by Beth Revis
“We’re not completely ignorant, Father,” I said. I’d heard Salis and Tomus talking. Salis had always been a history nut, but she was taking her studies of Bennum Wellebourne to new heights, recasting his rebellion as something heroic, not horrific. Treason was treason, even if it was dressed up as righteous rebellion. “Tomus said—”
Father grunted in approval. “I like that Tomus boy.”
“You should bring him with you during winter holiday,” Mother added.
“But I don’t care what he thinks. What do you think?” Father demanded. There was an eager light in his eyes, a hunger I didn’t recognize. The meeting at the governor’s inauguration had been a test; this was an offer.
“Do you really believe we’re on the brink of revolution? Lunar Island is not ‘suffering under the chains of oppression,’” I said, rolling my eyes as I repeated Tomus’s argument.
“Taxes have increased exponentially—” Father started.
“Good,” I snapped back. “Maybe they could go toward helping alleviate the overcrowded quarantine hospital. Or,” I added, my eyes narrowing, “the taxes could buy some soap, as you so eloquently put it.”
“They can buy their own damn soap!” Father said, slamming the jam jar on the table so hard that the chicken quivered.
“Oh, what does it matter?” I shot back, my own voice rising. Mother groaned, but I ignored her. “What will it take for you to realize there are more important things than politics?”
Without another word, Father pushed away from the table and left the room. He ignored Mother’s pleas to stay.
“Well, this is simply wonderful,” Mother said sarcastically, throwing her napkin on the table. Her shoulders hunched in defeat.
No one deserves such aggressive indifference, I thought. I stood and wrapped my arms around my mother’s shoulders. She leaned into me, her body relaxing. Then she patted my hand. “Go on,” she said. “Go back to school.”
I didn’t look back as I left the house where I had been raised. It had never been my home anyway.
FIFTEEN
Nedra
Ernesta had sent me several quick notes throughout the semester. They were little things, dashed off in her barely legible scrawl, the ink smudged as if she wrote them only moments before giving them to the postmaster. Mama burned all the bread because she couldn’t quit reading—I see where you get it from, she’d write, or, Papa just got back and brought me jelly candies. I ate them all and left you none; that’s what you get for leaving me. She followed the last one with a quick doodle of herself, cheeks stuffed with sweets, and me, clutching my stomach as if I were starving.
But the letter I’d received for Burial Day was thick, pages and pages not just from her, but from Mama and Papa as well.
Reading their words made me homesick. This would be my first holiday without them. I had never wanted to spend my entire life in my little village beyond the carmellina gate, but I also wished I could slip my family into my pocket and take them with me. I folded the pages and placed them back in the envelope, then tucked it safely into my hip bag. That would have to do.
Grey was already waiting for me, sitting on a bench outside the dormitories. His head was bent, his hands clasped over his knees, almost like he was praying, but there was a hollow expression in his eyes belying that idea. When he looked up at me, his smile cracked across every dark thought that had been etched on his face.
I wove my arm through his and led him to the gate. “How was breakfast with your parents?” I asked.
Grey groaned.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “They can’t be that bad.”
“They really can.”
My fingers clenched in the crook of his arm.
“Sorry,” he said, looking down at me. “I know you miss your parents.”
I offered him a grateful smile, touched that he noticed what had remained unspoken.
“So, what does a village celebration of Burial Day entail?” Grey asked.
“You’ll see,” I chirped. “I asked around at the hospital—this city isn’t completely devoid of celebrations.”
We veered downhill, following the same street that I had traveled when I first arrived in Northface Harbor. We heard the revelry before we saw it. The street was overrun with people. Everyone who could play an instrument did, the sound of joy made audible. The warm scent of honey bread wove through the streets. It didn’t take us long to find a cart selling buns for a copper. Grey bought us each one, then went back and bought five more.
“Told you they were good,” I said, smirking.
“How have I never had this before?” Crumbs flew from his mouth, his cheeks puffed like a chipmunk’s.
I laughed, drawing him deeper into the festivities. We passed a mob of dancers and had to weave our arms through theirs, kicking our legs up high in the traditional skeleton dance as we moved through the crowd, winding past a group of children who tried to encircle us, chanting the nursery rhyme “Crows and Bones.” Their faces were painted in black feathers and silvery skulls. I knew to break their hands and duck out of the circle before they finished singing, but Grey was trapped and had to pay the children a toll of another copper before they let him go.
“This is so much fun!” Grey shouted above the cacophony.
I grinned at him. A part of me was still sad to be without my parents, but this street festival was far larger than anything my village had ever put on, and it was a good distraction.
Old men and women walked through the crowd, handing anyone unadorned a bright red poppy-bud flower. Grey tried to offer the woman who gave him a flower another copper, but she spit at the ground, shaking her head.
“You don’t pay for that,” I told him, taking the bud from his hands and pinning it to his jacket.
Grey looked confused, but it was too loud to explain. How did he not know the traditions? The crimson flowers represented the blood of the war; you cannot pay for blood with coins.
“How do you celebrate Burial Day?” I asked. We were close to the dock now, and the intoxicating smell of a fish fry was drowning out the sweet, warm honey from the carts uphill. I pulled Grey to a bench that faced an empty wooden platform that had been built in the street from used pallets. The pubs along the docks had flung open their doors, serving pints on the street, but they started calling for last orders.
“It’s just a day out of school,” Grey said. “A break before midterms.”
I gave him a dubious look.
“I know what Burial Day is for, obviously,” he said. “It’s just that no one celebrates it.”
The chimes rang six times. The music died down, the dancing stopped. The loud celebrations faded away to nothing in mere moments.
“What’s happening?” Grey asked me in a whisper I wouldn’t have been able to hear a minute ago.
“Today’s not about the party.” Holidays were also holy days.
The crowd in the street parted, everyone moving to the sidewalks, leaving the cobblestone bare. A moment later, the doors of all the church halls up and down the street opened, and the Elders of each one formed a small parade, walking solemnly down the center of the lane. They mounted the wooden platform and dropped to their knees, the soft thuds echoing as loudly as bells tolling.
I slipped from the bench, letting my knees hit the paving stones. Everyone in the crowd did the same, including, after a moment of looking around, Grey.
The church halls in this part of the city comprised people from the north who’d moved south to work in the factories. They kept the old ways. The Elders chanted the prayer of Peace in Death, and my lips formed the words, murmuring them along with the hundreds of others who had gathered for the celebration. Beside me, Grey kept his head bent respectfully, but he stumbled over the words until he finally gave up. Even though the Empire’s official religion was Oryon, it was clear the north was more reve
rent than the south.
The words were the same that my family spoke every year on Burial Day. I shut my eyes. I pretended that I was home, my knees in the dirt instead of on paving stones. I imagined that it was Nessie beside me, not Grey.
As the prayer ended, I touched Grey’s elbow, letting him know we could stand again. “That was lovely,” he whispered into my ear. His warm breath sent chills down my spine.
In my village, now would be the time the blacksmith passed out iron rings, and we’d all go to the burial ground and place a circle on a different grave. Burial Day was about remembering the history of Lunar Island and promising to never make the same mistakes again. Maybe that’s why the north remembered it more than the south; during Bennum Wellebourne’s revolution, he took the bodies of the northerners, raising them from their graves.
There was a story about it in my great-grandmother’s journal. When she was alive, there were still people who remembered seeing the dead claw their way up through the earth, their fingers bloody and broken, their eyes rotting from their heads, their jaws slack. Bennum Wellebourne needed an army to lead against the Emperor, and necromancy provided one.
Before he was captured, Wellebourne had been sailing across the Azure Sea with his undead soldiers, intending to take over the whole Empire. Because his army was dead, he let them drag along the boat behind him. They would not drown. When Wellebourne hung for his crimes, his revenants died again—the necromancer’s power died with him. The bloated corpses floated to the shore, and the tides brought them to the center of the island, the place where Dilada had gotten a job to clear the forest. Villagers had gone down, identifying which of the corpses had been their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. They returned them to the graves they’d left and placed iron circles over the raw earth in the hopes that the old superstition would keep the dead where they had been planted.
But there were no graves in Northface Harbor; the city was too cramped to waste space on empty earth, aside from the Gardens. Cremation was more common here. As I wondered what would happen next, the Elders and acolytes of the church halls started to pass out small iron rings. A teenage boy handed Grey and me one each. A single nail, bent and hammered into a curved circle.
“What do we do with this?” Grey asked, looking at the ring in his hand. He stuck two fingers through the metal and wiggled them.
My attention, however, was on the wooden platform up the street. While the Elders were still passing out the rings, someone else had arrived at the stage. “That’s the governor,” I said in awe, recognizing her from the news sheets. A ripple of murmurs spread throughout the crowd; everyone shared my shock that the governor would come to the Burial Day celebration at the docks herself.
Governor Adelaide was maybe a decade older than my mother. Slender and tall, she carried herself with assurance and grace. She wore the embroidered pallium that marked her position as governor. Her hair was done up in a crown of braids; a more traditional style, one favored by farmers and factory workers—and me.
“Friends,” she said, spreading her hands wide. “I am honored to be a guest of the Elders today, and to take part in the remembrance of one of the most important days in Lunar Island history.”
A smattering of applause interrupted her, but most people didn’t clap, either because the solemnity of the prayer still weighed on them or, like me, they were still surprised to see Governor Adelaide here.
“I know that today’s celebrations are more bittersweet than they usually are. I know that times are not easy now. The plague that has swept through our community has weighed heavily on my shoulders.”
I did not miss that she called it “our” community, and neither did anyone else. We were used to being ignored by the government. Even at the hospital, which was funded by the governor and had been for a century and a half, there was constant concern that the doors wouldn’t remain open. Frugal Frue was stingy with potions for a reason.
“Please know that I am doing all I can,” Governor Adelaide continued. Her voice choked with real emotion. “My own alchemists have been working on the plague and nothing else since I first became aware of the problem. And today, I would like to offer everyone a chance both to continue the traditions of Burial Day and to remember those we’ve lost more recently.”
Governor Adelaide swept her hands toward the dock. Grey and I turned with the rest of the crowd and saw three barges pulling up. Murmurs rose from the crowd again. My fingers curled around the iron ring.
“These boats will run until sundown, or until everyone has had a chance to mourn and remember,” the governor said, her voice respectful. “Those who wish to visit the city grave may. I also invite you all to join me in the church halls for prayers.”
I turned back around to stare up at the governor. Her chin was tilted up, her spine straight, but it was clear that she was on the brink of crying. “It is no easy thing to lead a city faced with an enemy that cannot be fought,” she said, her voice lower. “But I will fight with you all.”
Cheers erupted throughout the crowd, the sound ringing out so loudly that I thought perhaps even my parents across the bay could hear it.
Grey and I were close to the docks, so we were able to board one of the barges in the first voyage across the bay. He stood at my side, his arm wrapped around me for warmth as the crowded boat plowed through the gentle waves.
Lunar Island was shaped like a crescent, the ends high above sea level and capped with cliffs, the center low with rolling hills and forests. Or, it had once held forests. Now there was a large clearing, black marks in the red soil the only remnant of the trees that had once stood there. Rather than individual graves, long trenches had been dug, filled, and covered again. Dark reddish-brown lines scarred the field in more or less straight lines. The first lines, the ones closest to the road, were only fifteen meters or so long. The mounds grew longer and longer as they neared the forest.
The barge bumped against the dock, and my stomach roiled with the movement. “It’s so big,” I said in a low voice, but Grey didn’t hear me. I clutched my iron circle, the sharp end of the nail pricking my skin.
Working at the hospital, I had seen plenty of death, but not like this, not all at once, with the very earth etched in long tally marks to record just how much had already been lost.
Grey reached for my hand, and I wove my fingers through his, clutching him, letting his warmth root me to this moment.
As we drew closer to the graves, I tried to count the long trenches, to guess how many bodies slept under the earth, but my eyes blurred.
I thought of Jax and Ronan, who had come so desperately to the quarantine hospital from a village in the north. Was their mother in one of these unmarked trenches?
All around me, people knelt, kissing their iron nails and then pressing them into the red earth, their lips mumbling the last phrases of the Prayer for the Dead. They touched the three knots tied into the cords around their necks before they stood and headed back to the barge.
I dropped to my knees, dragging Grey down beside me. I squeezed the iron ring in my hand so hard that it hurt, but I didn’t care.
I didn’t say the Prayer for the Dead.
I prayed—with all my heart and soul—that my family would be safe from graves like these. It was a sin, and I knew it. I should pray for the peace of those already gone. But the other prayers spoken today would have to serve; there was no other plea in my heart.
SIXTEEN
Grey
The barge was silent as it returned to Northface Harbor. I wrapped my arm around Nedra, holding her close as the boat pushed through a cold fog. I had never been a deeply religious person, but the murmured prayers over the mass grave weighed on me in a way I had not expected.
We climbed the hill back up to Yūgen without talking, Nedra and I both lost in our thoughts. Before we reached the gates, a group of students rushed out, Tomus at the head.
“Greggori!” he shouted, waving. Even with one word, I could tell he was well on his way to drunk. “Come with us! It’s time to properly celebrate our day off!”
My fingers tightened around Nedra’s hand. Tomus’s gaze dropped to our clasped palms, and his eyes narrowed with disdain.
Nedra slipped free of my grasp.
“Ned—” I started.
“Go,” she said in a low voice. “I want to be alone anyway.”
I hesitated, but she used my uncertainty to slip through the gates of Yūgen without me.
I turned to Tomus with flashing eyes. “Now that she’s gone, come with us,” he said, indicating the girls behind him. “We’re going to the pubs.”
“We should talk,” I said, my voice low.
“We should drink,” Tomus countered, slurring the last word. “Come on. You’re so boring these days.”
The group of students with him were growing restless; many had already started down to the Eagle’s Nest for pints. I grabbed Tomus by the arm and jerked him closer to me. “Let’s talk here,” I growled. A few of the lads looked back at us, but Tomus waved his hand, dismissing them.
“Fine,” he said, his tone cold. “Let’s talk. Let’s talk about the way you’ve been ignoring us all for some country girl who got into Yūgen on charity. Let’s talk about how she gets special treatment all the time and no one says anything.”
“This isn’t about Nedra,” I said.
Tomus laughed bitterly. “Is it not? Because before she came along, you used to be my friend.”
I bit back my retort. Friend? I supposed that was what Tomus and I had been. I felt revulsion churning in my stomach—not for him, but for myself. I hadn’t known what a real friend was until I met Nedra; I had not realized how low I’d let myself sink for companionship.
“We’ve known each other since we were born,” Tomus continued. “She’s only been here a few months.” He spit the words out. “I didn’t know your loyalty was so weak.”