by May Peterson
I leaned toward him fractionally, afraid of the space between us. “Ho there, lemon drop. Of course it’s me. I’m not going to leave you again.” A lump in my throat softened, finally.
He shook his head, as if I’d misunderstood him. “It—” His eyes became momentarily frantic, whatever he was trying to say shining namelessly in them. “It looked like you. The...incubus. But I couldn’t touch it.”
Shit. My throat locked. The incubus had taken my shape to torture Mio. “It’s gone now. It can’t hurt you.” At least—not yet. I held out my hand to him, palm open, so nothing was hidden. “I’m real. See? You can touch me.”
He seemed to consider it for several moments, the stretch of his grasp toward mine slow. But then our palms were resting together, and he relaxed. We traded pain in that moment of touch, trauma being passed between us. He knew the disease by name.
And he was the first living person to face that disease and live. I wanted to ask him...everything. What Eirlys had done to him. If she had tried to communicate. What the incubus had said. Why it had looked like me. If there was any way to go back to how he and I had been.
If there was a way out.
Cecilio passed through the wall; I pulled my hand back instantly. Cecilio brightened at the sight of Mio. “Well, look who’s awake! You’ve become a regular part of this house, sleeping like a bat. Would you like some breakfast?”
Mio nodded, expression still dazed. I asked Cecilio for a fresh round of stimulants, especially to help Mio stay warm. Rosemary appeared momentarily, nodding her approval over Mio’s condition.
“You look alert. No head pain? No blurry vision?” She touched his forehead, which probably was more reflex than utility. Mio nodded again. “Right.” She sniffed. “Wish I could listen to your lungs, but if your breathing feels natural, I suspect you’ll be all right.”
Food provided another reprieve. For him to recover, and for me to marshal my fortitude for whatever Mio might tell me.
Finally his teacup clinked back onto its saucer. “What was that creature? The incubus.”
Cecilio took a step back. “What just happened? I swear I do not know handspeak.” He pointed dramatically, as if Mio had sprung wings without warning.
“Settle down, Your Highness. It’s magic.” I rolled my eyes, then turned to Mio. “To answer your question—you’ve already figured out what it’s called. It’s an incubus. The incubus that curses my house. The specifics are...murkier.” Understatements abounded! “For now, I want to make sure you’re all right. Did Her Ladyship...harm you in any way?”
Mio’s expression became severe, almost vehement. “No!” He signed it repeatedly. “She...she tried to destroy it.” He paused, staring down at his fingers. “She spoke to me.”
For a good half minute, it seemed Cecilio, Rosemary, and I were all holding our breath. Or whatever the ghost equivalent of holding one’s breath was.
“That...shouldn’t be possible.” Rosemary squinted. And she did sound breathless. “It’s Her Ladyship’s curse.”
“Absolute hell.” Cecilio looked like he was trying to wring his hands off his wrists, pausing only to gesture wildly at Rosemary. “You’ve done it. You’ve forgotten that you can’t feel temperature. The boy is delirious with fever.”
Abruptly, I shouted. At no one. Four ghostly eyes snapped to me. Mio flinched. When I’d had my fill, I bared my teeth at my servants. “Will you two ninnies restrain yourselves for eight seconds? You’re going to overwhelm him!”
Lord ballet-dancing God, I needed a cigarette. And I doubted I had much helped the don’t-overwhelm-him plan. “Mio. It’s all right. You’ve done nothing wrong. Can you explain what you saw, if you feel able?”
Mio’s nod was shaky. But he went on. His fingers were like interpretive dancers, illustrating how Eirlys had appeared to him. The barbs entangling the incubus’s words, its stolen faces and threats. How Eirlys’s sword had defended him. That the crack of her thunder had possessed meaning to him, as if hearing her thoughts through the sound. And all that she had said. That an unseen hand served the incubus. That she had been fighting the incubus, all these years, after all. That she feared she would fail.
That the incubus could not curse Mio.
I had dreamed of moments like this. Some chink would appear through the obfuscations, and with that shred of light I would piece together the evidence. Succinctly divine the key to our salvation. I tried to absorb his tale, remain cool, deduce what it meant.
Instead, it felt like I’d fallen underwater. Everything streamed past like debris, constantly flowing. I could only hold on to one thing.
Someone could hear her. And it was him.
Rosemary’s frown seemed permanent now, as if written into her face. “How can we be sure you really understood her?”
Mio’s eyes searched helplessly; he had no way to prove the extent of his powers. I roused myself. “It makes sense. If the voce de cielo lets him communicate with us without his voice, he should be able to perform the same feat in reverse.” It seemed insane to not have considered the possibility before. Mio appeared to be a mage with startling potential for the emergence of new tricks.
Cecilio had one hand clapped over his mouth. He sank down to rest on the chair of the sofa. “Heaven. The real question ought to be how any power can resist the incubus.”
“If one can.” Rosemary reached over and straightened Cecilio’s cravat. For them, that may as well have been the first volley in a battle. “Let’s do try and not let our hopes run away with us before we’re certain.”
Mio was scowling miserably down at the carpet. “I think...it’s the silence. My silence. It’s like a barrier around my...” He touched his chest. “My soul, I suppose. Something that lets very little in or out, even my own voice. It’s protected me from my mother’s sorcery, and nothing can do that. Maybe it can shield me from whatever your incubus does. It kept trying to convince me to speak.”
His gaze flicked up, baring its wounds. He didn’t need to say it. Speak like he had out on the green, with me. So the incubus had been watching that, too.
And somehow, Eirlys knew. She knew, and she tried reaching out to the one person we might actually be able to save. If she was right, we may have our shred of light yet.
I stood. “We need to show him. Everything.”
The ghosts relinquished their combative fussing, eyebrows raised in unison. Cecilio blinked. “Are you...quite certain, my lord?”
“Yes.” The idea of hiding it from Mio now felt treacherous. It was my impulse to hide my diseases, a reflex the incubus had nourished in me. “It’s his life at risk. He deserves to know the whole story.” I dropped to one knee so that Mio and I were eye level. He looked flayed raw, but his blue gaze on me was unflinching. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you. The great curse of House Bedefyr.”
He hesitated only a moment before taking my hand.
The ghosts bundled him in slippers and blankets, and I guided him downstairs. Past the foyer, the storerooms. Down to the border of my twilight realm, where a chained iron door stood between us and what I had buried.
I curled its chain in my fist and snapped it open. Not much use for that now.
I stayed close to Mio, kept talking as we entered the dark corridor. What he was about to see would frighten him.
“The incubus is the curse of House Bedefyr. A curse is like an infection. Something born in the Deep out of the impressions, feelings, running off the living world. Most people won’t contract it because they aren’t close enough—emotionally, spiritually—to the Deep. But ghosts, possession, incubi? Or hell, simple death? Those all make it easier to catch the infection. The curse. Ghosts that arise from it become new carriers, with new curses to chain them. They joined together to make the incubus the way seed and soil become a plant. That’s why each soul claimed strengthens the incubus—it became a compound curse, the o
riginal building power with every new fetter. A curse that is strong enough, complex enough...it starts to think for itself.”
Thus it had risen up, clad in its thieved selfhood, the new cannibal god of this world. The world I had conveniently made for it.
The passage darkened until Mio’s eyes were as pale and large as small moons. The urge to wrap my arm protectively around him was overwhelming. Overwhelming, but wrong.
“The incubus had me believing the curse would be solved if I paid the price. That it had come from Eirlys’s desire for vengeance. I had wanted to give her that. Maybe set her free.”
We turned a bend in the passage, and the atmosphere changed. A watery, colorless light outlined another door, higher and striped with rust. The ragged, stony walls of the passage became visible, and Rosemary’s and Cecilio’s shadowy forms sprang into view. Mio gasped, stepping back.
His signs were faint as whispers. “There’s...something in there. I can feel it.”
If his powers were nearly as sensitive as they seemed to be, I was surprised he hadn’t felt it sooner. Could no doubt smell it, too. A rich, mineral scent of the underground, of bones and sediments, swelled from the door. “Brace yourself, lemon drop. May be a little intense.”
This was something that must be seen. I unbolted the door.
The source of the light dominated the room, flooding my vision with translucence. Everything touched by its glow seemed fainter, more ethereal. It revealed an expanse as wide as a cavern, one that had once been a musty cellar. But the walling and floor stones had long ago been torn through, broken to expose raw earth. By the same force that now illuminated the passage.
A tree. My tree. Its bark unlike any other—glossy as scar tissue, tinged silver. Branches that webbed through the chamber, snaking through the walls, the ceiling. Its roots had reduced the floor to a rough hillock of bedrock and soil. Flowers dotted those branches, minute as phantasmal kisses. They bloomed in summer and winter, immune to even Eirlys’s cold. And each delicate blossom radiated moonlight. Water flowed under the hillock, feeding the network of roots.
Mio’s face had grown still with awe. The blooms made his eyes look like they were full of stars. But it wasn’t just awe. His expression was also one of sorrow.
I knew why. I’d come to show him why. The tree was full of the same virtue, the same essence of the Deep, that infused moon-souls with ageless life. That healed our wounds, gave us the ability to undo curses and banish evil spirits. That virtue radiated out onto my charges.
Bodies. More bodies than could be counted at a glance, all arranged along the hillock. Most of them half buried, the ever-growing roots having unearthed those I’d tried to keep fully covered. But the growth never harmed the bodies. The tree’s virtue preserved them from rot. Figures lay with upper bodies exposed but whole; even the hair on their heads remained, scattered with petals. Soil and roots partially concealed them, as if they were floating in a pool that had been transformed into earth. It was a catastrophic but mesmeric sight. All those dead, coiled in the ground. Serene, as if only sleeping.
Mio gasped. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d run. But he stepped forward, gaze scraping desperately over the roots. “How? Who are they?”
I followed him in, giving him time to react. No good would come of trying to downplay it. “These are all the victims of the curse. Well. Except me. I’m not buried here.” Yet. “Everyone else who’s died, who’s been imprisoned by the incubus, I’ve buried here. Every single one.”
There was something mystical, priestly, about Mio standing above those blessed corpses, the only recipient of Eirlys’s words. The veil of silence around him, inuring him to the curse at his feet. He swung around, face full of storms. “You’ve been burying them all this time?”
I nodded stiffly. “Bear-souls have a virtue called the virtue of hallowing. The bodies I hallow cannot be possessed. That’s what the incubus wants. A body, with no inconvenient soul left over to muck things up. I’ve been able to keep the incubus from that. Just not able to get rid of it. The thing about an incubus is that you can’t destroy it like you can a living thing. I can banish it temporarily—very temporarily—but that only sends it back to the Deep. The only way to end an incubus is to purify the curse that created it. And this...” I swept my arm in an arc, indicating the legacy of the curse I’d been battling. “Well. I can’t seem to make a dent in it. It’s too strong for me.”
Or I was too entangled in it. This curse had spilled from my heart like ink, and my touch wasn’t enough to remove it now.
Cecilio appeared. “We’ve had to keep it a secret. The deaths were mostly wounded, or refugees. Or vagabonds. Trespassers.” We traded a glance momentarily. “Vermagna has been in chaos since the war, so in a way we’ve been lucky. An investigation into the deaths would only lead to...” He didn’t finish. The incubus would have a heyday with a steady stream of inspectors, funneling their lives into its trap as I stood by and had to let them pass.
“I’d believed all of these were Eirlys’s victims.” I stepped nearer, Mio looking small and bare on the side of the hill. “That she was killing them out of a cursed need for revenge. Her ghost’s fetter. But now...”
Mio regarded me, worrying his bottom lip. Maybe I’d been hoping he would just...fill in the blank. Say, oh, actually there was another killer all this time, and I have a name and birth date. But his powers didn’t make him omniscient. If Eirlys really could communicate with him, he’d only know what she knew.
And that was the most terrifying part. Eirlys had been dead longer than any of us. If she didn’t know, the murderer was a dark space. An unsigned letter.
“How does this tree grow here?” Mio caught one of the drifting flowers, its light bathing his palm.
“This is my ghost tree.” The bark was smooth and cool to my touch. “Do you see where it’s growing from, on the top of that mound? I died there. When the death blood of a person who becomes a moon-soul is spilled on the earth, a ghost tree might germinate. The wood naturally emanates the virtue of the holy darkness. This is where sacred wood comes from.”
Mio held himself as he listened, looking between me and the mound. “How did you die?”
I grinned sourly. “I killed myself.”
Mio’s eyes widened.
“I had always believed she wanted vengeance. I tried to give her symbolic retribution.” The lie slid easily over my tongue. It had never been only symbolic. But even now, I wasn’t ready to tell him why it was so obvious her vengeance had been aimed at me. “I took her sword, and—” I made a snick sound “—ended it. But as you can see, it didn’t exactly work out.”
All the energy appeared to evaporate from him, leaving him as still as one of the corpses. I had to play this carefully. My death had been the least of a long procession of tragedies. But it wouldn’t seem that way to Mio. He deserved better than casual from me.
I coughed. “It didn’t hurt that much. I think I was more cold than anything. And I came back! With a shiny black pelt to call my own. Do you want to see what we did with her sword?”
I moved around to the side of the tree, where its curving trunk shone over the stream. There, in the hollow between the roots, was her grave.
She had been the first. I’d buried her in a white funereal gown, embroidered with the seal of Mallory. I had so wanted her to be remembered for her heroism, for her acts of brilliance in the war. Not as some nameless lady who had given over to “hysterics.” There under her crossed arms was her blade. Ornamented with silver, bearing the mark of Vermagna. Its weight seemed to pin us both there, frozen in the same spot.
Cecilio and Rosemary kept their distance, but Mio stood next to me and looked at her for what felt like a long time. Lips slightly parted, as if he were watching a wounded animal die. A shame, but not something he could hope to fix.
Then his fingers moved. “Why do they not decay?”
> That one was easy. “The ghost tree. It sanctifies the water, and the soil. Preserves the bodies. In many places, that’s what’s traditionally done. Bury your loved ones under the white trees, so they will remain whole forever.” I shrugged.
His heavy breaths became choppy for a moment. When our eyes met again, he was gripping the spot over his heart as if he’d been struck. Tears glittered on his face.
I wanted to hold him. Even if for half a second. Just to—
“My lord,” Rosemary said. Somehow, her meaning was clear as a bell.
All our gazes shifted to the water. Ice had spread like lace over the surface. I had hardly noticed the temperature dropping, it was already so cold. But there, poised like a swan on the ice, was Eirlys.
Her hands were empty, and her smile was dark as a tomb.
Cecilio flickered to the water’s edge, falling to one knee. Rosemary did not follow, and Eirlys appeared unbothered by either reaction.
She looked toward me. A rumble rolled over me, disturbing the branches. A shower of delicate petals rained over me and Mio. She’d tried speaking to me before, but not like this. Never so calmly, with such sanity and sorrow and kindness lighting her face. Like it really was still her.
Mio skidded down the slope, and his hands sprang into motion. Then I realized—she hadn’t even been speaking to me, but to him.
“I’m all right!” He gestured between us. “Rhodry took care of me. He’s...”
He stopped. Maybe he saw whatever expression was on my face; the pain was too big to hide anymore. Eirlys had stood steps away from me, sword in hand, only days ago. But this felt like the closest we’d been in a lifetime.
“Let me.” Mio’s mouth turned up gently. “You should talk. I can interpret for you. If you’ll let me.”
The corners of my sight were already blurring. Cecilio swore under his breath. Goddammit, lemon drop. How did he keep gifting me with these tiny, impossible miracles? “Mio. I’m sure Her Ladyship doesn’t demand that of you, and neither do I. But—” But, oh God. She must be dying to be heard.
