted toward the horizon.

“Maybe they want to apologize for cutting out all those merchants’ hearts.”

“Then why send so many men? Have you seen the beach they’re camped at?”

I shrugged and tossed another stone into the sea. “Maybe they’re just passing through on the way to something better.”

“What’s better than the Sanokes?”

Lots of things. Everything. We were a windswept country, an island with no trees, no wealth, a place as bleak and barren as the bottom of the sea. We were a stop-off for whalers and wanderers, a pinprick on the map of the world. We were a country of nobodies.

I flicked wet sand with the toe of my boot and said, “Tide pools are over here.”

Katrina tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. Her brow furrowed in the look that said she was worried about something. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Do about what?”

“The magic.”

“What is there to do about it? We’re staff. Now come on. Starfish.”

She broke away from her spot on the sand and jogged to catch up. “I thought we were going to do the screaming thing.”

“We’re at the beach. We can’t do the screaming thing.”

“Come on. You love the screaming thing.”

“You just like secrets.” That was the rule with the screaming thing. You could scream anything you wanted, so long as it was a secret. Big secrets, small secrets, silly secrets. It just had to be a secret.

She grinned and tweaked my nose. “Why do you need to catch a starfish?”

I shrugged and shoved my hands under my arms. “Potential madness cure.”

“I wish my boss let me out to catch starfish.”

Well, Jens-Kjeld didn’t exactly ask me to catch a starfish. Last night, I’d come back from laundry and searched the white reference book for anything that might help. I had to wade through a lot of irrelevant information—how to knead plaster to pull inflammation, what herbs were the best at blood stopping, how to cauterize a wound with willow bark—until I came across a handwritten study about how starfish spines had been used to treat fixation.

Worth a shot.

We scrambled down the beach, to the tide pools, the rocks pocked and sharp, fuzzed with sea moss. Fish darted in and out of our shadows and purple crabs scurried. Wind pricked my eyes, plastered my bangs against my forehead. I tried tucking a strand behind my ear, but it whipped free.

“What’s that?” Katrina asked.

She’d stopped on a rock a few feet ahead of me, her mouth pressed into a line.

I followed her gaze until I saw it too—a black and scarlet smear stretching across the tide pools, reddening the rocks.

“It’s…”

But she was already running toward it, racing over the beach.

I followed. The wind pounded my skin, my feet pounded the earth, my heart pounded my mouth as we scrambled toward the smear.

Katrina reached it first. And when she saw it, she let out a whimper and dropped to her knees, sending a splash of red droplets. Red. The wrong color. It pushed and pulled, swirled in eddies around the thing.

Not a thing… A body.

A bloated hand splayed across the rock, fingers so swollen, they’d turned a veiny white. Sandflies leapt like fleas through a crop of matted hair and pink-tinged foam clung to its clothes.

“Wh-what do we do?” Katrina asked.

“That’s…that’s a staff jacket,” I said. “We flip them over, figure out who it is.”

Katrina stumbled back, her foot catching a rock. “Isy, I—”

I grabbed her arm and pulled her down. “Grab the ankles. Ready? One, two—”

Water sloshed like sudsy soap, stirring up bits of sand and stringy blood to reveal a face.

The world tipped and for a moment—a fleeting moment—I could not think and I could not breathe and I could not feel.

A handful of silver fish scattered, darting into the shadows.

“Is that—” Katrina’s voice cracked.

Tears pricked my eyes. “Get help,” I said, but the words were wrong, a gargle. I dropped to my knees. “Get help!”

The warmth of Katrina’s presence disappeared as she tore up the beach.

I clawed at the jacket, then at the blood-soaked cravat, my fingernails slipping over the knot tied too tight, too tight. I threw the fabric into the tide and pumped his chest. Water spurted from his lips.

I pumped his chest again, and again, and again. Be alive. He had to be alive. Any minute now, he’d sputter and sit up and tell me what the hell he was doing down here.

Pump, pump. Wait.

Pump, pump. Wait.

The sun beat against my arms, my neck. Gulls screeched. The waves pushed and pulled my skirt into a bloody swirl.

Pump, pump. Wait.

Pump, pump. Wait.

The world seemed to stop, seemed to spin, and the only sounds were my breath and the crash of the sea against sand.

Pump, pump. Wait.

Pump, pump—

Then shouting. Splashing. A dog barked. Hands. Wrapped around my waist. Hauling me out.

“Let me go,” I shouted, the rhythm of pounding, of pumping still caught in my bones. “I can save him, I can—”

“It’s too late,” the guard said, pulling me back. “It’s too late. Shh. I’m sorry. He’s gone.”

And then I was on the sand, and the guards were smoothing their hands over my hair, running them down my shoulders, checking for injuries. Someone gave me a blanket like I was the one who was hurt, but I wasn’t hurt. I was shivering and I was sobbing, and I wanted to wake up from this dream, this dream, because this had to be a dream.

But I already knew the truth.

The ugly truth.

Hans—the boy who held me crying behind the chicken coop, the boy who chased after our coach, who loved oceans, trained pigeons, who promised he’d never leave—

He was dead.