The Bone Palace

fingertip. “The cost is not one I feel like paying today.” Even with the headaches, the weariness and aching joints, the tender, bruised feeling that still accompanied any use of magic? No, he told himself firmly. Even so, her offer wasn’t worth it.

“But some day. You will.” She swayed against him and he held her carefully away.

“We’ll see.” He removed his hand and stepped back.

She smiled again, then licked her finger clean and turned back to her bird. After a few more coos and caresses she opened the window, through which it vanished with a flurry of black wings. When she sat her movements were unusually heavy-almost clumsy.

“Are you all right?” Kiril asked. As much as her demon grace unnerved him, its absence was more unsettling.

“Weak,” she admitted. “Tired. I had thought to postpone it, but I need to hunt tonight.”

“Hunt?”

“Living blood regenerates. Dead blood doesn’t. I need a living source every so often, and I didn’t imagine you wanted to bleed for me.”

“So you hunt, like a vrykola. With them?” Her silence was answer enough. Her quiet journeys into the underground had intrigued him when they were at the Arcanost together. Without her work, he would never have formed his own fragile ties to the catacombs. But now her renewed involvement brought only trouble, and his unease hadn’t faded. Varis’s schemes were dangerous enough-who knew what plots the vrykoloi whispered in her ear?

“Do you stalk the slums like they do,” he asked, his voice inflectionless, “taking those who won’t be missed, or whose families have no recourse to search for them?”

“You wanted me to be discreet. Would you rather I stalk the Octagon Court?”

“I didn’t realize you were making such a habit of murder.”

She flinched, then stiffened. “Will you play games of conscience with me, spymaster? How many other women disappeared because of you? How many other murders did you clean up for him?”

“None. None like you, that is.” Dozens of murders for king and country, hundreds, but never any so personal. And thank the saints for that-he didn’t think he could have done it more than once, not for any love or loyalty. “You… He was mad for you, as I’d never seen. Whatever alchemy was between you was a powerful one.” Kiril shook his head. “But you’re quite right-I have no place to be your conscience.” He rose, simultaneously annoyed and amused that he was ever the one retreating from his own home. “Do what you must. But try not to leave any more bodies in plain sight.”

He felt Phaedra leave the house not long after. But then, she never really left him anymore. He sat awake well past the final terce, turning a glass of whiskey between his palms and turning memories over in his head. He took them out every so often to keep them polished-he was the only one who carried them now, and he felt he shouldn’t lose them. The sight of Phaedra’s bird triggered his last memory of her as she had been. The one that should have been the end of it.

No one could survive the fall, no matter how powerful a mage. Phaedra certainly hasn’t. Kiril hopes and fears that the river might have claimed the body, denying them confirmation but sparing them the sight, but they receive no such mercy.

She sprawls on the rocks beside the ice-edged water, close enough to soak her skirts. Grey and crimson splatters freeze on stone, clot and crust in the unbound darkness of her hair. Her limbs are broken twigs, neck grotesquely twisted. Birds take flight in a rush of black wings as Kiril and Mathiros approach. They made short work of her; her hands are already picked to the bone, eyes and tongue gone, lips ripped free to bare a white rictus of teeth. They even took her glittering rings, and lesser gems and gold thread from her girdle.

The sight of her bare hands gives Kiril a moment’s unease, but no trace of life or unlife lingers in her shattered corpse, no hint of a ghost.

“Leave her for the beasts,” Mathiros mutters, his voice raw and hollow.

At another time, Kiril would have shot him a pointed glare. Now he doesn’t want to look his liege in the face. “That would be unwise, Highness,” he says instead.

Mathiros grunts and nods. “Do as you see fit, then.” He turns and strides back to the path, boot heels ringing on the stones.

When the prince is gone, Kiril kneels beside the body. He might have closed her eyes, but the lids are ruined, and straightening her limbs is out of the question. Instead he calls spellfire. It licks cold and silent around his fingers, flaring brighter when he touches Phaedra’s frozen gore-stiff gown, running and pooling as if the damp fabric were soaked in oil. The blue-white flames grow only colder as they burn, but cloth and flesh char and crumble all the same, till all that remains is greasy ash and a few blackened nubs of bone.

The ashes freeze Kiril’s hands to aching as he scatters them into the river.

CHAPTER 12

A pleasant side effect of necromancy was that Isyllt’s magic warded off any foreign life that tried to take root in her flesh, from plagues like the bronze fever to the little coughs and colds that spread through the streets every day. But even that required a modicum of strength and self-preservation.

Which was how Isyllt found herself bedridden and feverish for days after she summoned Forsythia, coughing and sneezing and choking on phlegm. Her former disregard of the influenza quickly vanished, leaving her weak and aching and wishing for death. She might have asked the landlord’s daughter to put her out of her misery when the girl came with soup and ginger tisane, but if so her request was ignored.

The fever brought dreams. Strange, dark dreams, full of wings and towers and the smell of cinnamon. And blood, always blood, oceans and messes of it. Slit throats and torn veins and the thick black vomit of fever victims. More than once she woke gasping in the dark, the taste of copper in her mouth, certain that the slickness on her skin was more than sweat.

On the seventh day she woke to afternoon sunlight and the feeling that she’d been beaten with truncheons and dragged behind a carriage. Her eyes were crusted with grit, and the taste in her mouth didn’t bear contemplating. Despite a head stuffed with snot and dirty rags, she knew someone else was in the apartment. She croaked a question that even she didn’t understand.

A rattle of dishes answered from the other room, followed by soft footsteps. The smell of something full of salt and garlic cut through the clinging reek of sweat and sickness, and Isyllt flopped back on her clammy pillows with a sigh.

“For a powerful sorceress, you whine a lot when you’re sick.”

She started, sticky eyes opening again. The voice, and the shadow that fell across the bed, belonged not to the landlady’s daughter but to Dahlia.

“What are you doing here?”

“The girl downstairs let me in. I told her I worked with you, but mostly I think she was tired of listening to you moan.”

Isyllt snorted and propped herself up on the pillows. The bedding stank, and her nose had cleared enough to remind her of it. Her scalp and back and breasts itched with dried sweat. Only sweat. Though from the ache tightening beneath her navel, her courses would begin soon. “You can make yourself useful, then. Is that lunch?”

Dahlia handed her a tray of bread and soup; the garlic and ginger in the broth were enough to sting her sinuses.

“You’re lucky,” the girl said. “People are dying of the influenza.”

“They always do. The young and the old, the weak and the starving.”

“It’s worse this year-the fever is worse. I heard a man in Harrowgate died vomiting blood two days ago.”