Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  And maybe, just maybe, working to give him what he’d needed had helped shape who Emma Hall had become. She didn’t ask him to describe what he saw; given his expression, she wasn’t certain she wanted to hear it.

  “Margaret?”

  “I see what you see,” was the quiet response.

  “I see a wall.”

  Margaret nodded. “The room is called the resurrection room. I was not here to be resurrected. I was not alone,” she added. “Longland was here.”

  Ernest tried to put an arm around Margaret’s shoulder. It passed through her without gaining any purchase, and Emma saw his expression shift, a brief, sharp bite of pain and regret, before he once again looked like a grim, older hunter.

  Movement caught her attention; Allison’s. She stepped into the narrow space between Emma and Michael, and reaching out, placed both of her hands beneath his, pulling them up.

  And Michael said, “I don’t think it’s a statue.”

  “It’s all right, Michael,” Ally said. “We’re here to help the dead.”

  “Not if you can’t see them.”

  The old woman said, “It is something she would have done. She would not be abandoned by anyone else she loved.” She exhaled ice; Emma could hear the air crackle around the single word that followed. “Scoros.”

  • • •

  Emma approached the wall and touched it gingerly at first; what she felt mirrored what she could see: flat but gently curved stone. She grimaced; what she hadn’t done to the circle, she now attempted to do here.

  She listened for the voices of the dead.

  The only one she heard was the old woman’s; it was sharp and angry, but very thin. “What are you doing, girl?”

  “If I’m right, I’m trying to reach what remains of your son.” She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth; they were harsh, unkind, a funnel for her own anxiety and fear, her own resentment. No matter how much she disliked the woman, no parent deserved to hear that.

  And regardless, Emma couldn’t find him. She could touch only the wall.

  She rose and turned back to her friends, shaking her head.

  “Don’t even think it,” Amy said, before Emma could speak. “We’re not leaving.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how long it will take.”

  Amy snorted. “Does it matter? If you’re still here when the Queen comes back, we’re all dead. The only hope we have of getting out of here alive is you.”

  Allison was trying not to glare at Amy. She was wise enough to leave it at that. But Emma was aware that everyone was watching her. Margaret knew about modern Necromancy; she didn’t know anything about the older stuff.

  But the old woman who had tried to kill Amy did. And Emma felt certain that there was only one way to reach the trapped man—the statue that Michael could see. She was aware that they were running out of the time Eric had borrowed for them. She was aware that learning something new took time.

  And she was certain that she could not reach that statue in any other way.

  Is it necessary? she asked; the room was cold and she had started to shiver. But the man trapped here had created the safe rooms within the citadel the Queen had built, and those rooms had not been found, until Michael. This man, this former Necromancer, understood the citadel and its construction in a way Emma never would—and if he had planned to finally kill his Queen, Emma guessed he’d left the metaphorical equivalent of parachutes somewhere.

  She did not want to leave the dead trapped here.

  She did not want her friends to die. Or herself, either, if it came to that.

  “Tell me,” Emma said, turning to the old woman with her narrowed eyes and pinched lips, “how to use the circle.” Speaking, she began to walk away from Michael’s theoretical statue, toward the engraved runes that formed the circle’s circumference.

  “It is not your circle,” the old woman said. She had managed to tear her gaze away from the blank wall, but it kept returning.

  “No, it’s not. But it’s a circle, and it’s the only one we have. Tell me how to use it.”

  “You—” The woman clearly wanted to sneer, but she kept it out of her words. But she stopped speaking. Maybe she wouldn’t start. Maybe she’d offer no advice, no guidance.

  Emma was willing to take that risk. What else was there she could do?

  She walked toward the heart of the room and hesitated only once, her toes an inch from the engraved circumference. This wasn’t her circle. If what she’d been told was true, each Necromancer—or whatever they’d been called before the Queen of the Dead—drew their own.

  And if what hadn’t been put into words was also true, a circle had been the beginning of the Queen’s power. If the circle was unnecessary, it wouldn’t be here. It was the centerpiece of the resurrection room. It was much larger than the circle in which the old woman’s ghost had been hidden, which meant that size didn’t matter.

  This was the heart of the Queen’s power, made grand—like the rest of the citadel—and ostentatious.

  Emma was not the Queen of the Dead. Nor did she ever wish to be that. And that was the reason she’d hesitated on the edge of the circle: because she felt that entering it was to don—for however short a time, and for whatever reason—the Queen’s crown.

  She looked back at her friends, inhaled, and squared her shoulders. She took a step, crossed the line, and continued, aware that it had started this way for that long-ago sixteen-year-old girl: the need to protect and preserve what she could of the world she’d loved in the face of certain death.

  • • •

  Nothing happened when she came to stand in the center of the circle. Looking out, she could see her friends. She could see the curving walls of the resurrection room, and the shelves and small tables that huddled awkwardly against it. She could see the edge of the circle.

  “Do I look any different?” she asked.

  Ally shook her head. Michael said, “No.”

  Amy said, “Do you feel any different?”

  She didn’t. She hesitated for another moment and then sat, crossing her legs rather than folding them. She took a deep breath, held it, and let it go; she did this three times. Nothing changed. The air was cold, the silence oppressive.

  On the fourth inhale, Emma closed her eyes.

  • • •

  From the heart of the circle, Emma could see the walls, the shelves, and two tables. She could see the engravings around the circumference of the circle in which she sat. She could see the floor. She could, eyes shut tight, see her crossed legs, her boots, her clothing. She could see her hands. She could no longer hear her friends.

  What she hadn’t expected was the sidewalk. Actually, that was probably the wrong word. It was a path, it appeared to be made of stone, and it wasn’t wide enough to be called a road. It led to one of the walls.

  It led, she thought, to the section of wall that Michael had called a statue. But even ensconced in the heart of this circle, Emma couldn’t see what Michael had seen.

  Not yet, she told herself.

  • • •

  “Very good, Emma Hall.”

  She almost opened her eyes again at the sound of the familiar voice, which would have been pointless. She could see the magar while her eyes were closed. She could see the woman who had given birth to both Helmi and the Queen of the Dead.

  “I don’t know where you learned to draw a circle, but you are sitting in one now.”

  “I didn’t draw it,” Emma replied. “It was already here.”

  “Here?”

  “In this room.”

  “Ah. I am not where you are. I am not in a room.”

  “Where are you?”

  The magar’s smile was lined and harsh. “Where the dead are. If you have not been taught the rudiments, you will not be ab
le to make use of the circle.”

  “Can you teach me what I need to know in five minutes or less?”

  This predictably caused annoyance in the magar. “I could teach you what you need to know in a decade. And yes, I know you don’t have a decade—not yet. Most of my pupils started far younger than you are now; they understood their roles and their abilities as they grew into them.

  “You have done the inverse; it cannot be changed. Come.” The woman drifted toward where Emma sat. She wore age far less heavily than she had on the first occasion Emma had seen her. When she reached the edge of the circle, she stopped and bent over the runes, as if she could not pass above or through them.

  She held out her right hand. “Do not move anything but your arm—not yet.”

  Emma lifted her left hand and bent to place it in the old woman’s.

  “Now, pay attention. I will help you to stand. No, I did not tell you to stand. I said I would help.”

  “I don’t really need help standing.”

  “You do. I have never interfered in this fashion with any of my own—it is risky, and if it’s required, it means the pupil has not been well taught. My daughter could do this on the day she turned sixteen.”

  “I have no ambition to ever become like your daughter.”

  “No,” the magar replied, with a bitter, bitter smile, which made Emma feel as if a bucket of ugly guilt had just been thrown in her face.

  Emma’s grip on the old woman’s hand tightened. To her surprise—and confusion—Emma didn’t feel the usual, instantaneous ice that came from physical contact with the dead. She did feel the old woman’s hand; it was wide, warm, and obviously far more callused than Emma’s hands had ever been.

  “I bore five children,” the magar said, which came almost out of nowhere. “Three died before they reached the age of five. Two survived.”

  “That must have been hard,” Emma replied, Hall manners kicking in automatically. She couldn’t see why the magar’s comment was relevant.

  “Hard? Yes. But children, then and now, are born weak and helpless, and mine did not have the advantages that you, as infants, had. Death was no stranger to me. Even had I not been magar, it would have been no stranger. It was no stranger to any of the villagers.”

  “The ones who killed you.”

  “Even so. They had no reason to fear us,” she added, as if it were necessary. “But they feared. Fear is a very, very poor ruler—and its rule spans empires.”

  “You don’t hate them for what they did.”

  “Why? Hate would change nothing. I wept when my children died. I wept when we buried them—and we did not bury them side by side. I knew that I could see them again, because I am magar. But I knew where they must go. I did not hope for them the torment and isolation of the trapped and the lost—and if they remained, that is all they would have had. I am grateful that they died when they did.”

  Emma was silent for one long beat. “Because they’re not trapped?”

  The magar nodded. “They are quit of the world. They went where the dead go and the living cannot. Helmi, my baby, has never had that peace; she understands that it waits and that she will never reach it. Not while her sister lives.”

  “Neither will you.”

  “No. But I carried the lantern for centuries, and its light kept me warm. It kept me safe.”

  “But—but you don’t have it, now.”

  “No, Emma, I don’t. You have it.”

  “Should I use it?”

  “If you use it here, the Queen will know. She is living the moment of her greatest triumph; she is approaching the pinnacle of her dreams. But she has lived without that achievement for all of her existence; if she feels or sees the lantern, she will return. Are you ready to face my daughter now? No?” As she spoke, she helped Emma to her feet.

  Emma stood.

  Emma stood, turned, and saw herself seated, cross-legged, in the circle.

  “You don’t look surprised.”

  “I am, a little—but it’s not the first time I’ve left my body. It’s not because of the circle, is it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s you.”

  “Yes and no. It is your will, in the end.”

  Emma understood, then, why the containment circle allowed the magar and her kin to find the dead; they weren’t constrained by what they could physically see and touch. What she hadn’t understood until now was that she was almost effectively dead, which is why the magar’s hand didn’t hurt her. She frowned. “The dead pass through each other.”

  The magar nodded.

  “How can you hold my hand?”

  “Because you, Emma Hall, are not dead.” The magar’s lips thinned. “You are thinking of your boy.”

  She was. She was thinking that if she could find Nathan, she could touch him. He could touch her. They could hold each other and offer each other comfort in this world gone crazy. She was thinking of love, of what it meant, of why it meant different things to different people. She was thinking of the Queen of the Dead and Eric.

  It was easy to think that she would never make the choices the Queen had made. But in truth, she wasn’t certain. If she had one chance to save Nathan’s life, one chance to save her own, would she truly have made a different choice?

  The Queen hadn’t saved Eric’s life. If she had, if she could, things would have been different.

  Nathan, she thought. Wouldn’t you have wanted to stay?

  • • •

  The magar waited until Emma lifted her chin.

  “Is there anything else you need to teach me?”

  “For now, no. What I helped you to do, you should be able to do on your own. You did it once—foolishly, stupidly—without the grounding circle. You survived. Many, in our dim and distant history, did not. Do not leave your body if you are not confined; it is too easy to lose your way.”

  She inhaled—it was habit—and turned to face the wall. It was still all wall to her; leaving her body had not given her Michael’s immunity to Necromantic illusion, if that was what it was.

  “Can you see the statue?” Emma asked the magar.

  Silence.

  Emma turned; the old woman was gone. So much for help. No, she thought, that was unfair. The magar was at risk in this citadel. Mother or no, she was dead, and the Queen ruled the dead.

  Emma listened. She couldn’t close her eyes; her eyes weren’t doing the seeing. She had hoped—somehow—that the circle would be her key to finding the door. And maybe it was; she just hadn’t found the lock it fit. Think, Emma.

  The only difference in the room now was the narrow path. It started at the edge of the engraved circle and led toward the wall. Emma thought that it led past it, but the wall obscured its final destination—if it had one.

  She wanted—for one brief minute—to confer with Ally and Michael. Instead, she made a decision. She stepped onto the path and stood at the edge of the circle, listening. Silence. Either her friends weren’t speaking at all or she had walked to a space that words and voices—living voices—couldn’t reach. It wasn’t a happy thought, and she glanced back at her body. She was still there.

  And still here.

  She began to follow the path.

  • • •

  The path did pass beneath the wall. Emma came to a halt in front of the curved stone surface, lifting a hand to touch it. And that was a mistake. The wall was not, as it looked, cool stone. It was warm. It was as warm as the magar’s hand had been and as solid.

  You already knew this, she told herself; her hand shook. The dead were here. If they took the form—unwillingly—of wall or floor or table, they were nonetheless people, far more trapped now than they had been in life.

  She listened. After a brief pause, she spoke. “Hello?”

  SILENCE. The silence of held breath. Hers, of course. T
he dead didn’t need to breathe.

  She lowered her hands. The man trapped here—if the old woman was right—was only one of thousands. Or tens of thousands. He had stood beside the Queen. He had been a Necromancer in life.

  Emma grimaced. Margaret had been one as well. If not for Eric and Chase, Emma would be a novice, imprisoned in a room that was, for all intents and purposes, a cell, trapped in a life that was designed and ruled over by the Queen of the Dead. Choice would be limited.

  She wasn’t here to judge. She was here to free the dead.

  She was here to free Nathan.

  She closed her eyes, which changed nothing. What she could see, now, had nothing to do with actual eyes. She couldn’t free a man if she couldn’t see him. Margaret, she had seen. The dead who had served as portable power generators for the Necromancers who had come to kill Eric and Chase, she had seen.

  But . . . Andrew Copis she hadn’t seen. She’d heard him. She’d heard him first. No, that wasn’t right. She hadn’t heard Andrew. She’d heard his mother shouting his name while a building burned, generating the smoke that would kill her young son.

  She’d heard what Andrew heard. She’d walked into the fire that Andrew saw. He couldn’t see anything other than the fire that had killed him. A four-year-old who had died in a terrible fire, he’d been jailed by his own fear and pain, trapped in the hour of his death.

  Margaret wouldn’t be here if the Queen of the Dead didn’t exist. She would be wherever it was the dead were meant to go. Andrew would not.

  He was gone now—but in truth, she hadn’t freed him. He’d freed himself. She’d brought his living mother through fire and death and guilt. She’d provided a window through which he could see beyond flames and betrayal and abandonment.

  The dead who were trapped by the Necromancers were trapped in an entirely different way. Chained, bound, taken out of their own lives, they were linked to the Necromancers who held their power.

  She could break those chains.

  She had.

  But she hadn’t seen them in time to save Nathan. She hadn’t realized the truth.