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I love her.

It was an emotion I no longer recognized. Love wasn’t sweet and pure. Love crept slowly, like a river rising, seeping into the earth, saturating it, spilling over the banks, drowning everything in its wake.

Nedra stood and shrugged out of her cloak. I scrambled up and helped her with the fasteners. The cloth fell away, exposing a plain beige chemise underneath. I looked at the snaking scars on what remained of her left arm, unusually long and puckered, as if the arm had been ripped from her, not cut.

I made myself look at the scars, still fresh, raw, and pink. At first to see if there was infection or any pain I could help take away. But then to make myself imagine how it had felt. I wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to her.

When I looked up from her arm, I saw Nedra watching me. Waiting for me to comment.

“You’re still beautiful,” I said.

She shook her head, disappointed. “Oh, Grey,” she replied. “How do you always know to say just the wrong thing?”

I frowned, unsure.

What was this thing between us? It didn’t feel like before, at school. It was different, deeper and darker, but perhaps more real. My eyes drifted to the chain that held her iron crucible. We needed to talk about the plague. What Lord Commander Ostrum had told me.

As soon as I spoke, I knew the spell between us would be over. We would not be able to face each other anymore; we would have to face our mutual enemy. Selfishly, I wanted to do nothing but stay here, the heavy ticking of the giant clock wrapping around us, and forget aboutthe world and death and necromancy and everything, everything else forever.

But I couldn’t let the plague continue. I opened my mouth to speak.

Nedra sighed and leaned toward me, resting her head on my shoulder.

We had kissed—many times—before. We had come close to doing more than kissing. But that moment, with her hair falling down my back, her skin’s warmth seeping through my shirt, her weight leaned against me, was more intimate than anything we’d done before.

SIXTY-THREE

Nedra

Grey pulled back,purpose in his gaze.

I knew it from the moment he had looked at my iron crucible. He had not come back for me. He had another reason.

“Why did you come here, Grey?” I asked, my voice as tired as my body.

He took a deep breath. “Ned, there’s another necromancer.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “I noticed. What with all the plague victims that keep dying.”

He reached for me, to grip my arms, but there was only one for him to touch. “No,” he said, letting his other hand drop, “you don’t understand. It’s the Emperor.”

I gaped at him. “The Emperor?”

Grey nodded. “He’s hiding in the castle, not because he was afraid of catching the plague, but because that part of the castle was made by Wellebourne. It’s protected by necromantic runes.”

I held my hands up, pausing Grey, trying to process this information. TheEmperor? But Grey explained it all—the revolution attempts, the plague, the conspiracies. I couldn’t hide my joy when I learned Master Ostrum was still alive—and not just cleared of charges, but vindicated and promoted to Lord Commander.

“We have to stop the Emperor,” I said.

“Master Ostrum said we have to kill him.”

I could tell Grey was uncomfortable with the idea, but it didn’t bother me. Kill the necromancer, kill the necromancy. Once a necromancer died, every necromantic action dissolves. My heart tugged, thinking of Ernesta. She only lived—with what little life she had—while I did. The same was true of all my revenants.

“But how can we reach him?” I asked. “If Wellebourne himself built that part of the castle...”

“Ostrum said we needed your crucible.”

My hand went unconsciously to the iron bead. Despite the fact that it rested between my breasts, the metal was ice cold. So too, I found, was my heart. The Emperor had done all this to me, to my people? He had let loose a plague that devastated the neediest on my island, simply to prove a point to some restless, spoiled, rich people who thought taxes were too high?