“Em, don’t—”
She lifted a hand, a signal between the two of them that he needed to let her finish, because she wouldn’t be able to if he interrupted her.
“It would have worked. I know myself. Even now—if you asked me, if you said it was what you wanted, I’m not sure I could say no. Because even knowing what I know, it’s what I want.” She saw his expression, then, and before he could speak—and he wanted to—she closed the distance between them, put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed him.
It was not a short kiss. The shock of cold numbed her lips and the palms of her hands. Everything about the gesture caused pain. She let him go and saw that his eyes were closed.
Eyes closed, he said, “I would never have asked.” And he smiled as he opened them. They were bright. Shining. She was sure hers were as well, but for entirely different reasons. “I know you mean it. I know you think you couldn’t say no. I know what my dying meant to you—I left. I did worse than leave.
“But to do what was done to Longland, you’d have to become like the Queen of the Dead. Like Longland himself, before he died. You’d have to learn to see the dead—all of them—as sources of convenient power. You’d understand that power is necessary, because without it, you couldn’t maintain what you’d built for me.
“You can’t learn all that without changing something fundamental. The Emma who still walks Michael to school is not the Emma who could build me a body for her own convenience. Or even for mine. You’d do it because you love me.
“Because I love you. And it would change the nature of what love means to both of us. I didn’t plan to die. I didn’t want to die. I never wanted to be a source of loss and pain to the people I loved—the people who loved me.” He looked past her shoulder for just a second, and then his gaze returned to her face, as if anchored there. “But I was. I was. I would change it in a heartbeat if I could—but not that way.”
Emma placed a hand on his chest, her fingers splayed wide. It was solid. It was even warm.
He hadn’t finished. “When I’m with you now, I don’t see the exit. I don’t long for it. I’m not drawn to it. I see you. I could spend the rest of your life seeing you, and I’d be happy. Believe that.
“I have to go soon. She’s calling.”
“You’re bound to her.”
His smile was slow and sweet. “Yes.”
She reached into his chest, then. She reached for the slender links she could only barely perceive, curling her palm around them. Warmth became sudden heat; she could have flattened her palm against a live stove element with the same effect. She cried out, her hand jerking open.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. He lifted a hand and then let it drop. “I’m already dead. Nothing worse can happen to me.” He was fading as she watched. She tried to grab the chains at his heart’s center again. She didn’t care if they burned. She had held onto fire before.
But her palm passed through them. She tried to grab his hand; it was no longer solid. “Nathan!”
“I’m sorry.”
She tried to throw her arms around him. To keep him. She knew—she knew this was an echo of dying for Nathan. He didn’t want to go; he didn’t choose to leave. But choice or no, he vanished.
She was left—as she had been left the first time—holding nothing. But this time she knew, for certain, that Nathan was out there somewhere. She knew who or what had taken him. She had told herself for months now that death was impersonal, because it was.
But the Queen of the Dead? There was nothing impersonal about her. Emma clenched her hands, and she turned to head down the hall.
Her father was waiting.
“How do I get him back?” she demanded. She had no doubt that he’d seen everything.
He didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said, “Amy’s packed the car. She’s waiting. Allison and Michael are with her.”
Emma swallowed. She didn’t want to go downstairs yet; she knew what her face looked like. She had to work to bring rage—and the pain at its core—under control; she had to stop her hands from shaking so much.
And that would take time, and it was time they didn’t have. “Dad?”
“I’m sorry, Em.”
“She won’t send him back,” Emma whispered. “I didn’t do whatever it was she wanted me to do. She won’t send him back.”
“I don’t think so, no.”
She made it halfway down the stairs, stopped, and turned again. “Allison’s brother?”
“He’s alive. No—don’t. He’s alive, but he wouldn’t be if it weren’t for machines. They’re not certain he’s going to pull through; he hasn’t regained consciousness.”
Emma closed her eyes. She balanced a moment between guilt and anger, and to her surprise, anger won. “Amy’s right,” she said, as she continued down the stairs.
“She frequently is.”
“The Queen of the Dead has to go.”
NATHAN
THE QUEEN IS NOT IN HER THRONE ROOM. The Court is not in session. The dead line the halls like rough statues; without the Queen’s command, there’s almost nothing for them to do—and nothing they dare to do. They don’t speak. Not like Emma’s dead.
Not like Brendan Hall.
Not like Mark.
Certainly not like Margaret.
These people have forgotten the life they lived; life might not have happened, for them, at all.
Nathan walks among them, avoiding them as if they were physical presences. As if he is. He knows he could walk the straight line through them, and through the walls themselves; nothing prevents it.
But the Queen doesn’t care for it.
He walks the long way. She’s not dead; she uses the halls. Many of the people who live in this great, fanciful edifice aren’t dead either; they use the halls too. Her knights. Her Necromancers.
Some of the dead gathered here belong to them, but they don’t wander the halls like handless puppets; they are hidden, invisible even to Nathan’s eyes, until the moment the Necromancers choose to show their power. In the throne room, they take out their dead, displaying them like trophies or status symbols. No Necromancer of note or worth in the Queen’s Court is ever without them.
The Queen alone doesn’t choose to do this—but her power is absolute and unquestioned. She is never without it. If she died, this city would crumble—probably instantly. But he can see her in the distance. The stone walls do nothing to bank the brilliance of her light. He cannot imagine that she will ever die.
He didn’t lie to Emma. He didn’t tell her all of the truth.
But he didn’t tell the Queen all of the truth either.
“Nathan.” She is sitting in her outer chamber, on a chair as unlike the tall-backed official throne from which she rules as chairs can get. She is dressed in long, flowing robes, but they are looser and far less confining; her hair is unbound and falls in one long, glistening sheet down her back and over her shoulders. She wears no crown in this room.
She wears one ring.
He kneels before her, because she demands respect, no matter where she might be found. She doesn’t stop him, but she tells him to rise almost immediately, and when he looks up, he meets her steady gaze. Her eyes are clear and shining; they are so much like Emma’s eyes, it is hard to meet them. But once he has, it’s impossible to look away.
“She saw you,” the Queen says.
Nathan nods.
“She saw you and she attempted to take you from me.”
He nods again.
“Do you wish to go to her?”
He does, and says, nothing.
The Queen rises. “I did not expect her to attempt to break my binding.”
He knows that Emma almost succeeded. The Queen walks from the room, indicating that he is to fol
low; he does. She opens tall, wide doors and leaves the confines of the palace for a grand balcony that is longer than Nathan’s former home. And wider. Above her, the sky is gray; beneath her, the sky is gray.
“Merrick Longland has not returned to me.” She stands, back to Nathan, and gazes up, and up again, and Nathan knows what she is looking at: the only light that is bright enough, at this distance, to rival her own. He looks as well, but he schools his expression; all of the dead do. What they long for, what they yearn for, is beyond them; acknowledging it only annoys her.
“Is he dead?”
“No,” Nathan replies.
“Ah.” She seems amused; he can’t see her expression. Amusement is no safety when it’s in her voice. “Has she seen him?”
“Yes.”
She turns, then, her expression haunted. “Did she speak to you, Nathan? Did she offer to resurrect you?”
He says nothing for as long as he safely can; he doesn’t want to answer this question. And what he wants, in the end, doesn’t matter. “No.” Before she can speak, he adds, “She doesn’t know how.”
“Not yet. Not yet.” The Queen smiles. It is cold. “You are certain, in the end, that she did love you?”
He says nothing.
She walks toward him, stopping six inches from his chest. She touches it with the flat of her palm; her hand is warm. It is the only warmth in the Castle. The only warmth he’s experienced that is not Emma’s. It is bloody hard to be cold all the time.
“Yes.”
“And did she tell you that she loves you?”
He closes his eyes. It doesn’t make a difference; he can still see her clearly. Eyes closed, she is the only thing he can see. “Yes.”
“And you believed her.”
“Yes.”
“Then she will come, Nathan. She will come to me. I have not yet decided what I will do with her when she does.” She looks at his face again. “You wanted to see her.” She caresses his cheek. He meets her gaze without flinching because her touch doesn’t make him flinch. It is warmth. It is life.
“Do you want to be able to hold her? To touch her?”
“Yes.” Even more than he wants to crawl out of this conversation into painful oblivion. Love is not something to be pulled apart and dissected, not like this. Not by outsiders. There is no joy in it; there is a rough, painful voyeurism.
Her hand falls, and her eyes narrow. “Why?”
It is not the question he expects. And he knows he will have to answer it because the compulsion is almost painful. He doesn’t have the words for it. He starts to say, because I love her, but he understands that this is not the answer she’s seeking. And he understands that he doesn’t have that answer, because in the end, the question has nothing to do with Nathan.
He has become so used to fear that he is almost too numb to feel it. “Because,” he says, “she’s alone.” He can’t look away. “She once made me promise that I would let her die first, when we were old. So she wouldn’t have to face losing me.”
“And you promised?”
“It was a stupid promise. I didn’t want to make a promise I couldn’t keep. But I know—I know what my death did to her. I know what it did, and I’d take it back in a second if I could. I want to be able to hold her when she cries—because she does cry, but only when she’s alone. Only when no one living can see her.”
It is all true. And he knows, looking at the Queen’s face, that the Queen has also cried, and that she never cries where anyone living can see her. It is not safe for even the dead to bear witness to her weakness.
“Come,” she says. “What your Emma is too unschooled to do, I will do.”
His eyes widen, then.
“Yes, Nathan. I will resurrect you. I will bring you back to Emma alive and in the flesh.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Sagara lives in Toronto with her husband and her two sons, where she writes a lot, reads far less than she would like, and wonders how it is that everything can pile up around her when she’s not paying attention. Raising her older son taught her a lot about ASD, the school system, and the way kids are not as unkind as we, as parents, are always terrified they will be
Having a teenage son—two, in fact—gives her hope for the future and has taught her not to shout, “Get off my lawn” in moments of frustration. She also gets a lot more sleep than she did when they were younger.
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