The smell of burning flesh dissipated. Outside, the clear, bright day mocked them. Dourin’s agony was a melody, begging Traegar back.
???
Ellina sat on the inn’s rooftop overlooking the crumbled section of Kenath’s wall, and beyond that, the tight barricade of soldiers.
She hated those soldiers. She hated how they were like a mirage, creating a false vision of safety. She especially hated how—even after allowing a living corpse into the city—they continued to stand sentry, as if they had not already proven their worthlessness.
Venick appeared. He pulled himself up the rickety trellis and onto the roof, cursing softly as his clothing caught the dry twigs. Night had descended. Venick’s face was a dark landscape. Behind him, the city’s lights slowly blinked out, its residents settling in for sleep.
Venick said nothing at first, simply pulled her into his arms.
It had been painful, wrapping Traegar’s body in cloth, carrying him to the gravesite. Elves did not perform burial rites, but it felt wrong to simply leave Traegar in the ground without ceremony, so Venick had helped improvise. He showed Dourin how to wave incense over the body, which gods might be appeased by which scents. How to mix rose petals with water, where to sprinkle the liquid. Dourin had remained silent throughout the ceremony, allowing Venick to speak in his place. After the others had retreated, Ellina watched Dourin sink to his knees in the freshly dug earth, bow his head, and grip the stone that had been placed over Traegar’s grave. She had intended to wait for him, but he stayed like that for so long that Ellina began to suspect he was waiting for her to leave, so she had.
Traegar’s death was worse than his death alone, because Ellina felt it through Dourin, like a refracted mirror. Grief for a loss, and grief for the one who grieved.
Venick’s voice was hoarse when he said, “That dagger was meant for me.”
Venick’s habit of self-blame was familiar, but this time, Ellina could not deny it. That daggerhadbeen meant for Venick. The corpse-bender, whoever they were, had misaimed, likely because they were wielding their magic from outside the city.
“I believed we were secure,” Venick went on. “Those soldiers. That wall.”
“That is what we all thought.”
“I just don’t understand.How are the corpse-benders doing it?”
It was the worst kind of mystery, one with an answer that sounded too much like magic. But conjuring was not mere magic. It was not unexplainable. There was always a process, a series of events that could be traced and understood.
“If the conjurors can attack us here,” Venick said, “they can attack us anywhere. None of us are safe. Not our soldiers, not the citizens.”
Ellina hugged her knees and gazed up into the dark sky. Three times now, the conjurors had managed to infiltrate their defenses, first sneaking past the night’s watch outside Igor, then by the guards in the banquet hall, and now here, through a fortified wall of highlanders. Each time, the corpses had been fairly unremarkable. No significant features. No wounds, either, to explain how the elves had died.
Ellina went still.
Venick noticed. He leaned back a bit, as if trying to better see her face, which must have been as shadowed to him as his was to her. “Ellina?”
“The corpses were all in perfect condition,” she said softly.
“I suppose…”
“And all recently dead,” she went on. “No decay. Fresh blood, when we cut them open. The undead were not dug up from gravesites, not like the ones I first saw in the palace crypts. The conjurors wanted new bodies. But how did they die?”
“How does anyone die?” He brushed his hands on his trousers. “A knife to the throat usually does it.”
“There were no wounds.”
Minceflesh works quickly,Erol had explained.From the outside, you cannot tell what has gone wrong.
Ellina was pushing to her feet, her body pitching to match the angle of the roof. She remembered hunting for Venick’s goblet in the baron’s kitchen, holding it up to the light, discovering minceflesh in the wine dregs. The squeeze of vindication, that her hunch had been confirmed. A waterfall of relief, that Venick had not drunk from the cup.
Yet Ellina remembered that goblet had not reallybelonged to Venick. The banquet toast had been unplanned. That jeweled cup was plucked from a guest’s fingers—a guest who had already taken a sip.
Ellina had gone hunting for proof that someone was trying to poison Venick, and she had found it. She believed the conjurors were sneaking living corpses into their midst from the outside, and that these two dangers were unrelated. But what if she was looking for the wrong thing?
Ellina remembered Harmon’s argument that corpse-benders would not choose to attack in a packed ballroom unless they had no other option…or needed the cover of a crowd.
She remembered Erol’s words.We are lucky no one has yet been harmed.
Ellina’s mouth dropped open. “I know how the conjurors are doing it.”
