If she had ever been happy, would this city and this citadel even exist?
Emma had not been born into a world that feared—and killed—witches. She hadn’t been born into a world in which her family had been murdered before her eyes, in which the natural order was kill or be killed. She could forgive—not that forgiveness was hers to grant or withhold—the death of the villagers who had murdered Helmi, a helpless eight-year-old child. She was certain that had she been the Queen of the Dead in the exact same circumstances, with the exact same power, those villagers would still be dead.
What she couldn’t understand was how Helmi’s murder, Eric’s death, could lead in a straight line to the death of Chase’s family, among others. She couldn’t follow the transformation of bereaved victim into callous mass murderer. Maybe if one killed, and killed enough—for any reason—life lost its value. All the good intentions, or at least the justified ones, couldn’t preserve what life meant.
Emma shook her head to clear it. She paused, briefly, to talk to her traumatized dog. She felt a little like Michael at the moment: out of her element and very afraid to be so. She wanted the world to make sense. She wanted the world to be safe, or at least predictable. She didn’t understand the Queen of the Dead, and because she didn’t, she couldn’t see the possible paths that led to a future in which they all survived.
It was the only path she wanted to see.
She lifted her face to Michael. “I think,” she told him, “I understand a little bit better how you see the world. Nothing that’s happening here makes any sense. And I hate it.”
Michael met—and held—her gaze.
“Your mother is never going to trust me again.”
• • •
The citadel was an impressively large and forbidding building. It looked like something taken out of a Lord of the Rings movie, but grimmer. And cleaner. There were no guards at the gates, although the gates were closed.
Margaret did not find this confounding. She took the lead, speaking quietly as she did. Ernest followed; Chase took the rear. Between them, Amy at their head, walked the rest of the Emery students. And Petal, who did not look any happier.
She should have left him.
She should have left him at home. She shouldn’t have taken him to Mark’s. She shouldn’t have kept her promise to Michael. She shouldn’t have—
Allison caught her left hand and held it tightly in her right, as if they were—briefly—five years old again, on a school trip. It steadied Emma.
Was it selfish to need people? Was it selfish to want their support and their friendship when things got unbearably hard? She wanted to reassure Allison. She wanted to tell Ally that she was fine. But the words wouldn’t come.
Margaret walked around the gate; there was a peaked door to the left of the gate, so small in comparison it would have been easy to miss. “This,” Margaret said quietly, “is how everyone but the Queen and her court leaves the citadel. Even when the gates are open, the apprentices and the novices are not allowed to use it; they exit before the Queen and move into their assigned positions in the streets.
“We’ll need to move quickly; if she intends a parade, they’ll be coming soon.” She waited. After an awkward pause, she said, “I’ll need someone to actually open the door for the rest of you.”
• • •
The interior of the citadel was not, as Emma had half-expected, a grim, gothic dungeon. The first thing she noticed was the light. It came in from high ceilings and huge windows in spokes, the air so sterile no dust motes danced in its fall. The walls and the floors were a pale gray beneath carpets and runners and paintings; statues in small alcoves could be glimpsed at a distance.
She wondered if any of those statues were actual dead people, and the sense of evocative grandeur faded, the way safety sometimes did when sleeping dream turned sharply, without warning, into nightmare.
Her hand in Allison’s to anchor her, Emma closed her eyes. She could still see the halls. The light, however, vanished. She couldn’t see individual ghosts, but she understood that in aggregate, they were here. She opened her eyes again.
She wondered, not for the first time, where Nathan was and what he was doing—or being forced to do. He was, in the end, the reason that Emma had come. The thought—never spoken aloud—felt wrong and selfish. Less than an hour ago she had struggled to pull a total stranger out of a floor in an empty house; she had felt—in that moment—that it was the most important thing she could do.
Nathan.
Was love, in the end, just selfish? Nathan had loved Emma. Nathan still loved Emma—she was certain of that. But Nathan’s love would not free the dead in the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands. And Emma’s love? Emma could remember a time when she hadn’t loved Nathan because she could remember most of her life, when she hadn’t known him. She knew that she hadn’t fallen in love with him at first sight, but she didn’t feel that, thinking of him now. He was—had been—Nathan. He had never been her whole world, but he had been her world whenever they were alone together.
And her love for Nathan wasn’t going to save the world, either.
In truth, the world would continue even if Emma and her friends failed. The dead would live an eternity in servitude and slavery, but the world itself would barely register their pain or captivity. Emma had known nothing of what happened to the dead; she had known, deeply and personally, the cost of death to the living. The absence. The silence of the grave.
And the grave, she thought, would be silent again if they achieved their goal here. The dead—most of the dead—would leave. They would go on to whatever awaited them. Emma had no idea whether or not what waited was a giant scam, and until she joined the dead, she wouldn’t. But she’d glimpsed it, and she understood why they wanted it. Why someone like Longland, who arguably didn’t deserve it, could see almost nothing else.
“Margaret?”
Margaret had stopped; she was frowning. She turned to Ernest and said something that Emma could only barely hear. The actual words faded into the sense of syllables. Amy, being Amy, stepped in beside Ernest, folding her arms; Emma could only see the line of her back, but it was clear she was annoyed. Amy did not get left out.
Chase didn’t move. “Margaret doesn’t know where she’s going,” he said quietly, almost under his breath.
“Has the citadel been changed?”
Chase shrugged. “We can’t stay in these halls. We’re going to have to take a chance on a side hall or room and wait.”
Allison and Emma were silent for a beat too long.
And Michael, in a fashion, rescued them. “Can’t we just go down that hall?” He pointed to a stretch of wall, in the center of which was a small alcove.
• • •
Margaret said, “What hall, dear?” Ernest was only half a beat behind, but he dropped the “dear” at the end of his question.
The Emery students—and Chase, to Emma’s surprise—turned instantly to look at Michael, following his gaze—and his slightly trembling hand—back to what appeared to be wall to their eyes.
“We don’t see a hall,” Allison told Michael. “We see a wall—with a small, curved alcove. There’s a pedestal there for a statue—but there’s no statue on it.”
Michael said, “There’s a hall.” He looked momentarily confused, and then his eyes narrowed; he shed confusion as he gathered thought. He raised a hand, palm turned as if offering to shake the empty air in polite greeting.
Emma caught that hand. Michael walked, with obvious purpose, toward the pedestal and the alcove, Emma in tow. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why Margaret can’t see it.” He hesitated, and then he walked through the alcove’s wall. Emma, trusting him, had to close her eyes. She wasn’t surprised when she failed to hit stone, but only barely.
Michael released her hand and turned.
On t
he other side of what was, to all intents and purposes, a very secret door, she could see the hall and its occupants. It was like a one-way mirror. “Why would she do this?”
Michael shook his head. “I don’t even understand how it works. Let me go get the others.”
• • •
Margaret did not require Michael’s help; she did require Emma’s. But Margaret, like the rest of them, could see the grand halls of the citadel from this side.
This side, on the other hand, was vastly less impressive. Emma had read about servant’s halls and servant’s quarters—and had even been in a house that used those quarters as the nanny’s living space—but she had never seen a hall like this one. It would have been at home in an ancient dungeon. It lacked the light and the sense of grandeur and open spaces that the citadel’s grand hall had evoked; it was, in fact, exactly what she might have imagined the Queen of the Dead’s citadel should be.
“I think we’re more or less safe here,” Chase said. “Margaret couldn’t see the space; none of us could see it. Either the Queen created secret passages known only to her, or this was created by someone else. In the former case, the Queen’s busy. In the latter . . .”
Petal whined.
Emma gently placed a hand on his head as a familiar pang of Hall guilt became a sharp pain. “I’m sorry, puppy,” she told her dog.
Margaret seemed fascinated by the hall. She insisted on exiting it and trying to reach the corridor on her own. Emma, nervous, said nothing—it was Amy who granted necessary permission. Nor did Margaret react as if permission wasn’t Amy’s to grant.
“It might be useful,” Amy told Chase, when Chase raised a red brow in her direction. “Helmi said the Queen uses the dead as spies. If even the dead can’t find this place, we’ve got a base of operation for however long we’ve got food.”
Ernest seemed to begrudge the fact that Amy’s decision had logic behind it. Chase, once again surprising Emma, didn’t.
Margaret did not return immediately, and when she did, she looked both relieved and perplexed. “If I were not bound—in some fashion—to you, I would not be able to enter this hall. I could, of course, pass through the walls and the doors of the citadel, as one would expect the dead to be able to do; I could not pass into this hall. There are rooms beyond it; if I walk through the walls of the great hall, I enter those. I seem to bypass this hall—and possibly what it leads to—entirely.
“We will consider this good news,” she added, in a very teacher-like way. “Shall we see where this hall leads?”
• • •
Seeing was a bit of an issue, which was resolved the practical way: with flashlights. Since the hall itself was so narrow, they walked single file; they had three flashlights, and they were of the emergency variety: small and portable.
The hall didn’t branch; it curved. Michael was the first to notice this, but Chase wasn’t far behind. Chase thought it also descended but was less certain about that; it was a very gradual descent, if true.
Margaret could pass through the floor and the walls to either side, but could not return the same way. “Helmi won’t be able to find us.”
“That’s a bad thing?” Chase asked.
“In this case, quite probably. If she is in touch with Nathan—if she can speak to him without the Queen’s knowledge—she won’t be able to tell him where we are. Unless she knows about this space. It’s possible. If the Queen created it, she’ll know. If it was not created by the Queen, she might still have some idea. I think, at one time, she loved her sister.”
“I think she still does,” Emma said quietly. “She just doesn’t trust her anymore.”
“Why do you think that?” Michael asked.
“When she asked me what I meant to do with her sister.” Michael waited. “It was the way she asked. I think she wants to stop her sister. I don’t think she wants her sister to—to be dead and trapped the way Helmi has been.”
“There’s a room.” Ernest’s voice drifted back. After a moment, he said, “Or at least there’s a door.”
Some of the light changed direction, effectively dimming for anyone in the line who wasn’t near the door in question.
“The door,” Margaret said, after a brief pause, “is impassible. I cannot walk through it.” She sounded slightly irritated and slightly surprised.
“It’s also locked,” Ernest added.
Chase said, “That’s my cue.” He began to bypass everyone else in the line; given the narrowness of the hall, people had to squeeze into the nearest wall to let him pass. He stopped for a bit longer in front of Allison, but Amy appeared to have stepped on his foot; he didn’t linger.
He did kneel at the door; he did demand one of the two remaining flashlights, and he did curse—a lot. When he finally rose, he said, “I don’t think it’s that kind of door.”
“You can’t pick the lock?” Amy demanded.
“There are locks I can’t pick. That type of lock is a little high tech for the Queen’s citadel.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It’s not a lock, per se.”
“So the door should open.”
“It’s not a normal door.” When Amy failed to reply, Chase glanced at her and said, “It’s a Necromantic door.”
• • •
“What is a Necromantic door?” Michael asked. To be fair, it was the question in everyone’s mind, but Michael got there first.
“I’m guessing,” Chase replied. “This door has a keyhole. It’s missing tumblers or any other mechanisms—at all—that I can see. Michael, come take a look.”
Michael obliged, although he made it clear as he knelt that he had no idea how to pick a lock.
“That’s because they teach nothing useful in school,” Chase snapped.
“He means,” Allison followed up quickly, “that they teach nothing useful about dealing with Necromancers in school. School works out fine for most of the rest of us.”
Michael, however, rose. “I don’t think that’s where the lock is,” he told Chase.
“Fine. Are you willing to allow that this is Necromantic magic?”
Michael nodded, lifted his hand about two feet, and touched the door. It wasn’t locked, for Michael.
• • •
The door itself was better suited to a closet than a room. Emma half expected what lay beyond it to be a dungeon cell.
Nothing about the dead, or the people who lived with them, worked as expected. She entered the room at the tail end of the group, Petal squeezing her into the left part of the frame. Chase was talking to Michael; Michael seemed naturally focused and far more at ease than he had since—since before they’d left the city.
The door had opened into a large room that contained chairs, two long couches, and a low table. Beyond this room was an arch, and beyond the arch what appeared to be a dining room; there was a small kitchen off to the side. Emma had doubts about the kitchen, but she said nothing. There was no fridge, and the oven was not a standard, modern appliance. It looked very much like a wood stove.
Chase and Ernest left the sitting room and headed toward the dining room and apparently beyond. Everyone else sat, heavily, as if the invisible strings keeping them upright had been cut.
Margaret spent some time testing the walls. To her surprise, they were impassible, just as the door had been. She could clearly see them, but she could not drift through them. Some of what must have been ferocious concentration when she had been alive took hold of her eyes and her face, transforming her expression; she no longer looked vaguely teacher-like.
Chase came back and sat beside Allison. This put him almost squarely in Amy’s lap; a bit of shuffling and a lot of Amy glaring, which everyone pretended not to notice, ensued.
“There are two bedrooms,” Chase said, “one small office space—there’s a desk in it, three cupboard
s, and not a lot else—and a library. Guess where I left Ernest. The library is probably the largest room in the suite. It’s down a very narrow set of stairs from the office. There don’t seem to be any permanent magical traps; we’ve done a clear sweep. Ernest suggests you touch nothing but furniture until we’ve had a chance to be more complete.”
“Does anyone look like they’re moving?” Amy asked.
Chase shrugged and continued. “There’s no food in the pantry.” He slid an arm around Allison’s shoulder; she tensed very slightly but didn’t ask him to remove it. Emma thought it was mostly because the arm was a very public—and casual—display of affection, and as Allison had never had to deal with that before, it made her nervous. Then again, Chase alternately made Ally nervous and angry. “Margaret?”
Margaret turned at the sound of her name, half her thought clearly somewhere else. “Yes?”
“Is it possible that this is the Queen’s version of an emergency bunker?”
Margaret’s lips compressed into a single thin line before she finally answered. “It would make some kind of sense—but I don’t think so. The citadel itself was the Queen’s version of an emergency bunker. I think this must have been created entirely by someone else. It has to be old—I can’t imagine it was created in an off-hour or two, and the Queen trusted none of the Court in my time.”
“Do you know what it would take to create this?”
Margaret shook her head. “A few minutes of uninterrupted thought might afford better answers.”
Chase laughed. “This is the first time,” he said, continuing his obviously unwelcome interruption, “that I can see you and Ernest as a couple.” His laughter faded as he glanced at Allison. His very theatrical sigh drew everyone’s attention, even Michael’s.
“What?” Amy demanded.
“Allison wants to see the library.”
• • •
The office desk was large and unadorned; cupboards were mounted on the wall opposite the door, and between them were a very simple chair and a desk. The desk’s drawers weren’t locked; they opened smoothly, but with effort. Pens of the variety Emma was used to were absent, but ink wells—long since dried—suggested that whoever had used this desk had used it to write. There was no paper, though. There were no books on the desk, no framed pictures, nothing to lend character or personality to the rooms’ occupant. Or occupants.