ONE
ARADYA
The dead never stop asking for more.
I kneel in the private mourning chamber, candlelight flickering across the bone-niched walls, and wait for a mother’s grief to summon her son. The stone floor bites into my knees through the thin fabric of my dress. Cold seeps up from the depths below—the lower crypts, where the nameless dead press against the darkness, listening for anyone willing to speak for them.
Not yet. Not them. Tonight belongs to one voice only.
The Mourning Crypts stretch beneath Blackreach City like the roots of a vast stone tree. Endless corridors lined with bone niches and epitaphs worn smooth by centuries of grieving hands. Thousands of candles burn in alcoves throughout these halls—their flames never quite steady, flickering in response to the spirits that drift through these sacred spaces.
Ira Genn sits across from me, her hollow face illuminated by the single candle between us. Forty years old, though grief has carved another decade into the lines around her mouth and the dark hollows beneath her eyes. Widowed twice—once by fever, once by a factory accident that left three families without fathers.Now childless, thanks to a border skirmish that sent her only son home in pieces three months ago.
She clutches a cloth-wrapped bundle in her lap. Bone fragments and a lock of hair, bound with faded ribbon. All that remains of Kellan Venn.
Her hands tremble. Her breath comes in short, desperate gasps. The candle flame wavers with each exhale, casting dancing shadows across her tear-tracked cheeks.
She’s not ready for this.
None of them ever are.
“You understand the price.” My voice comes out soft, gentle—the tone I’ve learned to use with the grieving. The one that makes them lean closer, confess their darkest fears, beg for one more moment with the people they’ve lost. “Blood calls to blood. The dead answer only when the living pay.”
Ira nods. Her throat works as she swallows. “I understand.”
“And you understand that I cannot control what they say.” I keep my gaze steady on hers, watching for the flicker of doubt that comes. “The dead speak truth. Not kindness. Not comfort. Truth.”
The dead speak as they wish, and no mourning witch in the history of Blackreach has ever been able to soften those words.
Ira doesn’t hesitate.
“I don’t care.” Her voice fractures. “I need to hear him. One more time. I need—” She presses her fist against her mouth, choking back a sob that threatens to shatter her composure entirely. “I need to know he didn’t die hating me.”
Ah. There it is.
The guilt. The unfinished business. The words they should have said before death stole the chance. Every client who finds me in the shadows of the Mourning Crypts carries the same wound—a conversation that ended too soon, a farewell that never happened, a love that was never spoken aloud.
I could refuse her. I should refuse her. The Council has standing orders to burn any mourning witch caught practicing within city limits. The Death Warden Guild patrols these crypts, and their blades are quick and their pyres are hungry. If they found me here, kneeling before a grieving woman with blood on my hands and magic in my throat?—
They’d burn me before sunrise.
But Ira Genn is drowning in sorrow, and I’ve never learned how to watch someone drown.
“Give me your hand.”
She extends her palm without hesitation. The skin is pale, blue-veined, trembling. I draw my silver knife—small, sharp, kept clean for moments exactly like this—and make a shallow cut across the meat of her hand. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t gasp. Grief has numbed her to lesser pains.
Blood wells up, dark and wet. I guide her hand over the cloth-wrapped bundle of her son’s remains, and the first drops fall onto the fabric with a soft pat. Then another. Then a steady drip that soaks into the cloth and begins to darken the bone fragments beneath.
The candle flame shivers.
Shadows stretch toward the blood, drawn to it, hungry for the life it represents. The temperature in the chamber drops another degree. Two. The chill that seeps up from the lower crypts intensifies, wrapping around my ankles, climbing my legs.
“Now,” I say. “Tell me about Kellan.”
The words spill out of her in a rush. Kellan’s first steps—how he’d laughed when he fell, got right back up, tried again. His laugh, bright and infectious, the kind of sound that filled a room and made strangers smile. The way he used to bring her flowers from the meadows outside the city walls, muddy-kneed and proud, clutching wilted daisies like they were treasure.
The last words she’d spoken to him: