It was an honor to work with the dead, but Rylan Hunt—four stone, fifty-two inches, eviscerated, my notes read—had died two days before his thirteenth birthday, and no funeral rites would fix that. I uncurled his clenched fists, the tense muscles creaking like tinder, and peeled off his sodden gloves. His mother had made them last autumn, and they’d been blue yesterday. Now the whole of him was red and brown and purple, the stains of death settling beneath his skin. I turned and tossed his gloves into the compost pile that would become his funeral plot. The collecting pool sloshed about my knees.
Every part of him loved and every part of him returned to the earth except for the parts that seeped into me. I was a graveyard so no one else needed to be.
Felhollow’s only undertaker: it wasn’t a title I wanted, but there had been nothing else left to do in this town when I arrived seven years ago.
“And it means I’m here for you,” I said, one shaking hand on his arm.
Rylan’s skin was in tatters, ribs splayed open like a hurricane lily. I collected what blood I could, but there was barely enough for funeral rites. There was hardly anything left of him.
The person who’d done it had been captured, but breathing still tasted bitter. What good was vengeance? Rylan was dead.
We feared the old tales of our long-gone demigod overlords, the Noble and the Vile, but we mortals were far worse. They might have ruled over us, warred with us, and dined on us, but the haughty court of peers with its money and soldiers was far more vicious than any old gossip’s tale.
I covered Rylan’s torso with a sheet of canvas. My needle slipped through his skin easily, stitching the canvas to him to hide the wound. The stitching was an old comfort, the steady movement the same sway as the river waves I’d been born on. Death was as common there as it was here. Only the wealthy—or more often, the peerage who had long ago been gifted titles and holdings by the Crown and ruled over Cynlira—could avoid it.
“You look older.” I brushed his hair from his face. “I know you liked that.”
Most twelve-year-olds did.
“I’ve never understood how you can stomach standing in that mess,” a familiar voice said behind me. “It makes my skin crawl.”
I sighed and leaned my head back, letting the midday sun soak into me. The open-air pool where I performed funeral rites was a shout away from the church doors. Rylan rested on a stone slab in the center of the pool, and if needed, I could sprint to the church and heal anyone who took a turn. The bandits who’d tried to raid us this morning were all dead save for one—the vilewrought.
“Don’t be rude, Jules,” I said without looking.
“Am I ever?” He huffed and dropped something with a sickening crack. “Lore?”
I turned. Julian stood over the crumpled vilewrought bandit and held out his bruised hand to me. He was Felhollow to the bone—pine green eyes, lean muscles from years felling trees, and a deep distrust of anyone not from Felhollow.
I held up my hand. “Almost done.”
I laid two square halfans atop Rylan’s eyes to hold them shut. Everything had a cost, including death. Most Felfolk could barely afford it these days. Well, except for Julian.
“You don’t have to follow the old traditions, you know,” he said. “You’re not from here. No one would blame you.”
“His mother asked for them,” I said and stepped out of the pool, pale pink water muddying the dirt. “How am I supposed to convince Felhollow I’m good enough to marry you without your traditions?”
He shrugged. Julian didn’t follow them. I was as good as adopted by his family, but I’d be an outsider till we married, probably a little while after too.
“You up to healing this trash?” asked Julian, nudging the vilewrought with his boot. “Fix her enough to talk. We need to know if we got all them bandits.”
The vilewrought at his feet flinched. Magic rolled off her in waves, raising the hair on my bare arms. I knelt down before her and touched her bloody hand. Her shoulders shook.
“Sure,” I said. “Go look after the others and make sure none of my healing comes undone while I’m working.”
Julian did what I asked without so much as blinking, and the dying girl’s laughter rattled out of her with a cough. I pulled my knife from its sheath.
“You’re vilewrought,” I said. “That’s rare.”
She lifted her head, blue eyes set in bruised white skin, and nodded to Rylan’s body. “He the only dead?”
“He is.” I touched the dried blood coating her arms. The only wound I could see was a ragged one gouged across her chest. “Any of this yours?”
“Probably,” she said. Her hands twisted in the tightly knotted ropes. I’d told Julian a dozen times vilewrought could still work even with bound hands. “What good’s a healer all the way out here?”
“Lately, barely any.” I pressed the knife to my arm. My noblewright, a force of magic I could feel but never see, unfurled from me like smoke from fire. “Hold still.”
She groaned. “No use healing me. There’s nothing to tell.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “You’re hurt, so you’re getting healed.”
Take it as sacrifice, I prayed and cut a strip of flesh from my arm, and heal her wound.
A shiver like a cat’s tongue ran down my arm, and the blood and skin vanished. Noblewrights, like the Noble they came from, could only create, and they always needed a self-sacrifice to create from. I dropped the knife, hands shaking. She hissed.
New flesh wove its way across her wound and settled as a shiny pink scar.
“Noblewrought.” The girl stared at the scar. “You’re noblewrought.”
Before the gods abandoned us and when the Noble and the Vile still walked this world, mortals hadn’t been able to use magic. They fought back against the Noble and Vile to no avail, and then, they were left with only one option. There was only one way to escape the terrifying grip of their immortal tyrants—they devoured the Noble and Vile and took their magic.
We noblewrought and vilewrought were the legacy of those who had feasted.
“You’re good.” She prodded the new skin and stared up at me. Even her shiner was gone. “Real good.”
My noblewright was like having a god in my veins, answering my prayers when I made the right sacrifice.
“Thank you.” I sat back and studied her. “Who did you sacrifice to kill Rylan?”
“Right,” she said with a sneer. “Vile me, always sacrificing others. Maybe I’m tired of killing.”
“Did you kill him?” I asked and pointed to Rylan.
“The blond one did.” She scratched at her chest and winced. “I didn’t bother learning names.”
There had been two blond bandits, and Julian’s father had ordered both killed this morning after questioning them.
My noblewright shivered. A thrum, bees in a hive, started in my chest and spread through my hands.
“You’re hurt elsewhere,” I said. My noblewright could only heal so much. I twisted my trembling hands together. “Tell me why you picked Felhollow, and I’ll fix it.”
“I know what’s wrong with me, and you can’t fix it. Bleeding out. Or in, I guess.” She chuckled, and blood bubbled in the corner of her mouth. Her bound hands tugged at her shirt. “We didn’t pick Felhollow. He did.”
Her vilewright, invisible and nearly intangible, hung between us like roiling storm air. She narrowed her eyes at me.
“They bound me with Chaos’s sigil when I was seven and made me a soldier, and I can feel their terrible commands even now. I can feel what I’m supposed to do gnawing at me,” she said and yanked her shirt open.
Beneath the new scar, a jagged sigil like a closed, bleeding eye had been carved into her chest and filled with red ink. All wrought, even the dualwrought Crown of Cynlira and her vilewrought son, were bound to serve and obey the court and common council. It kept their magic limited and tightly controlled, each sigil denoting what magic their wright could perform. The magic in hers ate away at her bleeding skin.
“This will kill me if I don’t do what I’m supposed to, and I’m going to let it. The only self-sacrifice my vilewright would ever accept,” said the girl with a laugh. “It’ll be enough to destroy our tracks and erase everything that might lead him here.”
“Who?” I asked. Mother had always told me to never let them bind me no matter what, so I’d run to Felhollow. What was this girl running from?
I reached for my knife, and she kicked it away.
“That man deserves what’s coming for him, but you don’t,” she said. “That vile boy’s going to love you, and I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head and pulled her hands from her chest. “Who? Tell me, and I can fix this.”
“This is my choice.” She smeared her hand through the blood on her chest and drew her fingers down her face. I knew the moves. All wrought did. Five lines over a half-moon, like a hand grasping from an open grave. Death’s sigil marked our final sacrifice, one last contract with our wrights. “My first real choice. Don’t worry. My vilewright will make it quick.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I said and leaned over her, the prickling of her vilewright’s presence an itch I couldn’t scratch.
“Tell that man I’m no assassin. Not for him.” She drew a line of red across her mouth. “And run. If he’s already here, run, because he will never let you go. You can’t fight him.”
But I could. An uneasy ache, a need to destroy, rose up within me, and she reared back.
“Oh, my noble sister,” she whispered. “That noblewright the only monster in you?”
I didn’t answer, and she didn’t speak again.
The only redemption for vilewrought was death.