“Lanie. Oh, Lanie.”
Not so much words as a sigh. Footsteps, light vibrations. Maybe someone touched the pulse in her throat. Maybe they didn’t.
“Do never fear”—it was a voice of breathless urgency, speaking a language Lanie knew but was not her own—“for I’ll return forthwith, and with our friends to help bear thee away. In meantime, stay…” The stranger’s—was she a stranger?—voice broke. “Oh, Lanie, try to stay.”
A susurrus of wings. Wind of ascension. A cry from on high: the clipped call of killy-killy-klee.
Time passed.
Or it didn’t.
Lanie used to measure days by the leafy shadow of the sorkhadari as it moved across her body. Getting back up to the sorkhadari tree had been her only goal for so long. Once she made it that far, she’d just… stopped.
Dark. Light. Sometimes rain—which she felt as pressure, rather than temperature or wetness. Sometimes she opened her mouth and let the un-wet wetness sluice through the dust of her throat.
She had been lying there for a long time.
Or she hadn’t.
“Tits and pickles!” A familiar curse, but Lanie could not place it. “How long’s she been like this?”
“Too long, I fear.” A third voice. Older. Sterner. “How she has wasted! Is she alone? Where are the child and her father?”
The first voice, the one with wings in it, replied: “I do not know, and dread the mystery. At all times secrets bided ’twixt those three.”
A sweet breath stirred upon Lanie’s cheek again. It almost made her want to breathe more deeply, which almost surprised her.
Stump. Stump. An uneven gate was approaching, the tinier footprint of a cane with it. A huff. A back-of-the-throat groan. The creak of a knee. Then a second, nearly-familiar hand touched her hair.
“Hey. Heya, cookie. Let’s getcha up and outta this bonebox, eh? Happen I got a spare room with a door that shuts. Bed made up with yer name on it. What more could a gal want? Well, maybe a bath. And some of Eidie’s fresh-baked bread.”
“She will not be able to eat solid food just yet,” warned the sterner, older voice. Meddlesome, bread-stealing, miserly voice. “Soup stock. Vegetable, I think. And dark, leafy greens.”
That irked her. Lanie thrashed, internally. She tried to thrash externally, but her body didn’t do as she bid it.
She wanted to demand both soup and bread, steaming and savory, warm and deep, stick-to-your-ribs, make-you-yawn stuff, that lasting fullness. Why not, when all she’d had for so long were fickle sunbeams and faded grass? And before that, hardtack and dried fruit, stale nuts with a fur of mold growing over them?
There.
Thrashing had accomplished something. Lanie managed to slit open her eyes. Three faces stared back down.
Ah, but this felt familiar too. Didn’t it? The last time she had seen these faces, hadn’t Lanie also just awoken from an injured sleep? And there they all were, then as now, each of them bright with their varied concerns?
Or perhaps that instance and this instance were the same. Perhaps it was still Midsummer, and there was still time—if she left right now—there was still time to go home and save…
But, no.
No, and no, and no. Lanie had tried and failed.
She’d tried everything, and every attempt had set her further back. Now the tunnel of herself had collapsed. The door was buried. She was sunk down so deep there was no digging herself out. No matter that she’d somehow managed to drag her battered old accident back up here, into the light; in substance, most of her remained behind, lying in the dark, gray and frozen beneath the catacombs.
And it was no more than she deserved. Lanie remembered that well enough.
Whoever these people were, whoever they thought they were to her or she to them, they shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be looking at her like that, whispering reassurances, trying to lift her from her grave beneath the sorkhadari tree. They should leave her to her rest, a shade amongst shades.
If she closed her eyes, they would all disappear. And then they would be safe again. Safe from her.
So she did.
Havoc’s spare bedroom was austere: a cot, a much-battered and deeply rusted trunk34, a few crates for bedside seating, a small table shoved up against a wall with a round, porthole window, and a shelf with a few curious books, which included: a stack of lovingly hand-bound poetry publications, an illustrated volume of mermaid lore, a complete nautical dictionary and etymology, and The Book of Knots.
Lanie didn’t know what would kill her first: staying here, where her presence endangered everyone who succored her; or leaving—most likely on hands and knees, as she could not yet walk without aid. Leaving and setting off for she knew not where, to do she knew not what, with nothing to help her, and no one for company.
Mostly, she cried.
She lay in bed and sobbed until someone—usually Havoc or Duantri—came into the room with soup.
She had learned to recognize them again, though she did not speak to them, or even call them by name. She could not even look them in the eye.
But she ate what they brought her. And then, she slept. And when she woke, she cried again.
Until the day Gyrlady Tanaliín decided that she’d had enough.
Tan came in armed with a vase of flowers.
Lanie lay in her cot, slitting her eyes against the effusive purple and yellow glare: asters, lilies, sage, goldenrod—all the smoke and ore of autumn. Just the goad she needed. Just the needle through her heart. The poisoned finger-stinger slipping under her skin. Autumn flowers to remind her how she had lost her entire autumn equinox—a whole high holy fire feast—down one of her numbing blinks between time. Disappeared. Gone.
She’d just… missed it. Failed to make use of her surge. Failed Goody. Failed everything. Again.
“Do you like them?” Tan set the vase on the desk by the window. “They made me think of you.”
Tears rolled down Lanie’s face, scalding her. Her skin was always cold these days.
“No?” Thoughtfully, Tan took a seat on the crate beside Lanie’s bed, and crossed her legs, clad in embroidered trousers, at the ankles. “But you are not liking much, these days, are you? That would require too much energy.”
Lanie would have liked to turn her head to the wall—but that would have required too much energy.
“Oh, I know you are pining for me to mind my own business,” the gyrlady told her with a smile. “You hold me deeply suspect, believe me to be devious and prying—a ferret at your warren, hoping to scare up secrets like panicked rabbits. It is true that my inquisitive nature has been both helpmeet and hamartia throughout my life, but I am too old to repudiate it now, even for you. So I will tell you what I know.”
Tan took a great, bracing breath.
Lanie held her own. An irritated flush was beginning to flood her extremities—the tips of her fingers, her toes—with a furious heat. Curiously, though, her desire to roll over and close her eyes was quickly melting into a desire to leap off the bed and shout and wave her hands until Tan went away.
“You, young lady, have been performing too much magic off-surge. Yes,” she added, seeing Lanie’s eyelids fly open, “I am well aware you are a sorcerer. We all know that by now, seeing as how we have each taken turns bathing you since bringing you home to Havoc’s. You are fairly freckled with wizard marks—not even counting your left hand! Duantri and Havoc have a bet going as to your god. Duantri thinks you are a hetch of Four-Faced Brotquen—for your love of gardens and flowers and trees. Havoc has pegged you for a priestess of Yssimyss of Mysteries—which would, I concur, explain a certain ‘aura of the unexplainable’ about you. I hate to spoil their fun.”
Tan leaned in closer, and Lanie wanted to shrink away, but could not.
“So I did not tell them,” she whispered, “that you are a necromancer. And that your name is Miscellaneous Stones.”
At the sound of her name on the gyrlady’s lips, Lanie shuddered. She opened her mouth to repudiate it, but started coughing instead.
Tan patiently fetched a cup of water from the edge of the desk and held it to Lanie’s lips until she drank and grew calmer.
“Why do you stare at me so, dear Lanie? As if I were about to start hurling insults and proselytizing Quadoni ways to you! It is true,” Tan admitted, “that we do not precisely have sorcerers in Quadiíb… Not officially, anyway. We pride ourselves too much on holding balance between the Twelve, paying our obeisances to each god in Their turn—but never devoting too much attention to any one of Them, lest Their attentions rebound upon us and we grow drunk with power. And yes, it is also true that the Quadoni tend to regard all Lirians—and not only Lirians, mind you, but Aganath’s holy urchins in Umrys-by-the-Sea, and, of course, the entirety of Rookery Court—as dangerously destabilized by their respective reductive theisms. But that is not to say that we do not dabble in magic whenever it suits us. We are just as hypocritical as the next country.”
Tan laughed at the startled expression on Lanie’s face.
“Really, Lanie! Why do you think I left Quadiíb? The Judicial Colloquium of Gyrladies is the worst trespasser. What is the result of our smug self-regard and the high esteem in which general opinion holds us but an institution that has become conservative, piously pretentious, stodgy, unimaginative, and stuck in its ways? Intellectual complacence is the opposite of good pedagogy! So, yes, I will freely confess that we Gyrladies practice magic. The Rite of Bryddongard is but the best known of a thousand secret song-spells, and that rite is only known to the population at large because it is hard to conceal the fact that a six-foot Gyrgardu like Duantri turns into a six–and-a-half-ounce kestrel on the regular. But will we ever admit it? No!” she answered herself. “No, we are coy and sly! If caught out in a casting, we call it ‘praying’ or ‘meditating’ or ‘miracle-making.’ We swaddle our works in codified ritual and academic jargon so that idle onlookers are impressed and confounded!”
Lanie frowned in consternation.
But then how, she thought laboriously, if the Gyrladies of Quadiíb practice magic, do they stay in balance with the Twelve? Why would a god favor a worshipper who worshipped eleven other gods as equally with their thoughts and attention? Everything I know about the nature of magic makes it impossible.
Tan had her answer ready, though Lanie never asked her questions out loud.
“Oh, we do exactly as you Lirian sorcerers do, my plumula! But we do it by the calendar. Every month is dedicated to a different god, and thus, we only perform certain magics during certain months of the year. And we always make sure to bring ourselves back into balance with the Twelve on the high holy fire feasts. Those four days,” she went on, “are the only time of year when we do not, in fact, ask our gods to favor us. Your Lirian practice of making your greatest magic on those days is completely bewildering to us Quadoni! Not to say blasphemous. But I do not like to use incendiary language. Now, I would like to ask you: do you know why we do as we do?”
This time, Lanie managed to croak out, “Is this Quadoni rhetoric? Do I wait for you to answer?”
The gyrlady snorted, commanding in Quadic, “Put up thy quills, thou porcupine! At ease! I truly cannot wait for thy reply.”
Nonplussed, Lanie muttered, “You’re asking me… if I know why all you Quadoni don’t use magic on surge days?”
Tan beamed. “Exactly!”
“Because… because…” Lanie frowned, then burst out, “No! Of course I don’t! It doesn’t make sense not to! When people gather in great numbers, holding festivals across the land to celebrate the gods, the gods can’t help but hear us all. They hear and remember Their creations. Their attention brightens on us, even as our attention summons Them nearer, and, and…” She trailed off, already exhausted. It was the most she had spoken in… she had lost track of the days.
Tan finished for her: “…and all creation grows more marvelous with the All-Marvel. And thus, the magic surges for all true believers, for magic is the memory of the gods.”
“I was taught,” Lanie tried again stiltedly, “I was taught”—she did not say by whom, hating the thought of him—“that on surge days, I was to make the most of my panthauma. That it is an incredibly potent resource, available to us for only a finite amount of time. Not to do use it would be… wasteful.”
Her stomach panged at her wastefulness. Her autumn equinox, lost. Goody and any good that Lanie might do for her, lost. Tears sprang to her eyes, never far from the surface.
But Lanie found that she was somehow sitting up. She was swinging her legs over the side of the cot, leaning forward. Her knees and Tan’s were practically touching. Tan even reached out and patted her leg briefly, saying, “That is certainly one way to think of it,” her tone indicating that she didn’t think much of that way of thinking.
“But here,” she said a moment later, “let me give you a different notion,” and then sat back on her crate, hands on thighs, to stare at the wall as if counting to ten in her language where even the numbers rhymed.
Lanie eyeballed her, feeling itchy and nervous, wondering if she should speak, ask questions, needle her. But before she could do so, the gyrlady finished setting her thoughts to order and cleared her throat.
“So. Let us, you and I, take a hypothetical Lirian sorcerer. For the sake of this thought experiment, let us say she is atypical amongst her countrypeople. Let us say that unlike most Lirian sorcerers, who traditionally dedicate themselves to Sappacor—Bloodlighters like the Brackenwilds, the fire priests and Bright Knights of the temple, even lowly street-performers who spin and eat fire for coin, or cabaret dancers who wear tiny points of flame and nothing else to tease their audience—alone of all of them, this Lirian sorcerer has dedicated her heart to the god of Death.”
Tan’s twinkly black eyes redoubled the sensation of beetles crawling all over Lanie’s skin.
“Let us say further that this sorcerer’s unusual devotion stems in part from a family legacy, in part from a habit of solitary study, and in part from a natural inclination towards, well, let us call it, compassion. Yes, compassion,” she repeated, when Lanie shifted uncomfortably and made a small noise of protest, “for all things: living, dead, and in-between… the, um, third of the three states.”
At the phrase, Lanie’s heavy head lifted. It was the first time she had heard any living person other than herself speak it.
Tan’s right eyelid shivered shut in a wink. “However our sorceress came by her devotion,” she waved her hands, dismissing further conjecture, “it was very real, and it was all for Doédenna alone. She begged the impossible from, offered up the best of herself to, and poured out all her profoundest attentions and every last drop of her faith into this one lone god. And Doédenna, grateful for the single-minded devotion that so few have shown to Her, came to regard this sorcerer as Her dear friend.
“Now, Lanie.” Tan cleared her throat again, earnestly and reflexively, and Lanie wondered if this was a habit of hers from her long years of lecturing. “You know and I know, that a sorcerer becomes the dwelling place that their god inhabits. A Blood Royal shares her palace. An herb-hetch, her hovel. But whatever their state, lofty or low, they carry their god within them. Beautiful, no?”
Lanie was squeezing her hands so tightly together they were cramping. “What if all you have is an empty house?” she asked bitterly. “What if your god comes knocking, expecting a feast, expecting you to be arrayed in finery, ready to welcome Her with music and dancing, and all you have is a bare table and the rags on your back? What kind of a sorcerer does that make you? When you have nothing to give Her—because you have already given Her everything, and it wasn’t enough?”
“I would say”—Tan’s words were as careful as a thief’s tread—“that perhaps this sorcerer is having a serious communication breakdown with her god.”
Lanie snorted.
“Well, think about it,” the gyrlady pressed, “here you have a sorcerer who has been asking her friend—her good friend, possibly her best friend—for favors her entire life! Maybe she started out small. Maybe her god was happy to grant those favors. Tiny tasks in return for enormous gratitude—which, as we know, is ambrosia to the gods. But as the sorcerer grew wiser and more learned, more ambitious, more desperate, so too did her favors. Perhaps they took on the form of demands. But what, in return, has she given to her god?”
“I’ve given up everything!” Lanie interjected. “Blood, safety, family—”
“A terrible return!” Tan retorted. “When all your god really wants is for Her young friend to ask Her, once in a while (perhaps as little as four days a year, for example), ‘And what, my darling One, may I do for You?’”
“I don’t have to ask!” Lanie shouted. “I know what She wants! I’ve always known it!” Heaving herself off the bed, she staggered toward the desk. “I can’t do it. Every time I try, it’s ruinous!”
“Have you tried,” Tan inquired, careful again, “asking for help?”
“What? And ruin those who would help me? Lady Tan,” she cried, “I don’t know how you came to know what you know. But you don’t know everything. You don’t know what I can do!”
On the desk was a letter opener, which acted as paperweight to a stack of old broadsides. Havoc ‘collected’ these off walls and posts and doors where they’d been plastered, in order to re-purpose them for a variety of functions. “Blank backs’re good fer everythin’ from letter-writin’ to wipin’ my own blank back!” she liked to say.
The broadsides scattered when Lanie snatched up the letter opener and pressed her finger to its point. Her skin was less hardy than rag paper; it split easily, like old fruit.
Tan sucked in a breath. “Lanie, really, you do not have to prove any—”
“I have to,” Lanie panted.
She slipped all too effortlessly into her deep sight, and right away heard the deep-down click of her second voice, the one that only the dead could hear. She hardly had to reach for this inward, downward access anymore; she’d spent so much of the last few weeks—months?—sliding, sinking, seeping, inch by fatal inch through Saint Death’s doorway. It would be so easy, too easy, even now, to pass all the way through it.
“You have to see,” she told Tan, “you have to understand.”
And she squeezed a fat drop of her blood into the vase.
The way she was feeling, her blood should have come out a ghostly grayish pink. But it was red and rich, like Canon Lir’s mouth, like their kiss, like the messages they used to send her by bloodlight.
Rich and red, like a gift, like a jewel for her god, her blood sank into the water, and the water immediately took on the hue of molten sapphires. The blue of Goody’s eyes.
“Wake!” Lanie sang out. Just that single word. One note of the Maranathasseth Anthem.
The flowers heard.
First the green stems—wound-side first, where stem had been snipped from bush—ignited with ectenica. Then the glossy leaves caught blue and pulsed with eldritch light. Then the petals and pistols and stamens swelled with phantom fire. Lanie felt rather than saw Tan coming to stand beside her. She heard the in-draw of awed breath, the slow sigh of wonder. A quick prayer whispered in Quadic.
“Ectenica,” Tan breathed, as if the word were one she’d only ever read and never spoken aloud. “What now? What happens? What may you ask of it?”
“Anything I desire,” Lanie said mournfully. “For a short time.” Addressing the luminous flowers with weary tenderness, she said, “Do what you will—my beloveds.”
Responding not to her spoken words, but to her second voice, the flowers writhed joyously in the glass vase. They were like dancing meteorites: bobbing and nodding and bumping and shirring. A few butted heads like kittens. Others nuzzled each other as if in recognition and entwined their stems like loving arms. A new scent pervaded the room. Not the sun-struck perfume of a living flower that flirts with bees and butterflies for the sake of perpetuation, but the unique fragrance of an undead blossom. Like a cluster of angelica trapped under ice, the greenwood musk of its umbels was more memory than aroma.
Tan shoved a hand into her fading orange hair. She had not dyed it recently; it showed a dark stripe of gray at the roots.
“Lanie, I tell you—save for my Duantri’s face—I have never seen anything half so marvelous as this.”
She touched one of the petals, and sucked in her breath at the icy silk of them, their sensuous and enthusiastic response.
“I can tell the ectenica to do anything,” Lanie reiterated. “I could tell it to turn into a viper and sink its fangs into you and murder you. It would leave no evidence, no mark. Nobody would know.”
Tan’s fingers flexed as if she wanted to snatch her hand away. “You could do so,” she agreed. “But you do not.”
“Not this time,” Lanie retorted. “But I will, one day. Watch me. That’s what all necromancers do, Mak says. They go to the bad.”
“That young man,” Tan mused, “strikes me as a deeply traumatized individual.”
Lanie’s hands knotted. “Of course he is! He was my sister’s captive for seven years!”
Tan gazed at her, sternly and long, “Duantri knew him for gyrgardon at a glance, even before we took a closer look at his cicatrization patterns. No gyrlady in evidence. A young daughter of certain age with Lirian matrilineage. The most fascinating… shall we call it ‘panthaumic aura’?… lingering around his right arm. Those clues, coupled with years of rumors flying about this city regarding Amanita Muscaria Stones”—Tan’s lip curled, not kindly—“her life and legend, and we were able to form a fairly accurate picture of his story. But a rough outline only. Poor boy. He never could look me in the eye, you know.”
“I know.”
“Then,” sighed the gyrlady, “knowing the injuries done to him, perhaps it would be fair to say that your brother—that Mak,” she corrected herself as Lanie shifted her weight, “for all his virtues, might not be an impartial judge when it comes to matters magical. Especially, perhaps, your own?”
She rubbed her fingertips together, frowning at the ash darkening her skin. Petal by petal, the glowing flowers beginning to crumble.
“Or maybe,” Lanie retorted, “Mak is more right than you suppose! He’s lived with me for seven years. He’s seen me do things… things you cannot begin to extrapolate from your little thought experiment!”
The water in the vase, black now. The glass stained like the chimney of a lamp. The bitter stench of char. Bile rose in Lanie’s throat. She backed away from the desk, gesturing to the mess she made.
“Do you see? I ruin everything I touch! Even though, even when… when it seems, seems so beautiful… so right… so good, at first?”
Her lips trembled. She drew her hand back into her body, and wrapped both arms around her ribs, shivering as the heat left her.
In response, Tan gave the sludge-filled, rot-spilling vase one final, thoughtful tap of the finger, then, turning, walked back to the cot, sat down, and patted the space beside her. Lanie elected to remain standing, as far from the vase of flowers, and the cot, as she could. This put her with her back to the door.
“Let me ask you something else.” Tan paused, muttered ‘hmm’ to herself, and took another staring-at-the-wall-composing-her-thoughts moment.
Lanie wondered if Tan had to think out her sentences in Quadic first, then translate into Lirian before speaking, as Lanie would have to do were their positions reversed. She grew so engrossed with the thought of teaching necromancy to a roomful of Quadoni students that she almost jumped when Tan spoke again.
“Why do you think you are a necromancer?”
Before Lanie could answer, Tan shook her head, and said, “No. Let us go further,” before clearing her throat with that same tic Lanie had noticed before. “Why do you think,” she began again, “that the Stoneses of your line have historically given birth to necromancers, when, from what we know, it is the rarest and most delicate of magic? Why them?”
Lanie frowned. “Because Saint Death blessed us.”
“Hmm,” said Tan again. “Well,” she coughed, “Saint Death certainly blessed Quick Fantastic Stones—not that that was her name originally, you know, back in Quadiíb, but that’s a minor detail, of historical interest but not pertinent to us today. We know, as sure as anything, that Doédenna blessed Quick Fantastic because Quick Fantastic chose Doédenna above all other gods. So far, so much makes sense. But so… why, then, was her son also a necromancer?”
“Because, he… he learned his devotions at her knee?” Lanie said, hearing the doubt in her voice. “Quick Fantastic was… a charismatic character. Her son was very much attached to her. She was forceful, opinionated, an almost god-like figure herself. People admired her and feared her. But they loved Ynyssyll Brackenwild more, and made her their queen.”
Tan smiled. “For my thesis, I studied Ynyssyll’s diaries from her early days. Not anything from after her exile, of course. When you visit Quadiíb, you must stop by Ylkazarra First University and have a peep at our primary documents collection. Enrapturing! But, Lanie, we digress. Again.”
Fixing Lanie with her disturbingly direct stare, she continued, “We now have a working theory about the first two necromancers of the Stones line. But now, Lanie, tell me: what of Quick Fantastic Stones’s great-great-great-whatever-great grand-niece, twice-removed, adopted, only-grudgingly-bestowed-the-surname-Stones-by-marriage? Why did she also give birth to a necromancer?”
“Who?”
For a moment, Lanie thought Tan was referring to Lichwake Stones35, but the antecedents were all wrong, and to the best of her knowledge, Lichwake never had any children. None that went by the name Stones, anyway.
“This grand-niece is a figure of conjecture only; I hyperbolize for effect! But do you see what I am driving at?” Lanie shook her head, but Tan was already answering herself. “Why are Stones babies—who have no choice in their gods—born as necromancers to your line? Why are Stones babies, like you, born with that—what do you call it?—that ‘allergy’ to violence, or what we might call ‘an early, violent reaction against death,’ already inbred in them?”
“Oh,” Lanie stammered. “I… I understand what you’re asking, Tan… but… the Stoneses have always loved Saint Death. And Saint Death has always loved us back. That’s just how it’s always been—ever since the Founding. Her love is passed on through our blood, which is why… why most of us are like… like Nita.”
But her words were coming more and more slowly. “Like Nita,” she continued, “we Stoneses are mostly assassins and… executioners. We are—were—the strong left hand of the Blood Royal Brackenwilds.”
Tan nodded in approval. “Natural proclivity meets family custom! There is precedent. As the livestock butchers of Twelfth Circle inherit their trade from their parents, so too do the Stoneses inherit theirs. Your people are, in essence, professional butchers. But, Lanie. Trade is not the same as vocation, is it? Sorcery is a vocation. So tell me,” she demanded, in another of her lightning-strike, bright-faced turns, “was your family particularly pious? Was, to take one example, Irradiant Radithor Stones—the greatest necromancer ever born since Quick Fantastic—a religious man?”
“Grandpa Rad?” Lanie scoffed at the thought. “He never prayed a day in his life. Or after.”
The gyrlady looked startled, then stared at her for a long, meditative moment, as if wishing to pursue an all-new line of questioning, beginning with: Why was Lanie on familiar terms with a man who’d been dead for a century?
But she didn’t.
“Do you think,” she asked instead, “that perhaps Irradiant Stones was secretly devout? That his parents taught him his prayers to Doédenna whilst dandling him on their fond knees?”
“How could they?” Lanie retorted. “He was orphaned as an infant—the youngest of a pack of siblings. They all grew up wild at Stones Manor, with a rotating roster of ommers, aunties, and uncles who leeched off the estate until the children grew old enough to drive them out. Or kill them off. As far as I know, it was mostly Goody who looked after them. Grandpa Rad was her nursling in particular.”
Goody had rarely spoken to Lanie of those days, but taken collectively over the years, Lanie had gleaned a good bit of history from her terse remembrances. She’d also managed to decipher all of Grandpa Rad’s compulsively-kept but nigh-impossible-to-read journals. Like Lanie herself, he’d never even left the grounds of Stones Manor till he was in his twenties—shortly after he and Sosha Brackenwild met for the first time by happenstance in the Diesmali.
The Blood Royal was out hunting. His favorite horse had broken a leg. Grandpa Rad offered to bayonet her when Sosha confessed he could not. Then he raised her up again so that the Blood Royal didn’t have to walk all the way home. The friendship between the two men was instant and lifelong. Sosha, Grandpa Rad used to boast, even arranged his own marriage. He’d found Grandpa Rad the perfect wife: large fortune, low intelligence, fertile womb—and they’d all lived together at Castle Ynyssyll, two happy tyrants lording it over their prodigiously cowed families. Right up until the Northernmost War.
But Lanie didn’t tell Tan any of this, because the gyrlady was practically snapping with excitement.
“Now we come to it!” Tan crowed.
“To what?” Lanie backtracked over her last words, wondering what she’d said to sharpen the gyrlady’s focus to spindle’s end.
“To Goody. Goody Graves, am I correct? That is what you call her? The legendary revenant of Stones Manor. You say her name in your sleep. Now, tell me, Lanie, about your Goody.”
Time blinked.
The next thing she knew, Lanie found herself huddled on the floor, her head cradled in Tan’s lap. She was sobbing again, numb in all her extremities.
“Lanie, Lanie,” Tan crooned, her voice rough, as if she had been crooning for a while. “I know it hurts. I know. But this is it. This is the boil we must lance. You must speak of it, if you can. We are close to something now.”
So Lanie told her everything, her cheek pressed against Tan’s embroidered trousers. About Goody Graves. About Lanie’s sickly infancy. How Unnatural Stones had declared Lanie’s illness to be an early sign of her necromancy. How he had ordered Goody to tend to her, lest her allergy to her parents’ profession and proximity finish her off. How Goody had done just that: attended her childhood sickbed, cared for her, sang to her, told her stories in Quadic. Comfortless herself, Goody had had no reason to offer solace to her enfeebled charge, but nonetheless she had given it. She applied wet cloths to Lanie’s aches, caressed her matted hair, kept her in clean handkerchiefs, lit beeswax candles against nightmares, murmured assurances, sang lullabies, told stories, fed her, brought freshly cut flowers to her bedside—all while Lanie’s fainting sicknesses, her swellings and outbreaks, her thunderous colds and flus, her sweats and wracks of fever, like storms, worsened, cracked, and finally passed.
Then she told Tan the rest.
Midsummer. Grandpa Rad. The Sarcophagus of Souls. Hatchet’s ward. Datu and the wolf cub. Mak. Her descent. Her visit with Sari Scratch. Gallowsdance Stones’s tunnel. Her walk to Skrathmandan. Hatchet’s wards. The ice. The dirt. The dark.
By the time she finished, Lanie’s burning eyes were drooping. She longed to crawl back into her cot and sleep. Instead, Tan propped her up and wiped her face.
Setting her hands upon her shoulders, she held Lanie’s gaze. “Here is what I think,” she said. “The real reason necromancers keep being born to the Stones line is not because the Stoneses are blessed of Saint Death. It is because the first necromancers of the Founding Era instigated a wrong long ago, and Saint Death wants to put to right.
“I believe that your Goody Graves—we must find her true name; I have some ideas about that—has been praying to Doédenna all these long years of her undeath. But she has been cut off from Doédenna; they cannot find each other. And because it was a Stones who severed them each from each, it must be a Stones to effect their reunion. Goody raised Irradiant from infancy. Perhaps because of this, feeling that he loved her best of all Stoneses thus far, Doédenna concentrated her greatest efforts on him. But Irradiant went astray. Raised without principles or role models, he fell in at a young age with a cruel and profligate friend who stripped him of whatever remained of his humanity.
“History,” Tan reflected, “has nothing good to say about the Regent Sinister, Sosha Brackenwild. Even his sister, Moll the Second, laughed when he died36. After that, Doédenna was perhaps more careful in her choice of necromancers. When you were born, and put into Goody’s care, Doédenna bent even more of Her concentration on you. She brightened the potential She had planted in you with each passing year. And Goody did the rest, just by loving you.”
This had the skin-peeling sensation of truth.
“But,” she protested, “this is all conjecture!”
“Of course it is!” Tan said. “I am not in constant communication with Doédenna! I cannot presume to know the mind of the god of Death! Although,” she mused, “come the twelfth month of Vespers, I intend to ask Her all about it. Sometimes She answers me in dreams, or comes to me in visions if I hold sothaín long enough. Exhausting, but worth the effort. You, however,” she added, “may ask Her at any time. Your religion does not forbid chatting with the god of your choice no matter the calendar month! In fact, you’re encouraged to do so!”
Lanie said slowly, “You want me to ask Saint Death about Goody? About the Stoneses being necromancers because of her?”
Tan’s round face creased as it beamed. “It would be useful, would it not, to know where you came from? Why you are what you are? What hopes were placed in you from infancy—perhaps unfairly, but not, I might add, unjustly?”
Finding herself nodding along with Tan’s enthusiastically bobbing head, Lanie almost flinched back when Tan leapt to her feet.
“Wonderful! You stay right here, in this room, and have a little talk with Doédenna. I, meanwhile, will pursue other avenues of research regarding your Goody’s original identity. I want to know who she was, exactly, before she became slave to the Stoneses. I will also pursue my acquaintance with Sari Scratch—or, Baroness Skrathmandan, as she prefers these days. A formidable woman! Perhaps something might yet be arranged for you there. You see,” she hinted slyly, “I have ties to Quadiíb that the Skrathmandan clan might covet for Skakmaht. Rook is a powerful ally, yes, but Quadiíb? Quadiíb could eat Rook for brunch! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You, young lady, have some meditating to do.”
“Yes,” Lanie murmured, glancing away from the gyrlady to stare distractedly at the walls. They were already taking on the translucence and brilliance of citrine. This far from her next surge day, it was the very last thing Lanie had expected.
But she knew: her god was drawing near.
“Talk to Her,” Tan urged Lanie, helping her to attain, albeit wobblingly, her feet. “Assure Her you’re still working on the task She has laid out for you. That you haven’t given up on either of them—not on Her, not on Goody. That you haven’t given up hope.”
“Haven’t I?” Lanie asked.
“Have you?” Tan countered.
“No,” Lanie sighed as the walls began to flash and glitter, and the air filled with the smell of lemons. “I suppose I haven’t.”
“Good!” Her small black eyes sparking suddenly, Tan looked up and around, and gave a deep, salubrious sniff.
“That! Is! Marvelous!” She shook herself like a wet robin. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I? When you’re ready, wash your face and come downstairs to the tap room for a late breakfast. Duantri will be down after her morning classes, and Havoc won’t open to the public till noon. There will lentils. Spicy ones!” she added, shivering with decadence. “Delicious! And we deserve it!”
“Thank you, Tan.” Lanie meant it with all her heart, but she also firmly shut the door behind the gyrlady the moment Tan stepped through, and resolutely fixed the latch.
For a moment, she let her left hand rest on the wood, watching the grayly glimmering color-play of her wizard mark begin to dance, as it reflected or responded to a light behind her that had not been there a moment before.
And when she turned around, she saw exactly what she expected to see, and also what she never could expect—not if she lived for ten thousand years:
Doédenna, god of Death, waiting for her.
Her hood and cowl shadowed that quiet brown face, those eyes like endless fog. Her cloak filled the tiny room, ivory-colored bones overlapping each other like scales, bones of every shape and size, bones from every beast imaginable, and exoskeletons, and ammonites, chitons and shells, sponges and luminescent algae, mites, bristle worms, black coral: all creatures who had ever lived and died were caught in her cloak.
“I missed our autumn equinox,” Lanie said softly. “I regret that, more than I can say. But I promise You—I will make myself Your shrine at Midwinter. I shall be Your palace and Sky House and cathedral. And I promise You dancing. If You will still have me.”
Saint Death smiled shyly.
In the glass vase on the desk, the black sludge of rotted ectenica gathered itself back together like a mandrake taking form. It stretched, it bubbled, it blossomed. It extruded flowers from itself, and those flowers turned the color of alluvial larimar, if larimar were made of moonlight instead of stone. A barely detectable scent perfumed the room, cold and faint and sweet: the memory of the woods in every season. This time, the petals did not blacken or slacken or fall to ash; they remained upright and trembling, chiming with their own music, alert to every tender word the god of Death murmured in answer to Her necromancer.
And when She opened Her arms, Lanie ran to Her, and hugged Her hard.
34 The trunk had a checkered history: it originated as a storage chest for a captain on the seedier side of the seafaring industry; had safeguarded, in its time, illicitly acquired silver cups, emeralds the size of ostrich eggs, and ropes of pearls enough to depopulate whole oyster farms; and became, in its retirement at a Lirian brewpub, a repository for extra quilts. How it fell into Havoc Dreadnought’s possession is a tale far too tortuous and beguiling for a mere footnote. For further reading, see Havoc: How an Urchin of Umrys Lost a Finger, Kissed a Devil, and Let the Ocean In.
35 A foundling adopted by the triplets Iniquity, Propinquity, and Antiquity Stones. Also the arsonist behind the torching of the Lirian Academy for Young Cutthroats, in which blazing inferno Lichwake’s (so-called) benefactresses perished.
36 Moll II (who before her coronation was Canon Moll of the High Temple of Sappacor) was considered solemn, efficient, and kindly, but not much given to raucous mirth. The Brackenwild courtiers who reported hearing laughter echoing from the royal chambers at Castle Ynyssyll, where Moll II kept vigil at her brother’s deathbed, could not actually swear it was her laughter; they had never heard such a sound before that night, nor did ever again after.