Page 113 of The Second Death of Locke
Kier left the cart at the bottom of the steps and brought some of the linens with him. He followed her up the stairs, the pat of their boots on the stone the only sound. The gulls were still absent; with the thick fog, Grey couldn’t even hear the sea crashing below.
The heavy doors were closed. Behind them, she knew, she would find carnage. She stopped at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, her heart pounding.
“We don’t have to,” Kier said very quietly behind her. “Youdon’t have to.”
The motto of her family, her house and her isle wasPower inbravery. She did not feel brave, even with all the power of Idistra crackling in the air around her.
“I do,” she said.
Kier said nothing. He only put his hand on her shoulder.
Grey opened the door.
Iron to ashes, ashes to sea, sea to iron again. Let us rejoice at the memory of our victorious dead.
Funeral rites of the Isle of Locke
twenty-seven
BEHIND HER, KIER SUCKEDin a breath. Grey could only stare, her heart in her throat.
The door opened outwards, which was good, because the pile of bodies on the other side would’ve stopped it. But that wasn’t what made her stand there unmoving in shock. Hazy sunlight streamed through the high windows, catching the dust motes in the air. The bodies were piled on the floor, over the tables, slung on chairs. Most of them had no visible injuries, nothing at all to say they were doing any more than sleeping. Some had clearly died in the struggle, run through with swords and stained with brown dried blood. She did not look to the front of the room, the dais.
It was all there, she thought with growing dread, as if time had not touched the Isle since the moment her power submerged it. She was a girl again, eight years old, waiting for death to catch her.
They were not bones, like she’d prepared for; not moth-eaten fabric and dust. They were flesh and blood, with open eyes and mouths and teeth and tongues, wearing masks of death and pain and fear. It was as if time had not touched the Isle in sixteen years, suspended forever in that awful night.
“Gods,” Kier said behind her. She heard the sound of metal as hedrew his sword, but there was no reason for it. The assemblage in front of them was not simply sleeping, like the lost court in a fairytale. They all were dead.
Dread settled in Grey’s heart as she stepped further into the room. She saw the soldiers from Eprain mixed among her own people, in various states of battle interrupted. The truth of it settled on her skin, a terrible realization sixteen years too late.
The battle hadn’t killed them all. No, even with Eprain’s soldiers, even after Locke herself had fallen, most of these people were still alive. It was something else that had ended them—a shock wave, a protection; the power of the Isle shutting down.
Greyhad killed them. She remembered what Scaelas had told her: to save her, to save the line, it had required the sacrifice of everyone else.
She fell to her knees on the stones, narrowly missing the first of the bodies. “I didn’t know,” she said, helpless, because Kier must’ve gathered the truth of what he saw.
Behind her, he only sighed and sheathed his sword. She heard another sound, rustling and shifting, and came out of her horrified stupor to find him leaning over one of the fallen women, clad in a black gown as if already mourning. He shut her eyes carefully, then picked her up in his arms. Without another word, he turned for the door.
“What are you doing?” she asked, numb with agony.
He only looked at her. “It’s the way of Locke,” he said finally, “to return their ashes to the sea.” There was no hatred in his gaze. No judgment. He turned and left, carrying his grisly cargo as carefully as he would his own bride.
She felt hours pass as they worked, separating the dead into two pyres. The larger pile, close to the cliffs, was for Locke’s dead. The second, much smaller, was for Eprain’s. Kier carried body after body out of the hall, shutting their eyes, laying them down in tidy rows in the same way he treated the dead after battle. He used his magic to help them, bearing most of the weight of the bodies, so it was as easy as moving stones around instead of grown people. Grey helped whenshe could, but she had to leave often to vomit, horrified all over again by the truth of what she’d done.
They did not approach the dais. She sensed that Kier was waiting for her to go first, but she could not do it. Not now. Not yet.
Outside, the mist did not change. The sun did not set. There were no gulls, and no waves. After a while, Kier, wiping sweat from his face with one filthy sleeve as he passed her on the stairs, said, “I don’t think time is passing.”
Grey looked up at the mist, the shield shimmering above. “I think you’re right.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
They glanced at each other, uneasy. They were a quarter of the way through clearing the hall, Grey’s body aching with the strain. There were a few hundred dead there, she thought; she was frightened to think of what the houses would hold, or to consider the grueling work of going through all of them.
“Are you tired?” she asked.
