Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  “Go home with my friends. Except for the dead one,” she added, her throat tightening.

  “And him?”

  “If he can’t find his way to the door, I’ll walk him there.” And try, desperately, not to weep while she was doing it.

  • • •

  Margaret’s gaze sharpened when Emma stepped out of the circle. The hand that she held allowed the dead woman to cross the boundaries woven into an aged carpet with what appeared to be gold thread.

  “The carpet is a circle,” Emma told Margaret, half apologetically. “The living—Necromancers—would probably see her, as I did. But not the dead.” Turning to the old woman, she said, “This is Margaret Henney.” To Margaret, she said, “She didn’t introduce herself, so I don’t know her name.”

  “Names have power,” the old woman said.

  Emma didn’t actually believe this, but Hall manners in a public space prevented any verbal disagreement. “She was hidden within the circle. I’m hoping she can tell us a little bit about the citadel or the Queen of the Dead.”

  “Or how these rooms were built?”

  “Or that, yes.”

  • • •

  The woman looked around the room, taking in all occupants at a glance. The fact that they returned her stare—some more politely than others—didn’t seem to concern her at all. “This room, the rooms that surround it, are a circle.”

  “What are circles?” Amy seldom did something as trivial as asking where a demand would do.

  “They are bindings,” the woman replied. “Not chains, but—reminders. When we leave our bodies, we meet the dead in their own domain. It is easy—far too easy—to become as they are. It is easy to lose ourselves and the sense of our own lives, and if we do that, we lose our lives. We’re no good to the trapped and the lost if we become trapped and lost ourselves.” She looked down an angular nose at Amy with very clear distaste before her glance returned to Emma and the hand that bound them. She seemed to be making a decision.

  “The dead have no choice. But the living do. We leave our bodies tethered to the circles of the living world. Every circle is therefore slightly different, but at base, the principles are the same. We write or carve the ancient symbols of earth, fire, water, and air. We carve the runes of birth and death. We surround ourselves with those symbols, and into that mix, we choose one for ourselves. A name, if you will. A name to join the symbols that speak of life.

  “From there, from behind those protections, we can seek the dead. It is not a trivial undertaking, to draw a circle. It is not trivial to learn the mechanics of creating one.”

  “I don’t mean to be a killjoy,” Amy interrupted, in a tone that heavily implied the opposite, “but these rooms aren’t exactly circular.”

  “The circle is a metaphor,” the woman snapped, her expression as cold as her hand. “There is a reason that the dead cannot drift into this space. The Queen could, but magics of her own devising prevent the finding of the rooms by the living. And perhaps those magics are finally failing—you are here, after all.” She glanced at Emma. “Or perhaps your queen—”

  “So not a queen.”

  “It is habit; forgive me. How did you find this room?”

  Everyone in the room very carefully avoided looking at Michael. Michael was silent as well.

  The woman didn’t seem to find the silence offensive. “The rooms were constructed by my son over a period of years. The Queen trusted him, as she trusted very, very few. She taught him everything she had learned, and he taught her everything he had learned. Yes,” she added, glancing toward the floor, “he became the first of her supporters, the first of her knights.

  “He believed—we believed—that time would heal the pain she felt. We committed crimes in the short term while we waited for that healing. And we did so from a place of safety. We were free to speak about our vocation. We were free to exchange information about both our successes and our failures.

  “You cannot understand what that was like—to be free to be true to ourselves. It was a powerful, heady gift. For the first time in our lives, we did not fear to be murdered in our beds by the terrified and the ignorant.” Her voice had grown in strength as she spoke; Emma could see her features shift, the wrinkles sliding away from the corners of her lips and her mouth. Those wrinkles were not laugh lines or smile lines; they’d been carved there by grim frowns.

  “She gathered us from the corners of the land; found us in our tents and our homes. She brought us to her village. And the village grew.” She was definitely younger now in appearance; her hair was a wild, tangled spill down shoulders that were no longer stooped. She was, to Emma’s surprise, striking—even beautiful.

  “We offered safety and shelter to our distant kin. And they were grateful, just as we were. They felt free, just as we did. But some were troubled by the Queen’s treatment of the dead and the use of their power. Some could justify it, of course. Some could not. The disagreement grew heated, and the division, bitter. It did not stop with words.

  “It was perhaps the closest the Queen had come to death, beyond that first terrible day. She took control of those who were loyal to her and banished the survivors who were not.” The woman hesitated, and then added, “There were very few survivors.

  “But the conflict started from a very simple question: How long? How long were the dead to be trapped? How long would they exist in a state of servitude?” The woman fell silent. Emma thought she had stopped speaking. She was wrong.

  “It’s easy to say: just a little while longer. It’s easy to speak of the primacy of the living. The dead do not age. They have time.”

  It was not easy for Emma. She said nothing.

  “We had seen death. We had lived in fear. We were drunk with the knowledge that we need not fear again.” She shook her head. “But fear comes anyway. What we fear changes. I was not taught the arts of longevity. At that point, the Queen trusted very few, and I was not among them. I reminded her,” she added, with a bitter grimace, “of her mother. And so, as all must, I died. But I died of old age. Of ill-health. Men did not come to murder me in my bed.

  “And I existed thereafter as the dead exist. The enormity of what had been done—to the dead—became real to me only once I had joined them. I returned, not to the Queen but to my son. We spoke for some time. He asked me to wait. And what could I say to him?” She spread her hands, palm up. “Had I not decided the dead could wait when I was not myself among them?

  “He would not listen to me, not immediately. I thought him cold and proud, and perhaps he was—but perhaps I was as well. He wished for the Queen to be safe.”

  “If he’s dead,” Margaret said, her voice oddly gentle, “He must have changed his mind.”

  The woman nodded; she wrapped one arm around herself, as if she could feel the cold. “Yes. The Queen required a legion of the dead to build her city, her citadel. She built a circle for herself, and she went out to gather them; she found them by the wall.”

  “The wall?”

  “It is what I call what she has made of the only exit offered us.

  “But it was not enough. Had the magar granted her daughter the one distinguishing item she possessed, it would have been much, much simpler. But if the magar loved her daughter, it was a harsh love, and it did not imply trust. She searched for her dead mother,” the woman added. “For decades. For centuries, to listen to my son. She could not be found.

  “And had I not come to my son, I would not have been found either. To the Queen, I was one of a legion of necessary tools. To my son? I was his mother. They argued, then. It was the first real argument they had had. In the end, the Queen relented, or appeared to relent; she agreed that I would not have the honor of becoming a necessary foundation for her future home.”

  “She didn’t say that?”

  “That is exactly what she said—to my son. My son did not agr
ee. I make no excuse for him. He was willing to consign strangers—innocents, even—to the fate of being floor or wall for as long as the Queen reigned. He was unwilling to consign me to it. She acquiesced.

  “But she was not happy to see his loyalty divided. The dead were dead. They did not have the primacy of the living. And even among the living, there was the Queen and everyone else. She did not wish me to continue to influence my son, and she attempted to bind me. I remember it. It was . . . unpleasant.”

  Margaret nodded.

  “He came in time to prevent this, and she apologized; she said I had insulted her, that she had lost her temper. That was her excuse.”

  Emma could well imagine it was true.

  “But he kept me by him after that. I seldom left his side. It . . . did not please her. She was always angered by lack of trust, even when the lack was deserved. My son proved not to be an utter fool; he had already built what he called a haven—this one. It was hard for him to come here in the latter days; they never completely recovered from the conflict. She was a child,” the woman added. “And, as children do, she wished to be the most important—the only important—person. She wished to know that she, above all others, was cherished. He had given her that, for as long as he could.

  “He created the circle you found me in. It is . . . clever. It can be moved or placed where necessary, in a way that the Queen’s circle cannot.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. He left me here.” She lifted her chin. “I do not think he felt certain he would survive whatever it was he intended; he did not tell me. He did not ask my advice; he wished me to be safe and beyond her reach—something he could not, in the end, guarantee for himself.

  “He intended, I think, to destroy her.”

  “HOW?” Michael asked. The woman was so unfriendly, he didn’t follow it with the usual barrage of subsequent questions.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. If he failed—if we were discovered—I would have told her everything. There were things he did not want her to know. And that was wise. If he failed—and he must have, if you are here—he might have had hope that someone else would eventually succeed.”

  “He was taught the old ways?” Margaret asked, her voice still soft and shorn of all judgment.

  “Of course,” the woman replied, her voice harsh.

  Amy folded her arms, tilting her hip to the right. “There’s no ‘of course.’ If he’d been taught the old ways and he’d stuck with them, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.” The woman’s face aged as she turned to Amy, but age wasn’t going to garner any respect from that quarter. “Don’t even,” she said, glaring. “The only reason you’ve got regrets is that you personally suffered.”

  If the hand Emma held had been cold before, it became ice. Even the sense that she held something in the shape of a hand vanished. Time froze, in the same way her hand did; as if all warmth had been leeched from it, and warmth—like life—was required.

  And yet, at the core of that implacable ice, there was heat—not warmth, it was too blistering, too unforgiving, for that. The sensation was both new and at the same time, familiar; Emma understood, just in time, what it meant. The fire wasn’t meant for her. She was a conduit.

  She had been a conduit for a dead child in just this way, and people had died. She’d had no regrets about those deaths; the people who had died had meant to murder Allison.

  This was different. What she’d allowed a four-year-old child in her ignorance, she could not allow now; she knew who the power was aimed at. And if, on rare occasions, she’d strongly desired to kick Amy Snitman in the shins, that was the extent of her anger. Amy was, thorns and all, one of the best friends a person could have, especially when the chips were down.

  After all, she was here, wasn’t she?

  Fire gathered in Emma’s hands; she curled them into fists. That was simple; pain caused her to tense, to clench, to bite her own lip simply to endure. The only thing that was cold was her left hand. Without thinking, she reached for the cold—and to her surprise, it came, flowing up her arm and across her shoulders like a thin shell of sensation within which she could contain the rage of fire.

  Her own rage was already contained because she was a Hall. She opened her eyes—when had she closed them?—to meet the older woman’s and said, No. I will not let you do this.

  The heat of the fire intensified, but Emma had cold, and as she applied it, the fire ceased to burn.

  “Emma—” Margaret began.

  Emma swiveled and Margaret fell silent—and not in the good way. The ghost took a step back, passing through Ernest before she stopped herself.

  “Em,” Allison said, at the same time. “Your hair is—”

  “Standing on end,” Chase finished. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Stopping a cranky old woman from turning Amy into an ash pile,” Emma snapped back.

  “That is not all you are doing,” Margaret’s voice was soft, almost a whisper, but it had an edge Emma had never heard there before.

  Amy shrugged. Of course she did. “Emma’s got my vote of confidence.” She glared at Chase. “You asked a stupid question. She answered it, which is more than I would have done.”

  “Not noticing you’re short of words right now,” Chase replied.

  “You asked her what she was doing. Rudely. She answered anyway. I personally don’t care how she’s doing it—I’m in favor of the end goal.” She then turned to Emma. In a different tone of voice, she said, “Margaret’s worried.”

  Since this was obvious, Emma nodded. “You remember what happened with Andrew Copis—the four-year-old trapped in the burning house?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was trying to do what he did. She was going to lash out through me. I stopped her.” Exhaling, she added, “I stopped me.” Emma turned to the old woman. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  The woman was utterly silent. What Emma had assumed was a glare because it was the woman’s natural expression was something entirely different. She was staring through Emma, as though Emma was no longer visible. Or as though nothing was.

  Emma had seen that look before. She yanked her hand back, and only when she did did she realize that she was no longer holding onto the woman’s hand. She could still feel the cold, but it wasn’t painful or numbing; it was almost pleasant.

  She looked down at her hands. They hadn’t changed. She was half afraid she’d see some sign of luminescence, of otherworldly energy; she didn’t. She looked up, slowly this time.

  “Em?”

  “I think—I think she’s bound. To me.” She felt queasy, nauseated, even saying it.

  “I think so too,” Margaret replied. She had regained her composure.

  “I didn’t—I didn’t have time to think,” Emma said, voice dropping. “I recognized what she meant to do. I had to stop her.”

  “How did you recognize it?”

  “It felt the same. I could feel fire. I could feel it in my hands. And I could feel ice, because I was still holding onto her hand. I used that. I used the ice to build a barrier between the fire and my fingertips.”

  “This is not the way it is normally done,” Margaret said. “Normally, the binding process is much longer, much more onerous.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have the incentive I did.”

  “No, dear, we probably didn’t. We were concerned, of course, with our own survival—without power, it wasn’t guaranteed. There are Necromancers who fail the many tests laid out for them. The Queen is not interested in failure.”

  Emma said, quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  The old woman stirred.

  Emma faced her, uneasiness giving way to anger. “If the dead have power, it’s meant to be used to leave. It’s not meant to be used to kill the living—no matter how you feel about the living. Yo
u couldn’t do it on your own—the only way you could do it is through me—and I’m not going to let you murder my friends because you happen to think they’re too rude. I wouldn’t let you do it if you were alive, either. Rude is not a death sentence in this world.

  “And I think Amy’s right. You think it’s acceptable to kill someone because you don’t like the way they talk to you? There’s probably a reason that you were one of the Queen’s early supporters. Or later, if it comes to that.”

  The woman’s face lost the slack, distant look that had characterized the bound whom Emma had worked so hard to free. The fact that she was somehow bound to Emma—that it was because Emma had used her innate power when she had ceased to be aware of herself or anything else in the room—made it far, far worse: It was an accusation. It was proof that the power she had was the same power as the Queen’s.

  And she knew this. But the knowledge had, until this point, been entirely intellectual. Now it wasn’t.

  The woman’s expression, however, was not one of horror; it was almost . . . smug. “So you’ve will in you, girl. You’re not as weak as you look.” She frowned and added, “Children had better manners in my day.”

  “Not if they learned them from you,” Amy shot back.

  As she couldn’t reduce Amy to ash, she chose the next best option; she pretended Amy didn’t exist. “What will you do with me now? I have power.” She said this with a certain amount of pride.

  “It wasn’t your power you were attempting to use,” was Emma’s quiet reply. “Can you just stay here?”

  “You do not require my permission to leave me here.”

  “No, I guess I don’t.” Emma flexed her fingers, paused, and examined her hands. The chains that bound Margaret—or Nathan—had been visible as chains to her eye. There were no chains around her hand or her arm. There was no visible sign that she had enslaved this woman. She winced even thinking the word—but she forced herself to call it what it was. Anything else was a lie, meant for her own comfort.

  She did not want to become comfortable with what she’d done.