“I do this so often with Safiyya, that I forget others aren’t as hardened to it. Especially you. You always seem so in control working for the Citadel, but you don’t often see our villagers like this, do you? Not while you are with the others, high up in their tower.”
His words weren’t judgmental, they felt observational. Which made them sting much more—like the truth of them was undeniable. I worked for the Citadel, while he buried the bodies of those they killed.
But he didn’t know the risks I took at night, while he buried the dead.
He didn’t know what I dug up.
Bair moved toward Ghassan, motioning me to join him. “Grab by the legs first. Not the ankle, because it might snap. The thicker part. Once you’ve lifted the heft of the torso onto the stretcher, then it’s safe to grab the upper part.”
I swallowed the thick lump in my throat and concentrated on his factual recitation of what we were about to do. His voice was measured, nearly dull. Like the head scholar relating instructional research techniques he’d relayed a thousand times.
But a word stood out in my mind.
“Safe?” I walked around the body and crouched down, my stomach finally settling once I focused on the practicalities of what we were about to do.
Bair gestured to the makeshift bed. “We need the bulk of the body on the stretcher so it’s easier to lift the rest. After prolonged starvation the bodies are fragile, we want to be careful.”
I nodded as if all this was perfectly normal—my cousin’s best friend giving me advice on how best to pick up a dead body of a former coworker.
I could do this.
I exhaled, pretending this was an excavation site, that I was unearthing an ancient artifact instead of moving the fragile body of a man I had worked beside.
Lifting Ghassan’s leg onto the stretcher, I followed Bair’s lead while he hefted the rest of the body on. We worked in silence, until a strangled scream escaped my throat as we lifted the stretcher up and Ghassan’s hand swung out from beneath the sheet.
I froze, my body unable to move at seeing the horror of his dark lifeless hand drop from the stretcher.
Bair neatly tucked it back under the sheet within seconds.
He didn’t look at me. His face didn’t move. It was stone, seemingly not affected by the dead hand he’d tucked back in, as if plucking an errant vegetable from the ground and placing it back into his basket. But when I looked at Bair’s dark fingers curled into a tight fist, so hard the knuckles turned white, I knew he was not unaffected.
And in the midst of the awfulness of what we were doing there was something else on Ghassan’s hand that only I had seen.
Threads of my magic still clung to him, woven around his arm, revealing something hidden.
A thin golden chain was clasped around his wrist and on it hung a key.
My breath caught in my throat, my heart beating so fast I was afraid Bair would turn and stare.
Ghassan had a golden key dangling from his wrist.
And it certainly wasn’t a key that matched the door to his house—that was an old, battered iron lock that would take an iron key. From what I’d seen, this one was a brilliant gold, with a curving, ornate bow and an elaborate key bit that was much too big to fit the door to any house.
But it may fit a fae vault.
I tried to shake off the thought, but it took root in my mind, its tendrils curling through my brain until that was the only thing I could think of.
This was not a key anyone from our village would possess.
Unless one used to work in the archives and found the key to an ancient fae vault.
But where did he get it from?
Something didn’t make sense about it all, the golden key and chain incongruent with his too-frail frame, like a dried-up riverbed next to an overflowing waterfall.
If he had it, why did he kill himself to prevent starvation?
With gold like that, he could have sold it. Even if owning jewelry was forbidden by the Citadel, there was still a black market where people traded in gold every day. My own mother was a goldsmith, and even after it was outlawed provided her expertise on valuing gold jewelry for the black market weekly.
