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I sat on the floor, my back resting against Papa’s side of the bed, his worn slippers by my knees, and I pulled the books from his shelf.

I opened an old leather-bound Oryon-illuminated manuscript, each page decorated with gold and silver paint, the words handwritten in fading brownish-red ink. There was no title, just three faded stars on the cover representing Oryous, the three-in-one god, past, present, and future. He has seen me grow up, he is with me now, he knows what I will do in the future. He knew, he knows, he will know forever.

I leaned over the book, squinting through the embellished letters. The old tongue wasn’t an easy language to learn, but I sounded out the opening passages, partly from memory. They were about faith and love and forgiveness and acceptance, but my parents were still dead and gone, and none of these words would ever make that okay. I knew it, I know it, I will know it forever.

I closed the giant book and leaned down, resting my forehead against the cover. Hundreds of years ago, someone pressed heavy stamps into the leather to decorate the book, and someone else bound the pages that had been toiled over by someone else, and every single someone from so long ago had done that for this moment, to reach out to another they’d never know and hope the words meant something.

They didn’t.

But when I leaned back up, I saw not the words, but the love and work and hope that led to their creation, and maybethatmeant something. Maybe.

I pulled down the next volume. An old atlas, with lines marking the Empire’s reach, the maps now incorrect. The mainland and capital city hadn’t moved, but the Emperor’s rule now stretched deep into Siber to the east, Enja to the south, and into the sea, into islands like this one. Pockets of colonies scattered across countries, each one with a new regent ruler like Governor Adelaide, each one serving under the Emperor. I wondered if the governors in Siber or Enja had ever experienced a civil war like we had so many years ago. I wondered if they still felt the repercussions, a century later. I wondered if some people scratched arrows on old buildings and whispered about another rebellion; I wondered if the Emperor knew or cared.

I shut the book with more force than I’d intended. What did I care about the rest of the world when my own was crumbling down around me?

I reached for the next book.

The cover was so worn I couldn’t read the title embossed into the tan leather. I opened it carefully; the paper was thin as onionskin.

It was an alchemical text, but handwritten in an older style, not Standard Imperial. Hope surged within me as I recognized some of the runes. Finally, finally, here was a book that may help me.

“Neddie?”

I was so startled that I dropped the book, losing my place. “Ernesta!” I snapped, impatient.

She shrank against the doorframe as if I’d hit her.

“What?” I said in a softer tone.

“Nothing.” She slipped back into the hallway, silent as a petal falling.

I rolled my eyes and carefully picked the book back up, my fingers peeling the thin pages apart. She had spent almost the whole week huddled on her bed and had chosen now to interrupt me.

The ink was faded and the light was failing, but I read anyway. My head ached. The book was mostly full of warnings about the evils of necromancy, but then I found what I was looking for.

“A skilled necromancer manipulates both death and life,” the book said near the middle. “Death comes in many forms. Perhaps the easiest to manufacture is by means of a plague. The necromancer’s hand can be seen by the black stain of the victim’s blood.”

“This is it,” I whispered to the dark. Proof, finally, that the plague really was caused by necromancy. My hands trembled as I turned the page.

But there was nothing else. No hint of how the plague was made, exactly, or how to stop it, short of killing the necromancer. “No,” I whispered, turning the thin paper so frantically that several pages ripped.

What good was knowing the cause if I still didn’t have a cure?

•••

“Nessie?” I said gently on the seventh day. She didn’t lift her head, but she opened her eyes.

Dehydration,my student brain thought, taking in her symptoms—sunken eyes, sallow skin, ashen look.Lack of vitamins and sunlight. Depression.I had spent so much time trying to ignore reality that I hadn’t taken a proper look at my sister since this nightmare started.

“It’s time,” I said.

“Time?”

“We can go.”

From outside, we could hear a bell. “Brysstain family!” a male voice called from outside. “Do any of you still live?”

Ernesta wouldn’t put the quilt down. She carried it wrapped around her shoulders, the end dragging on the floor behind her, as westaggered down the hall together. I went to the front room door but stopped. We could go out the back. We went through the kitchen. Only dry goods left on the table—some beans, flour, salt.