And then she wonders, instead, why Eric is here. Joy and hope and relief freeze; they hang suspended somewhere outside of Reyna as she studies his face. She knows his face. She has never forgotten it.
She has never let herself forget it. But this expression is not the expression that she has captured in a thousand different images. This street is not the edge of a forest; it is not the banks of a brook, run low in its bed by lack of rain. There were more people here—until she dismissed them—than the entire village contained.
She made decisions. She made choices. She worked tirelessly. She has done everything, everything, for Eric.
Eric, who walked away from her once.
Eric, for whom she waited. And waited. And waited.
She looks at him now, and she is terrified, and she has never dealt well with fear. She can feel it rise like a wave, like bile, and she cannot will it away, although she does try. She has done everything for Eric. What has she not done?
You have never asked Eric what Eric wants or needs. You have almost destroyed yourself to give Eric what you believed he wanted.
And she hears the voice clearly, she knows the voice, although it has been centuries, literally centuries, since she last sought it out. Scoros. Scoros is speaking. He is not here. He will never be here again. She does not turn to look at him; she knows there is nothing to see.
She says, in anger, in despair, her voice as cold as she suddenly feels, “Eric, did you ever love me?”
But Eric is looking past Reyna. He is looking down the street, his eyes oddly shaped—not narrowed, not widened. Softly, softly, he asks, “Who was that?”
She realizes that Eric heard. He heard that voice from the dim and distant past; the voice that had promised love and understanding and in the end offered only judgment. And he should not be able to hear it. Wheeling, she turns to Nathan, to Emma’s Nathan.
“Did you hear him?”
Nathan immediately folds into a bow that hides his face—and at the moment, shorn of disciples, she no longer wants that. She orders him, sharply, to rise—and he does. His face is the color of Eric’s, his expression more strained. “He said, ‘Who was that?’”
“And you heard nothing else?”
“You asked—you asked him a question.” He does not repeat it.
Helmi says, “If you want, we can leave the two of you alone.” Helmi rarely speaks anymore, although Reyna realizes this only because the sound of her voice is a shock. “You might want to talk about things too private for audiences.”
Eric has not answered Reyna’s question.
Or maybe he has. Maybe, over the passing centuries, he has.
Reyna, you are asking the wrong question. The voice is gentle.
Reyna stiffens at the weight of it, the weight of familiarity, the pointed reminder of things missing, things gone. She has almost forgotten. It has been so long. She should have known that he would wake and be present today, of all days.
Today is the day that she could finally prove him wrong.
And Eric doesn’t answer her question. She turns to her sister, standing beside her sole personal attendant. “You may leave. Nathan. Return to my quarters and wait.” Nathan bows again.
“And me?” Helmi asks, in her little-girl, trying-too-hard-to-sound-bored voice.
“You may keep him company if that is what you desire—but, Helmi, for the moment, I need him. Do you understand?”
Helmi says, sharply, “Because he can do things, and I can’t.”
Today is not the day to deal with Helmi’s resentment, but Reyna tries. “There are many things you can do. You’ve saved my life at least three times just by being careful and listening. I would never have made it this far without you. You are the only one who’s stayed by my side.” She watches Helmi carefully as she speaks, although she wishes Helmi were someplace else.
Helmi shrugs, sullen. “You just want to be alone with Eric,” she says. It reminds the Queen, sharply and unexpectedly, of the life she led before the massacre. Before she almost lost Eric. She loved her sister.
But she wished—as she wishes now—that her sister would just go away. Without leaving guilt in her wake.
“Eric and I have things to talk about. I promise I will come and find you when we’re done.” She speaks without much hope; this never worked in the past, when Helmi was actually alive.
Helmi’s frown sets. She looks—with disdain—at Nathan and says, “Fine. I’ll be waiting. Nathan can keep me company.” When Nathan fails to move, she glares at him, finding a different target for her sullen rage.
“Nathan,” the Queen says. “Please accompany Helmi.”
Nathan bows. He is not like Helmi; he is not sullen or resentful. He is a much quieter, much less brittle presence. Perhaps that is why she will keep him, in the end.
But Nathan is not her problem. She dismisses him, with far less work than she dismissed her sister. She dismisses everyone, and the crowds, the triumphal witnesses to the end of her long and bitter struggle, also disperse with far less resentment than Helmi did.
And when they are alone, she turns to Eric.
But there is one person she cannot dismiss. You ask the wrong questions. You have always asked the wrong questions.
“Shut up.” Eric’s eyes narrow—and why wouldn’t they? “I—apologize, I wasn’t speaking to you.”
He says nothing, and this is troubling; she has apologized, and he has failed to respond. Perhaps he doesn’t know how seldom she apologizes. It has been a long time, after all. Perhaps he thinks she is as powerless, as stupid, as she once was. And that thought angers her.
No—it revives dormant anger. It roots anger to pain. She wants—has always wanted—Eric. But she wants him here. Not standing at her side as if he were still half a world away, and hidden.
And what, she thinks bitterly, did she expect? That he would grovel, that he would beg her forgiveness? No. Pathos is not what she wants.
And yet, conversely, he should do all of these things, because he left her. He is not looking at the city. He is not looking at the buildings. He is not looking at anything. She did so much. She built so much. And for what, in the end?
“Eric.”
Ask the right question, Reyna.
“Go away!”
If I could, I would. You know why I am here. You know why I am almost anywhere you choose to be. Child—
“I am not a child!”
Reyna, love, you are.
She turns then. Turns before she can stop herself. She storms toward the nearest wall—the wall of a townhouse—and slams her fists into it in fury. The wall shatters. If she stomped, the ground would shatter in the same way.
She turns again; the building’s facade lies in shards, but the shards are not of stone or glass. She hears the distant wailing of living things in pain, and she realizes that some part of it is her own voice.
She does not look at Eric. She doesn’t want to see his expression.
“Reyna.”
She looks at her feet. At her magnificent skirts. At the stones she took so long to figure out how to make. At the fall of her own shadow.
“Reyna.” Eric’s voice is not harsh, not angry. She can’t look up to meet his eyes. “Reyna.” She doesn’t look up until his fingers touch her chin, until he lifts her face. Until his thumbs wipe tears—inexplicable tears—away.
“Who are you shouting at?”
“It’s not—it’s not important.”
He looks at the melting hole in what was once wall; at the shards that had once been all of a piece but now lie, becoming amorphous as the seconds pass, at her feet. He closes his eyes.
HELMI LEADS NATHAN out of the streets. She walks slowly, turning every so often to look over her shoulder. She even ditches the dress. Nathan wishes he could ditch the suit in the same way, but the suit isn’t an integ
ral part of what he is.
If the Queen notices, she says nothing—and Nathan is fairly certain she hasn’t noticed. He is not Helmi. He is not the Queen’s baby sister. He doesn’t give much for his chances if he strips off his clothing, even in the ruins of her victory parade. Nor does he give much for his chances if he glances back and sees something he is not meant to see.
Helmi knows.
It’s why she takes so damn long to clear the street.
He can’t decide if her sullen resentment was put on or not. She isn’t a child anymore—she just looks like one. He can’t tell if she wants—as the dead do—to be ceaselessly near her sister’s light and warmth, regardless of the fact that it burns to ash anything it touches. Given the Queen as the only choice, Nathan isn’t certain himself.
But she isn’t the only choice, not yet.
He suddenly wants to race down the streets. To race back to the citadel. Emma is here, somewhere. In life, Emma was his choice. In death, she is even more so. But he keeps pace with Helmi; it’s a type of invisibility.
Helmi isn’t in a rush. She doesn’t appear to notice Nathan at all. Either she’s the world’s best actor, or things are complicated. Nathan goes with complicated.
• • •
“I can’t help it,” Helmi says, when they’ve turned a corner and put several solid walls between them and their Queen. “I hate Eric.”
“Why?”
“If it weren’t for Eric, none of this would have happened.”
“Wrong. It had nothing to do with Eric, in the end.”
“She loved Eric!”
“Is that what you call it? Love?” He lowers his voice, tries to still his hands. He is shaking with something like rage. “You can hate him—you’re going to do what you want, anyway—but none of this is his fault. He didn’t kill himself. You’re blaming the wrong person.”
“Really?” Sarcasm of the ages—all of them, ever—in that voice.
Nathan falls silent. He’s been dead for weeks. Not years. Not centuries. To his knowledge, no one he loves and trusts has ever been guilty of murder, let alone Necromancy. He doesn’t think it’s Eric he’d hate, in Helmi’s position—but how can he be certain?
“You didn’t have sisters,” Helmi says.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes. You want to ask me if I still love mine.”
Nathan is silent.
“And the answer is no.” It sounded like yes. “And yes.” Which conversely sounded like no. “I don’t remember what it’s like to be alive. I want it,” she adds, voice a burning kind of cold. “I almost remember when I’m with her. And that’s irony, for you. I wish she had never fallen in love. I wish Eric had treated her the way most outsiders treated us: with suspicion and contempt.
“I never understood why we had to avoid people who were kind. People who liked us.” Her face, her expression, is uncomfortable; it is not a child’s expression, but it is informed in all ways by a child’s features.
Nathan doesn’t know what to say. He wants to tell her that this is wrong, that it is not the kindness that has to be avoided. Or the love. But he understands—and he hasn’t understood this so clearly before—that the kindness and the love, like the anger and the fear, are not divorced from the rest of the person. He doesn’t doubt—he cannot doubt—that Eric once loved the Queen of the Dead.
“Sometimes,” he says carefully, “people can turn anything to crap. Anything. It doesn’t mean that it started out as crap.”
“And some days,” Helmi says, as if Nathan hadn’t spoken, “I want what she didn’t give me then. Or ever. I want her time, her attention, her affection. Even now.” She exhales. “How stupid is that?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead he says, “Do you know where Emma is?”
“No. I know where she was, but she’s not there now.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can’t see her.”
“Can you find her?”
Helmi says nothing. She closes her eyes. Nathan is aware that this is cosmetic for the disembodied dead. So is breathing. But he holds his breath, his constructed, artificial breath, until the moment her eyes widen in something akin to horror. “What is she doing?” she hisses.
Turning to Nathan she says, “The Queen told us to wait in her chambers. I’m going ahead.” Turning, she marches—there’s no other word for it—through the wall. Nathan, embodied, has to take the long way.
He runs.
EMMA’S HANDS FELT ALMOST NUMB, but not with cold. She turned first. She moved, subconsciously attempting to put herself between Chase and the stranger who had just spoken. Clutched hands made it almost impossible, but she wasn’t certain she could let go of Chase’s hands even if she wanted to.
And there he was: the man she’d stepped into a carved circle to find. He was older than Brendan Hall had been at the time of his death—if age meant anything to him; he was not newly dead and could change his appearance at will.
He was not looking at her. He was looking at Chase. Chase, who didn’t appear to see him.
“Chase, you have to let go of my hands.”
Chase’s eyes found hers and narrowed; he shook his head, as if not trusting his voice.
“One of my hands, then.”
He managed that, but it took time, and time had returned, at least for Emma. What she wanted, right now, was home. Home, peace, and even her mother. She wanted her half-deaf rottweiler. She wanted safety.
She had no idea how to get home from here, but she knew that home would never be safe while the Queen of the Dead ruled. Or lived. In the quiet of her thoughts, she accepted the truth that she had shied away from. While the Queen of the Dead lived, there was no home that would be safe—not for her, and not for the friends who’d been dragged into the world of Necromancers because they refused, in the end, to be left behind.
Because they loved her, or needed her, or some combination of both.
Hall manners asserted themselves as Chase released her right hand. She turned to the man who had spoken—and who looked, to her eye, as shattered as Chase. She had lived through so many atrocities as a voiceless passenger—most committed by him. But the start of his path had been the same as the start of Chase’s, and she wondered if that was the inevitable destination for anyone who was forced to walk it.
She held out her free hand.
The stranger stepped forward. He looked like a ghost, unlike the undead Emma was accustomed to seeing; he was entirely transparent. Even when he attempted to take her hand, his fingers passed through hers.
“I am Scoros,” he said.
“I’m Emma Hall. This is Chase.”
“Yes.” It was at Chase he was looking. “It was not your fault.” Chase blinked. Focused. He could hear the man and, with effort, could see him. “You didn’t kill them.”
“I didn’t save them either.”
“No. You couldn’t. You didn’t run.”
“I couldn’t. Why did she do it?”
“I do not know. I was not alive when it happened. You see me.”
Chase nodded.
“And yet you are not one of the people.”
“Neither is Emma.”
Emma’s eyes widened at the words. It was the first time Chase had said anything remotely like this. She wished that Allison could hear it.
“Why do you look like a ghost?” she asked.
The man turned to her. “Do I?”
“To me, yes—a storybook ghost. I can see right through you.”
“With practice, Emma, you could see through anyone.”
She grimaced. “Everyone else looks like a living person.” When they weren’t floors or walls.
“Ah.” He looked past Emma and Chase, his eyes narrowing. Emma looked in the direction of his gaze and saw nothing. Nothing at all.
> “I am not . . . all here.”
“What do you mean?”
He smiled. “You are no part of the many, many memories it has been my task to keep. You are not the first person I have spoken to since my long confinement, but you are the first to hear my voice.”
“I’m not,” Emma replied. She didn’t accuse him of lying.
His smile deepened; it was bitter. “But you are, Emma. My Reyna has not heard my voice for a very long time. I have heard hers.” He lifted his head. “Eric is with her.”
Emma nodded.
“I can see them.”
“I can’t.”
“No. You are alive. You are not woven through the citadel. You are not embedded in its walls and towers and streets. You are not part of the bitter history of its creation.”
“And you are?”
“Yes.”
“Voluntarily?”
“No. No and yes. I knew what she would do. Reyna has always feared abandonment. I at least could never leave her.”
“You tried to kill her.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. It is not one of the memories in which I’ve been imprisoned. She could not believe that the attempt would bring me nothing but pain, and she desired pain. Chase said you are not of the people.”
Emma nodded.
“He was wrong. I can see it in you. You are very like Reyna.”
“She’s nothing like the Queen of the Dead.”
“Is she not, boy? But I forget. You are not yet dead. You see the dead, but you do not see the living as the dead see them. To the eyes of the dead, she is no different.”
“Not to the eyes, maybe,” Chase said. “But what she does for the dead is different.”
“Is it? I see that she has bound the dead. At least two; perhaps more. They are not with her, now.”
Chase cursed. Stopped. “Can you see who she’s bound?”
The man’s expression rippled. If Emma could have, she would have kicked Chase; she was staring daggers at the side of his face. This man had tried to kill the Queen of the Dead because the Queen had attempted to bind his mother—and his mother was now bound to Emma. This could go bad very fast.