I BENT DOWN, ignoring the way my muscles burned with exertion. My body wanted to shut down, but my mind feared the silence sleep would bring. I kept my gaze focused on the soldier’s chest, the shiny brass buttons, the crisp lines of the wool coat, as I slipped my hands under his shoulders and heaved his body up. I stared at the starched collar, not the lolling head. I focused on the tangled gilded threads of his epaulette, not the sword embedded in his flesh.
I dragged the soldier’s body down the hall, dark crimson smearing a trail on the white marble.
When I had arrived at the castle with Nedra and her army, I had been horrified at the way her revenants attacked. But if I was honest, I’d also been in awe of how efficiently they cut a swath through the highly trained Emperor’s Guard.
What I hadn’t thought about was how heavy the corpses would be when we cleared them from the hall.
The human body was not designed to be moved after death. It was awkward and unevenly weighted. When death felled a man, the earth should swallow him.
Bile rose in my throat.
When death felled a man, he should not stand again.
“This the last of them?” a small man with wire-rimmed glasses asked me. He held a clipboard, and I wondered if he intended to take a census of the dead.
“As far as I know,” I replied. Servants in black coats with green trim moved wearily, carting the bodies of the fallen from the halls and toward a wagon outside, where they could be transported to the pauper’s grave in the clear-cut forest at the center of the island.
The man nodded. “Just the tower, then.” He looked around, squinting. It wasn’t until his eyes landed on me that I realized he had been looking for volunteers. The other servants were busy loading up the last of the soldiers.
“I’m not a—” I started, but the man had already turned, leading me back into the castle. I sighed, the weight of exhaustion sinking in.
I could walk away. But when I looked behind me, to the open door and the night sky beyond, all I could think was that she was out there. Nedra. She had left through that door, and I did not want to follow her.
So I followed the man.
“Who are you, anyway?” he asked me as I fell into step behind him.
“A student at Yūgen,” I answered, although I wasn’t sure that was true anymore. I had still been arrested, even if it had been by a corrupt, traitorous governor. I wondered if saving the Emperor would have any kind of bearing on my status.
“Linden’s boy,” the man said after looking me up and down. We mounted the stairs leading to the old tower.
“Yeah.” My father was high on the council, much more accustomed to walking the halls of the palace than I was.
The man made a derisive snorting sound that seemed utterly incongruous with his short, mousy stature. “I’m Hamish Hamlayton,” he said, pausing in front of the iron doors that had been locked earlier, trapping the Emperor behind them. “City planning.”
“Grey—gori,” I said awkwardly, then repeated my name more clearly. “Greggori. Astor.”
“Yes,” Hamish said, but his attention was elsewhere. His rounded shoulders hunched a little, reminding me of the rats we kept caged at Yūgen for alchemical experiments, the ones that stood on their hind legs and sniffed the air, their lips curling over their fangs.
I wondered how such a man had not only found himself on the governing council, but become something of a leader in clearing out the bodies. Hamish held the door open for me and caught my curious look. I was still trying to place him; I thought I’d known most of Father’s fellow councilmen. “City planning,” he said again, stressing the words. “Streets and sewers.”
It clicked then. Father had often mocked the role. City planning was the least respected position on the council, a near-thankless task with twice the work and none of the prestige other council members enjoyed.
I stepped inside the room that had been used to imprison the Emperor. It smelled sharply of metal—unsurprising, as iron covered the walls, a remnant of when the chamber had been used to imprison Bennum Wellebourne, the original traitor of Lunar Island. But the metallic twinge was so sharp I could almost taste it.
Blood, I realized, looking down at the floor. It pooled on the dark metal, drying and sticky, clinging to my boots.
My eyes followed the lamplight flickering on the bodies.
The one closest to me was a man. Strange, wasn’t it, that I had spent every evening in his office for a year, that I had sat across from his desk and recited my lessons like a good lad, that I had spoken to him more than my own father, and yet, in death, I almost didn’t recognize him. How could the escape of a soul change a body so much? But it had. It made Master Ostrum’s face slacker, his eyes duller. He didn’t look asleep, as I’d often heard death described.
He just looked dead.
“Did you know him?” Hamish asked, hefting another body around and positioning it so that he could drag it down the stairs and to the hallway.
“Yes,” I said simply.
Hamish thumped down the stairs, then paused, waiting for me. I picked up Master Ostrum from under the shoulders, struggling with his limp weight and the joints in his body that were already stiffening. He was larger than me, and I staggered under his weight, but I would not let his body bounce on the steps and drag along the floor like the one Hamish was weighed down with. Master Ostrum deserved more than that. I could give him so little now, but I at least had respect.
By the time I reached the cart in the hall, hefting Master Ostrum’s body up, Hamish was waiting for me. I finally saw which body he had moved so callously out of the iron chamber.
Governor Adelaide’s lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling, one lid half-opened, squinting up at the ceiling. Someone had removed the sword Nedra had used to kill her, but the wound remained, a stain of black-burgundy across her dress.
Master Ostrum no longer looked like himself in death. But when Nedra had plunged the sword into Adelaide’s chest, piercing the governor’s heart and watching the life drain from her, Nedra had not looked like herself either.