Page 172 of Grave Situation

“The necromancer transfers what’s left—their own soul—out of that body and to a new one. The old one dies.”

“Soulless?” Arimen whispers. “They die without their soul?”

I nod. “These are bad people and they’re doing bad things. But that’s why the Baswegian histories show that necromancers are hard to kill. Their souls are elsewhere, so they can remove their consciousness from their bodies long enough for… repairs to be done.”

“Not how I would have worded it,” Jaimin murmurs. “You can get around this?”

The others perk up and look at me hopefully.

“Yes. Well, Wasianth can. Peiris is right that this needs the intervention of the gods. Souls are their—our—domain, and I can summon the necromancers’ souls out of the beings they were transferred to.” I give Jaimin a speaking look, and comprehension lights his eyes. The others don’t know I’ve already been using Wasianth’s power to convey souls to the afterlife. “The only other way to do it would be to identify who those beings are and kill them at the exact same time as the necromancer.”

“We’ll call that plan B,” Jaimin suggests. “Okay. As horrific as all that is, at least now we have answers and can form a plan.”

I slump down in my seat. “We don’t have all the answers. Why are the zombies still massed at my family estate? They know we know about them—my father left there weeks ago, and we have dragons patrolling overhead. Why wouldn’t they be moving out into the countryside, infecting villagers and marching toward Harfarin… or wherever?”

“Perhaps their leadership is falling apart,” Peiris suggests. “It could be that those remaining can’t agree on the next move.”

“Or they’re the decoy,” Coryn adds.

My gut freezes. “What?” I rasp.

“They’re the decoy. While we’re watching the big group at the estate, maybe lots of the little groups are getting ready to move in other places. They could even be joining up into a big army somewhere else.” His eyes go wide. “That’s not good.”

Not fucking good, indeed.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

I standat the ship’s rail and watch as the land gets closer and closer. Just uphill from the tiny cove we’ve chosen to disembark at, Leicht is waiting—I can see him clearly. Even more clear is the rocky spur extending into the cove. With the tide this low, it’s almost like a natural dock, and the only way we can get the horses off the ship without finding an actual dock. In the past—and probably not so past—smugglers used to use this spur as a convenient way to bring goods into Rebithia without paying tariffs. My father used to rant about it a lot, so of course Tia and I had to investigate.

Of course, the downside of the tide being this low is that there’s a serious risk of us running aground. Not being a sailor myself and never having been a smuggler, I wasn’t able to tell the captain or helmsman much about the conditions here. So as we inch closer and closer to the spur, it feels as though everyone aboard is holding their breath.

Finally, when it’s so close that I mightalmostbe able to jump the distance, one of the sailors shouts something, and the captain calls for the anchor to be dropped.

“Ready?” Jaimin asks quietly from beside me, and I let out a slow breath.

“Not really, but since when has that mattered?”

He makes a sound that wants to be a laugh but isn’t quite, and we make our way toward where crew members are fitting the long boards meant for boarding other ships at sea into place to form ramps. They’ll be a little steep, and we’ll need to be very careful with the horses, but the captain assures me they’ll hold.

It’s been a week since my sojourn to Harfarin, and after Coryn’s terrifying revelation, I decided to use some of my god powers to move things along. Some of the sailors are deeply suspicious of the convenient wind that sprang up to push us up the coast, but everyone knows that even the best air mage can’t hold a strong wind for days on end without showing strain, so eventually they stopped looking sideways at me. Instead, they’re now saying that the gods must surely be on our side, which made Peiris laugh out loud.

Leicht spoke with the other dragons, and I with Master, and the patrols around the continent intensified their efforts, searching for any clues that the zombies scattered across Vaderyn might be massing together. It only took a few days for word to come back: Yes, that’s what appears to be happening. The only zombies that aren’t moving toward the City of Knowledge are the ones with my uncle and some small groups that seem poised to strike at mid-sized cities—likely as distractions.

At least now we have a better idea of what’s planned—the mage behind all this wants to take control of the academies, and presumably from there exert that control over the rest of Vaderyn. It’s unclear how they plan to neutralize the dragons or even the mages, but I don’t plan to let them get close enough to the city to find out. The combined councils went into an utter panic at the news, not at all helped by the reactions of the ruling monarchs—the King of Gall has apparently barricaded himself in his private apartments and is telling his generals to executeeverybody and not let the zombie mages get him—so Master and I decided it was the right time to reveal “the truth” to the councils.

Of course, that “truth” was invented by Arimen, but it seemed to make them a lot happier anyway.

“They don’t need to know you’re Wasianth,” he declared when he heard about my dilemma. “That would be a mistake—people are greedy, and they’d try to use you. Just tell them that when we were at his temple at Caimae, you had a vision or found a sacred engraving or something that said Wasianth would act through the bearer of the stone at the time of greatest need. Only with fancy words. That way, they know it’s Wasianth who’s gonna fix everything, but they think he’s only using you like a puppet.”

So that’s what we did. It has more holes in it than an archer’s target, but nobody seems to be looking at those. It helps that the dragons finally stepped in and disclosed the secret that Leicht kept hinting at: their prophecy of a rider-mage, the only one to ever exist, who will step forward at the darkest hour and save the world.

Dragons. Always so dramatic. But that solves our other problem—anyone who tries to interfere with the bond between me and Leicht will be in direct violation of the treaty with the dragons. As far as they’re concerned, he and I are destined to be bonded.

Oh, and nobody’s worried about there being mass executions in Gall. The king there has basically been a figurehead for the past twenty years. Everyone knows his advisors and generals run things, and that’s why the kingdom hasn’t fallen to pieces.

It takes a lot less time than I expected for us to get the horses down the ramp, and then we’re standing on the uneven rocks, trying to keep our balance as waves wash over our feet. On the captain’s advice, we took our boots off to protect them fromthe salt water, and my feet are now freezing. We pick our way carefully through the cold water and sharp rocks to the beach. Spring has definitely reached this part of the world—finally—but I know from growing up just a few miles from here that the water will be frigid for months yet. The horses arenothappy, though part of that might be that they’ve been saddled again after weeks without and forced to walk down a shaky plank.

When we finally reach the dry sand, I take my time putting my boots back on, letting the others get a little ahead of me, and murmur to Sweetie, “Well, looks like this is it. Are you ready for a fight?”

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