“It’s the only one I have for now.”
“The people will be outraged,” the priest says, louder, looking into the half circle of people in support. “A common gravedigger woman wearing the crown? It spits on the royal bloodline. The monarchy is built on tradition, not…not dirt under?—”
“You have been in the chapel for too long, Father.” It is Miss Hampshire who speaks up, her voice dry as old parchment, cutting through the priest’s sputtering. “You forget the smell of the streets.”
The priest blinks, his doughy face slackening. “I beg your pardon, Miss Hampshire?”
She lifts her head, and the pustule above her brow catches the fading sun, shiny and defiant. “The realm has been rotting for years. Children eat mud; mothers eat their stillbirths.” She looks at me then, her gaze sharp, assessing, but not unkind. “The common folk won’t care if she digs graves, so long as they don’t get rolled into them. They will only care,” she continues, her voice rising just enough to carry over the wind, “that there is a new ruler who might yet end this rot.”
The priest opens his mouth to retort, perhaps to cite some scripture about the sanctity of royal blood, but he looks at the crown and closes his mouth. He steps back, defeated by a housekeeper with missing fingers and a queen with dirt under her nails.
I look at Miss Hampshire, at the ally I least expected, then back at Mother before I give a nod. “I’ll take the shoulders.”
Mother takes the feet. Her eyes are wide, glassy with unshed tears, but her jaw is set in that line I know so well—the line thatmeans we have a job to do, and we will do it until it’s done. We grab the straps.
Kael is unwieldy the way dead things are, weight pulling toward the earth, eager to return to it. We shuffle to the edge of the hole I dug this morning. The soil is dark and rich here, fed by generations of mostly royal decay.
We lower. The straps hiss against the wooden supports as Kael descends into the dark, black earth. It’s a sound I know better than my own name. Friction of rope on bark. The soft, inevitablethudas the body finds its final bed.
The strain in my forearms grounds me, calming the screams in my head into the honesty of gravity. Death is simple.
You stop breathing. You get heavy. You go down.
There is a comfort in the finality of it.
The palace graveyard is quiet, but not peaceful. Trees, tall and clipped, their shadows long and thin. The stone markers are carved with names that once mattered enough to be chiseled. But rot doesn’t care about names. It eats everything just the same.
Including Daron.
Beyond the graveyard fence, the palace walls loom—wet raven slate and sweating stone, the air still carrying that faint vinegar stink they use to pretend the sickness can be scrubbed away.
Farther still, the city squats under a haze the color of decaying leaves. Smoke from a thousand small fires smears the horizon. Hunger doesn’t stop because a king dies. Rot doesn’t pause to see who wears the crown now.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, the words catching in my throat, too low for the people to hear. Most of them are already turning away anyway, not seeing the single tear that tracks hot down my cheek. “What am I supposed to do now?”
A pat on the back is all the advice Mother can offer before she, too, turns away. “Time to look after your brother.”
I look after her for a moment, gaze catching on those dark veins on her neck. Aside from that first telltale sign of rot, she’s asymptomatic, but for how long? How many days, weeks, or months until rot will show on a finger? A toe?
When the first shovelful of dirt hits the shroud, Miss Hampshire steps up beside me, black dress starched to cracked whiteness at the seams, cap pulled low. “He was a good man.”
“Was he?” I watch the dirt cover his hand—the hand that had held mine in the spring, that had trembled against my cheek. “I can’t help but feel like I knew nothing about him. Nothing.”
She shakes her head, watching the grave fill. “I know he was fond of you.”
The words land soft…
…and still, they split me.
My throat tightens until swallowing feels like dragging cloth through a wound. I keep my face still—queen-still, gravedigger-still—while my insides lurch like a cart wheel hitting a rut.Fond…
He’d been cruel and stubborn and half-mad with hope. He’d kept his secrets locked up like coffins, so tight that even when he shoved the crown onto my head, he couldn’t spare a breath to tell me what I’d become. And yet…his handshadtrembled when he touched my face.
I stare at the dirt swallowing him inch by inch and feel myself pulled in two directions. One part of me wants to spit on his grave for leaving me with this mess. The other wants to claw the earth back open to shake answers out of him.
It doesn’t matter. He’s gone because my hands did what they do best: deathwork.
“What am I supposed to make of all this?” I turn to Miss Hampshire, the early evening sun now slanting through thetrees, turning the fresh mound of dirt into a golden smear. “Did he mention anything? Leave instructions? Anything at all?”
