by May Peterson
Not with him gone.
I’d thrown him and everything else in a bet on Piero—and lost.
She looked at me with the jagged shock of someone who’d just understood.
Her sins, like mine, would not be forgiven. Because the consequences would roll on anyway. Her shame had been enough for Serafina to step right in and take possession. Enough to keep it hidden, even if it meant this.
For a moment, all I could see was the faint shaking of her shoulders, the line of her back. Then, without transition, she vanished into air.
Cecilio lifted upward, a smear of misery. “I’ll go to her.”
My nod was slow, numb. Someone should go to her.
Goddammit, Piero.
It wasn’t our curse.
I made for the cellar.
Piero’s body was buried separately from the others. Two lovers had been sculpted into murderers, transformed against their wills to oppose me. It was a feast of poisons, fed to me by a hand so careful it was almost nurturing. By someone who’d counted on time, who had access to every door. Piero the killer was like Eirlys the killer, a hallucinogen so lethal I hadn’t tasted it going down.
A presence appeared at my side. Rosemary. “I don’t wish for you to be alone right now, my lord.” She sounded tight, apprehensive.
“You—” She should leave. But it made no difference now. “Thank you.”
Bursting through the entrance, I ran up the hillock. The ghost tree’s perfume was thick and wild. I was running low on blood, and the power of the water and flowers felt intoxicating. “I need to go to Mio.”
“Not like this. Facing the witch now would accomplish nothing.”
Except further injury for Mio. I ground my teeth.
“Cecilio will find Her Ladyship. Just...stay here. I’ll fetch some food.”
Wafting down the hill, she didn’t so much as brush the flowers. I really should thank her. For always being such a cool head. For always being there.
The blood in my heart froze. Always. Her being here had been a stroke of luck. I turned slowly to look at her.
No. No, no, no.
“Rosemary.”
She paused. “Yes?”
I wanted to be wrong. So badly I almost didn’t ask her. But under the ghost-light, a catalytic calm filled me. And I knew I was right. “How did you get the second letter to Serafina without leaving the estate?”
Her brows knit. “My lord?”
“It was on our stationery. She had to have received it at the exact same time as the first. You didn’t have much time to act, and your curse binds you to the property.”
She crossed an arm over her chest, frown deepening. “Do you truly think to accuse me of this?”
She was so familiar. Her tightly bound hair, calm demeanor. She and Cecilio were almost as much a part of me as the noble bear spirit was. But that familiarity was becoming alien before my eyes. Reality was chipping apart, the raw, diseased truth showing through at last.
Epiphanies exploded through me faster than I could put them into words. “It was staring me straight in the face. The person who died right before me was you. You ‘found’ Eirlys’s body, and you declared it a suicide. Eirlys couldn’t so much as speak a word for herself—perfect setup.”
She might have protested, then, her mouth slightly open. Yet as I spoke, a change passed over her. The demure professionalism, the unassuming warmth, all fell like a veil to the ground. What remained almost stopped my heart. Serafina Gianbellicci, with her bale and sorcery, could never have produced a look so heavy with iron and murder.
“The answer is banal, really.” She took one precise step closer. “I slipped my letter into the same envelope. Who checks a letter once it’s sealed? But as usual, you ask the wrong questions.”
I was panting. Her straightforward admission caught me around the throat. She was the unseen hand. All that had kept me from seeing it has been my belief that first Eirlys, then Piero, would be to blame. Everything had always been her, all the damage she’d carefully carved into me. The killer.
She was a ghost facing off a bear-soul on his own turf, and yet my heart was screaming in my chest. “All right. Who killed you?”
The corner of her mouth flicked up, but her eyes remained dead. “It was General Santonino, believe it or not. Isn’t that the truest of ironies? Now he was a fast adapter, much like Eirlys. She killed him; his spirit rose again to kill me, with none of you the wiser before I disposed of him. The difference between them was that he saw through the ruse. He always saw me for who I was, right from the beginning.”
Somehow, her referring to Eirlys by name made her seem like a new person, as if she’d stepped out of a hollow in the Rosemary I had known.
Possibilities flamed into existence. “Don’t tell me. You were another one of his collection of lovers, only your feelings were decidedly stronger than his. And then he falls for me. Bad enough he picks someone else, but he has to carry out the affair right in front of you.”
“Ah, Rhodry. You are a romantic, right down to your black core.” She was closing the distance between us like encroaching mist. “No, my partnership with the general was...intellectual. That of a common vision. I didn’t care then who Piero fucked, and I don’t care now. Not that I failed to see your blossoming dalliance. You covered for yourself rather poorly, and Piero never had the heart for deceit. Secrecy leaves too many vulnerabilities.”
I swallowed against my dry throat. “But not for you?”
“No.” The lilt in her voice bordered on wistful. “Not for me. My only real vulnerability, Piero solved.” She gestured at her incorporeity. “My murder was perhaps the greatest favor he could have rendered. I would never have held on to humanity so long, had I known how fully ghosthood surpassed it.”
My foot slammed into a root, sending me sprawling over the dirt. I scrambled to support myself on the tree. I should have been angry. Mighty with fury. This was my land, and I was its lord. But waves of stifling, humiliating terror smothered all else. She was the shadow that had controlled my perceptions for years. The reason Mio was gone.
“Those are your chains binding the souls. Your curse.” Oh, God.
She nodded, quietly, triumphantly, as if accepting praise.
“So what the fuck did you do to Piero?”
“His soul was the first I bound. I willed him to be buried, as far into the Deep as could be. And the incubus obeyed.” She described this with medical detachment. My visions filled in the gaps, of her rising with sudden virulence upon her death, the incubus wreathed about her with new power. No mere ghost, but an unclean spirit. “This is when I learned how much influence death had given me over the incubus. Trust that you will never encounter Piero again.”
And I had blamed him. I had wanted to drag him to hell, when he was already there. Tangled in chains so deep that he didn’t even surface in my nightmares. I had loved him, and hated him, and he’d been reduced to virtual nothingness.
Gasps shook me. “Tell me why. You and Piero have some fucked-up murder bond. Why start to begin with? Why bother with any of us mere mortals? Why Eirlys?”
The self-command that had taken me years to accrue was gone almost instantly. It was clear what I asked, even if I could not say the words why me?
“Why?” Surprise broke through her detachment. “Yes, I suppose you would want to know.”
The chinks in her riddles were closing again, slowing the flow of realizations. She paused, as if we were still employer and servant, discussing dinner plans. My blood supply was too low. I needed to finish this, and fast.
Rosemary floated gently in circles above the bodies. “I served for twenty years, in two wars. I must have treated more POWs than there are grains of sand on the earth. It’s said the only certainty in life is death, but I learned of another certainty altogether: pain. Pain will outpace death every time,
and leave more ruin behind. Everyone thinks the aftermath is weakness, or anger. But if I could diagnose any true sign of pain having marked a life, it would be guilt.
“Some of my patients had committed truly unspeakable acts. Rape. Murder. Drinking their comrades’ blood in hope of quickening. But the most exquisite, simplistic guilt was that of those who merely survived. They avoided death, and forgiveness had slipped away with it.”
As she moved, she changed like a shadow adapting to the light. The color in her faded; her lines became harder. She became purest white.
This is what she looked like, under the mask.
“At first the treatments were simple. An added dose in the syringe, the slip of a scalpel at the throat. Understand that I aimed not to relieve them. Some I cared not to relieve, given their crimes. My goal was merely to close the circle. The world fills up with the weight of its wounds, and it is intolerable. Everything had become poisoned, and my only way out was to begin wiping it clean.
“I continued this work after the first war—until it all changed. Out of nothing, a force arose to walk beside me. With each new death, it grew.”
My eyes widened. “The incubus.” She wasn’t just bound by it. She was the true progenitor of the curse of House Bedefyr.
“Indeed.” A smile, pale as bone, touched her face. She might have been savoring lush memories. “You should have heeded your sorcerer. A simple affair could never have yielded a curse so potent. It is the amassed proof of my work. I knew that if any peace was to be mine, I must bring it to fruition. Yet its power cut me, as well; it cursed my subjects into afterlife. Imagine the difficulty as one after another, each of the slain rose again as a ghost.”
My head was swimming. “You had to make sure your victims didn’t know who killed them, or you’d be fucked. Hence the subterfuge. I bet Rosemary Cropper isn’t even your real name.”
Her unblinking white gaze glared like the patina of a fever.
“I see how it happened. You relied on the incubus to take you to places concentrated with the most suffering. Where the dead wouldn’t be missed. Hospitals. Orphanages. War camps.”
She descended toward me, a cloud of deadly vapor. “Your home.”
Tears stung my eyes. The refugees and soldiers that filled my personal image of hell, that swam in the ghost swarm at the gate of the Deep. Each life tied to the trinkets in my room, lives discarded like garbage. Behind it all had been Rosemary, sheaving through the ranks. And I’d taken her in and given her a monthly stipend.
“Piero found out somehow.” I wrestled not to break into sobs. “About the incubus. Did you tell him why it existed?”
“He knew enough. That it was the child of war and loss. He was the only person I ever told—until you.” The affection in that confession made me squirm. “Piero believed in an antidote to death. That decay could be turned back. In me, he found such a hope. My incubus could be used to crack open the passage to eternal afterlife. We hoped it could be severed from me, preserved as a source of redemption. All those who died near it had a nigh perfect chance of becoming a phantom. An elixir to cure mortality.”
I made myself face her ominous stare. “And you saw him as a way to disconnect from the incubus so that you wouldn’t have a trail of ghosts following you. Until I got in the way. I’m guessing Piero lost interest when he had me to play with. But that doesn’t explain why Eirlys. She was the victim that began all this. But she wasn’t guilty or dying from some wound you couldn’t tolerate. She was humane in battle, healthy, strong. Why not kill me? I was the one who sinned.”
Rosemary’s brow wrinkled, as if with fondness. “You miscomprehend my purpose. She is perhaps my greatest masterpiece, beside the incubus. Into her strength, I delivered great suffering in the space of hours, the collapse of everything she loved. Like the incubus, she is mine, yet she alone defies me. Before I have won free, I will shatter her spirit as I have shattered all others who fought.”
It was enough. While she spoke, I beckoned the darkness that had resurrected me. Stainless and black, it unbound the rage in my heart. I had invited her here. I would see her gone. Straightening my back like a beast under the moon, I snarled the noble spirit’s disgust. “The fuck you will.”
And tried to exorcise her.
Now that I had seen Rosemary with her corpselike rheum, the gaze that had been watching me all this time, I simply wanted it out of my sight.
Moon glow scattered across my vision. When the sparks cleared, she remained unmoved. Not so much as a wind ruffled her hair.
Slowly, I backed into the tree. “What the fuck are you?” Even the incubus should have flickered.
She lifted the hem of her skirt and, with ritual grace, lowered one ghostly foot to the ground. Her voice rose like a hiss. “I am death.”
Decay spread from her like flames.
The flowers died. The roots at her feet shriveled, blackness streaking through them toward the tree’s heart. I slipped against the ghost tree behind me, my hand pulling away damp.
Blood. Blood, dark and still warm, springing from the trunk as though it were weeping.
“Do you yet fail to understand?” Her voice reverberated through my mind. “A bear-soul in the strength of his domain should at least have warded off an incubus through exile. Yet you could not. It draws its power from me! The curse upon you is mine. While it traps you, your virtues are nothing to me! And it is beautiful, for no sin of yours earned it. No struggle could have freed you from it. All you needed do was agree to it.”
The ghost tree shook as if in agony. I saw myself, falling on Eirlys’s sword. Sealing the oath. It may as well have been Rosemary’s weapon, skewering me to her curse.
“To think that you would dare command me now, my lord.”
Out of the rotting dirt streamed a chattering, like thousands of jaws snapping. I flinched in horror as masses tore free from the earth, each one a stab of promise. They looked like bones, misshapen and sharp—but this was not bone.
It was metal. Silver. Knifelike shapes, undulating as if molten, exploded from under the bodies. The smell of it burned. It had to be hundreds of pieces, everything from silverware to broken chains to old weapons, buried there with the dead. Silver she’d been collecting. Every piece I had given her for removal. For a ghost to possess a piece of silver at all, let alone so much at once—
“The only flaw in my afterlife is that I am contained to this place. Had the noble spirit not redeemed you, all would have been accomplished. You slowed my work to a trickle, and each death that might have won me freedom, you sanctified. Still I might have chosen a gentler end for you—if not for your gravest mistake.”
“You’re going to have to narrow it down.” I gasped, the silvered air taking my breath away.
“Bringing your sorcerer into this house. Many things in this world are grim, but his powers are a violation beyond forgiveness. Had he been in full possession of his voice, ah. Then would I have been tested. But rest assured that when I have quit this place, I will waste no time purging Mio from existence.”
The silver fell as gleaming rain. Needles without number, piercing wherever skin could be pierced. It didn’t so much hurt as it destroyed. My consciousness became one prolonged cataclysm, invasion and destruction and humiliation.
The gnashing stopped, an instant or an eternity later, and blackness dragged me under.
Chapter Seventeen
MIO
A tired rain covered our departure from Rhodry’s house.
Mamma kept her arm around my shoulder. The drops were so barely palpable they could have been illusions. All I seemed to feel was the weight of her arm. Tibario remained a step ahead of us.
The city was ominously quiet. Tibario slinked forth to scan the path into the streets, but found no one but vagabonds. Even the beggars were thinned, as if avoiding the rain. Or the cloud of Mamma’s wrath.
No
w that my voce de cielo was fully awake, her aura slammed into me like fumes. There was more than wrath to it.
We hadn’t even made it home. But in a dark passage, obscuring the streetlights, she stopped. Mechanically, I stopped with her. For a few seconds she was still, like she couldn’t go on anymore. The rain caressed our cheeks, and Tibario turned to watch her. We waited.
The light of her eye was gone. Her arm fell away, and she shifted to face me. “I’m sorry, Mio.” Her voice was thick.
The thought kept tumbling around in my head. Which parts was she apologizing for? Which parts did she recognize as wrong?
When she spoke again, it was as soft as the rain. “Why are you coming back?”
Tibario jerked, touched her arm. “Mother. Please. No more, I am begging you. It’s done.”
Whirling, she swatted away Tibario’s hand, seized both his shoulders. She looked like she was going to strangle him. Instead, she pulled him to her chest. An angry sob issued from it. “It is not done! Nothing is done. You were dead! His fucking ghost killed you and I felt it happen. How can I ever forgive that? In his house, and you were dead.”
I stared. My sanity must have been coming loose. I couldn’t grasp why she was so angry. She was acting like the violence had nothing to do with her.
“I’m not dead anymore.” Tibario’s words were raspy, strained.
She pushed back as if he’d slapped her. “And why are you coming back, if I’m the one you fear? You could have run. Any clowder on the continent would accept you.”
Once more, my voice returned to me. “Because there’s no place on earth where you wouldn’t have found him. And taken him in an instant.”
That made her look at me. Her face was invisible. But I half expected her to demand, Is that what you think of me? Except she knew better. That was exactly what I thought of her.
She drew a breath. “I was trying to keep you both from harm.” Each word was gritted out.
Anger tightened my chest. “Mamma, you used me against the Prince Elector. How, precisely, was that keeping me from harm? That was the harm.”