Thirteen.
Twelve.
His breathing changes. The intervals stretch, tension leaving his fingers the way the light leaves his body.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Against the very existence that defines me, I reach out. I push a single finger into his small palm, sensing his hand clench once…then uncurl to the final fall of his rattling chest.
Heaviness settles onto my heartstrings like rust on iron, a dull, spreading corrosion. Over a stranger…
I absorb his soul, the faint, luminous thread that detaches from his body like steam from a cup left out in winter. It curls into me, carries through me, until it expands into the peaceful, vast stillness of all.
A stillness that doesn’t match the quiet chiming in my head—the summons of the dead blending into the familiar, colorless hum of obligation. But one note among them is neither quiet nor colorless. Also, not dead.
I follow it, letting shadows extend, stretch, and part.
Then I’m standing in the lower graveyard of the palace. Moonlight lays itself across the headstones in pale, crooked lines. Fresh soil rests on the snow beside a hole in the earth, and inside that hole, waist-deep and gasping, is my wife.
I walk up to the edge, cloak billowing around my flesh-stripped toes. “You’re doing a poor job of being a queen.”
“It’s for one of the guards,” she says without turning around. “Took me forever to get through the frost. Everyone else is either sick, exhausted, or too deep in their own grief to lift a shovel. So here I am.” She wrenches the blade free and throws the dirt onto the pile, finally glancing up at me from a flushed face. “You look…exhausted. Something happened?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
Elara drives the shovel into the soil and leans on the handle, watching me as if she knows I’m calculating whether to tell her the truth or retreat behind something safer. Something that won’t cost me her affection, or the way she slept tangled with my body last night with nothing but truth between us.
I don’t want to go back to lies.
“The sick boy from the orphanage.” In their heaviness, the words nearly scrape my teeth. “His soul is at rest now.”
Elara doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.
Yet something shifts behind her eyes. Not surprise—she’s buried too many bodies for that—but more subtle, more dangerous. The kind of unresolved quiet that settles between husbands and wives, I’ve observed more than once, hardening into what will one day become distant silence.
My chest hollows. “Elara, I?—”
“I have to finish this.” She pulls out the shovel and drives the blade back into the earth with enough force to split the stones beneath. The crack echoes across the graveyard.
I watch her work for a moment. The vicious rhythm of it. The way eachhrrkseems to lift out a grave for our marriage, sending a clawed scrape down my spine.
I jump into the grave with her. The space is cramped, the shovel small. My looming height forces me to hunch, my bones clicking as I wrap my knuckles around the handle.
I shake my head. “You don’t understand.”
Elara steps back against the earthen wall, arms folding across her chest, and watches me with an expression I cannot read. “I do understand.”
“No.” I drive the shovel down harder than necessary. The blade clangs against rock, and the impact jolts up through my wrists. “You have—what, sixty years? Seventy? A blink in the span of my existence. What would someone so temporary understand of eternity?”
The words land badly, I know it the moment they leave my mouth. Know it by the way her chin lifts, by the way her arms tighten across her chest, by the barely perceptible anger she tries to bury beneath the dirt on her face.
“But I know whatthisfeels like.” The words snap out of her, hand gesturing between the narrow grave, the frozen dirt, the impossible distance between us contained in three feet of space. “And I do understand. Just because—” She clenches her eyes shut. Presses her fingers against her temples. When she speaks again, the edge is gone, replaced by something more ragged. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… I’m exhausted. I’ve been digging this grave for three hours in frozen soil, and I just?—”
She stops. Breathes. Opens her eyes and looks at me, and beneath the frustration and the dirt and the dark circles carved under her eyes, there is something tender and fraying.
