by Lisa Henry
The feathers in the air shivered and shifted. A soundless wave burst through the gallery, and the Iron Tower began to collapse.
Min heard the scream of tearing metal and looked up at the ceiling just in time to see it crumbling down toward him.
He didn’t even have time to raise his arms to shield his head.
DUST.
Choking dust.
Min blinked in a vain attempt to clear his vision. Was he dead? And if not, then why not? Was he mortally hurt? He couldn’t feel it yet, but he didn’t trust it either. He probably was dead, because the ceiling—and the three stories above it—had just landed on his skull.
Definitely dead.
He blinked again.
Light too. Sunlight. It dazzled him.
And a woman’s voice, raised in a song as soft and sweet as a lullaby.
Min lifted his head, shaking dust from his hair, and looked around. Feathers still hung in the air, drifting in slanted columns of dust, and—Min’s breath caught in his throat—so did the ceiling, like a child’s puzzle broken apart in a tantrum, thrown into the air but somehow not yet landed. The sunlight blazed through the places where the ceiling and the walls had broken apart. When Min looked up, he could see three stories worth of rubble hanging in the air above him—cracked tiles and shattered boards, chunks of plaster and masonry, iron bones snapped like twigs—and glimpses of the sky beyond.
The Iron Tower hadn’t collapsed, he realized. It was still in the middle of collapsing, except that somehow it had frozen at the moment of disaster.
Rubble and dust and feathers shifted for the woman who walked toward them, parting like the waters of a bow wave. The woman wore no cloak or hood, just a plain white gown. Her dark hair spilled down her back. Her feet were bare. This must have been what she looked liked when they buried her.
“Avice!” Robert’s voice cracked on the name.
The shade walked on, still singing softly. She passed Robert, passed the courtiers cowering against the wall, passed the blue-robed sorcerers, and then passed through the invisible barrier that separated Kaz and Min from the rest of the gallery.
And then she stopped and fell silent.
Min was half-afraid to look at her. He dropped his gaze to her feet and saw that they were covered in dust. It took a moment for the strangeness of that to make itself known to him. In Pran she’d remained dry despite the rain, but here she was dusty? Min lifted his gaze.
She was as young as her son. As beautiful too. Min could drown in her dark eyes as easily as he’d drowned in Kaz’s.
“Kazimir,” she whispered, and his name sounded like a prayer on her lips, hopeful and fearful in equal measure.
Kaz looked up. His mouth moved, but no words came.
“Kazimir,” she whispered again, and held out her pale hand toward him.
Kaz reached up, his trembling fingers touching hers.
She was not a shade at all. Whatever she was, she was real. She was here. Kaz had woken the dead, and Avice Sabadine was here.
Kaz stumbled to his feet, as ungainly as a newborn colt, and stood there, white eyes blinking, as Avice caught his face between her palms. They were a mirror image. Dark-haired and pale-skinned. They might have been twins.
“Oh,” she said softly. She combed her fingers through his hair, tucking his curls behind his pointed ears. She ran her thumb over his cheekbone, brushing away the tears that shone there. The bluish tinge to Kaz’s skin vanished under her touch. The black lines faded. “But you’re so tall!”
Avice was shorter than her son by half a head, but Kaz still seemed somehow smaller. A child, Min thought. A frightened, lonely child, afraid that his mother hated him.
“I’m sorry,” Kaz whispered. He closed his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Avice leaned up and pressed a gentle kiss to one eyelid and then the other. Kaz flinched at the first kiss, stood frozen for the second, and when he opened his eyes again they were the eyes of the boy Min knew: dark and clever and shy and human.
Taavi the cat tumbled out of Kaz’s untucked shirt, leaping down onto the floor. She batted a paw at the hem of Avice’s gown and then skittered back.
“You have your father’s magic,” Avice said. “I hoped you might.” Her smile was beautiful. “He made flowers bloom in the winter, just for me.”
“No,” Kaz said softly. “No, he hurt you.”
“He did not,” Avice said, catching Kaz’s hands in her own. “He could not. I went into the woods at Pran when the servants all told me not to. I followed the sound of bells, and there he was. Llefelys, your father. I should have been afraid, I think, but I wasn’t. He held out his hand and I went to him, and the woods played such music for us!” She closed her eyes for a moment as though the memory of it had overwhelmed her. When she opened them again, she was smiling. “I would have danced with him even if a thousand years might have passed in one night. But the dawn was just the next day after all, and I had a path of flowers through the snow to follow back home. And from then, every time I went into the woods, he was waiting for me and it was like summer.”
“No. No, that’s not what….” Kaz shook his head helplessly. “H-he hurt you and I killed you!”
“I loved him,” Avice said. “And I loved you, even when you were just a flutter in my belly. I wanted nothing more than to hold you when you were born and to sing you all the lullabies my mother once sang to me, but it is not your fault I couldn’t. If want was enough, I would never have left you, my Kazimir.”
Min’s chest ached, and his was not the only one.
From the other end of the gallery, Robert let out an anguished sound.
Avice turned her head to look at her brother. “I loved him,” she repeated. “And he loved me.”
Robert stumbled forward, knocking chunks of floating plaster and pieces of brick to the floor. “Avice!”
“Hold!” Edward bellowed suddenly. “That is not your sister! It is a trick, or—or a demon! It lies!”
Avice tightened her grip on Kaz’s hands, her face still turned toward Robert. “He locked me in a room in the manor house and bolted the door and windows. He nailed rowan to every wall and laid iron across every threshold. And all because I told him that I loved a fae! He would not let me speak to you or any of our brothers. He stopped Llefelys from coming for me, and he would not let me leave!”
“Lies,” Edward said, his voice dust-ragged and reed thin. “All lies!”
Robert’s face, drawn and grim, said he knew exactly who the liar was here. “You told me she was raped. You told me the creature that did it was a monster.”
“He is a monster!” Edward cried. “And the boy is an abomination! Look at him! Look! He is a necromancer!”
Robert stared at his father. Something imperceptible passed across his face. Min might have mistaken it for smugness, if he’d believed Robert could ever lower himself to be so petty. “I knew that already.”
Edward’s jaw dropped. “You knew?”
“You dragged him back from Anhaga to make him a hostage for the king,” Robert said. “You thought his Gift was worthless because he was a hedgewitch. Only a fool would have told you his true Gift. With a necromancer at your command, your ambition would be unbridled. You would have used him to attack your enemies. No House would have been safe from you, not even the House of Anarawd.”
Min was grudgingly impressed at Robert’s unexpected show of honor. Edward was not.
“You faithless dog!” the old man exclaimed, reaching for the knife in his belt. “You traitor to your own blood!” With more speed than Min would have credited him with, he darted toward his son. He struck.
Robert twisted away from him but let out a grunt of pain. “Are you mad?”
Which, in all honesty, Min felt was a question that had been thoroughly answered already. He’d known it the moment he’d set eyes on the old man. Yes, Edward Sabadine was mad, drunk on his own ambition, and as foul and fetid a creature as might have crawled out of the open sewers in
the eastern quarter.
“Tell her!” Edward taunted. “Tell your sister what you did to her mongrel of a son! Tell her how you wed him!”
Robert pressed a hand to his side where Edward’s knife had glanced off him. He kept his gaze fixed on his father. “To get him out of your clutches, since you wouldn’t let him go until it was done. Which of us were you truly punishing? The boy or me?” His mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “It was me, wasn’t it? It took you twenty years, but at last you found just the right indignity to force on me.”
Edward showed his yellowing teeth in a vile grimace. “Tell her how you fucked her son!”
“I didn’t touch him! How could I? He looks exactly like her!” Robert turned to face his sister, his desperate plea written on his face. “Avice, believe me, I would never—”
“Look out!” Min shouted.
Robert spun back to face his father, just in time to dodge what might have been a fatal blow. He caught his father’s arm, and they wrestled for control of the knife.
“Sweeting,” Min said. “Remember how I said that revenge should be exacting?”
Kaz nodded, his dark eyes wide.
“Now might be a good time.”
Min remembered again that it was said sorcerers could tear the flesh from a man’s bones with just an uttered incantation. Apparently Kaz didn’t even need words. He lifted a hand toward his grandfather, there was a sharp cracking sound, a strangled scream from the old viper, and then no sound at all except that of wet pieces of flesh and bone hitting the floor.
Ew.
Min decided not to look too closely at the remains. Nausea battled with delight, and while Min was confident delight would win out in the end, he didn’t want to spoil its chances.
His stomach twisted as a tremor ran through the Iron Tower.
Robert Sabadine blinked dumbly, reaching up to wipe a spray of blood from his face. “I—I—” He gulped in a breath and tried again. “I—”
“I think you broke him, sweeting.” Min climbed cautiously to his feet at last. “Do we survive this, Kaz? In all of Harry’s books, the evil dragon is killed and the hero survives. We’re lacking a hero, I suspect, but I’m quite partial to the idea of survival. But here we are in the middle of a collapsing tower, and the dead are risen, and I don’t know how it plays out from here.”
“I….” Kaz looked to Avice.
She smiled at him sadly and pressed her palm to his cheek. Some silent conversation passed between them. Tears sprung in Kaz’s eyes, and he shook his head emphatically.
“Yes,” Avice said softly. “Yes, you can, and you must. It’s too much. You can’t hold it for much longer.”
“I only just met you!”
The air shuddered, and the Iron Tower shifted and swayed underneath them. A lump of brick hit the tiles next to Min’s boots.
“You must,” she repeated. “Your will brought me here, Kazimir, but this is… this is not what the dead look like. You know that. The dead are not kind, my child, and this is not where we belong.”
“No,” he whispered. “Please.”
“I love you,” Avice said. “We will meet again one day, but for now you must let me go.”
Kaz blinked, and tears slid down his face.
“I love you,” she repeated, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. “Now, go.” She turned to Robert. “All of you, go.”
Min heard the courtiers scuttling like cockroaches for the door. He hoped Harry and Aiode were already ahead of them.
“No,” Kaz said. His jaw trembled.
The Iron Tower shuddered again, and the floor pitched. A wall cracked open and sunlight blazed through the feathers and the dust.
Avice looked to Min, beseeching him.
Well then. Just another thing Kaz would hate him for. He gripped Kaz by the arm and pulled him away.
“No!” Kaz screamed. “No!”
Min managed to drag him a few feet away. Kaz struggled, as mad as a wet cat, pushing and kicking and yowling, but he hadn’t been raised in the eastern quarter, had he? Min had been fighting dirty since the time he could walk. And once he had pulled Kaz through whatever invisible barrier had protected him from the sorcerers, Robert grabbed Kaz’s other arm.
They ran for the door.
Min saw flashes of color through the dust and the feathers: the blue robes of the sorcerers, a green kirtle that might have been Aiode’s, and the russet of a courtier’s tunic.
“Min! Please!” Kaz screamed, pulling back.
Min and Robert wrestled him through the door. Min caught a glimpse of Avice Sabadine standing in the gallery in her white gown. She raised her hand, and Min saw that she was holding a bright yellow blossom that hadn’t been there before. She raised it to her face, closing her eyes and smiling as she smelled it. The Iron Tower screamed again, one of the walls tumbled inward, and then she was gone.
Choking dust blinded Min, and he stumbled down the stairs still clutching Kaz’s arm, Robert on the other side. Another gallery, this one lined with the busts of kings and queens going back hundreds of years or more. Stern marble faces pitched forward and broke into pieces as the Iron Tower fell.
Stairs again, and then, finally, blessed sunlight, and Min was still running, dragged along by Robert with Kaz as their tether.
It was a hedge that caught them finally. Somebody tripped into it, and then all three of them were on the ground in a tangle of limbs. Min rolled out from underneath and stared back at the Iron Tower just in time to see it shudder one last time, like some old starving workhorse letting out a final breath, before collapsing into a pile of bones.
A wave of dust blocked out the sun, and for a long moment Min was aware of nothing except the body on top of his and the sound of quiet sobbing in his ear.
Min twisted his neck. Dust and rubble lay as thick as snow on the grassy parklands of the King’s Hill. He glimpsed Harry and Aiode, the courtiers, the soldiers…. And standing there like grotesque parodies of the statues that dotted the place, three figures wearing what might have been fine silk once upon a time but which now hung from them in clumped threads like lichen. The dead men had no faces that Min could discern, only rotting flesh and cavernous spaces where their eyes had been. One of them wore a tarnished crown. There must have been a sepulcher somewhere close by, Min realized, where the remains of kings were supposed to lie undisturbed, except that Kaz had woken them.
And this, Min thought, this was why necromancers were fuel for nightmares.
He thought of every crowded little graveyard in the city, every tomb, every charnel house. Were rotting hands digging through dirt even now, seeking the daylight? The city of Amberwich had been built on countless generations of the dead. There might have been millions of them, mouthless, putrid, pushing their way through cobblestones and cellar walls, through floors and foundations. A wave of the rotting dead, rising up through the city. Amberwich would drown in corpses.
“Kaz,” he said, his voice rasping. He reached up and held the back of Kaz’s neck. His palm slid against his gritty skin. He turned his head. Pressed his mouth to Kaz’s cheek, and tasted dust. “End it. End it, please.”
Kaz let out a juddering breath and then a whimper and lay still.
The dead men crumpled.
In the city, the bells continued to ring out for a long time.
Chapter 19
A CLOUD of dust hung over the King’s Hill like fog.
Min wrenched his aching body off the ground at last and climbed to his feet. He tugged his shirt out of the neckline of his tunic, breathing through the sweat-damp cloth in a vain effort not to choke. He leaned down to help Kaz up and then Robert. They were both as dusty as an old maid’s dowry chest, and Robert had a dark patch of blood on his side that was slowly growing larger.
Min blinked dumbly at the massive pile of rubble that had once been the Iron Tower and then blinked again as a dust-covered cat appeared somewhere near the top of it and then picked a dainty path toward the ground. Taavi. Chirpy swooped
down to follow her.
“Sabadine.” It was possibly the redheaded man who spoke from underneath a mask of dusk. “Your fae has destroyed my tower!”
“Half fae,” Robert said stonily. “Sire.”
Definitely the king, then.
“And with the rest of them at our gates!”
Min snorted, his shirt puffing out from his nose.
The king stared at him. “Who the fuck are you even?”
“Aramin Decourcey,” Min said, giving a short bow and a bonus flourish of his hand. “At your service, sire. And it does strike me that, yes, while you no longer possess a tower, all of the iron is still here, so it’s probably very likely that the Hidden Lord is still unable to enter the city. The properties of the iron remain, after all, even if their configuration is somewhat… scattered.”
The king opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. He pointed a dirty finger at Robert. “You knowingly brought a necromancer into the Iron Tower.”
“Yes, sire,” Robert said. “Into the Iron Tower, whilst wearing an iron collar, both of which should have prevented him from using his Gift. Forgive me for not predicting an entirely unprecedented event.”
Min wondered if Robert’s open wound had made him susceptible to infection by Min’s virulent strain of sarcasm or if the death of his father had led him to rediscover his balls. Either way, Min liked him a lot more today than he had last night. He might even be tempted to drink a beer with the man if they managed to walk away from this and not end up swinging from a gibbet instead. So long as Robert paid the tab.
“Sire,” Min said in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. “Of course you are angry. This morning you had a tower, and now you do not. I am not a man who has ever possessed a tower, but I imagine that if I were, then the loss of one would be very upsetting. But you are alive, and isn’t that what really matters?”
The king stared at him, and then at Robert. “Who is this fool?”
“Aramin Decourcey,” Min repeated. “Fool, void, and the reason that you and your sorcerers aren’t currently painting the walls of your former tower with your own guts.”