“Sister,” she breathed. “Why are you glowing?”
I stood abruptly, crushing wriggling maggots beneath my shoes, then stalked the length of the table, pausing beside a middle-aged gentleman with graying hair and a mustache. Well, he would have been middle-aged—if he weren’t obviously dead.
“What your magic does is not resurrection.” Distantly, I registered Irian drawing the Sky-Sword. Even more distantly, I saw Eithne rise in her chair, shaking her head more ferociously than before. “And it is far from holy.”
I buried my hands in the man’s hair—ragged and dry as straw around my fingers—twisted as hard as I could, then yanked. His hands came up half-heartedly as his head pulled away from hisbody—his decaying skin separating with the sound of wet parchment ripping, his graying muscles and tendons stretching thin before unraveling with a sucking snap. Viscera slopped out from the cavity of his body, swollen organs and masses of blood bursting on the flagstones, twined with knots of worms.
Eala rose from her chair, some deep and deadly emotion twisting her beautiful, bloodless features into a mask of menace. “Stop that.”
“Do you call this life?” I moved past a teenaged girl silently weeping into her untouched dessert, toward her mother, a woman who shared her golden hair but otherwise looked pulled from a casket. Half her skin had sloughed away to reveal the glaring eye socket of her skull and the cage of her ribs. I grabbed one of her desiccated hands resting on the table, and—with a silent apology to her living daughter—yanked it clean off her body. I held up the bony appendage, strung with ribbons of dried flesh. “Do you call thisfreedom?”
“Stop that!” Eala screamed, the words reverberating from her mouth with the force of her denial. “Stop itnow!”
“Would you do to both worlds what you have done to this one, Eala?” I spat, disgust clinging to my words like the dead flesh clung to its skeleton. “It is not peace. It will not make you whole. It is death. You are no Grave Mother. No Deathless Queen. You are the Rotten Princess. And I will burn you to ash before I let you do this to another realm!”
Eala screamed, a raw, furious cry of life unraveling into death. Her fingers scrabbled at the table, the blackness where she’d touched me expanding along the cracks of her markings.
“Guards!” Her diamond-blue eyes looked hollow—an abyss I hardly dared gaze into. She snapped her fingers, and Rogan obediently straightened. “Secure the changeling!”
Rogan came at me with a speed that belied his bulk. His once-lively eyes, the blue-green of river stones, were as flat and gray as a field left fallow. I searched his gaze for any recognition, any personality, any humanity.
On Emain Ablach, I’d sworn I’d caught fleeting glimpses of the man Rogan had once been. I’d sworn he was still there, albeit trapped inside his own mind, his will subsumed by another. But that had been months ago. Now I feared that what Irian had once predicted had come to pass. No human could withstand the effects of the black flower for that long and keep any shred of themselves intact.
“Princeling?” I whispered as I backed away, hitching my skirts around my knees as I readied to run. Behind me, I sensed Irian prowling, Sky-Sword at the ready. Rogan did not flinch; his eyes did not flicker. Still, I could not bring myself to say goodbye to him—even if there was no one to say it to.
I turned and fled.
But the guards who poured into the great hall—as guests scattered and the musicians dropped their flagging instruments—were not the ones who had escorted us from our rooms.
These ones were dead. And there were more of them.
So many more.
They surged into the room on teetering, jolting legs. Ragged armor listed and shifted over their rotting frames, the sound of their advance a sickening symphony of clattering bones and flesh too far gone. The stench of death and corruption wafted heavy on the air.
I threw up a dense wall of thorns as the undead guards approached us, but they flung their bodies against the barrier until the stiff brambles were streaked with gore. At my back, Irian’s black blade swung in deadly arcs as he lunged and parried the onslaught. But there were so many of them. They climbed over my barrier and pressed us to the wall as their withered hands grabbed for his mantle and my arms—
I stilled, letting them seize me. Then I let my starshine slip.
Decaying flesh began to smoke as the radiance lurking beneath my skin expanded, a hot numbness racing from my fingertips over my elbow to cocoon my throbbing heart. Rivulets of silverexpanded over the revenants’ cold flesh before sparking hot and fast like oil in a scalding pan. Light exploded—I closed my eyes, but I could not escape it. It burned toward my core, incinerated my spine, scalped me. For a bare instant, I floated free of my body, and beyond me there was only light, pure and perfect and impossibly hot.
The light rippled back into me, delicate as fluff blown from a dandelion. And when I opened my eyes, the revenants I’d touched were gone, nothing more than black dust sifting away between my glowing fingers. Shock and awe and creeping horror burned through me in quick succession.
I dared look at Eala.
Fear and hunger slashed across her features, dark as a night sky and insatiable as a bottomless pit. She stared at me as if unsure whether she wanted to destroy me… or devour me.
“Hold!” Her shout skittered over the room, mingling with the clang of Irian’s sword and the weeping of the living guests and the wet slump of limbs gone soft with rot. “Leave them be!”
As one, the horde of dead soldiers stopped moving. Irian slowly extricated himself from the mass of bodies and armor. Long scratches ridged his neck; dark brown blood smeared his face and stained the Bridei green of his—Rogan’s—mantle. His tarnished-silver eyes caressed my face.
I could not tell what Irian was thinking.
“I must think on this new development.” Eala had regained her composure—although she cradled her injured arm to her chest like a babe. “Take them to the dungeons. We shall speak again in the morn.”
Although her voice grated like broken nails over soft skin, I neither argued with her nor resisted as we were frog-marched from the great hall by an army of the undead.
But as the doors shut behind us, I swore to myself—I would get close enough to touch my sister again. And this time, I wouldn’t let go.
