If you love that army more than your own mother, then go. Don’t bother coming back.
He didn’t come back. Not alive, anyway.
Three months later, a cart arrived bearing a bundle of remains and a letter expressing the army’s regrets. Kellan Venn had died defending a supply line that had been abandoned the following week. His body had been recovered from a mass burial pit, identified only by the locket around his neck.
A mass burial pit. Where soldiers were thrown by the dozens, covered with quicklime powder, forgotten.
I close my eyes and reach.
The Veil between the living and the dead is thin in the Mourning Crypts—thin enough that I can sense it pressing against my awareness, a membrane of shadow and silence separating two worlds that were never meant to touch. My magic slides through the barrier with the ease of long practice, following the thread of Ira’s grief to its source.
Blood calls to blood.
And the dead answer.
The first sensation is cold. Not the chill of the crypts, but a deeper freeze. It crawls through my lungs, spreading ice through my veins, down my arms, into my fingertips. My nose begins to bleed. It does every time.
Come on, Kellan. Your mother needs you.
A presence brushes against my consciousness. Young. Male. Confused by his own ending, still trying to understand how a body that once ran and laughed and loved could be reduced to bone fragments in a cloth bundle.
There you are.
I pull.
The sensation is familiar—a stretching, a thinning, as if my body is becoming a doorway and my throat is the threshold. Myvocal cords vibrate with energy that isn’t mine. My lungs fill with air that tastes of battlefields and blood and the final desperate breath of a boy who died alone in the mud.
When I speak again, the words are not my own.
“Mother.”
Ira makes a sound—half gasp, half sob. Her bloodied hand flies to her mouth, pressing hard against her lips as if she’s trying to hold back the grief that threatens to pour out of her.
“Mother, I’m sorry.” The voice coming from my throat is young, male, carrying the echo of a boy who will never grow old. “I shouldn’t have left the way I did. I shouldn’t have?—”
The candle flame gutters.
Kellan’s voice catches. Deepens. Shifts into a register that makes my skin prickle with warning.
No.
“I didn’t die angry.” The words keep coming, but they twist now—too heavy, too layered, as if multiple voices are trying to speak through a single throat. “I died afraid. The pain wasn’t—” A pause. A fracture in the voice, hairline cracks spreading through the syllables. “—wasn’t the worst part.”
Ira reaches toward me, toward the remains in her lap. “Kellan? Kellan, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean what I said, I?—”
I try to release the spirit. Try to let Kellan say his piece and fade back through the Veil where he belongs. But my throat won’t close. My voice won’t stop. The door I opened is stuck, and a presence is pushing through from the other side.
Bigger than one dead boy. Older. Hungrier.
“They never burned us properly.”
The voice is a chorus now. Dozens of tones harmonizing into wrongness, layered over Kellan’s words, drowning him out. My hands shake. Blood drips from my nose onto my black dress, blooming across the fabric in wet, spreading stains.
“They threw us in pits and left us to rot. They forgot our names. They forgot?—”
TWO
ARADYA