Helmi nodded. “But if you stop them, the Necromancers will know instantly. The Necromancers who used Belinda and Marcel to sustain the portal know that they’ve lost them both. They’re not going to be particularly happy about it, either. If it was Alraed—”
“It was Alraed, at least for me,” Belinda said.
“—his concern will be replacing them. He’d be sweating if Longland were still alive. With the absence of Longland, there’s less to threaten him. Without Belinda, he’s still powerful. He doesn’t have the power of the Queen, but the Queen seldom kills her knights. She leaves them to kill each other.
“After she’s enthroned Eric, after she’s made a public display of both him and his love, she’ll probably leave the Citadel to go on parade. In other circumstances, you might even like the parade—it’s pure spectacle. She’ll expect every attendant she has, every servant, every knight, and even the dead who personally serve her, to be lining these streets and filling these windows. During that time, the Citadel will be empty.
“That’s when we need to make our move.”
Chase and Ernest exchanged a glance. “How many of the dead are used as spies outside of the Citadel? How many could we expect to find in these houses?”
“Here?” Helmi shrugged. “None. I told you: no one lives here. The Necromancers, especially the youngest, live in the Citadel. It’s where they train, eat, and sleep.”
“Where does their food come from?”
“That,” Helmi replied, “is a good question. It’s not grown here. There are no farms in the city. There’s a greenhouse in the Citadel, but it’s not used for food.”
“Food has to be brought here.”
Helmi nodded. “Among the oldest of the Necromancers are those with less power and less ambition. They see to the Queen’s finances and the necessities of the living—but they do it from the ground.”
“Ground?”
Helmi frowned. “Ground.” When this failed to sink in, she added, “We’re in the air. The whole of the Citadel is a floating city. It is built on the dead, and of the dead—literally. There are very few structures here—including this one—that aren’t composed entirely of people who were once like Belinda and Marcel.”
“What do you mean?” Allison asked. She’d been silent since they’d entered the portal. “You don’t mean we’re standing on the dead?”
“I mean exactly that,” Helmi replied; she looked annoyed. “You’ve seen—maybe you haven’t. Emma has seen the shapes the dead can be forced to take. We only look human in our natural form—but we can be molded, blended or twisted into almost any shape. The beams beneath the floor; the planks beneath your feet; the stones in the street below. All of it. She built this city out of the dead.”
THE QUEEN IS WEEPING.
She has sent everyone—living or dead—from her chambers and has sealed herself in the large, stone room into which, over decades, she has carved a fitting circle for a Queen. It was meant to bring her power. And peace. No tears, no act of human rage, can break it. Nothing can be erased by the accidental brush of skirts, of feet. The circle is complete and whole.
There, on the northernmost edge of the circumference, wind, air: the symbol for breath and thought. Opposite it, the most complicated of the symbols, water, for life: for tears of both joy and despair. The latter, she has shed for centuries, an ocean’s worth.
She cannot be seen to be weak. When she is weak, people attempt to take advantage of the weakness; they think her stupid or shallow or vain. And perhaps she is, in part, all of those things—but only in part.
She has no living family. Of the dead, only Helmi remains by her side; those she did not bind left her, sooner or later. She bound none of her family. None. Their power was not meant to be a weapon. It wasn’t, in the end, meant to be a shelter either—she knows the lie in that belief. They died. She didn’t.
Her mother left almost immediately, abandoning her to her dreams of safety and freedom in angry judgment. And what, in the end, was Reyna’s crime?
She didn’t die. The power that she’d used to survive was the power of the dead, yes. But what had the alternative been? To die, as her mother had died? To bleed out the rest of her short life without ever knowing life at all?
Yes, her mother says. Even though she’s not here, Reyna can still hear the word. She has lived the whole of her life under the cloud of her mother’s disapproval. She no longer expects that to change.
No one, in the end, stays by her side.
And she has wanted it. Once, when she was young, she had had a brief dream of life, of love. She had planned to have daughters, but her daughters would not be forced to become seekers, as she was. Her daughters would have the life that she herself had wanted so badly and was denied.
There are no daughters, for Reyna. No children. The only person she has ever wanted to create a family with is Eric. And Eric, like her mother, refused her. She offered him everything. She changed the world to bring him back to life. He is alive now only because she loved him so much she was willing to do anything for him.
Anything.
She stops weeping; she inhales several shaky breaths. Eric is finally returning. It doesn’t matter why.
• • •
She dresses. She has help dressing; the youngest of the Necromancers—two boys, one girl—have been trained to assist her when she requires assistance. They are sullen, bruised children; the smaller of the boys has a discolored eye. They are not as graceful as they will no doubt become—if they survive.
She thinks about Eric as she is dressed. She thinks about Eric and the village in which she met him, about love and death and abandonment. She thinks that she is lying to herself; why he’s returning does matter. She worries at it in stiff silence. She has called for a full meeting of the Court, and her own attendants must be given time to prepare themselves appropriately—but she wants to look her best.
Her best involves powders and starches and oil. Her best involves complicated, intricate dresses. Her best involves the crown that she wears only in the massive audience chambers—it is too heavy to wear at other times.
She has a similar crown for Eric, if he will wear it. He has never once taken his place at the throne by her side. She does not know whether he will take it now. This is not the first time he has been in her Citadel. But it is the first time he has agreed to the escort of her knights without killing some of them first.
Why? Why now?
This should be her moment of triumph. This should be a moment in which life—the desire for life—triumphs. But a single word inserts itself into the stream of her thoughts, like a large rock in a small stream.
Emma.
She feels as if she is falling, although the ground beneath her feet is solid. He has come home, yes—but is it a coincidence that he has come only at the appearance of this Emma, this stranger who she is now certain opened the door, however briefly?
She suspects that her mother has given Emma the single gift she had left to give. She did not pass it to her daughter; of course not. She passed it, in the end, to a stranger. A girl who would be here, helping her Queen dress, had it not been for . . . Eric.
How did he meet this Emma?
How did he meet her and fail to kill her? He has killed others before; some were younger than Emma, some a bit older. It makes no sense. What did he see in this girl? What did her mother see? She should have demanded more information from Nathan. She shouldn’t have been content to let things slide. But she was, and now she is paying for it. She has all the time in the world—and so does Nathan, if she desires it.
But all the time in the world has become a very sudden now. This moment contains Eric. And she will face him without all the facts she suddenly feels she needs.
Reyna is afraid in the moment of her greatest happiness. She is afraid that he will not love her. That he might, instead, love someone else. That w
as her fear in the village, as well—but she never feared it when she was actually by his side. His smile, his focus, his dreams destroyed all but the shadow of fear.
He has not been with her for centuries, and that shadow is so strong it looks like night.
She will know. When she sees Eric, she will know.
EMMA KNELT.
Her knees had locked for three long breaths as Helmi’s words sunk in. This was probably good; it prevented her from collapsing.
In the graveyard in which Nathan’s ashes were buried her dog had run across grass and inlaid stones. She hadn’t thought twice about it. She herself, however, had never stepped directly upon the symbols of grief and memory that other families, other bereaved, had left.
Even so, there was a layer of stone and earth over ash—or coffins. She would not, in a million years, have let her dog walk across corpses. She would never have walked across them herself.
And yet, here she was, and the floor—which looked and felt like a normal floor—was composed of the dead. Not of corpses, not precisely; it was worse than that. She swallowed; her throat was dry in the cold air, and for just a moment, she wondered if she would ever feel warm again.
All of the dead she could see watched her: Helmi, Belinda, Marcel, and Margaret.
“Can you see them?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible to her own ears.
Everyone living looked at her then as well.
No one answered.
“Can you hear them?” she asked, her voice louder. Her hands were shaking, and not with cold, although Helmi’s hand had numbed hers.
“Can you?” Helmi countered. She was the only person who spoke. The only dead person. Amy wanted to know what Emma was talking about.
Emma closed her eyes. She placed her free hand on the surface of the floor itself; the floors were cold, but not in the way that Helmi’s hand was. She listened, but Amy’s voice was too loud. That might have been a mercy in any other circumstance. Today Emma couldn’t allow it.
“Amy,” she said, eyes closed. “Give me a minute.”
“To do what?”
“To listen to the dead.”
Amy fell silent. Emma could imagine her expression.
• • •
Silence. The silence of the dead. The silence of the grave, which, no matter how personal the loss, was also unapproachable and impersonal: a fact of life. Death was. But as Emma listened, she could hear the attenuated, distant sound of weeping. There was more than one voice. There were no faces. Nor were there words. Not for the dead and not, at the moment, for Emma.
She pressed her hand into the floor; it fooled the senses. It was floor, with about as much give as any of the floors in her own home. For one long moment, Emma wanted to join the voices in their weeping and their grief.
That would help no one.
“What are you doing?” Ernest asked, taking over Amy’s role.
“I’m trying to . . .” what? What exactly was she trying to do? “I’m trying to reach them.”
“Reach who?”
“The dead, Ernest.”
How had she reached them before? The lantern. She almost lifted it—how, she wasn’t certain—but stopped. She was in the Queen’s city, and she felt certain that if the lantern were raised here, the Queen would know. Hiding would be impossible.
Without its light, what did she have? Had Mark been a part of the floor, she would never have heard him. She could never have spoken with him. Who spoke to the floor? Or the walls? Who expected them to weep?
Emma reached.
She heard Helmi’s sharp intake of breath—a breath that was cosmetic in every way—but didn’t look up. The floor’s texture changed; it became disturbingly less floorlike beneath her rigid palm. The weeping grew louder, more distinct. Emma reached again, as she had once reached for the mother of a dead four-year-old boy.
This time, she felt pain, ice, and nausea. And the voice beneath her hand grew ever more distinct. The weeping stopped, shuddering to a halt the way weeping sometimes did. A disembodied voice asked, “Who’s there?”
Hope was carried in the two words: hope and fear.
“Emma,” Emma said. “Emma Hall. I’m—” Words failed her. What could she say? You’re part of the floor and I’m standing on you? No. No, she couldn’t say that. She had no idea how much awareness the dead had. When Margaret had been bound to a wall in the Snitman mansion, she had seen—and heard—nothing. Or so Emma had assumed.
She forced herself to work free of those assumptions now. The dead were like clay. They could be molded and shaped into any form; they could be forced to fill any function. Here they were the floors. The floors, the roof, anything else in this unfurnished room. They weren’t the windows—their absence was—but they were probably the cobbled streets outside the windows, the facades of the architecturally uniform buildings, the stairs.
Anything but the food.
This was a type of slavery that Emma had never conceived of in her life, and she’d spent a unit in school studying slavery until it had become very difficult not to be sick to death of humanity.
“Emma?” The voice was quavery, but Emma thought a young man spoke. Or perhaps a young woman. It was hard to tell, and at this particular moment, it was irrelevant.
She was sickened, yes. But that led to two places: despair, which she expected, and anger. She did not want to speak in anger now, not to this person, who didn’t deserve it. Marcel had said the dead didn’t really mark the passage of time the way they had when they were alive, and Emma fervently prayed that this was the truth.
“Yes. I’m Emma.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m right—I’m right beside you. I’m holding your hand. Can you feel it?”
“I can—I can feel your hand. It’s—it’s so warm.”
The dead always said that. To Emma, the floor was not as cold as Helmi. She didn’t know why, and at this point, she didn’t want to interrupt what little conversation there was to ask Margaret, who might be able to answer.
“Emma,” Margaret said, speaking far more gently than she usually did. “I think I understand what you’re attempting to do, but it is not wise. It is not yet time for it.”
“And when is the time for it?” Emma asked, before she could stop herself.
“When the fall won’t kill you or your friends.”
This made no sense for one long minute, and during that minute, Emma willed herself to feel a stranger’s hand, a stranger’s fingers. She transferred part of her attention to Helmi, whose hand she did hold. The hands of the dead—even Nathan’s—felt like hands with all the warmth sucked out. They had never felt like the flat, impersonal surface of the floor.
But these floors—if Helmi were right—weren’t impersonal surfaces.
When the section of floor became a hand, she gripped it far more tightly than she had gripped the hand of anyone dead—except Nathan. And Nathan, she couldn’t hold, in the end. She hadn’t been prepared for the truth: The Queen had bound him, and the Queen could summon him, in an instant, across a geographical divide Emma could not easily traverse. Love didn’t change that in the afterlife.
Love hadn’t changed that in life, either.
Emma believed that love was eternal, that it could last forever. It was a thin belief, tested and damaged by Nathan’s death, and before that by her father’s; she had come, on dark days, to understand that the only eternity was death. Death and its endless silence, endless absence.
And eternity was being played out here in gutting ways. Emma wasn’t always certain what she believed about the afterlife—and in some ways, she still didn’t know. But this? This was hell. It wasn’t the hell of demons or endless fire or endless punishment, but it didn’t have to be. Human beings were perfectly capable of creating hell on earth. She just hadn’t expected that they could continue to
do so when their victims had died.
She meant to end it.
She meant to free the dead.
Thinking it, feeling the heat and the weight and the anger of it, she pulled on the hand she now grasped. She put weight behind it because she had to. She imagined that this was very like catching someone by the hand as they slipped off a cliff. Her arm strained with the weight of a stranger, and her hand locked with the visceral fear that if she could not hold on, they would be lost forever.
It wasn’t true. They would be here. She could find them again.
But she didn’t believe that, and she held on until she thought her hand would snap off at the wrist, it was so frozen. Held on to the falling weight, the weight of someone who would be lost if she couldn’t maintain her desperate grip.
Michael said, in the distance, “Emma, you’re crying.”
Was she? She couldn’t feel tears on her face—but she felt that particular thickness of throat that comes just before tears, when you’re still trying to talk. She swallowed and realized he was right. She was crying. But she forced herself to speak, anyway. “Michael, what do you see?”
“It looks like you’re trying to make a fist. But there’s something in the way.”
“You can’t—you can’t see a hand?”
His silence went on a beat. “Maybe?” he finally said, his tone doubtful. With Michael this actually meant uncertainty.
“You can see Helmi.”
“Yes.”
Emma found her voice after a long, thick pause. “I am holding someone’s hand. I can’t see them. I have no idea who they are. I just—I have their hand. It’s like when someone’s falling off a cliff or a building. I can’t let go. But I can’t—I can’t pull them up. I’m not strong enough.”
Michael was Michael. He trusted Emma enough that he was willing to try to help; trying sometimes paralyzed him. She almost told him, as he knelt beside her, that there wasn’t anything he could do—but she didn’t. Because as he reached for her hand, as he placed his over hers, interleaving their fingers, she felt warmth.