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Rue opened her eyes fully, then squinted, doubting what she saw. Einsa’s ghost frowned back at her, standing close by Gressa and her lieutenant at the map table.

“What are you doing here?” Rue worked her jaw, wincing, then spat out a bloody mess.

“Hey!” The man with the bald head, pale eyes, and hard hand reached for his anger, trying to reassert himself.

Gressa and her subordinate had both turned to watch, surprise vying with amusement.

“What are you doing? That’s the real question,” Einsa said.

“Me? I was waiting my chance. Just like Instructor Akki—” Rue snapped her face towards the bald man, who had started to raise his hand. “I. Said. Wait.” She looked back at Einsa. “Just like Instructor Akki taught us.”

“I taught you a better lesson than that,” Einsa said.

“Did you scramble the old bitch’s brain?” Gressa asked the bald man.

“What’s she looking at?” The lieutenant was staring at Einsa as if he could see something, but not enough to be sure. A fault line in the air perhaps, twisting the light.

“You taught me to check the lock first.” Anger coloured Rue’s words. She didn’t understand why she was angry with Einsa, but she was.

“I taught you that this”—the ghost moved her hands rapidly in front of her chest, the motion towards Rue indicating some connection—“works so much better when you love the person.”

“Necromancy?” Rue blinked. “I didn’t—” She bit off the habitual denial. Of course she had loved her friends, and if that was weakness then yes, she, Mollandra Plight, had been weak.

“Necromancy!” Gressa’s amusement dropped away. “Stop her doing that.”

“I didn’t love Tamaster Sams! Wha—”

The hard-handed mercenary’s hard hand closed over Rue’s mouth.

Einsa’s dripping ghost rolled her eyes, looking for a moment like the young girl she was rather than the stern giant Rue remembered. “You love this place. All the people. Maybe not individually. But as a whole.”

Rue wouldn’t have got all of her denial out even if she had been able to speak. It was true, though she’d never admitted it to herself. If she’d admitted it she would have seen it as weakness and felt compelled to do something about it. But she had liked her life. Something she had for many years never imagined was possible. She had enjoyed pottering in her vegetable rows, walking too slowly down the street, passing houses beneath whose roofs little happened that wasn’t shared as gossip, watching the village folk craft and weave the necessities of their existence. She had cared for some people more than others. She wondered even now if Soosa Smith had made it to the woods, and how the foolish girl would live in the wilds all by herself. She had liked being someone they knew was solid, whose word they knew was hard-given and hard-kept. She had liked that they knew she had an edge but had no inkling of how many it had cut. She had liked that mothers left their babies in her care, and that they were nervous asking to do so. They knew that she might make them sweat but if the wolf came it’d likely tuck tail and run when Molly Plight turned her scowl its way.

“What was she looking at?” The lieutenant, a beefy man with a sizeable gut and a black beard, was still staring at Einsa, entranced.

Rue felt the dead as if they were candles flickering to life one after the other in some cathedral vault, each a faint star in the consuming void. She would have breathed the words “so many” had she been able to speak. She would have moved swiftly to anger at their stupidity. How could they be such ignorant peasants? They had so little, was it that hard to leave it behind? Why…why hadn’t they just run away?

The anger would turn towards herself later—she knew that too, though it made no difference now. She understood what had tied them to their homes, their animals, their plots of land, their families.

As she tried to spit and bite at the hand across her mouth, Rue drew the candle flames closer. Their heat burned across her skin. They were flames because the corpses of the villagers were burning in their burning homes.

On the table the eyes in Sebrin Weaver’s discarded head suddenly swivelled and found Rue where she hung on the wall.

Rue sought and found Soosa, not ablaze but just as dead, discarded in a ditch after cruelties no less than that of the fire. Rue rejected the girl’s fate, cursing behind unclean fingers, watching both the one corpse and the many. Gressa was approaching now, a gutting blade glimmering in her hand. Rue reached out to the dead, to the ruin of the life she had loved. And as she did so, Soosa Smith rejected at least part of what had been imposed upon her too.

Rue sensed them all, those whose names she hardly used, and those whose company she might seek, pretending it to be an accidental wandering. As Soosa stood up, bloodless in the gutter running by Shymon’s field, every other corpse in the village stood too, many thick with flames, some shouldering aside burning timbers or shaking off hot embers.

“Stop her!” Baron Mancer shouted silently with Sebrin’s cold lips. “Kill the bitch!”

“What in fuck’s name is that?” Gressa turned towards the shuttered windows.

Those among the dead that could howl roared their anger. The others mouthed it, some lipless with blackened teeth between which smoke issued as if the fire had given them kinship with dragonkind.

The first corpse to come crashing through the shutters was on fire. In the main street beyond, Rue could now see what she had only sensed before: in the village’s single street a score of mercenaries found themselves assaulted by the peasants they had recently slaughtered. The people of Pye might have been terrified in the moments of their death, but they returned filled with such anger that their flesh could hardly hold their bones. The strength in their smouldering hands tore heads from shoulders and launched men into the blazes they had started. The remains of a young woman staggered beneath an axe blow: then, with the blade buried deep in her chest, she seized the near giant of a mercenary who had swung the weapon. Together with a blackened child she took him to the ground.

“Kill her!” Gressa yelled, now echoing the unheard baron. The hoarseness of pain infected her voice as she wrestled with the burning peasant who’d been first through the window. Her yells rapidly became howls.

The bald man, whose hand had slipped from Rue’s mouth as his attention strayed to the screaming corpses breaking through the remaining shutters, had the presence of mind to draw his knife and stab Rue in the chest.