“What evenisthis?” Her attention pulled to the throne, to its many spires and imposing size. She skirted around the ice grave toward it, unaware until her arrival at its side of her entire body thudding with warning.
It was the all-consuming cold.
It was the cottage in the wood.
It waswrong, wrong, wrong.
A pedestal sat next to the throne, a silver basin with a depressed lip atop it. She frowned and reached for it, because it looked recently used. Wet. Her finger brushed along its edge; she lifted it to inspect what came away.
Nothing.
Her lips parted. She craned her neck, staring up and up. The saint didn’t watch her back. If the sculptor had gifted it eyes, it would have stared instead at the man frozen in time. At the entrance too. Lux scanned the curved walls surrounding her, and realized there were recesses in them. Rectangular cutouts—and inside were familiar shapes resting in black shrouds.
Some were empty.
Most were not.
Lux stepped down from the dais. She stalked toward the first recess she could reach and peeled the shroud back.
Hollowed eye sockets in a skeletal face stared back at her. She pulled it farther, until a breastbone with a silver ribbon and a cross-shaped pendant flashed in the torchlight.
Collectors?
Had she actually found the resting place of the morning room’s portraits?
Contrary to what her prior job might have indicated, Lux didn’t wish to disturb the dead. She dragged the shroud back into place and stepped away. “A throne overlooking a room of corpses,” she whispered and tucked her thumb between her teeth.
And one frozen body.
It was the strangest thing seeing a person buried in ice. She could pick out the faint, pallid line of leg and arm, and the barest profile. Lux crept forward and then crouched to better view the angles. A familiarity niggled at her. Her hand lifted.
“Saints above. Could you be Alixsander the Overlord?” she wondered, settling her fingertips on the coffin.
The cold shocked her straight through. Lux hissed at the burn. She jerked her fingers back only for it not to work on one. The pad of her thumb remained stuck fast. Lux gritted her teeth. She pulled again and yelped. It wouldn’t release her.
“Devil’s tits,” she ground out. “You’re the biggest idiot!”
Lux stilled on her next breath.
Beyond the coffin—
The sound of something being dragged. Her insides matched her outsides as everything within her froze.No. No!
She yanked again on her finger and a single tear slipped down her cheek from the pain.Please don’t come around. Please stay on that side.Lux curled in on herself, and because she could see nothing, she listened as hard as she could.
She’d experience with the sound of a dragging body. Whatever was being hauled into the chamber was not that. It sounded heavy, wooden maybe, and whoever had been made in charge of it breathed like a bellows.
Lux wished she could do the same.
She kept her breathing minimal, and then stopped entirely when the dragging ceased.
“Open the lid,” said a voice, harshly familiar. “Now lift him together. Do not drop him. Yes, place him there.”
No muttering. No questions. Only direction. And heavy breaths.
Lux slapped a hand over her mouth when a different hand fell overtop the ice grave. She huffed away her startled yelp, her eyes wide as saucers. The limp limb was brown and uncovered. Snaking black veins lined the length. It could have been Mistress Lefroy’s in death if the skin were powder white.
Poison,Lux thought as the hand settled in line with her vision. But why were they stacking a poisoned body above a frozen one? Was this standard process in their entombing?
