“Emma doesn’t know what she’s doing either,” Michael helpfully pointed out. He was as worried as Allison was.
Amy shrugged. “She got the kid out of the fire, right? And she knew even less then. Whatever she’s doing now, she probably has to do it.” She exhaled. “Look, I know you want to help,” she said to Allison. “You’ve got ‘Emma’s little helper’ written all over your face. But she’s somewhere we can’t go. I don’t want our ‘help’ to pull her back before she’s done what she needs to do.”
“And you’re sure she needs to do this?” It was Chase who answered. He came to stand beside Allison at the circle’s edge—but not between her and Amy. Not even Chase was that stupid.
Amy’s expression sharpened. What she wasn’t willing to say to Allison, she was more than happy to say to Chase—and that came as a huge surprise to Allison. Amy wasn’t known for either her tact or her consideration of other people’s feelings. “I’m sure she thinks she does. I’m willing to hear rational arguments against,” she added, in a tone that implied none of that rationality would come from Chase.
Chase swore under his breath. Clearly both Chase and Amy were struggling to be civil in their own unique ways. It wasn’t Amy who responded—a glare from Amy didn’t count—it was Margaret.
“I can’t cross that circle,” she said quietly. “Or I would. Anyone else in the room can cross the boundary—but it won’t change what they see.” Before anyone could respond she said, “I am not an expert in what Emma is now attempting. I have no advice or wisdom to offer. But, Allison, I’m also concerned.”
It was confirmation, but it didn’t make Allison feel any better. She turned back to Emma. “Will it hurt anything if I cross the circle?”
“I don’t know, dear. I think it may disrupt things if you actually touch Emma—but again, I am not an expert. I do not know what she’s attempting to do.” She looked, again to Chase, as if it were against her better judgment. Or any judgment of any quality, anyway.
“There’s no guarantee I’ll see anything either,” Chase said, the words pulled from him by an unseen force.
“No.” Margaret waited. Ernest was watching Chase with hooded eyes and the slightest hint of . . . pain. He said nothing when Chase turned to him. Not a single word.
Allison was aware that it was the silence, the lack of words, that stung Chase. Chase looked for all the world like a man who was determined to fight—but Ernest wasn’t going to be his opponent. If anyone was, it was Margaret, and her usual prim and dour school-teacher demeanor was absent.
“She’s a Necromancer,” Chase said, but the words lacked the heated conviction that Allison found so very difficult.
Ernest said nothing. Margaret added a layer to the silence. She seemed content to wait.
Chase demonstrated his ability to swear without repeating a single word, which was impressive, given he hadn’t paused for breath. Without thought, Allison put a gentle hand on his shoulder; he swung round, as if struck.
“I don’t know what she did to you,” Allison said, voice only barely above a whisper. “But you don’t have to do this. Amy’s right—we should trust Emma.”
Chase’s laughter was bitter, all edge. “Thanks to the Queen of the Dead,” was his angry reply, “I’m the only one who can.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing, either,” Amy told him. “And this might not be the best time for your bull-in-the-china-shop routine.”
He ignored her. Turning to face Allison, he said, “I don’t like her.”
Allison could have pretended to misunderstand; she didn’t. She simply waited.
“I’m not doing this for her. Understand?”
“You don’t have to do this for me, either. She’s my best friend—but she doesn’t have to be yours. Amy’s right.”
“On the other hand? I could live without ever hearing those two words side by side again.” He grinned. It was a pale echo of his normal grin, but it was there, and it was real. In front of everyone in the room, he bent and kissed her. It was not a fast kiss. It said a lot about something that it was, for a moment, the most important sensation in the world.
And that was just wrong.
Chase pulled back before she could, the grin stronger and a little more lopsided. “Wish me luck,” he whispered. He stepped away from her, squared his shoulders, checked—yes, his knives, as if they’d do any good—and headed toward the circumference of the circle.
Allison watched him go. She was standing less than a foot away from the engraved runes; it wasn’t a great distance. But it felt as if it were miles. Emma had gone where Allison couldn’t follow—and it was Chase who was joining her.
“I don’t like her,” he said, without turning back. “But I can’t hate her. God knows I’ve tried. And without her in my life, there would be no you in my life.”
• • •
Emma did not come back to herself. She did not come back to the circle in which she was sitting, in a grand, sterile room blessedly free of the terrible sounds of death. No. No that wasn’t right. It was full of the sounds of the dead. But not—not the screams of the dying. Not the screams of men who had given up on life and who looked death in the face as if death were the only mercy left.
And it should have been.
She knew it wasn’t. She was sitting on the dead. But it was hard to remember that fact while the charring corpse of a child occupied the whole of her vision no matter what she did. The first child, joined by the second. The two children joined by the man. And yes, by that time, he had wanted death—but the pain of it, the pain of fire . . .
She looked up, almost wild with the need to escape.
The need to escape inverted itself in the space of a single scream. It was not the terror and pain of children—it was the nameless, faceless man whose memories had once again absorbed Emma Hall. She wished that some of those memories could actually be useful: that they would be memories of how the powers of Necromancers were used before the Queen of the Dead had broken everything.
But no, this was not to be one of those memories either; the scream was joined by shouting, by one other scream, and by metal. Metal. Emma frowned. Metal.
Iron.
He had been running—desperation lent him speed, but only a little. She was, once again, in the passenger seat of his careening, painful memory. She saw what he saw. She felt what he felt. She could not look away, could not change the trajectory of what had already happened.
He saw salt across the ground and recognized the lines into which it had been placed; he kicked them, displaced them, and realized that iron shavings, under salt, now clung to his feet.
Iron and salt here.
Iron.
He knew before he reached the end of the hall what the iron presaged. He knew, as he removed his sweater and dragged it across the precise lines of salt, what it meant—but the knowledge was almost too large, too impossible to believe.
Men with bows or swords or axes, men with torches, men on horseback—these, they’d faced as they grew. They were a fact of life, an almost natural disaster.
But those men did not understand what iron meant. And even had they, they carried it as weapons. They did not draw it in lines across the floor. They did not—and he saw, destroying as much of the pattern as he could, in safety, destroy—inscribe ancient runes, invoking their protection and power.
Only his own kin could do that.
Another scream. A shout of betrayed rage. He didn’t recognize the voice, and perhaps that was a mercy: There was only one voice he listened for, now. Only one. From half the building away, he heard it; he dropped the sweater, left it, avoided the rest of the salt and the iron shavings that would cling to too much of his boots. He paused briefly and removed those boots; he could not carry weakness with him. Not now.
Oh, they’d prepared.
They’d prepared for
this. They’d chosen the meeting of the moon at nadir. Here, they gathered: men, women, and the youngsters who teetered on the edge of adulthood and their adult strength. He did not know—not yet—what numbers they’d come in. He did not know how many traitors there were in the midst of this village that Reyna had struggled to build.
That there was one was enough.
He paused at the wide doors to the long hall; they were open. Light and noise spilled into the natural darkness of the hall; the small torches were not enough to provide more than scant illumination. This close, he could hear voices more distinctly.
“You have broken all of the ancient codes. You have betrayed the gift you were given. You have betrayed and enslaved the lost.”
He recognized the voice; had he not come to a quiet halt, he would have stumbled. As it was, he froze for one long beat, into which more words were spoken. Stavros’ voice was fire and fury.
And there was only one person to whom he could be speaking. Reyna was silent.
He wondered, then, whether she was dead. But no—Stavros would not speak to a corpse, and if Reyna was not dead, there was time.
Time.
His hands were dry. His throat, drier. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words emerged; words were a bitter, broken jumble, a useless thing. He needed to see what was happening. He needed to see where Reyna was and how the room was arranged. More than that, he needed to know who had betrayed her. Stavros could not be acting alone in this room.
Reyna, he thought. I did not understand you, until now. He wished, bitterly, for that earlier ignorance, but he knew he would never have it again. Because he had the power. He had the power that Reyna had had on that fateful day that had changed everything.
It was forbidden power. It was the reason that she was surrounded by her own kin, facing exile. Facing, he thought, death. Because she’d had that power, and she’d used it, and she’d saved her own life.
Not just her own life. She’d saved all their lives. She had given them safety and harbor.
Emma was firmly ensconced in the memories of the unnamed man; she understood that this was not happening now; it had already happened. Nothing she said or did could change the past. But she tried, because the strongest memory she now had was that of murdered children.
That is not all she did.
It was for our safety!
Because young girls are so much of a danger. They died horrible, horrible deaths. It wasn’t about safety!
It was.
You just tell yourself that, she thought, her fury far, far greater than his. Far greater, yes—and his own. She could not speak to an echo or a memory. She couldn’t argue with one. She wasn’t arguing with him now. He was arguing with himself. And he was winning—and losing.
He loved Reyna.
He loved Reyna as a child, not as the sovereign she would become. He loved her, saw her as an injured, scarred girl, in need of support. In need of, yes, the love that he felt for her. She was not his child; he knew that. But unlike his own children, she would survive.
He had had children.
Emma knew it was hard for parents to judge their child. To be angry, yes; that was natural. But to judge them? To exile them? To desert them? To let them be killed?
No.
But the scream she could hear building up behind his closed lips was almost her own. He held the dead, just as Reyna had shyly taught him to do. He held their chains, and he therefore held their power. He was not bound, as Reyna was bound; he was not yet captive—but he would be. No doubt, he would be. And he would then be as helpless as she must be now, for Stavros to speak so.
He had one chance, and he knew it. He had broken some of the confinement on his way to the hall; he had erased the patterns in which salt had been laid. None of these protections had ever been meant to be used against the living. Only against the raging dead.
And perhaps the dead were raging against Reyna now; they were certainly weeping.
He gathered their power, felt it infuse his hands with warmth; felt it lift him, although in truth he did not move from his silent crouch. He did not use the soul-fire; that would come later, much later. But he did summon fire.
He summoned death—because the dead knew death. He was limited by the knowledge of those that he had bound to himself. He was no longer limited by the promise he had made to them in that binding. They had given him the permission he required to use the power itself, and they had no choice now in how it was used.
He begged their forgiveness in silence. He gave them no voice and refused to listen to what remained—always—close to his own heart: the cries of the lost.
If you start this, you will never, ever stop.
He knew. But he could not live with the knowledge that he had stood mute, remained hidden, while she was murdered. It would kill him. He had the power to save her.
It’s not your power!
But it was. He summoned fire, and it came, and it spread into the wooden slats of the open hall. It spread everywhere at his command, lapping with ease against the robes, dresses, tunics that it touched. As he entered, columns of fire rose; they were reflected in eyes that otherwise saw only one person.
She had turned toward the door; her legs were bound, as were her arms. She had been forced to kneel in the posture of the penitent. There was no penitence in her now; there was rage. Rage and gratitude. She struggled to stand, and he could not help her; he was too far away. Too far and too vulnerable.
He shouted her name. He could not break the barriers they had set up around her—not yet. But the fire would do that, and when it did, she would be free to act. Her face shone with tears.
They were the last tears she would shed in public.
He hesitated. He hesitated just once. Mira stood just behind Stavros. Mira, only a handful of years older than Reyna. Like Reyna, Mira had suffered for the crime of being born into the wrong family, the wrong people, and yet she stood in judgment.
And he did not want to kill her.
Did not want to light her ablaze. He was willing to do that to Stavros, for he was angry as well—but Mira was a girl. Barely older than child. Barely older than Reyna.
It almost cost him his life.
She stepped out from behind Stavros, she lifted a crossbow, and she pointed it—at him. She fired. He felt the bolt pierce his thigh. Her aim was not good—but the heat of fire was causing distortions in the air, and smoke rose in a quavering bloom. He ran—limped—to Reyna to cut her free.
“Do not approach me!”
He stopped. No, no, he wasn’t thinking. She was right. Whatever power he had, whatever power their survival depended on, would not work if he was standing where she now stood. He had to trust that she would survive. The whole of the rough council could not be on Stavros’ side.
He could hear shouts and screams—at his back, to his side—as the world dissolved in flame and noise. But he listened for Reyna, afraid to move, his leg throbbing as the world they had built ended.
She would survive. He was almost certain of it. But what she built in future would be different. What they built in future would have to be different. He had broken the only oath that had ever mattered in his long years of service to the shadows of death, and there was no restitution, no repentance, that would absolve him of that crime.
Reyna had to live, because if she died, nothing would remain to him.
• • •
The memory faded. The sickening lurch of guilt, rage, and fear remained in its wake. Emma struggled to breathe—as she’d struggled to breathe once before, in the fire that had killed a four-year-old boy in a distant Toronto townhouse.
His fear had been her fear for what felt like far too long. But it was not her fear, and she knew that were it not for his interference, the girl who would become the Queen of the Dead would have died in that long-ago hall. She knew—wi
thout knowing—that the men and women who had chosen to stand against her had died.
She didn’t imagine that their deaths had been pleasant—and she was almost certain that she could see them all if she had any desire to examine them. And she didn’t. She could see the screaming girl on the lit pyre. Had no one else died, ever, that would have been enough.
Enough? Enough for what?
She frowned. Lifting her head, she looked once again into formless, shapeless gray. Nothingness surrounded her, with a texture of its own; she could see no walls, but she felt them all around her: high, forbidding, thick.
Without thought, she reached for Margaret—something she had never done before. The faintest ripple of gray appeared. She could see it only out of the corner of eyes too sensitized to colorlessness to recognize the subtle shift in the air. Like everything in her surroundings, it was formless—but she could now see that something struggled to take form, to don shape.
And it wasn’t Margaret.
• • •
She rose, aware that she had been kneeling. Aware, in some distant way, that she had always been seated and remained so. It was hard to wait, and in the end, she didn’t bother. She walked toward whatever it was that was coalescing. She knew that she had managed to find the man whose memories she had inhabited. She had chosen to search for him. She couldn’t blame him for that experience, but not even Emma Hall could manage to be fair all of the time. She did blame him.
She struggled with anger, with rage, with disgust, with—yes—hatred. On some visceral level, beneath the very justified reactions, she knew she was not here to judge him. To judge him was to fail.
But he deserved judgment.
He deserved to be trapped in whatever personal hell the Queen had created for him. The people trapped in the walls and floors and rooftops didn’t. Her hands were fists. Never mind her hands—her whole body felt as if it were a fist. As if it were raised and shaking. She couldn’t find the words that would convey the whole of what she felt—and she wanted them, as the swirls of translucence began to combine in a way that reminded her inexplicably of basket weaving.
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