Page 64 of The Second Death of Locke

twenty-seven

B EHIND HER, KIER SUCKED in a breath. Grey could only stare, her heart in her throat.

The door opened outwards, which was good, because the pile of bodies on the other side would’ve stopped it.

But that wasn’t what made her stand there unmoving in shock.

Hazy sunlight streamed through the high windows, catching the dust motes in the air.

The bodies were piled on the floor, over the tables, slung on chairs.

Most of them had no visible injuries, nothing at all to say they were doing any more than sleeping.

Some had clearly died in the struggle, run through with swords and stained with brown dried blood.

She did not look to the front of the room, the dais.

It was all there, she thought with growing dread, as if time had not touched the Isle since the moment her power submerged it. She was a girl again, eight years old, waiting for death to catch her.

They were not bones, like she’d prepared for; not moth-eaten fabric and dust. They were flesh and blood, with open eyes and mouths and teeth and tongues, wearing masks of death and pain and fear. It was as if time had not touched the Isle in sixteen years, suspended forever in that awful night.

“Gods,” Kier said behind her. She heard the sound of metal as he drew his sword, but there was no reason for it. The assemblage in front of them was not simply sleeping, like the lost court in a fairytale. They all were dead.

Dread settled in Grey’s heart as she stepped further into the room. She saw the soldiers from Eprain mixed among her own people, in various states of battle interrupted. The truth of it settled on her skin, a terrible realization sixteen years too late.

The battle hadn’t killed them all. No, even with Eprain’s soldiers, even after Locke herself had fallen, most of these people were still alive. It was something else that had ended them—a shock wave, a protection; the power of the Isle shutting down.

Grey had killed them. She remembered what Scaelas had told her: to save her, to save the line, it had required the sacrifice of everyone else.

She fell to her knees on the stones, narrowly missing the first of the bodies. “I didn’t know,” she said, helpless, because Kier must’ve gathered the truth of what he saw.

Behind her, he only sighed and sheathed his sword.

She heard another sound, rustling and shifting, and came out of her horrified stupor to find him leaning over one of the fallen women, clad in a black gown as if already mourning.

He shut her eyes carefully, then picked her up in his arms. Without another word, he turned for the door.

“What are you doing?” she asked, numb with agony.

He only looked at her. “It’s the way of Locke,” he said finally, “to return their ashes to the sea.” There was no hatred in his gaze. No judgment. He turned and left, carrying his grisly cargo as carefully as he would his own bride.

She felt hours pass as they worked, separating the dead into two pyres.

The larger pile, close to the cliffs, was for Locke’s dead.

The second, much smaller, was for Eprain’s.

Kier carried body after body out of the hall, shutting their eyes, laying them down in tidy rows in the same way he treated the dead after battle.

He used his magic to help them, bearing most of the weight of the bodies, so it was as easy as moving stones around instead of grown people.

Grey helped when she could, but she had to leave often to vomit, horrified all over again by the truth of what she’d done.

They did not approach the dais. She sensed that Kier was waiting for her to go first, but she could not do it. Not now. Not yet.

Outside, the mist did not change. The sun did not set. There were no gulls, and no waves. After a while, Kier, wiping sweat from his face with one filthy sleeve as he passed her on the stairs, said, “I don’t think time is passing.”

Grey looked up at the mist, the shield shimmering above. “I think you’re right.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

They glanced at each other, uneasy. They were a quarter of the way through clearing the hall, Grey’s body aching with the strain.

There were a few hundred dead there, she thought; she was frightened to think of what the houses would hold, or to consider the grueling work of going through all of them.

“Are you tired?” she asked.

“No,” Kier said, his face uncertain. “I’m not sure I feel… normal.”

Grey nodded. “Then let’s keep going.”

She lost herself in the awful work. She dragged the bodies through the hall, close to the door, then Kier came and took them to the pyres he was building. It would’ve been easier, she thought darkly, to have set the whole cathedral ablaze.

She found her grandmother unexpectedly, pulling the body of one of Eprain’s soldiers by the arms to reveal the small woman crushed beneath him.

She gasped, staggering back—Kier was there in an instant, reading the fear through the tether as if she was facing an unknown threat and not the gaping chasm of her own grief; his hands were on her shoulders before she could recover.

She looked at the woman’s pale, shriveled face, and the hands that had taught her to sew, and she turned and walked out.

Kier found her sitting at the edge of the cliffs, her legs dangling over the edge, tears cold on her face. She’d been sick again, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t think she’d ever stop being sick over this.

He didn’t say anything until he was sitting next to her, his legs hanging alongside hers over the steep drop.

“Have I ever told you,” he said, “that I’m afraid of heights?”

She squinted at him. “No.”

“Good. It’s because I didn’t think I was until this very moment.” He looked down at the sheer drop in front of them and the gloom below, and his face paled.

“It was a mistake to come back,” Grey said.

He reached out and laid his hand over hers. “There’s nothing that can be done now. We’ll get through the worst of it, and then we will keep on living.”

She winced. It cut too close to her own lies, and the truth she had not yet told him. “They’re all dead because of me.”

He did not deny it. “There are hundreds of others in countries all over Idistra who are dead because of me.” And you , he did not say.

“But what did these people do, besides live here? They did not hurt me, nor fight me. Many of them would’ve fought for me, if given the chance.”

He nodded, the eerie silence like a blanket over them. “You can do nothing to change that.”

She laughed bitterly. “I could burn it all down. The entire Isle.”

“You could,” he said.

But you won’t , he did not say.

She stared out at the mist, out at nothing. After a while, Kier got up and went to continue with the bodies. She did not know how long she sat there, motionless, before he came back behind her and said, “I think I’ve found your parents.”

She got up and followed him back to the cathedral. She noticed a lone body lying away from the two organized pyres: it was her grandmother, set aside to be buried in the Ghostwood. She swallowed her bile down and did not ask Kier how he’d known.

The cathedral was nearly empty of bodies when she went back in, stepping carefully across the bloodstained stones.

The table at the dais was in disarray: smashed goblets and dark wine stains on the tablecloth, mixing with the blood.

Grey made her way to the stairs, Kier one step behind—and then she stopped.

Her mother was the one who had taught her to use her power, eking it out in tremulous threads from the time she was barely old enough to walk or speak full sentences.

Though she had a reputation for swift justice, she was never cruel to her own daughter, who was often found clinging to her skirts.

And Isaak, a mage from Scaela’s noble class, used to make speckled magelights in the shape of constellations on the ceiling of her bedroom, then lie next to her and point out the names and shapes of each one.

They were now two bodies, eyes closed as if they were only sleeping, entwined in front of the tomb that was meant to hold Retarik’s bones.

Grey moved past the bodies that surrounded them in concentric circles, wrapped in thorny vines that pierced their flesh—whatever her father had done in his dying moments had flattened them all—and lowered herself very carefully beside them.

She knew the dark green velvet of the dress, remembered the feeling of it on her cheek as her mother carried her to bed dozens of times.

She reached out and ran her hand along the line of her father’s sword, out of its scabbard, still clutched in his hand.

The other hand rested on the dark velvet of her mother’s waist. When Grey’s eyes traced up to her mother’s face, she saw what memory could not fill in, what she had not realized fully looking at her ghost with anger in the Ghostwood: she herself looked like a carefully made copy of her mother.

“I’m sorry,” she said, the grief bubbling up like it never had before. She couldn’t breathe—all the magic in the world didn’t matter; it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t bring them back.

She didn’t hear Kier until he was behind her, kneeling, one arm snaking around her shoulders.

She reached out to grip his forearm, nails digging in, and leaned back against him, unable to keep herself up, his other arm wrapped around her waist like he could protect her from all the awful things that had happened all those years before.

He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. She tucked her head, hiding it in the shelter of his body, and sobbed.

When she was done, wrung out and exhausted, Kier was still there. “I need to do it,” she said shakily, pulling away from the tangle of limbs.

He let her. He stood by as she took one of the linen sheets.

Ever so carefully, she shifted her parents’ bodies onto it.

She recovered her father’s sword and set it aside, her mother’s silver necklace, the rings they’d inherited from Alma’s parents and the signet ring of Locke.

Once she’d folded the sheet over, she sat back on her knees and stared at the bundle of tidy white cloth, tied off and ready for the grave.

“Obsidian born and iron made,” Kier murmured. She used to say it to him, like a prayer, as she stitched his wounds together after battle.

She looked at him, something inexplicable rising within her. Perhaps all she wanted, after all this time, was to be soft.

The last body she needed waited for her in the basement.

Kier followed her, quiet as a ghost, as she retraced the steps she’d run as a child.

The stone chamber was a burned-out shell.

There was no body where Severin had been—there were only shards and fragments, bones embedded in the walls, a tooth in one corner.

But she felt the spirit of him here, like a revenant, as if he’d been waiting for her this whole time. She sucked a breath through her teeth, certain she could hear her brother’s laugh, that she could feel the press of his hand on hers.

“Sev?” she asked, turning, as if she’d catch the edge of his shadow on the wall.

But there was nothing. Only disaster. Only ash and bone.

The pyres crackled with unnatural mageflame as they set off back to the Ghostwood, the cart loaded with their grisly cargo. “We should keep the ashes of Eprain,” Kier said, “to return to their nation.”

Grey only nodded.

In the clearing where the Lockes were laid to rest, Grey picked up one of the shovels Kier had thought to bring.

She found a spot unmarked by stones, past the line of graves, and started digging.

Wordlessly, Kier took the other shovel and started on the other end.

He seemed to understand that she needed the ache of this last task, that she had to do this.

Carefully, they dug a grave for her parents and grandmother and what was left of her brother, for those who had sacrificed everything for her survival.

When it was finished, they each took an end of the heavy tied-off sheets, the awkwardness of their weight, and laid them carefully in the open grave.

In another lifetime, if she had made another choice, she would be laying Kier to rest with their bodies.

She watched, kneeling at the edge, as Kier tipped in shovelful after shovelful of rocky dirt. For a half-second of unrepressed grief, she thought about climbing in with them.

She had to tell him the truth. She had to make him understand the decision she had before her. She opened her mouth, searching for words—then closed it. She could not do it.

A hand reached down when it was finished, caked in dirt and grime. “Come on, Locke,” Kier said.

She took his hand. Side by side, they made their way home.