“No!” I blurt with surprising ferocity.
Father gapes at me as if leaves are growing out of my head, and I automatically lower my voice.
“I would like to prepare Rowenna for burial myself. Please,” I add.
“You couldn’t possibly,” Father sputters. “You don’t know the first thing about preparing a body.”
“I’ll learn,” I insist, wedging my fingers beneath the coffin. “Let me do this.Helpme do this. It’s what Ro would want.”
Father chews his lower lip before shaking his head. “It wouldn’t be proper. According to tradition—”
“What about any of this is proper or traditional?” I demand, feeling it again—the twist of vicious claws and teeth, stirring deep inside me. “Yousent Ro to live with those cold, heartless stone people, so it’s only fairyoushould deal with the consequences.”
Father blinks at me for an entire minute, as if realizing, for the first time, that I might have thorns too. That his quiet, dutiful daughter who happily tends the bagrava might be capable of drawing blood, just like Rowenna—our kingdom’s prized rose.
With a slow nod, he takes up the other end of the coffin, and we lug Rowenna’s body across the courtyard. When we reach the latticeworkdoor of the chapel, I shoulder through without hesitation, but Father stops at the threshold and sets down his end of the coffin. He peers warily into the dank, shadowed space, down the mossy aisle, past the cobwebbed benches, to the hewn-stump altar. “I-I’m sorry, Indira. I can’t. It’s too much,” he says without meeting my eyes. Then he retreats back across the courtyard to Mother’s side, where he can wallow in misery and pretend this isn’t all his fault.
I grit my teeth and drag Rowenna’s coffin through the loamy soil myself, step by excruciating step. When I reach the altar, Tashir’s lone hedge-priest, Father Alonzo, shuffles out from the shadows.
“Have you come to pray, my child?” he starts, but his milky eyes pop wide as he takes in the scene. “What’s all this?”
“Go and collect the other body from the courtyard,” I order without glancing up.
“There’sanotherbody? Whose? What happened?” His wrinkled hands flutter to his chest in the sign of the sacred harvest.
“It’s too late to ward off evil, Father. The Vanzadorians murdered Rowenna and brought her back in this box. And they just killed Haddesh, the blacksmith’s apprentice.”
The old man clutches his bagrava seed rosary and reverently murmurs, “May Earth Mother accept their souls.” Then he totters out into the courtyard, leaving my sister and me alone in the sage-scented candlelight.
I kneel beside the coffin and watch the light from the swinging braziers dart across the wood, licking the silver chains with fire. An old key dangles on a ring beside a heavy padlock, and my breath quickens as I take the key in my hand and fit it into the keyhole.
I have never seen a dead body—not before it’s been prepared for burial. When Chancellor Orrin died three years ago, his casket was laid open in the center of High Street, and all of Tashir came to place a shiny apple in his coffin and a fresh-cut flower on the surrounding banquet tables. He looked precisely as he had in life—heavy-browedand jowl-cheeked, despite being cut down by sickness, and dressed in an impeccable wrap embroidered with daisies, the heritage flower of his family.
Before Orrin’s death, during the dark days of the relentless Marauder raids, the dead had been too numerous to hold individual burials. Their bodies were lowered into a pit in the fallow fields beyond the cabbage beds, and Mother forbade us from visiting.
A warning I heeded.
Rowenna did not.
Now part of me wishes I’d been brave enough to follow her and Haddesh the night they snuck out to see the pits. At least then I’d know what to expect. Though I doubt those bodies held any similarities to hers.
How does it look when someone “falls” off a cliff? When bone and muscle and sinew meet unyielding stone?
I shiver and nearly drop the key.
I don’t want to look.
I have to look.
As much as I’d like to only remember Ro’s fierce smile and laughing eyes, I need to bear witness to her suffering. I need to be the one to care for her. She’d have done the same for me. She’d have already opened the casket by now.
I wouldn’t have allowed you to go to Vanzador at all, Rowenna whispers. Not in an accusatory way. Just a matter of fact.
A sob breaks loose in my chest, and with a breath that feels both too shallow and too deep, I turn my wrist until I hear a click.
The chains slide to the floor with a jarringclank, and I throw back the lid before I lose my nerve.
Then I scream.
