I understand it now. Some people leave no other choice.
“Leave him,” I add. “Tie him up like this. I want everyone to see.”
No one argues. Behind me, the crowd is no longer silent. The sound of movement, of voices, of coins being taken fills the square, no longer cautious, no longer uncertain. They have chosen.
I turn before the noise finishes building.
I’ve already made mine.
The crowd parts as I move through it, a path opening ahead of me without question, without resistance. At the edge of the square, Aunt Petunis steps into my path.
She carries a staff of translucent material in one hand, its length catching the light in shifting, unreal tones, as if it has been shaped from something that does not fully belong to this world. In her other hand, she holds another.
Gold.
It gleams with a living brightness, its surface etched in fine, intricate work that draws the eye and holds it. There is a weight to it beyond what can be seen, something ancient, something that hums faintly beneath the surface, older than the square, older than the palace itself.
She studies me in silence, her eyes moving over me with careful attention, measuring what stands before her.
Then she steps forward. The gold staff is placed into my hand. Its weight meets me at once, firm and certain, as though it has always known this place, as though it has always been meant to rest here.
“This was supposed to be your mother’s,” she says quietly.
Her fingers fall away. “You’ve earned the right to wield it.”
And I take it.
Part Three
SIX MONTHS LATER
The Undead
COLSAR
Six Months Later
By the time Colsar reached the final pass, winter hadset into him. The wind off the frozen sea carried rot with it, strong enough to sit at the back of his throat, a scent he had learned too well in the months since Asharin vanished. Snow dragged across the narrow stretch ahead, the pale surface breaking in places where something beneath it shifted and stirred.
The dead were waiting. They always were.
Six months earlier, he had begun the journey north with little more than rumor to guide him. Somewhere beyond the mountains, people whispered that Alarna’s princess would be returning, the heir to the kingdom. The royals of the hidden city had found a way to bring their blood back through the wards, they said.
Their blood. It had taken weeks of listening and piecing together fragments of half-truths before the realization struck him. Asharin. An Alarnan princess. He was not surprised.
Then there were other rumors. A ship had tried to enter Alarna and had been overtaken by the undead, its passengers lighting it on fire in an attempt to save themselves. No survivors.
He refused to believe Asharin had been on that ship. And if she had died there, then on this journey he would find her anyway. If she now roamed the snow as a walking corpse, he would roam with her.
She was his. Until the end.
The letter she had left with her lady’s maid had said two words:Find me.He would do it, or die trying.
What should have been a simple crossing by sea had become something else entirely on land, drawn out into months of blood and cold and things that refused to die. But he had not had time to prepare a ship, and in truth, by land or sea, the journey would have been just as dangerous.
How it had happened he did not know. How the girl who played darts and gambled and wielded a sword better than most of his soldiers could somehow be the lost blood of Alarna made no sense at all. But none of that mattered. Only one truth had remained clear from the moment the pieces fell into place. She had gone there without him. And he would not let her remain there alone.
The undead had multiplied in ways he had never seen before.
