Page 105 of The Second Death of Locke
All of it familiar—all of it devastating in its stillness.
She was the High Lady of Locke. The sovereign of the Isle, restored. The center and master of every bit of power that Idistra had to offer.
And yet there was not a single thing she could do with it, not on her own. She could not force his heart to beat again; she could not open him up and use the threads of her power to pull him back together. Not if the life had already left him; not if there was nothing of him left to reach for.
For the first time in her life, sitting in front of Kier’s body, Grey found that she was utterly powerless.
“You can’t ask me to do this,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t do this without you.”
You can do anything you want to, with or without me, Kier would probably say. And she remembered the sound of his voice in the inn:I always knew you were a survivor.
Not this,Kier. She couldn’t survive this. “Please,” she begged, one last fruitless attempt to call him back from death.
But there was no response. Of course there wasn’t—there would never be a response again. His voice would live on only in her memory.
She felt all previous versions of herself splitting apart and converging again, all the decisions they had made: she was a girl of eight, taking his hand and pushing him her power; she was following himand Lot to a village with a letter in her hand; she was a teenager, pressing her fingers to her lips at night, trapping the feeling of the first time he had kissed her on a dare; she was fifteen, watching the determination form in his face as he made up his mind to save her; she was eighteen and his arms were around her, his tears hot against her neck; she was a dying light, a horrified shell of herself, and she was binding to him and changing him forever.
Every decision. Every sacrifice. All of it led to here, to now, to her on the edge of death and the edge of twenty-five, holding his body against her like that would bring him back.
In some world, some reality, there had to be a version of him that lived. A version of her that didn’t make him die for her.
She wanted to take it all back, to claw back every year and every decision that had made them this version: the girl who lived turning into the woman who lived, who lured every person she loved into death by sacrifice.
She fell, her head landing heavy on his chest, and she wept over his body until the darkness claimed her.
I LOVE YOU, AND I’M SORRY.
Last words of Captain Kiernan Seward, recorded at Mecketer, 16 yearsPD
twenty-five
GREY DID NOT REMEMBERwaking, but her eyes were open, and she was no longer on Kier’s body. She jolted up, searching for him, but he was not there. She was in the Ghostwood now, surrounded by the skinny trees, just off the path. She knew where she was immediately—if she turned and walked in the other direction, she’d find the graves of all the Lockes who’d lived here before, and beyond that, the old abbey.
The first thing that came back to her was the grief. She felt it in every part of her body, the aching emptiness, the knowledge that with every second that stretched forward, she was living in a time in which Kier no longer existed. It was unbearable, the magnitude of that grief. She did not think she would ever find the bottom of it. She did not know, either, how she had moved from his body, or where his body had been taken.
She turned to find him, and froze, her heart in her throat.
Her mother waited, standing straight and tall as ever, the mist stirring near the bottom of her skirts. Locke had always had the unnatural, brutal beauty of someone who’d learned very early that to be iron strong, cruelty was its own kind of currency. Isaak walked from the mist behind her, his hand coming to rest on his wife’s waist. Grey felt the bitter weight of them on her heart.
“You’re here,” she said.
“We’ve been waiting,” someone said behind her. She turned—it was Severin. Severin, who’d grown nearly six inches in the summer before he died; Severin, with his mop of curly hair like his father’s; Severin, who had held her hands and told her to forget. For one aching moment, Grey had hoped… but he was still fifteen, still as young as he was when they’d brought the Isle down.
He was still dead. They all were.
She rose slowly to her feet—she had never seen them from this height, never known that she’d grown to be taller than her mother. She was older now than Severin ever got to be. They spoke with the rounded vowels and smooth burr of the Isle, the accent that she herself had hidden over time, partially for protection. She spotted more shapes in the mist, more relatives that she only half remembered.
“You’re not really here,” she said, laying her hand over her heart. She could not feel it beating. Perhaps this was death after all.
“No,” her mother said. She moved forward, the mist stirring as she walked. She did not look dead. When she reached up to touch Grey, the silver of her signet ring gleamed in the opaque light. “You are Locke now.”
Before she could think better of it, Grey went to grab her mother’s hand. Her own fingers went right through it—they both stepped back, as if burned.
Behind her parents, the mist was clearing. There in the meadow where the Lockes were buried, Grey could see someone else: in the rubble of the old temple, he sat on a sepulcher with his back to her, his black tunic sticking to his skin with the damp.
No, she realized. Not a sepulcher. The altar.
He wasn’t alone—there was another person, a woman, standing beside him.
