I vomited in the washroom. Basil held back my hair, washing Carlow’s blood from my hand with a damp cloth. Because of the bindings, none of them had ever been able to create ways to trap immortal things or destroy them, since that was too similar to trapping and destroying wrights. The Crown would never have allowed such experimentations, but I wasn’t bound and could undertake whatever contracts I wanted. We repeated similar contracts for the rest of the day, learning that physical sacrifices worked best for destroying immortal objects.
It made sense. The Door required physical sacrifices to stay shut. Why wouldn’t creations made by the only other immortal things left, wrights, require the same to be destroyed?
“However we deal with the Door, it will require blood,” said Basil, glancing from Carlow’s corpse to the watered-down wine sky outside. “Why is it always blood?”
“It won’t be if you open it,” Creek said. His body was pocked with holes left by my vilewright’s destructions. “Carlow had to die for you to manage even this little bit. Imagine what destroying the Door would require?”
“Imagine what remaking a version that didn’t demand sacrifices would require?” countered Basil.
“Let me think on it tomorrow,” I said. Carlow’s body, still and silent, made me shudder each time I saw it in the corner of my sight. My wrights were overworked and lethargic. My head ached from all the contracts. “I doubt anything will ever be enough.”
“Not from us alone.” Basil shooed me out the door. “Go rest. We’ll resume tomorrow.”
By the time I got to my room, I was too tired to sleep. Restless energy raced over my arms and legs.
I never heard Carlow return. That was another way Cynlira scarred us; it was how Cynlira had scarred my mother and all the folks in the Wallows. It pushed us to work and work and work until our bodies broke down and we couldn’t remember the last time we slept. It told us that if we worked hard enough, we could be rich.
We couldn’t be.
The peerage would work us until we died, bolster their bank vaults with our work, and then leave all the money we’d earned them to their heirs. It was what it had done to my mother. It was what the Heir was doing to Carlow. It was what the Crown was doing to all of us. Overwork, be it from too many sacrifices or too tiring jobs, kept folks too exhausted to resist the way things were.
Someone knocked three times on my door, and I hesitated. The Door would try to lure me to open it.
“Lorena?” came the voice of the Heir.
He would be a terrible lure.
I opened the door. “Your Majesty?”
“I fear I have neglected you, but my mother required my presence for these last few days,” he said and swept into the room. “Next time, make sure it’s me at the door before you open it. Ask me only something I can know.”
“Excessive, but if you insist.”
“I do.” He set a small glass bowl of red dirt on my desk, leaned against the wall, and clasped his arms behind himself. It was the same bowl Carlow had presented me with but never deemed me ready to work with after all our tests. “Basil told me of your experiments today, and if you are up to it, I have another for you. Can you destroy this?”
The dirt was impossibly smooth, each granule the same minuscule shape and color. I tipped the bowl, and the dirt spilled out. It pooled like water.
“What is it?” I asked, and an oily, bitter taste coated my tongue. I had not been up to it, but now I wanted to know. “It’s not dirt.”
“Do you know why blood is red?” asked the Heir.
“Iron.” In order to create or destroy blood with my wrights, I had to know what everything was made of. My work as an undertaker had given me excellent knowledge of how the mortal body worked. “Iron doesn’t make dirt perfectly ordered like this.”
“No, but this isn’t really dirt so far as I can tell,” he said. “It’s part of the Door, or at least a physical manifestation of the Door. It took us two years to figure out how to separate it from the Door’s cavern.”
“What?” I yanked my hand away from it. “What do you mean by physical manifestation? A door is a door.”
“Not always.” He raised one shoulder and lowered it slowly. “We know this isn’t truly dirt, but what it is eludes us, just as the Door’s true form eludes us. Can you destroy it?”
He eyed me over his glasses. I followed his line of sight to a little spot above my shoulder. He nodded to the empty space.
“Your vilewright is…” He waved his hand back and forth. “Listing?”
“Tired,” I said.
“If you insist. Can you do it?”
This was a challenge then. Could the dualwrought girl who’d threatened him in Felhollow back up her confidence?
“Of course I can attempt it, but I have questions. Can I touch it?” I asked. When he nodded, I swept the dirt back into the bowl. The grains made a sound like shattering glass, and a few clung to my skin, their touch oily and damp. I scraped them into the bowl and sniffed my hand. It smelled of nothing. “Have you tasted this?”
“It tastes of nothing as well,” he said. “Several people and wrought have tasted it, myself included. Touch appears to be the only sense through which we can accurately perceive it.”
I rubbed my fingers on my shirtsleeve. It was like I had dunked my fingers in lard.
“How many people did you feed it to before trying it yourself?” I asked.
“I am the Heir to the Crown of Cynlira. I am too valuable to be tested so freely, but I did test it myself last year.” He bowed his head, hair covering his face, but he couldn’t hide his smile. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Because all lives could be reduced to value. The peerage never saw the nuance in such a statement.
My teeth clenched together, and he glanced up at me.
He inhaled, exhaled, removed his glasses, and cleaned them against his shirt. “You are upset by this?”
“Yes,” I said.
The disappointment of his sigh was palpable, and I remembered clearly how he had once said, “You must understand me.”
If I was to be here, help Will, and stop the sacrifices, this boy was my best chance.
“I understand why you did.” I touched his arm. I did not let my thumb slide a hairbreadth to the left and beneath his sleeve. I did not curl my fingers around his wrist. He stilled. “That doesn’t mean I agree with it.”
He was as twitchy about touch as me. He wore his clothes like armor, the sleeves always buttoned tight against his wrists and his cravat knotted about his neck. I loved touch, to be touched and to touch, but so often, others expected more afterward and didn’t know how to stop when I drew back. I used undertaking as a shield: no one wanted to touch the girl who touched death. It saved me from expectations. The Heir used fear and finely tailored suits.
The Heir’s jaw tightened. I withdrew my hand.
“What would you have done?” he asked.
Not approached those certain to say yes if you offered them enough money. That was too easy and led down too many dangerous paths.
But I lied and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I hate not knowing,” he muttered. He unbuttoned his greatcoat and sat at my desk. “I have not yet explained to my mother that you are here. I do not know how she will react to our deal involving Willoughby Chase. You realize that not sacrificing him will require another sacrifice? Can your conscience bear to send another in his place?”
Will had helped me when no one else would, and now I could finally help him.
“My conscience can’t bear letting an innocent man die,” I said and leaned against the desk. “Does she select the sacrifices?”
He nodded. “Now that it’s one sacrifice every month, she discusses it with the court, and in the event the court betrays her, she alone will decide. She hardly needs them to do what she wants, but it is easier for all when she agrees with the court. They could kill her, but she would kill them. Everyone would die. She could kill them, but they would kill her. Everyone would die. For now, it is a precarious peace.”
For them. From the peerage warring over lands to the daily dangers of work, most of Cynlira had never known peace.
“If she goes ahead with the sacrifice, she’ll be breaking my contract with you,” I said. “How does she feel about killing her only surviving child?”
“Far less conflicted about it than you’re imagining.” He glanced up at me, gray eyes pale against the dark shadows beneath his eyes, and settled his glasses on his face. “How did your father die?”
“Mining accident.” His hands had been ripped off, and the mine hadn’t kept a noblewrought healer on-site like they were supposed to. “Let’s get this done. I need a sacrifice.”
The Heir laughed softly. He held out his arm to me and rolled back his sleeve until the tendons of his forearm were tense beneath my fingers. I tapped the nook of his elbow, holding his arm until a vein rolled beneath my fingers, and pricked it with the long needle he offered up to me. He didn’t even wince.
Take his blood, not enough to kill him, I prayed to my vilewright, and pain as sacrifice, and destroy this part of the door.
If I knew something, my wrights knew it. They were like some distant part of me I could only access when I paid the price. I had never put boundaries on my wrights—I rarely used them in a way that could get someone killed—but if this was part of the Door, it was Vile. There was no telling how much blood was necessary to destroy it.
The blood dripping from the Heir’s arm vanished in a stuttering motion as if some small tongue lapped it from his skin. Black smoke drifted from the bowl, and the scent of charred hair burned in my nose. The Heir and I leaned over the bowl.
Three little granules crumbled and drifted away in the smoke. The Heir made a small noise in the back of his throat. My vilewright trilled.
It wasn’t a sound exactly but a feeling that rang in my head, like those whistles only dogs could hear. I knew the sound was happening even though I couldn’t quite hear it.
“Wait,” I said. “It’s not right.”
Three other grains twisted, the red rippling and something writhing beneath their surface, and each buckled about their middle. The grains split, and the three new ones wobbled atop the pile in the bowl.
The Heir hummed. “Only three. Curious.”
“Baiting me won’t work.” I ground my teeth together and took a breath. It did work, but I was too tired to rise to it tonight. “Same thing happened to you?”
“Every time,” he said. “The Door is not a door, but it looks like one. This is the dirt that surrounds it. It is not dirt. The area around the Door is part of the Door as well, but we’re not certain where that boundary ends. Carlow and I believe it’s expanding.”
“Who disagrees with you?” I asked.
“My mother.” He swallowed. “The growth, when compared to the almost exponential increase in sacrifices necessary, is negligible.”
“If we knew the mechanism it uses to replicate, we might be able to destroy that and then destroy the Door,” I said. “Tried it?”
“Of course,” said the Heir. “We even attempted to re-create it to gain some insight.”
“You can’t create, so who attempted it?”
“I am well aware of my ability to only ever destroy,” he said, words clipped and teeth bared. They weren’t as sharp as the rumors said. “Carlow. She was dead for a month after.”
My day had been filled with Carlow moving—tapping her fingers against her desk, throwing her notes at Creek’s head, and tugging at her tangled hair as she read—and then the sudden unsettling stillness of death at my hands.
“My mother discovered what we had done and alerted the court and council. We were forbidden from attempting it again. The court of peers and common council are often at odds, but they concur on this: we can do nothing with the Door that might open or destroy it.” He chuckled, and my noblewright shuddered. “Keep the dirt. Do nothing that could harm you, but see what you can make of it.”
I nodded. “So this is what my work will be—dirt.”
“Dirt,” he said and rose from my chair. He stopped in the doorway. “I have heard that Willoughby Chase will arrive tomorrow to begin mounting his defense and begin his house arrest. You are welcome to visit him. You will be followed. Feel free to inform him that we will be watching him as well. Do not think you can escape my guards or our contract.”
“I would never,” I said. “Are you going to tell me why I should make sure whoever knocks at my door is who I think they are?”
He shook his head. “No. You’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out.”
So he wanted to watch me figure it out. What a peer he was, playing with me.
I slid the lock into place. His footsteps faded down the hall, and I crawled into bed. The door rattled once. I didn’t answer.
“Smart girl,” I thought I heard, but by the time I opened the door, I was alone.