Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  “Emma.”

  She nodded.

  “The words—she’s going to change them. She’s trying to remake them in the old image.”

  • • •

  Emma stared at the Queen, although her back was, in theory, turned toward her. She could see the fires that raged around the Queen’s chamber. She heard Chase’s voice. It had none of Margaret’s pinched gravity or careful urgency. But she knew what the Queen was attempting.

  And she knew it would, eventually, succeed. Helmi and Nathan could hold out for some time—but not against the power the Queen now brought to bear. Once the circle ruptured, the fire would blaze in, killing them all.

  And the door wouldn’t open. Emma strained against it, pushing, pulling, but nothing worked. And why would it? She’d been across an ocean the last time she’d tried. She was now standing in the seat of the Queen’s power.

  Margaret was talking, her voice lost to the rising crackle of burning flame.

  “I’m going to try to distract her,” Chase said.

  Emma turned away from the door, away from the stairs and the thought of ascension. She shook her head.

  “Emma—”

  Because she understood why the image of the Queen was so clear when she looked at the door. She understood what powered the barrier. She understood what had to be done to destroy it.

  Yes.

  “Not yet, Chase,” she told him, touching his shoulder. He was tense—of course he was tense. “I can’t throw your life away.”

  “You aren’t.” He was frowning. Something in her voice made him turn to her. His eyes widened. Emma wasn’t certain what he saw in her expression, because she wasn’t certain what her expression was. “You can’t.” His voice was flat.

  “Throw your life away? No. No, I can’t.” She was deliberately misunderstanding him.

  He didn’t want to allow it. She couldn’t think how this red-haired, angry, violent person had come to mean so much to her. Maybe it was because she’d seen some of his past and understood how it had opened up the path he walked. Maybe it was because Ally loved him, or maybe it was because he loved Allison.

  Or maybe it was just because he was here, and even disliking her, he was willing to throw his life—and possible future happiness—away to buy her time. And it wouldn’t be enough time.

  He looked annoyed. “You can’t kill her.”

  She said nothing.

  “You’ve never killed anyone. In your life. You won’t be able to kill her.”

  She felt calm. “I have to kill her,” she said quietly. “She’s the barrier, Chase. She’s the door. She’s the reason the dead can’t leave. And they’ll never be able to leave while she lives.”

  • • •

  “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s soul-fire across every square inch of floor. You step outside of this circle and you’re ash. Less than ash. You won’t be able to kill her. You’ll just die.”

  Emma shook her head. “Look at the circle. Look at the circle, Chase.”

  He did. Emma knew he would have grabbed her arm or shoulder if he’d had a free hand, but he didn’t. He had two hands full of knife, and he didn’t intend to surrender them while the Queen lived.

  The circle that the Queen had pulled up from the ground remained. But it wouldn’t remain for long, not against the concerted effort of the Queen and her army of undead.

  “Just a little bit longer,” she whispered. “Just hold it a little bit longer.” To Chase, she said, “You’d better help Scoros.”

  “Help him what?”

  “Stand, Chase. I’m moving, and the circle will come with me.” She wasn’t certain what Chase did. She wasn’t certain what Scoros did. She looked at the Queen and only at the Queen. The army of the dead and the fire it produced wouldn’t kill Emma yet. A simple knife would if the Queen carried one. A gun would.

  The only gun in the room was on the floor beneath Emma’s feet. The man who had carried it would never pick up a gun again. It didn’t matter.

  Reyna’s eyes were clear and cold and almost green as they met Emma’s. She looked faintly confused. “What are you doing?” Her eyes fell on the lantern that Emma carried. Emma held it out to her, as if offering it. She reached for it slowly.

  But Emma shook her head. “You gave me a few days with Nathan,” she said. “I thought I would never see him again except in dreams. Memories. I got to say everything I thought I’d never get to say again—and he could actually hear it.

  “I got to hold him.” She swallowed.

  Reyna was watching her, arrested, although the fires didn’t diminish, and the thinning of the words that held the circle together—the circle that moved now, with Emma—continued.

  “I spent a lot of time sitting in the cemetery. I spent a lot of evenings sitting beside what was left of him. Probably as much time as I got to spend with him, in the end.” She inhaled. Exhaled. She was an arm’s length away from Reyna.

  In one hand, she held the lantern; the other was empty.

  “I thought the world ended the day he died. I had plans, Reyna. We had plans. It was easier for me. His parents don’t get to choose what he does, and mine don’t get to choose what I do. When his mother found out about me, she didn’t come to kill me. She wouldn’t. Even if she hated me, she wouldn’t. It would have killed Nathan.” She swallowed, smiled. There were no tears left. “I wanted to go to university with Nathan. I wanted to spend years with him. Live with him. I wanted to get married, find a home, have children—I wanted that life.”

  Reyna was still, in the light of the lamp.

  “I still want it. I want it so much, sometimes I can’t breathe. I look at every other man, and I can only see the ways in which they aren’t Nathan.”

  “Why—why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you’ll understand it,” Emma replied. “Because you’ll understand it better than my friends or my mother or my teachers.”

  “But I gave him back to you,” Reyna said, voice low—but not loud.

  “No. You didn’t. Nothing can give him back to me. He’s dead.”

  “I resurrected him!”

  “You made him a body of the dead. He’s as much alive as the floor is. He’s dead. And I can stay here, and grieve, and want, and let it destroy me. But, Reyna, it’s not what he wants. It’s not what Nathan has ever wanted for me.” She swallowed. “The only thing he wants—the only thing I can give him—is peace. He wants what waits for the dead. He can’t want me anymore—and I hate it. I hate that I can’t—” She shook her head. “Eric’s dead, Reyna.”

  “He is not dead—”

  “But because of the choices you’ve made, so are you.”

  “Do you think you can—”

  Emma shook her head. “Right now, Reyna, you are more dead than alive. You’ve never stepped out of the shadows. You are as trapped in Eric’s death as—as Eric is. There’s peace, there is joy, there’s something beyond pain.”

  “You don’t even believe that!” Reyna’s eyes narrowed. Helmi had said she wasn’t stupid.

  “I believe it. I don’t feel it. I don’t know it the way I know how to breathe. But I do believe it. There’s peace and joy and belonging and love—that’s what Merrick Longland said. And that’s what I’ve seen. You must have seen it yourself.”

  “I hate death,” Reyna said. Bitter, angry, and bewildered. “All my life. All of it. Nothing but death. The dead. Always.” She shook her head. “Only Eric—only Eric was about life. He made me want to live. To be alive.”

  “It’s what I wanted as well,” Eric said. Even in her rage, she had preserved him. “It was all I wanted. When I was working in the forge, it almost killed me—I’d get so distracted. I wanted to go to the stream. I wanted to stand beneath our tree. I wanted to watch until you arrived—you were always so breathless. I wanted to watch you
look up and realize I was there, waiting, because your smile—” He touched her frozen lips, his hand so gentle Emma was certain that he could never have forced himself to kill her. “This isn’t where I wanted to live. This isn’t how I wanted to live. There’s no stream, no tree—and no joy, Reyna.

  “You haven’t smiled at me that way since I died. Even this time.”

  “But I’m here,” she whispered.

  “Are you, love?” He bent down, kissed her forehead gently. “Emma?”

  • • •

  Emma held out her arms, lantern dangling from one hand, stepped forward, and hugged the Queen of the Dead. She hugged the Queen as if the Queen were another teenage girl, new to gut-wrenching loss and wandering the halls of an empty school, weeping. She hugged her knowing that in seconds the circle that protected her would dissolve, and she would die in the fires of that girl’s wrath.

  And she hugged her knowing that her body was mostly composed of the dead, the way Nathan’s had been. The way Eric’s was. Immortality, of a sort, had been made just as a new body had been made. And it could be undone the same way.

  It would kill the Queen. It would kill Reyna. It would free the dead. And because the last thing was true, Emma unraveled the dead bound to the Queen’s physical form, releasing them as she did. She knew what would happen, or thought she knew: Age would rush in, and the semblance of youth—with nothing to support it—would vanish.

  In an odd rush of something like sympathy, she would have spared Reyna that. Because no one wanted to look like that in the eyes of the man they loved. And it was stupid, and she knew it. And she hated the choices the Queen had made, the damage she’d done, and she knew that if there was any justice, this wasn’t it.

  But she no longer believed in Hell. And even had she, she never wanted to be Hell’s ruler. It wasn’t, in the end, up to Emma to mete out punishment or judgment. It was simply to find the lost and lead them . . . home.

  And it happened as she had expected it would; the health and vigor of this pseudo-youth drained away from Reyna’s living body as Eric held it, held her; the armor melted, and the heat of the fire slowly banked. Eric’s arms tightened as he smiled down into a face that was sinking into age and ruin and decay, smiled as he gathered her tighter, as if he could hold her to him forever—as if he wanted to.

  Reyna whispered his name. She lifted a withered, bony hand, skin draped over its sunken flesh, its atrophied muscle, and she touched his face and said, “Eric, you’re crying.” And she didn’t seem to notice that her own hand was so old, that her arm was spotted and white, that her hair had fallen out and away. She was smiling.

  She was smiling as she died.

  THE GREEN FIRE DIED when the Queen did, winking out of existence in the cold, high air so suddenly it left nothing behind. The floor wasn’t scorched; nothing was burned. But the holes in the wall and floor remained. They weren’t sharp-edged or jagged; they were rounded and smoothed, as if portions of the rock had melted.

  Except it wasn’t rock.

  Emma looked at Chase, briefly, before she turned to Eric. “Your turn?” she asked, voice soft.

  He shook his bowed head, his arms tightening around a wizened corpse. She was glad that she couldn’t see his face, which made her feel guilty. But it was Hall guilt, it was small and normal, and she almost welcomed it.

  Chase had sheathed his knives. “That’s it?” he asked.

  Emma shook her head. She heard the cries of joy, of jubilation; she saw the dead—those who could move—shiver in place. She had thought they would stream to the exit, because the door that was locked had been opened, and it would never close again.

  But they didn’t. They looked—they looked up—and they raised arms or hands, as if something were reaching for them. As if something were gently gathering them. She watched them vanish, their expressions etched in her memory. The joy and the tears and the relief were bright. They gave her hope.

  She even recognized one of them. Merrick Longland. She was surprised when he turned—arms still lifted—to look over his shoulder. She had never seen him look like this: younger, stronger. Happy.

  She knew he didn’t deserve happiness. But in that moment, she didn’t care. Because the people he had killed, the people he had trapped, the people he had used, wouldn’t care either. Like Merrick, they would pass beyond all pain, and she knew that they would deny Merrick Longland none of the joy they themselves felt. Even if he didn’t deserve it. It was not the type of happiness that depended on the unhappiness of others to shine more brightly.

  He didn’t speak. Neither did Emma. But she smiled at him and nodded.

  And when she looked down, Eric was watching them. But he gently—gently—set Reyna’s body aside.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s only just died,” he whispered. “She won’t be here yet.” He stood. His legs shook.

  “Can I—”

  “Not yet. I know what it means for the dead who contain me. But they know, Emma. They’ve seen.”

  “But you could leave. They could leave.”

  He nodded. “We will. But there’s work to do here—for me, for Ernest, for Chase—that you can’t do. There’s not much of it left, but the Queen of the Dead taught her Necromancers well.”

  “I can do what I did to—or for—the Queen.”

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Chase cut in, “no. Allison would kill me if anything happened to you. We know how to fight Necromancers—and now they have no Queen. We’ll do what we’ve always done. Let us finish this.”

  “I want you to come home,” she told him softly.

  “Emma, this is home for me.” He walked over to Eric’s side. Eric met his gaze, and to Emma’s surprise, it was Eric who looked away. “But I want a different home. And I won’t trust it until the last of the Necromancers is dead. They’ll come back. Allison’s baby brother may already be dead. Who’s next? Her parents? Michael’s? Yours?

  “I don’t want that life for any of you. Even Amy. And I won’t be able to believe in home until I believe that it won’t happen again. You get that, right? There’s no damage this hunt can do to me. Not anymore.”

  She hesitated, and Eric watched her. “Chase can see the dead,” she finally told him. “I don’t want to leave the rest of your dead trapped the way they’ve been trapped for so long. It’s not right, Eric.”

  “Emma—”

  “If I do it—if I do it for a good reason, I’ll eventually do it for a bad reason. Good, bad—it seems so much of it is subjective. I know what you intend to do. I think it has to be done. But I don’t think it has to be done by you.”

  Eric exhaled. “Magar,” he said. It was what Scoros had called her. Eric’s gaze, however, traveled to the left of her face.

  The old woman, Reyna’s mother, was standing beside Emma, her arms folded, her lips pursed. She no longer looked like a shambling, ancient, undead creature. She looked like a joyless, severe taskmaster. “It is not up to me,” she told Eric. “It’s not my decision.”

  “But you would allow it.”

  The magar said nothing, refusing to offer anything Emma might use as guidance. Refusing, Emma thought, to take any of the responsibility of decision off Emma’s shoulders.

  It was Margaret who said, “Ask them.”

  “Ask?”

  “Ask the dead.”

  “They’ll want—”

  “I am still here, Emma. I believe your father will wait for your return. Nathan and Helmi are both here—because the circle is still, barely, coherent. You will need it,” she added softly. “They had the choice; you gave it to them. I admit Helmi surprised me. Ask them.”

  “I can’t do what she did. Even if I could find dead who were willing, I couldn’t rebuild a body for him.” And she didn’t want to, either.

  “No. But I believe Scoros could. If it is necessary, I w
ill volunteer.”

  Emma was silent. “I think we need four.”

  They both looked at Scoros. Scoros shook his head. “Emma has the lantern,” he told them both. “If Margaret is willing, and you are willing to use its power, Margaret will be enough. More than enough. She already draws sustenance directly from you, magar.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No. Do you doubt me?”

  Emma shook her head. To Eric she said, “Margaret won’t be voiceless. Not the way—”

  “They aren’t voiceless,” he said softly. “They weep constantly. Or they used to.”

  Scoros approached Eric. “Then come,” he said quietly. “I understand what you intend, and I would stay to aid you—but it is my time as well. Past time, and for the same reason. Emma will free the dead bound to me, and I will vanish. Before I do, I will do this one thing. Understand that it is contingent upon Emma’s survival. If she dies, it will unravel.”

  Eric nodded. “Ernest won’t be happy about it.”

  Scoros said nothing.

  “Ernest will not be happy,” Margaret agreed. “But I’ll deal with that if I’m still left a voice. There is no other way. Emma will not let you leave as you are—and Eric, I don’t think she’s wrong.”

  Scoros came to stand by Eric. He held out his hands, palm out; Eric placed his in them. “This isn’t the way—”

  “I do not wish you to leave if you do not wish it. And I have never attempted this—not without some element of living flesh. Mostly my own. The containment that the Queen created must be preserved, and I cannot do it from a distance. Reyna was the most gifted, the most powerful, of our number. What she could achieve, we could not achieve on our own.” He smiled almost apologetically. “It is possible that your body will not be quite as functional as it currently is.”

  Eric shook his head. “I’d like to be able to sleep at night. It’s been hard since—”

  “Since your resurrection. Margaret.”