She shook her head.
“You could talk yourself into the worst places. You could believe that a moment’s anger described the whole of you forever and ever, that a random bad thought somehow made you a bad person. You could decide that you weren’t good enough for me on the bad days. You might not remember them. I do.
“I remember all the days, Emma. I wouldn’t let you decide that you weren’t good enough for me on the hard days. Remember? Because that was my choice to make, not yours.”
She shook her head again. Words failed her utterly, but she did remember. She remembered the insecurity and the excitement of the early, early days. The fear, and the jealousies that she tried so hard to banish. She’d forgotten them; it was easy to forget because the loss had been so profound.
“Don’t choose for me. I’d give my life for you if I still had it. This is as close I come in the afterlife. Let me do this. I know you. I know who you are. And I know your name.”
“I don’t know how,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to turn you into—” something that looked nothing like Nathan.
He nodded and turned to the magar. The magar’s pursed lips failed to move. But Emma heard her voice anyway. You are not old enough, boy. You have not yet learned that form is habit and limitation. She turned to look at her daughter.
Helmi snorted. She reached out with both hands for Nathan. Her hands should have passed through him. They didn’t. Emma didn’t understand why—but she realized that Helmi’s hands were the same color as the light shed by the lantern.
“I know what to do,” she told Nathan. “If you’re stupid enough to do this on purpose.”
His smile was crooked. “I don’t want her to die.” He stared at Helmi’s hands. “Why can you touch me?”
“The lantern,” Helmi replied. “And no, before you ask, it only works on the dead. You still can’t touch her without freezing her. Are you going to ask stupid questions for the rest of her life? ’Cause if you are, that’s going to be measured in minutes.”
Nathan fell silent.
“You can stop him,” the magar told Emma, watching her youngest daughter holding onto the only person Emma thought she would ever love.
She almost did. She had to struggle with her visceral reaction to do what he had asked: to give him the choice. To respect it. He wasn’t Anne or Rose. He wasn’t a child. He understood what would happen.
And he understood Emma. The magar had said the words that Reyna had chosen to describe herself were words that were also relevant to Emma. She had said it dismissively, as if those words weren’t actually important.
They were important to Nathan. He walked to the periphery of the circle, knelt, and placed one hand on the rock beneath his ghostly feet. The rock began to absorb him. Helmi said, and did, nothing that Emma could see, but the light that was Nathan faded.
The dead didn’t need to breathe; the living did. She forgot how.
Helmi turned to Emma and to her mother and shrugged. And then, to Emma’s shock, Helmi also began to fade.
The magar said nothing. She simply watched. Emma glanced briefly at the closed door and then did the same.
Words began to emerge, recreating the circumference of the depleted circle. But they weren’t like the words that had lifted themselves into the air in the lantern’s light. They were English words. Words she recognized.
“It is not the form,” the magar said, although Emma hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t. “It is never the form.”
The first word was Love. The word that followed was Hope. The third word was Fear, and the fourth, Courage. The fifth—Loyalty—made her eyes tear. The sixth was not a word she would have chosen for herself—but she would have chosen none of them so far, except perhaps fear.
Responsible.
She smiled.
Kind.
The word that followed kind was Ignorant, which made her laugh out loud. That wasn’t a Nathan word—clearly Helmi had opinions. And even if the word was unkind, it was true. Emma did not know what she was doing. She only knew the why.
The last word was Strength. She shook her head, denying it. She wasn’t certain if Nathan was saying she was strong in his eyes, or if he was urging her to be stronger—but it didn’t matter. This circle was like a love letter. Nathan hadn’t been a big letter writer, but then again, neither had Emma. So, this was the first love letter.
She stepped over the circumference that was almost complete, and she folded her legs, sitting in the circle; she looked up at Chase and found that he was wavering in her vision in a dangerous way. But she didn’t care.
He said nothing. He offered no sympathy, no advice. He shook his head. “Circle’s not for me,” he told her, drawing daggers.
The last two words to emerge were the words that completed the circle in which Emma sat. Her name. Emma Hall. She set the lantern in her lap and met the magar’s steady gaze.
“Helmi,” the old woman said, although no sign of her daughter remained. “I am proud of you. If you had lived, you would have become a better guardian, a better guide, than Reyna.” Her lips twisted. “And perhaps better than your mother, as well.”
The words were now grooves in flat stone. They had no ears, no faces, no way of receiving information, and no way of broadcasting it.
But a final word pushed itself into the circle, squeezed and cramped because it was not the shortest of English words. It was also misspelled.
GRATITUD.
Emma liked it. Death had made it hard to feel gratitude. Hard to feel grateful for what she had, the loss was so enormous, the pain of it permeating everything. But she still had her mother—who was not the magar. She had Allison. She had Michael and Amy and Petal. She had a school life she had once enjoyed and might enjoy again, given effort and time. She had a roof over her head, and food on the table, and a mother who made certain that both of those things kept happening.
She had so much more than Reyna had had on the day of Eric’s death. None of it excused Reyna’s choices or actions since that day, but maybe it explained some of it. Maybe. Broken people did broken things; it was an act of will to change the course that violence and death laid over a life. She’d seen it in Scoros, in his memories of Reyna, in Chase. Emma had been hurt. She hadn’t been broken.
She looked toward the wall that Michael had seen as a door. She closed her eyes, although that changed very, very little in the room. But as she lifted her chin she saw, at last, what Michael meant. She remained in the circle, but she left it as well, just as she had done when she had gone in search of Scoros the first time.
She now went in search of him for the last time.
NONE OF THE DEAD tried to stop her. None of them moved. As she left the circle, she turned back to look at herself; she was seated, cross-legged, in the circle, the lantern in her crooked lap.
As Michael had said, there was a door where smooth, curved wall had been. As doors went, it looked like something that belonged to a closet; it was neither large nor particularly impressive. Emma walked toward it.
“You will not be able to open that door,” a familiar voice said. The magar.
Emma grimaced. “You can see the door now?”
“No. You can see it now. But you are not particularly opaque.”
Emma reached the door and placed a hand against it. Her hand passed through its surface.
“Maybe I don’t need to open it.” But she frowned. What she had assumed were scratches and wear were, on closer inspection, badly carved words. She couldn’t read them, but she recognized the etching for what it was.
“Those words,” she said to the magar. “The ones on the lantern. You said the living couldn’t hear them.”
The magar was silent. Emma took this as agreement.
“But we can see them.”
More silence.
“Your daughter could see them. I
think these words are meant to be the words on the lantern’s sheath.”
“They won’t have the same power. They won’t have the same meaning.”
“This door can’t be seen by the living. It can’t be seen by the dead.” Speaking, Emma lifted the lantern. She wasn’t surprised when it came to her hand; it wasn’t a physical artifact. “Reyna saw the lantern.”
“When I held it, yes. She did not have it to study. If you are correct—and I allow the possibility—she wrote from memory. She had a very good memory for the things that hurt her.”
“The lantern?”
“She wanted it. I refused to give it to her.”
Ah. “The lantern is physical. You pushed it into my hands the first night we met.” Frowning, she held it up to the door, to the less polished, less perfect words scratched into the surface, as if with a pen. “Magar—how was the lantern made?”
“We do not know.”
Frowning, Emma turned to look over her shoulder. She saw Chase Loern, moving outside the periphery of her circle. She saw the dead; they had turned toward her—but of course they had. She held the light aloft.
Emma pressed the lantern into the door’s surface. Light stretched and spread across wood that was far too irregular, far too blemished, to be anything but real. With her free hand, she touched the door again, and this time, her hand met resistance. It was not like the doors she’d opened—or tried to open, or beat her fists against—in Scoros’ memory. It was solid, but it wasn’t; it didn’t feel like an actual door.
The handle—and it had one—didn’t feel like a handle, either. Michael had been able to touch the door. He hadn’t been able to open it. The only person in the room with a professed ability to pick locks hadn’t been able to see it.
Emma gripped the handle. It was warm, which she hadn’t expected. She opened the door as the light across its surface faded. In the distance, she heard Chase curse.
• • •
The room behind the door was the size of a closet. It contained almost nothing that Emma could see. It was dark; there was a small table, a single stool. Emma wasn’t certain what she had expected to find. Memories, maybe. That was how she had gathered the rest of Scoros.
Walking into his memories had been involuntary. She’d done nothing except walk out of the circle—a circle that guaranteed no safety from the dead. She faced this room in a circle that now did. Maybe that’s why there was nothing here but silence and stillness in a cramped, tiny space.
She couldn’t imagine the Queen ever sitting in that chair; she couldn’t imagine the Queen sitting at this table.
“Scoros,” she called. The lantern in her hand rose as she spoke his name.
She felt his presence as he walked through her. He was still mostly shade and shadow to her eye, although he had the outline and general features of an older man. He approached the table; she thought his head was bowed.
He took the single chair. As he sat, he placed his forearms on the tabletop, entwining his hands. For one long moment, he seemed to study the tabletop. The table itself, like the door, looked old, almost unfinished; it lacked the grandeur of every other piece of furniture in these chambers.
It was real.
“Scoros.”
He lifted his head slowly. He looked old, to Emma—much older than he had looked in any other memory. He was bearded, but the beard was patchy; his brows were a crust of iron gray above the bridge of his prominent nose. His eyes were brown—but a brown that was dark enough she couldn’t distinguish it from pupil. He wore robes that seemed threadbare. She might have mistaken him for a monk of the kind that wandered across historical flashbacks on television.
“Scoros,” she said again.
His eyes focused slowly. “Reyna.”
“No,” she replied, her voice gentling without effort. “I’m Emma.” She held out her right hand.
Her named confused him, which Emma hadn’t expected. She glanced over her shoulder; the door was still open.
“The candle,” he said quietly. “The candle is not lit.” He looked at the center of the empty tabletop. So did Emma. What he saw, she didn’t see; there was no candle here. Scoros’ memory didn’t cause a candle to materialize, either. This room was real. The candle that he expected was probably real as well, and she didn’t have one.
“What is the candle meant to do?” she asked him.
His eyes flickered again, brushing across her face as if he couldn’t actually see it.
“Burn,” he replied.
She approached him, moving slowly as if afraid to startle him. His gaze brushed past her as she did, coming to rest at the table’s center.
“Magar, what was the purpose of a candle?”
“We did not use candles,” the old woman replied. “We did not hide rooms, or mark them in the fashion this one was marked. We did not bind and imprison the dead—they did that to themselves. It was our duty to release them from bindings, not to add to them.”
Scoros frowned.
Emma walked around the chair, searching for the thin, golden line that meant he was bound to a Necromancer. There was no such line.
As Emma searched with growing concern, another woman entered the room—Scoros’ mother. She looked very much as if she wanted to either slap her son or push him off his chair. Anger came easily to her expression, nestling into lines carved there by use and time.
She couldn’t slap her son, though. It was the first thing she tried; her hand passed through his face. He frowned, blinked. She bent and shouted in his ear, which was even less successful.
“I don’t think he can hear you,” Emma told the woman.
“No.” She looked at Emma, and beneath the anger, there was a hint of fear. “He hears Reyna. He only ever heard Reyna.”
Emma understood why Scoros’ mother thought it; she even understood the bitterness in the statement. But she knew it wasn’t completely true. He obeyed Reyna. In a fashion, he loved her. He supported her. He had tried to make her feel safe—and that had been an utter failure.
Emma turned toward the part of the Queen’s chambers she could see through the open, narrow door. She spoke two names, and two young girls walked toward her. Anne and Rose.
The mother glanced at them, frowning. She didn’t recognize the girls. Scoros, however, did. They were the first thing to truly grab and hold his attention; he could see Emma, but not clearly enough to acknowledge her.
His eyes widened as the girls approached him. It was the first fear he’d shown since she’d opened this door.
“Do you hate him?” Emma asked Anne.
Anne glanced at her. “Do you?”
She almost said she didn’t know him well enough to hate him, but that was untrue. She knew Scoros better than she knew most of the people she’d ever met or interacted with. “No. But he didn’t kill me. He didn’t kill my sister.”
“No?” she asked, and Emma almost said, ‘I don’t have a sister’. But she realized that it was the hatred the girl was questioning.
“No. To find him the first time, I had to live through a lot of his life. As him. I’m not sure you can truly hate someone you’ve been.”
“He tried to protect us.”
After he’d murdered you both. Emma nodded.
Anne took his left hand. Rose took his right. What Scoros’ mother couldn’t accomplish, the children could. “The lantern,” Anne said. She smiled, her expression at odds with her age. Or maybe not; it was gentle and even protective. “That’s what the other girl said.”
Emma blinked.
“You gave the girls—and Helmi—your hands. You did not release them.”
“I did.”
“No, Emma, you didn’t. You didn’t bind them; they were free to leave you. Come. My daughter will be here in minutes.”
• • •
Scoros rose. He
left the chair. The two girls—one on either hand—dragged him to his feet, looking for all the world like young daughters ganging up on a favorite uncle. His expression shifted as he left the chair, his eyes sharpening, their color lightening. He looked around the room—the closet—blinking rapidly. And then he looked at the lantern, and he froze.
“Magar,” he whispered.
Emma turned to her right, but the magar wasn’t there. A voice from her left said, gently, “He is speaking to you, girl.”
Emma shook her head. “I’m not your magar. I’m Emma. We’ve met before.”
Anne reached Emma first. She held out her free hand, and Emma took it. Then Anne passed Scoros’ hand into hers. Her eyes were shining. They were the eyes of the dead, but they were brimming with light, and the light looked, for a moment, like tears.
Emma realized then what was wrong with Scoros: His eyes were brown. Or black. Or some color in between. They were not the eyes of the dead. This Scoros was like a memory.
Yes.
“Scoros,” Emma said—to the brown-eyed man. “I need your help.” She held the hand; it felt weathered, old—but not cold. She wondered, then, whether this was a side-effect of the lantern.
“To do what?” the older man asked, eyes narrowing as he glanced past Emma to the doorway.
“To save the citadel,” Emma replied.
“If the citadel’s safety is your concern, magar, leave me.”
She swallowed. “It’s not. I don’t care what happens to the citadel.” That was also a lie. She tried again. “I do care what happens to the citadel. I want to unmake it. I want to free the dead. But I can’t do that until the living are safe. If I try to destroy what the Queen has built now, we’re all going to die.”
He frowned.
“The citadel is flying.”
“Impossible.”
“No. Maybe it was impossible when you were actually alive.”
Again he frowned, glancing at Anne and Rose, at the open door, and at the table. “I am not dead.”
Emma grimaced. She had no time to argue with him, and she had no choice. But she didn’t, couldn’t, understand how he could be here, trapped in this semblance of life, and be there, everywhere, trapped as the dead were trapped.
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