by May Peterson
One other watched with it. Rosemary. Her pale form shone gray in the erratic shadows. She did not rage. She did not sing or celebrate.
When I approached, she slid me a cool smile. “Well done, my lord. Piero was not mistaken in you. I know not if any other soul could have produced this. But surely yours has.” Her smiled broadened, its implications ripening. “But know that you have set me free.”
Yes. I must have. No other way existed for this curse to be undone. I had no answer to the being she had become—something beyond a ghost.
She levitated upward through the branches, her expression hardening. “Do you suppose yourself strong enough to exorcise me to the depths? That I have need of this?” She gestured like a sword strike at the incubus. “I am free. No flesh in this city—nay, on earth—is beyond me now. You have won the redemption you promised—and granted me my heart’s desire!”
Rosemary flew in a ring above us like a bird of prey, gathering her dark wings around her. Over the other ghosts’ exultation rose her scalding laughter. The power was yet within me to forbid her, but I could not protect all of Vermagna, let alone the whole world. She turned upward, as if reaching for the divine, and sped to the roof of the cave.
Except something stopped her midflight. A weight, grasping at her ankle. It was a manacle.
A new chain of perfect ice.
“No—” Rosemary clawed at it, but the ice was unyielding.
I looked to Eirlys. She, too, was no longer singing. Only hovering above the bodies with her palm outstretched. Snow mustered gently in her hands.
Her smile held no malice. She would have deserved to gloat. But it looked like the face of the orphan girl. Tears still glittered in her eyes—tears of release.
The snow condensed into bands around Rosemary’s ankles and wrists. She tugged against their weight. “No!”
Yes. I had only purified the curse on Eirlys, both that of her death and that binding her to Rosemary. My virtue had done nothing to extinguish the vow she’d sworn so long ago, the same vow that had made her immune to the incubus. That vow burned now unconstrained. This was her choice. That she would finally avenge herself.
“I swear a new vow, Rosemary.” Her voice. Oh, God, it had been so long. “You will never be free. So long as my spirit moves, you will not harm one single living thing again. Not. One.”
Ice crystallized over Rosemary as though she were turning to stone. It froze her ability to struggle, encased her in a translucent globe. Her cry of denial was silenced as the ice closed around her head. The ice was holy, bright as the oath that had made it. Their battle was over. Eirlys had won.
Lowering her hands, Eirlys relinquished the crystal across the Verge. It drifted with its prisoner into the darkness until its glow winked out.
* * *
I smoothed Mio’s hair back from his brow. The delicate layer of snow around where I’d laid him, at the ghost tree’s base, made him look ageless and mythical.
“Rhodry.” Eirlys was hushed. “Tell me he’ll survive.”
Hearing her voice again felt amazing, much like hearing Mio. I couldn’t take simple speech for granted ever again.
Mio’s shirt was still open, exposing the precious landscape of his chest. It rose and fell gently.
“I hope so.” I took a deep breath. “He’s breathing.”
The souls had all but gone now; a few lingered like breaths of perfume. The Verge was closing; the last pair of joined hands departed. My ghost tree illuminated the cave like a nascent moon.
We saw no sign of Rosemary. Eirlys had dealt to her the same fate Rosemary’d given Piero. That was perhaps my one lasting regret. In the end, Piero had also been a victim, even if he had served Rosemary. And I could do fuck-all for him.
I ran my thumb over the vulnerable arc of Mio’s neck. The curse mark remained. It was no longer black but thinned to a pale blue. Almost like an old bruise, so faint it glistened.
I sighed. “I don’t understand. The curse on him should have been purified along with everything else. His mark is still there.”
A voice joined from the other side of the tree. “Because it is a curse mark no more.”
Ah. One other remained with us. The three of us turned to meet it. The incubus approached, diaphanous as a cloud. It took us in with new emotions on its face, shivering like a soap bubble that could pop at any second.
Hell if I had any idea how to deal with it. Could I trust it? The transformation Mio had made possible within it had to be so deep that nothing remained untouched. And the source of its poison was gone.
“What exactly does that mean?” Eirlys spoke delicately, as though afraid the incubus might break.
“He and I have been linked.” It touched its own throat. “He brought me into his own heart. I do not know if we can be disentangled now. You see? I bear his mark on me, as well.” It gestured at its appearance, the resemblance to Mio that still colored its features. “And yet—may I?”
It was asking for permission to come nearer? If that didn’t beat the shit out of literally everything. “All right.”
It floated over Mio, looking down into his sleeping face. “So this is what it means—to live and to die.”
Not what I wanted to hear. But then it surprised me. Its expression crumpled into grief, then joy, in turns. And with the slowness of a ceremony, it started to sing.
The same melody that Mio had carried into the Deep, that had permeated the voices of the ghosts, made their chains light. The song Mio had given to it. When it stopped, it drooped down as if it’d given too much of its new self to the effort.
It was enough. Mio stirred on my lap. When I looked down, his eyes were opening. “Rhodry?”
I hugged him, maybe a bit too hard. Call me impulsive.
He squeaked for a moment, then spoke, muffled, into my shoulder. “Is this...death?”
Cecilio laughed and wiped his eyes. Eirlys stroked the top of Mio’s head. “Whatever this is, it’s not death. Trust me.”
He jolted up, staring. “Eirlys...your voice. How—” He looked to me, then her again, in confusion.
Eirlys made eye contact with me, the corner of her mouth turning up. “Rhodry broke the curse.”
Mio couldn’t seem to help himself. He dissolved into tears, reaching for her, then throwing his arms around me. I let him hide his face in my chest, savored the way he leaned on me as sobs rocked him.
“They have gone.” The incubus sounded abruptly intense, as if just realizing something overwhelming. “They were once everything. Now, I am only me.”
Mio sniffled, rubbing his eyes with his tattered sleeve and looking up at the incubus. “You can choose now. Your heart survived its birth.”
Survived. That word seized me by the throat. Of course. That was what had changed. Mio had simply found it—the song inside the incubus. That was why it hadn’t dissipated with the curse. The incubus could finally decide what to be—and the moment it’d been Rosemary’s creature no longer, her dominion had crumbled.
It had survived. We had survived.
“What are you going to do now?” I tried to sound like I wasn’t about to cry myself.
The incubus met my eyes for what felt like the first time. “I do not know what I am now. The curse has passed. And there is a new sorrow in me that I cannot fathom. I believe...that it is the sorrow called ‘guilt.’”
I winced. Nice fucking welcome to the land of the ensouled.
“I’m sorry.” Mio sighed. “You were created by pain. I left you to face that by yourself. I would take it from you if I could.”
The incubus shook its head, smile stained with melancholy. “No. I am thankful for that, too, in its way. It is my burden alone.” It examined its form again, its open hands. “I exist. I am real. That is enough.”
Snow and petals fluttered over us, a breeze descending from the open passa
ge. The incubus rose with it, crystals making a halo around it. “I will now go to find the meaning of my desire. Of the truth that I now live.”
It closed its eyes, becoming a cloud as fine as gem powder. And vanished.
We sat and waited for a time. When I turned to Eirlys, she was focused on the spot where the incubus had floated. Only she had ever been able to sense it when it was invisible, her oath binding their spirits together. I poked her shoulder. “Is it still there?”
She paused then gave me a complexly peaceful expression. “No,” she said. “It’s gone.”
Snowfall and the husks of flowers settled on the bodies of the fallen, the pieces of them they’d left behind. I was finally able to accept it. They were just dead. And it was all right.
Because they were free, too.
Mio lay in my embrace, head on my chest. His breath on my arm was soothing. Cecilio seemed to be praying, and Eirlys watched the petals fall.
After a while, I cleared my throat.
“I am fucking starving.”
Chapter Twenty-One
MIO
Two weeks later, I hadn’t heard anything from my mother.
Of course I hadn’t. She was done with me. I knew that.
But new expectations, hopes, fears, bubbled up in me each passing day. That the glint of red in the corner of my eye would be some messenger, sent by her. That she’d try to reach my mind again in the night, make one last attempt at contact. That a letter would arrive, saying she hated me, or that she was sorry, or that she missed me.
Surely Tibario would come. I’d rise before dusk and watch the hills. He’d snuck on the property before—all the easier as a cat. I watched for some sign. A ginger-colored shape. A lashing tail.
Nothing. Not one thing.
A few nights before, I’d sat for hours and stared out the window. Rhodry had appeared behind me, a soft shadow smelling of white flowers. He’d placed his big hand over mine. Then, easing me out of the chair, he’d leaned in and kissed me. So carefully, just tasting me, not rushing me to accept. I hadn’t expected it; I’d gasped involuntarily before opening to him, letting his tongue graze mine. And then he’d been all around me. Holding me.
On that day the curse broke, we rose from the cellar, and the sun was up. Rhodry practically dove headfirst into the meat locker, swallowing an entire hog. He needed everything he could stomach. I could never keep up with him, but I ate more than I had in days. We cleaned out the larder, with Cecilio tsking from behind. When Rhodry came up for breath, Cecilio daintily tossed a napkin on him.
I was apparently a cure for silver burn; my singing had let Rhodry heal completely from it. What followed was harder.
I’d gone first to my own room. My room. My bed. I hadn’t slept here since I’d first seen the incubus. But Rhodry hadn’t seemed to want to let me out of his sight. And he hadn’t needed to ask—his face did for him. If I would stay with him until sleep came.
He dozed through the day and into the night. When the moon set, he woke up, eyes bright silver coins. His breathing became fast, unnerving.
“I feel like I’m falling.” Tears fragmented the gleam of his eyes. “It won’t stop.”
I stroked his face, let his arms engulf me. “I’m catching you,” I whispered. “I followed you, and I’m catching you. And nothing can get to you now. Not through me.”
Then, I sang. The tune that I had found in the incubus, that had led me to him in the Deep. The song that had saved us. I touched my forehead to his, and just sang. After a while, he relaxed back into sleep.
I lay next to him for hours. Humming to my lord of the moon, lord of the dark, his heartbeat steady against mine.
In the days following Rosemary’s defeat, Eirlys was surprisingly quiet. She disappeared at times for hours; I’d look over the stairwell or the balcony, and Cecilio would be standing in the air, simply at attention. Waiting for her. Only these two ghosts now were left in this house.
She continued to walk its halls, through broad beams of sunlight when Rhodry was asleep. She came across me sometimes, without saying a word. Running her hands over the walls, as if learning them all over again. This house and its denizens were hers. She had finally been able to defend them.
One morning, after Rhodry’s sleep had become more restful, music beckoned me from the downstairs hall. A violin solo. I slipped out of bed with a kiss on Rhodry’s forehead and padded down the steps.
Eirlys was standing in what had been the music room. The door was open, her pale shape translucent in the dawn. She was playing the same violin that Rhodry had given to me. The one she’d played while alive. Its melody was timid, slow, but clear. She had not forgotten.
When she caught me listening, she laughed abashedly. She indicated the violin with a shrug. “I’m decidedly out of practice.”
I came to sit at the piano. “I wouldn’t mind hearing more.”
So I did. Every day. It was good, lying down with Rhodry to sleep as the sun rose, the sound of violin practice just underneath us.
One evening, Rhodry said he wanted to have a memorial.
So over the next few days, we got to work. We began uncovering the bodies from the cellar and bringing them up to the light. Rhodry started digging trenches for their new graves. Out under the sky, under the fireflies. Eirlys and Cecilio pushed the dirt away, helped him align the sites along the line of the stream. In a few nights, the meadow-side became a cemetery, clean and fresh with spring, fragrant with promise in spite of its purpose. It was a task that would have taken ages had it not been a bear-soul and two ghosts performing it.
What amazed me the most was the condition of the bodies. It seemed safer, kinder to think of them that way now—the bodies. The people they’d once been were elsewhere. What they’d left behind showed no signs of decay. The care Rhodry had given them showed in every detail—the death wounds covered, clothing repaired or fitted to hide battered flesh, faces cleaned and composed with an air of dignity. The virtue of his ghost tree had preserved them perfectly.
I wanted to do them every justice in my power, to honor the long story told in their features. I helped wherever I could, clearing the paths for burial, counting the bodies for transport, making the graves. Digging proved difficult for me—I wasn’t able to come close to keeping up with Rhodry’s pace, but it felt like an insult to give up. Until I paused to yawn, lost my footing, and pitched forward into an open grave.
Rhodry caught me deftly in one arm. He dropped his burden and picked me up, and by the time my head stopped spinning, he was setting me gently on the grass. A chuckle rumbled in his throat as he planted a kiss on my temple. “You’ve done more for us than anyone could have asked of you, lemon drop. Relax. Let us handle this.”
I sat and watched them. The two ghosts flitted in and out of light like ethereal butterflies, graceful and lit from within; they controlled their cargo with a simplicity akin to magic. Rhodry, his black hair a shaggy mess, muscles slick with sweat as he dove vigorously into his work. They moved with the intensity of people struggling toward recovery.
My time in this house, this curse, had become a deep part of me. Rewritten me somehow, so that I could no longer be what I’d been. Yet I had scarcely been here a month. For them, it had been years. It had become their whole lives—well, afterlives. This, perhaps more than Rosemary’s passing, was the end of an era for them.
I wrapped my arms around my knees and bore witness to them laying the past to rest.
Soon, neat new lines of graves dotted the hillsides.
But there was one last step: a ceremony. The next night was the night of the new moon. I suggested we have it then.
It was customary to wear red on the new moon, of course. But of the four of us, only Cecilio donned the color. It was a ghost’s prerogative, no longer fettered, to command their own appearance. He wore waistcoat and cravat of carnelian and gold, a red ribb
on on each of his perfectly buffed shoes.
I wore blue. Powder and shades of sky, which Rhodry said made me look like I was a frosted pastry. It suited me, somehow. And around my neck, stitched to a silver ribbon—a single, off-white pearl.
Eirlys and Rhodry, however, set the tone for the night. Rhodry was swathed all in one consuming shade, shoulder to the hem, looking every bit a god of the night. This was the first time I’d seen Eirlys out of her tattered death garment; she’d become a spirit of majesty, with a gown that seemed to flow on forever along with her hair. All perfect black. Rhodry’s black, the black of the Deep. Black that could never be marred, never be soiled. And they gathered props and lights, dark-clad guardians of death, as we began.
A memorial at midnight could have been depressing, if not for what a comfortably nocturnal creature I’d become—and for the rows of candles they had set in place.
I stepped forward and sang an ode. It was a song I’d written myself. The same tune as the incubus’s song, only lighter. Gentler. I wondered, briefly, if it was out there, listening.
Afterward, the four of us stood out under the new moon. With a breath, Eirlys extinguished all of the candles. The darkness was warm and familiar. Rhodry had his arms around me, sighing into the crown of my hair. We had each other. We were safe.
“It’s strange,” Cecilio said, voice intimate in the lack of light. “I’ve imagined this happening so many times, but I always pictured Rosemary here with us. She seemed part of the story, like...like she’d always be there.”
Rhodry took a deep breath. “I know. It’s like she took that from us. I never thought—”
Eirlys stopped him. “No one did. Not even me.” She paused. “Do you mourn her?”
Cecilio produced a noncommittal noise. “Maybe I mourn the person she could have been. That she seemed to be. The friend who spent the days with me. That person...never really existed, did she?”