THE WAGON FINALLY rolled to a stop. Through the iron bars on the window, I could see the last rays of sunlight dip below the bay.
I heard the wagoner hop off his seat in the front, pausing to pet the horses. I stood and faced the door, so that when he opened it, he saw not the pile of jostled dead bodies, but me.
I lowered my cloak’s hood as he gaped at me. My white tresses tumbled out onto the black cloth.
He stuttered unintelligibly, scrambling back and tripping on a stone. I hopped out of the back of the wagon, with Nessie trailing behind. The wagoner’s eyes looked from me to her, and he blanched even more.
“Go,” I said.
He launched himself back up to the front of the wagon and whipped the already-tired horses into a frenzy. I was barely aware of the clatter of his departure. Dusk had settled over the graveyard, but I hardly noticed that either. Because now that I was here, I realized I didn’t need the sun to see what had been waiting for me all along.
The earth itself radiated light, a golden glow that was warm and inviting.
And powerful.
“What is this?” I muttered, awed by what was before me. The corpses buried here had all been dead for at least a month, some for half a year. Their souls should have long since disappeared, but they were here. Thousands of souls, hidden under only a few feet of earth.
My ghost hand reached blindly for the crystal knife. I wasn’t even sure if it could hold this much pure, raw energy. But I was damn sure going to try. A fraction of this energy had given Nessie back to me for a moment. What if this could buy her months, a year?
I licked my lips, my mouth unintentionally salivating at the power so readily available to me.
Nessie followed me as I walked through the center of the graves, the long mounds extending all the way to the dark forest on the far end. How could this be? I dropped to my knees, inspecting the grave dirt.
The entire field was lit up in gold, veins of light weaving through the dirt, pooling over the mounded trenches. I could feel each body buried in the field as if I were connected to them by a long string. I knew some of them. Carso, Dilada’s brother, far more rotted than she had been. Kava, the girl my sister had a crush on, whose leg had been amputated before she died anyway. People I’d met only once or twice, as I siphoned their pain away in the hospital or the mills. And the ones I didn’t know, I knew now as my power sank into their illuminated bones. Glimpses of their histories, their lives, their wants, their regrets—everything of everyone, seeping into my mind.
But how? I thought. Their souls should have left their bodies.
I dug out a fistful of the rich red clay, and my fingers wrapped around something hard and round. I wiped the dirt away from a rusted iron ring, then laid the circle in my open palm. I shifted it to my shadow hand. Little strings of light formed a net inside the ring.
When Grey and I had boarded the ferry and placed the iron over the graves on Burial Day, I was not a necromancer. I was just a girl, and I was scared—for my life, for my family’s lives. And when Governor Adelaide had distributed the iron rings, a gift from her to the people of her colony, I had thought she was being generous.
Horror caught in my throat, choking me. I scrambled to another mound of dirt, clawing at the earth until I found a second ring. It had been altered by necromancy as well. I flung myself at a third grave, digging out another ring. Each one was like the ancient ring Bunchen had given me—a tiny necromantic net designed to trap the soul in the earth. I gagged, thinking of the tortured people within, imprisoned in their graves.
Governor Adelaide had developed the plague in order to kill as many people as possible, intending to raise them into an army of the undead. But she must have known what I did not—that souls fade over time, evaporating into nothing as they move on into the realm of Death. She could have easily learned of the rings that had sealed the revenants of Bennum Wellebourne after his failed rebellion. But rather than trap the dead in their graves, Adelaide had twisted the rings’ original purpose, using them to ensure that both the life force and the souls of the dead remained in their graves, waiting for the day she could raise an army of her own.
I felt bile rising in my throat as I remembered the sincere prayer I had whispered to Oryous on Burial Day. The way I had pressed an iron ring into the fresh upturned earth. I had been sealing the dead in their graves, trapping them there, torturing them, without even realizing it. How could I have so easily and unwittingly done Governor Adelaide’s bidding?
I stood, renewed determination giving me strength as I gripped the crystal blade in my shadow hand. If I cut out this golden light, absorbing it into my blade, it would free these trapped souls. Their souls would move on, and I could pass the energy on to Nessie.
A momentary panic seized my heart as I remembered how good it felt for the power to flow through me, pooling into my shadow arm. But I knew, no matter how tempting the power was, that I would be the crucible for it, transferring it into the one who needed it most—my sister. And I would be saving the thousands dead here from a fate far worse even than the plague that stole their lives.
My power could save them all.