Page 61 of The Second Death of Locke

twenty-six

S AFELY TETHERED, GREY LED the way back toward the fortress at the highest point of the Isle.

Her body moved without her telling it the directions, sinking into the inheritance of muscle memory her brain barely recalled.

She kept one hand in Kier’s, unable to let go; the other, she draped awkwardly across his chest, making sure his collarbone had healed.

Though she could not heal him with power alone on the mainland, she could feel his bones under her hand now, knitting back together as her power poured into him.

“Do the others know? About you?”

“Brit, Ola and Eron did already.”

“I mean the High Lord. And Cleoc.”

“Oh. Yes.”

He glanced at her sideways. Grey only shrugged. She had too many emotions right now to deal with any of them, and the reality of being on Locke was closing in on her.

She could barely breathe with the crush of power swirling around the island.

It was like pressure all about her—when she was young, she remembered it as a stomach ache, but that wasn’t quite right.

It was like electricity in the air, crackling through her lungs when she drew breath, sticky on her skin.

Kier was not unaffected either. He looked down at Grey, her hand on his chest as she poured power into him.

“I think…” He stopped, looking up at the fortress as they breached the edge of the Ghostwood, back out into the mist of the day.

The fog rolled in, heavy from the sea. He frowned, and Grey treasured every expression his face made even as she wanted to rub her thumb across his lips to smooth away any unhappiness.

“You feeling okay?”

“I feel… like everything is trying to give me power,” he said. “But that’s…” Impossible . He didn’t say impossible.

“We have a lot to talk about,” Grey said. She did not think she could look into his eyes and tell him about his death, still cold on his bones and heavy on her heart, nor the decisions she had to make regarding it—but first, she had to tell him that he, too, was Locke.

They passed through the walls, under the open portcullis, to where the hulking stone keep waited. She sucked a breath through her teeth, staring up at the great doors.

“Is it as you remembered it?” he asked, his voice still rough with seawater.

“Yes,” Grey said. Kier looked at her. Very gently, he took her hand and removed it from his chest. He no longer bore any trace of unfamiliarity at all.

She was pretty sure his ribs were stable enough for now, his collarbone mended. All over again, she was struck with the power of the Isle: it would’ve taken her hours, maybe days, to gradually do the same sort of work in Scaela, if she’d been able to do it at all.

“Are there bodies inside?” Kier asked, hesitating. Not fearful—just preparing.

“No,” Grey said, looking away. “I don’t know what’s left of them, if anything. The feast was… in the town. Further down.”

He nodded. He pressed a hand to the solid wood of the door. The knocker in the middle was carved to look like a seabird, a ring of fire clutched in its beak. The door was untouched by rot or sea, as if it hadn’t spent the last two decades submerged.

He offered Grey his other hand. She laced her bloody, wet fingers through his, then raised her other hand, set it beside Kier’s on the wooden door. Together, they pushed it open.

The wood creaked, then gave, revealing a stone entry; all these years, it had been unlatched, as if waiting just for her.

Grey took it in, gaze skating over the tapestries on the walls, untouched by age; the great stone staircase with the banister she and Sev used to slide down again and again until their grandmother scolded them.

The sconces on the walls still bore fat, waxy candles, half-melted.

She sucked a breath through her teeth, stepping into the home of her childhood like she was shedding time.

She kept her fingers locked in Kier’s as he followed a step behind her.

She walked carefully, wet boots squeaking on the stone floor.

She led him through the entry, through an archway to the right: this was the dining hall, with its great windows looking out to the sea.

She pressed her free hand to the cold glass.

The fog still surrounded them on all sides, leaving the world white and formless.

“We won’t be able to see anyone coming,” she said.

“I know. What do you think about this fog? Is it normal?”

Grey shook her head, thinking back to the Ghostwood. “I don’t know if the Isle is fully restored yet,” she said cautiously. “We should have some time before we need to worry.”

“It feels like we’re already shielded,” Kier said softly, curiously.

Protect me , she had asked the Isle, and it had listened. “That must be the fog. I think it’s only temporary,” she said. Even with just her power, she could feel that much.

“I can assess the shielding,” he said. He made a low noise at the force of power that hit him when he siphoned, wincing at it. “Isn’t that too much?”

Grey shook her head. She was not depleted in the slightest. “Not here,” she said. “Nothing is too much here.”

Kier was silent for a moment. She watched his face— Do you know? Do you feel it in your heart? Does death still chill you to the bone?

“I have so many questions,” he murmured finally, and Grey watched a second shield shimmer into existence.

She felt it, strong and whole, a bubble of protection over only the fortress.

Perhaps it would not hold, if anyone came in earnest, but it was a chance she felt safe taking.

It was larger than any shield he’d cast before, by far—and it seemed to cost him nothing.

“It’s temporary,” he said.

She turned back to him. Here, she felt oddly shy, as if he had not seen every part of her. Like this was the one thing she could not convince him to love.

What is love without freedom? She pushed the thought away before it could take root. There would be time to confront what she must choose. For now, she would revel in the simple fact that he was alive.

“Come on,” she said. She avoided the back parlor and kitchen and ballroom—there were too many memories to sort through, and she was not ready to deal with what she might find. Dull horror pounded in her heart. She was not ready. She could not face it.

Instead, she led Kier up the stairs, up and up and up, onto the turret roof where she and Sev used to greet the sunset. The wind whipped at their hair, and the roof of Kier’s shield looked almost close enough to touch.

Grey sucked in a breath, taking in the Isle spread out below them.

There was the sparse shadow of the Ghostwood, mist creeping through the trees, and on the cliffs at one edge, the crumbling remains of the old abbey.

There, beyond the wood, she could see the small houses and great hall of Osar, some of them burned by Eprain’s forces; then, further down, the harbor and the half-burned town of Maerin, and the remnants of the villages dotted between the two towns.

To the far side of the Isle, she took in the Barrens, the uninhabited stretch of trees and mountains; the fortress was the highest point, but the Barrens were a close second.

It was all still and silent, ghost villages for a phantom lord.

From this height, she could see the entire Isle.

She turned away, back to the mist of the sea. A ruined Locke, but hers all the same.

“There will be time,” Kier said, gently touching her back.

She made him sit against the wall and removed his shirt.

There, where she could see the whole Isle and all that surrounded it, where she could see the first sign of trouble, she called the power to her.

She felt it moving from the Isle into her middle, then radiating outward, flexing all the way to her fingertips.

When she pressed her hand to Kier’s half-healed injuries, he flinched.

“That will take some getting used to,” he said, eyes sliding shut.

“Does it feel different?” Grey asked. It did to her, a bit—not in the feeling; power was power, even on Locke. It was the extent that had changed, and the quality of it. She didn’t think she’d ever find the end of it, her own middle constantly refilled by the Isle around her.

“Very,” Kier said. He pressed a hand over hers—Grey had gone back to knitting the bones of his ribs back together.

This, she mused, pushing the power into him as she tried to construct them in her mind, would be something she would not have the power, liberty or skill to do on the mainland.

She nudged the threads of magic under his skin.

His eyes slid open, pupils blown wide. He looked half-drunk.

“How so?” she asked.

“It feels…” He considered this, gaze rolling back, staring at the misty white of the sky. His nose wrinkled, the effect only marginally ruined by the crookedness from the last time he broke it. “It feels like you,” he said finally. “All of it. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that.”

She leaned against the stone next to him, her hand still tightly laced in his.

She tried not to think of the moldering piles of bones and fabric that were waiting for them in Osar’s hall—to think of that would be to think of what those bones had once been, and every time her thoughts edged along that, it did something very odd to her heart and throat and stomach and the relationship between the aforementioned organs.

They were here, waiting. They had always been here, waiting, every moment of the sixteen years she had spent away from this place; every single heartbeat in which she was alive and they were not.

She bit it all down in one clean slice, because once she started, she would not be able to stop.

“Can you try to explain?” she asked Kier, desperate for distraction.