Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  He puts on the robe and turns, once again, to face the Queen; she is standing, arms wrapped around her upper body, in the center of the circle. He looks away immediately. It is not—it is never—safe to see the Queen’s pain, and it is evident now; she is a confused, lost girl, her fragility both her armor and her weapon. If he were a different man, he would go to her; he would slide an awkward arm around her shoulder; he would offer her comfort.

  He doesn’t. He knows there’s no comfort she’ll take from him. There is only one person she wants.

  And that person has devoted himself to her death.

  • • •

  Nathan doesn’t remember being born. He will never forget being reborn.

  REYNA LIVES WITH THE DEAD.

  This wasn’t always true.

  As a child, living on the edge of villages, and once or twice, larger towns, she spent her days helping her mother in her various gardens, and helping her uncles when they went on errands for her mother. When she was eight, she took care of Helmi, her squalling, infant sister. From time to time, she played with other children, but in truth, not often; strangers always made her mother nervous.

  Reyna has lived with the dead since she was just shy of thirteen. The dead don’t frighten her. They can’t do anything on their own. The scariest person Reyna knows is alive.

  Reyna’s mother is frowning at her over a circle etched in chalk. Reyna drew that circle. It’s not good enough for her mother. Nothing is ever good enough for her mother. But the floors are rough here; it’s hard to draw straight lines—or solid, curved lines—with chunks of chalk. Chalk is not to be wasted. Nothing is to be wasted. Reyna understands why.

  She makes no excuses because she’s learned, with time, that no excuse satisfies her mother and the attempt to offer one darkens a mood that is never bright to begin with. The circles are anchors. Without anchors, searching for the dead is not safe.

  If she’s to leave this house before sunset, these circles have to be exact. Her mother will settle for nothing less. Reyna works with deliberate care, even if her hands are shaking. If she makes mistakes, she will have to do it all over again—and that will take too long, always too long.

  While she works, her mother talks about the only thing that matters to her: the dead. The dead who are lost. “It’s cold,” her mother says. “It’s cold, where she is.”

  Reyna doesn’t ask who. She knows. Somewhere—nowhere close to the village in which they’ve lived for almost a full year—someone died. Death didn’t free her. She is trapped somewhere cold. She’s afraid. The dead are almost always afraid.

  “Did you see her?” she asks her mother.

  Her mother shakes her head.

  Reyna is surprised.

  “She’s not close enough for me. You’re going to have to do it.” It’s said so grudgingly, it stings. Reyna swallows backtalk. Beneath her mother’s words is the acknowledgment of the uncomfortable truth between them: Reyna’s gift is more powerful than her mother’s. Of course her mother’s not happy about it.

  But she has to be worthy of that power. “Can’t you use the lantern?” she asks.

  Her mother snorts. “We don’t use it unless we have no other choice.”

  Daring more, Reyna says, “If you let me use it—”

  “No. Not yet. You’re not old enough yet.”

  But she is old enough to sit in a circle for hours, walking a path toward a stranger who died somewhere cold. Reyna doesn’t say this. She tries not to resent it. Instead, she draws and redraws and tries to do it quickly.

  • • •

  Reyna has a secret.

  It’s never wise to keep secrets from her mother or the rest of her family—and it’s always hard to keep them when Helmi is underfoot. But more than half of Reyna’s life is a secret now; she’s had practice. She knows when to speak, and she knows how to say very little. She knows how to let people fill in the silences and the spaces between words on their own.

  And this secret is not a guilty secret. This is not a secret she keeps primarily out of fear, the way her mother keeps secrets from every stranger, every neighbor, everyone who might—just might—become a friend, otherwise. She keeps it because it is hers and it has nothing to do with the dead, nothing to do with the life the magar forces her family to lead.

  This secret is about life. It’s about living. It fills all the spaces that have existed as empty gaps and insecurities for as long as Reyna can remember. It is about love. Reyna’s love. And the fact that Reyna is loved.

  She feels she has never been loved before now. She has certainly never loved this way before. When she is with Eric, she never thinks about the dead. When she is with Eric, she isn’t confined by circles of chalk and stories of death and loss. She barely thinks about the future. She wants every minute in his company she can get—because every minute is precious, and they seem to fly by, hours becoming minutes and minutes, seconds, until it’s time to return to the darkness and the secrecy.

  Reyna lives with the dead—but she’s not dead yet, and she wants, she desperately wants, to live.

  • • •

  Reyna knows when Eric became so important to her.

  She doesn’t understand how it happened—but she thinks about it because it gives her joy. She thinks about every moment, from the first meeting to the last, every awkward word; she thinks about the fear of speaking, and the fear of touching, and the fear of being sent away. All of it—the anticipation, the insecurity, the hesitance—is part of the perfect story, because she knows how it ends. She loves the ending, so she has to love the beginning.

  They talk about it in snatches at the end of the day or before the day starts; they have only stolen moments. Eric is the smith’s son, and he is expected to work. They talk about the first time they met. They talk about how they saw each other. Reyna could listen to Eric talk about it all day, every day.

  But she knows the important moment, for her, was his laughter. It was so open, so loud, so low, so instant—and so unguarded. He was laughing at her. That should have ended things right there. It had before. But his voice was so—so joyful. As though he had swallowed life and her part in it, and he had to let the happiness out somehow. There was no laughter like that in Reyna’s life.

  There was barely any life in her life.

  Shade dappled Eric’s face and hid the color of hers; even the birds fell silent. She can close her eyes and see Eric so clearly she could spend all day with her eyes closed. She can remember her own laughter, welling up in response to his, as if the sheer sound of him had opened a dialogue in a language she didn’t know, until that moment, was her mother tongue.

  “Reyna, pay attention.”

  Reyna opens her eyes. This is the wrong thing to do. She can see the crimped, weathered lines of her mother’s face—her mother, who is just past forty and looks as though she’s already at the end of her life. Age has withered her skin, and the pinched frown lines around her lips, eyes, and forehead are so different from the lines that transform Eric’s face when he laughs.

  If there is joy in this room, her mother will hunt it down and kill it.

  “What are you thinking?” her mother demands.

  Reyna doesn’t tell. She grabs her joy and she holds it close and tight in the cage of her body, because if her mother finds it, she will take it away. She exhales and tries to wipe the vestiges of a smile from her own face. She is not supposed to be thinking of Eric, or of life with Eric.

  She is not supposed to be thinking of life at all.

  Reyna’s mother only has eyes for dead people. Reyna remembers wishing, as a child, that she were dead—because then, her mother would come for her. Then, she would be the only person her mother could see. She would have all of her mother’s attention.

  The closest she ever comes is during lessons like these, but there’s nothing unconditional about her mother�
�s attention. She sits in judgment. She waits to criticize. Nothing Reyna says will be a good enough reason to wait. Reyna says nothing. She tries to focus. If she does what her mother wants done quickly, she will be able to see Eric.

  • • •

  Reyna listens. Eric’s constant presence doesn’t make her deaf; the reminder of life doesn’t inure her to death. She understands the desire for home, for a place to belong. The dead trapped here don’t have that, because no matter what they were in life, life has moved past them. The only people they can talk to are people like Reyna and her mother. Reyna doesn’t understand why she can see the dead. She doesn’t understand why her mother can. She knows it’s a gift.

  But tonight, it feels like a burden or a curse. Tonight, Eric will be waiting. If she could explain, it would help. She can’t. If her mother is wrong about Eric—and her mother absolutely is—she’s not wrong about villagers. People fear what they don’t understand.

  Then let me tell them. Let me explain it.

  What will you tell them? That you can speak with the dead? That there are dead who are trapped here? They already have ghost stories, girl. Stories of the vengeful dead are not going to make us welcome.

  But the dead aren’t vengeful. Mostly.

  No. The dead are people who have become invisible. But the invisibility is necessary. No one wants to let go.

  Reyna thinks of the lingering dead who were killed in anger, or for greed.

  Even hatred is a form of attachment, her mother said. She tries to remember this, but it’s hard. She is not full of hatred, now; she is overwhelmed by love, and yes—she wants to hold on to it. There is so much that is hard and difficult and fearful, holding on to things that give joy makes sense. It makes all the sense in the world.

  In the distance, Reyna hears weeping. She opens her eyes; her mother’s are closed, her mother’s brow furrowed in the etched lines of concentration.

  • • •

  Reyna has always been powerful. It is her mother’s pride—but also, Reyna knows, her mother’s fear. The only thing her mother has is her role as magar. Take that away, and what defines her? Nothing. When Reyna was younger, she attempted to hide her power, to ease her mother’s fear. It didn’t work, and her mother didn’t appreciate it. Reyna’s power has only served to increase her mother’s expectations and the harshness of her mother’s lessons.

  Helmi, Reyna’s surviving youngest sister, takes lessons that are far less harsh, far kinder. Helmi, however, is too young to show even the traces of the power that came to Reyna when she was twelve or thirteen. Reyna can’t remember her mother ever being as kind to her oldest daughter as she is to her youngest.

  It’s not a gift, Reyna thinks. She wants to tell her sister that. It’s not a gift. It’s just another way to fail. But maybe Helmi will be free of the curse. Helmi will be allowed to have friends, or maybe even fall in love. Helmi won’t have to be magar.

  Helmi won’t hear the weeping.

  It draws Reyna; it pulls at her while she sits in the confines of the circle she etched in such broad strokes. Safe in the circle, Reyna lets herself be pulled into the pit of another person’s pain. Walking this path is hard. It’s not like the first dead girl she met; that had been an accident.

  She’d been working in the new field. The sky had been blue and the earth, brown; in the distance, trees blurred the horizon. Talking to the stranger had been natural, a part of the day.

  Talking to this stranger is not. The circle defines the landscape, as Reyna sits at its center. There is no natural sky, no natural gardens, no trees; there are no people and no possibility of people. Reyna goes to the dead girl, but she walks the magar’s road to do it.

  She thinks the weeping voice belongs to a girl, possibly a young woman. The road takes the shape of the dead girl’s memory. Reyna looks for some sign of her mother, but her mother is not present; Reyna is walking the narrow road alone.

  There are trees in the distance, shadowed and gray. The magar has warned Reyna, many, many times, not to add color or substance to the world she sees while she sits in the heart of the circle. The circle is supposed to be both guide and anchor. It is a reminder of the life that exists outside the world of the dead. But it’s hard not to add traces of color to what she sees, to give strength to the echoes of another’s memories. She does it without thinking, as she walks. It’s easier not to do it when it’s night, because at night, there is very little color.

  The path is familiar; Reyna realizes this only as she draws close to the voice itself. It’s the path Reyna walks to see Eric. She is glad her mother has not yet found the girl; it gives Reyna time to let the natural landscape of the dead reassert itself. She stands very still until she no longer recognizes the turn of the road, the rise and the fall of the gently sloped land, the shape of the trees. She no longer hears the brook passing yards from her closed eyes.

  She no longer feels the touch of Eric’s lips or hands.

  Instead, she feels cold. It is bone-numbing. She no longer sees earth, but something that looks whiter and softer. It covers branches, flecks bark, hides the rounded gnarl of tree roots entirely. It is hard to see past it. It is not hard to listen.

  She walks across the ground, leaving no tracks; this is not reality. It once was, for the girl who is now dead. The cabin, such as it is, is covered in white. There are shutters; she can see their shape in outline. They’re closed. So is the door. Neither matters. Reyna was no part of the girl’s death. No part of death at all. Memories don’t, and can’t, contain her.

  The girl is huddled in the corner of the room farthest from the shuttered windows. She is sitting in the dark—and it is dark here. There is a fireplace; it contains ash. There’s no wood beside it. It is so cold in this room, breath is visible. She died here. She died alone.

  There is a table in this room. Three chairs. A fireplace. There are plates on the table. Cups that look like tin. There is a door that leads to another room. Reyna skirts around the weeping girl and looks in. One large bed. One fire grate. One small table that contains shut drawers and the remnants of a melted candle.

  This is where the girl died, but she didn’t live alone. Reyna drifts back through the door and comes to stand a few yards away from the girl herself. This has always been the hardest part of the job for Reyna. The dead don’t always pay attention to the living because they’re so caught up in their own final moments. If she knew the girl’s name, it would be easier. The dead often respond to their names.

  She doesn’t. The girl—and probably her family—died on the outskirts of an entirely different village.

  Reyna tries anyway. But the girl can’t hear her because her own pain, her own fear, is too loud. It has to be. If it weren’t, she wouldn’t be trapped here.

  Reyna exhales. She then reaches out to touch the girl’s shoulder.

  • • •

  In the heart of the circle in a distant, darkened room, Reyna flinches. The cold eats sensation in her palms, but not quickly enough: It hurts. She has to push past the cold—and quickly—or her arm will be numb for a day.

  The dead are not meant to speak with the living. It’s a natural law. The cold is a reminder, a sign that means: Stay out. But it’s a thin sheet of ice. When one knows how to stand on it, it breaks. Beneath that ice, beneath the overwhelming cold, there is heat and warmth, a reminder that the dead come from the living.

  The girl’s eyes widen. She lifts her head, tightening her arms around her knees as she meets Reyna’s eyes. Reyna doesn’t know what the girl sees; what Reyna sees is a gaunt face, hollow eyes, pale, sunless skin. A threadbare dress, too large for the girl who inhabits it. The girl died when she wasn’t much younger than Reyna. Or older. With the dead, it’s hard to tell.

  They don’t age when dead.

  “Who are you?” The girl asks. She lets go of her knees and rises. To Reyna’s surprise, the girl is—was—talle
r.

  Reyna doesn’t give her name to strangers, even dead ones. “I’ve come to find you.”

  “Have you found my father? Is my father—”

  “Your father,” Reyna replies, “is waiting for you.”

  “How did you get here? With all the snow—” The girl shakes her head. “It’s been snowing so long. You can always hear the wind screaming, just outside. We ran out of firewood.”

  And food, Reyna thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. She holds onto the girl, and the girl doesn’t seem to notice; she walks, quickly, to the door. It opens for her, because it is not a door in a real house; it is the memory of a house. Just as the girl herself is the memory of a life.

  The door opens into a howling snarl of wind and ice and snow. The girl struggles to close it. Reyna feels the undercurrents of her fear; it is so strong, it pulls her under. If the door is left open, they’ll both die.

  She shakes the fear out, almost literally. This death is not her death. She is not dead. The girl is—and doesn’t realize it. She’s caught in the moment of fear; it’s all she can see. That and Reyna. Reyna takes shallow breaths. Her mother still hasn’t found them, but she’s closer, now.

  There’s only one certain way to break the dead out of the trap they’ve built for themselves—and it does take power. But it takes the power they carry within them. Reyna looks at the door. She looks at the room, and the empty fireplace, the empty table. To lead the girl out of this nightmare, she will have to alter what the girl perceives.

  Fear is hard to shift. Reyna thinks, again, of Eric. She wants to be in his arms; instead, she is holding the remnants of a terrified girl, and she knows, looking at her, that there will be no time for Eric this evening. There might be no time in the morning, either, before the day’s chores truly start. She swallows.

  She swallows and accepts it. Yes, her mother could—and will—find this girl. She won’t find her as quickly as Reyna because she’s never been as sensitive. But even if she does find her, Reyna’s not certain her mother could do what needs to be done. The winter and the isolation are both so strong it’s hard to think of the circle and the summer that she left hours ago. And it has been hours.