Page 114 of The Second Death of Locke
“No,” Kier said, his face uncertain. “I’m not sure I feel… normal.”
Grey nodded. “Then let’s keep going.”
She lost herself in the awful work. She dragged the bodies through the hall, close to the door, then Kier came and took them to the pyres he was building. It would’ve been easier, she thought darkly, to have set the whole cathedral ablaze.
She found her grandmother unexpectedly, pulling the body of one of Eprain’s soldiers by the arms to reveal the small woman crushed beneath him. She gasped, staggering back—Kier was there in an instant, reading the fear through the tether as if she was facing an unknown threat and not the gaping chasm of her own grief; his hands were on her shoulders before she could recover. She looked at the woman’s pale, shriveled face, and the hands that had taught her to sew, and she turned and walked out.
Kier found her sitting at the edge of the cliffs, her legs dangling over the edge, tears cold on her face. She’d been sick again, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t think she’d ever stop being sick over this.
He didn’t say anything until he was sitting next to her, his legs hanging alongside hers over the steep drop.
“Have I ever told you,” he said, “that I’m afraid of heights?”
She squinted at him. “No.”
“Good. It’s because I didn’t think I was until this very moment.” He looked down at the sheer drop in front of them and the gloom below, and his face paled.
“It was a mistake to come back,” Grey said.
He reached out and laid his hand over hers. “There’s nothing that can be done now. We’ll get through the worst of it, and then we will keep on living.”
She winced. It cut too close to her own lies, and the truth she had not yet told him. “They’re all dead because of me.”
He did not deny it. “There are hundreds of others in countries all over Idistra who are dead because of me.”And you, he did not say.
“But what did these people do, besides live here? They did not hurt me, nor fight me. Many of them would’ve foughtforme, if given the chance.”
He nodded, the eerie silence like a blanket over them. “You can do nothing to change that.”
She laughed bitterly. “I could burn it all down. The entire Isle.”
“You could,” he said.
But you won’t, he did not say.
She stared out at the mist, out at nothing. After a while, Kier got up and went to continue with the bodies. She did not know how long she sat there, motionless, before he came back behind her and said, “I think I’ve found your parents.”
She got up and followed him back to the cathedral. She noticed a lone body lying away from the two organized pyres: it was her grandmother, set aside to be buried in the Ghostwood. She swallowed her bile down and did not ask Kier how he’d known.
The cathedral was nearly empty of bodies when she went back in, stepping carefully across the bloodstained stones. The table at the dais was in disarray: smashed goblets and dark wine stains on the tablecloth, mixing with the blood. Grey made her way to the stairs, Kier one step behind—and then she stopped.
Her mother was the one who had taught her to use her power, eking it out in tremulous threads from the time she was barely old enough to walk or speak full sentences. Though she had a reputation for swift justice, she was never cruel to her own daughter, who was often found clinging to her skirts. And Isaak, a mage from Scaela’s noble class, used to make speckled magelights in the shape of constellations on the ceiling of her bedroom, then lie next to her and point out the names and shapes of each one.
They were now two bodies, eyes closed as if they were only sleeping, entwined in front of the tomb that was meant to hold Retarik’s bones. Grey moved past the bodies that surrounded them in concentric circles, wrapped in thorny vines that pierced their flesh—whatever her father had done in his dying moments had flattened them all—and lowered herself very carefully beside them. She knew the dark green velvet of the dress, remembered the feeling of it on her cheek as her mother carried her to bed dozens of times. She reached out and ran her hand along the line of her father’s sword, out of its scabbard, still clutched in his hand. The other hand rested on the dark velvet of her mother’s waist. When Grey’s eyes traced up to her mother’s face, she saw what memory could not fill in, what she had not realized fully looking at her ghost with anger in the Ghostwood: she herself looked like a carefully made copy of her mother.
“I’m sorry,” she said, the grief bubbling up like it never had before. She couldn’t breathe—all the magic in the world didn’t matter; it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t bring them back.
She didn’t hear Kier until he was behind her, kneeling, one arm snaking around her shoulders. She reached out to grip his forearm, nails digging in, and leaned back against him, unable to keep herself up, his other arm wrapped around her waist like he could protect her from all the awful things that had happened all those years before.
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. She tucked her head, hiding it in the shelter of his body, and sobbed.
When she was done, wrung out and exhausted, Kier was still there. “I need to do it,” she said shakily, pulling away from the tangle of limbs.
He let her. He stood by as she took one of the linen sheets. Everso carefully, she shifted her parents’ bodies onto it. She recovered her father’s sword and set it aside, her mother’s silver necklace, the rings they’d inherited from Alma’s parents and the signet ring of Locke. Once she’d folded the sheet over, she sat back on her knees and stared at the bundle of tidy white cloth, tied off and ready for the grave.
“Obsidian born and iron made,” Kier murmured. She used to say it to him, like a prayer, as she stitched his wounds together after battle.
She looked at him, something inexplicable rising within her. Perhaps all she wanted, after all this time, was to be soft.
