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I rolled the strange word in my mouth, repeating it carefully a few times before letting my magic slip into the hex.
“Roots to keep walls from collapsing?” Iggy asked Eli. “Could you do that?”
Eli nodded.
“Why aren’t you doing anything?” I asked, more curious than accusatory.
Iggy answered, “Because you will need me to speak the hexes we require to let all of us breathe when we reach the sea.”
“I do not need to breathe,” Beatrice pointed out. “Neither does”—she gestured at the seemingly dead woman in Iggy’s arms—“she.”
“Your granddaughter does, and her spouse’s death would kill her, so . . .” Iggy shrugged, as if the plan weren’t both terrifying and desperate.
Our best option—our only option—was that we were to tunnel into the sea, breathe underwater, and then what?
“This is a terrible plan,” Eli said.
I silently agreed.
“There are no better options. We cannot wait here,” Iggy argued. “And if we go to the surface, Geneviève will die.”
“No.” Beatrice glared at the seemingly impenetrable wall of earth. Then she began to cast the hex, carving away the soil with magic.
There was no other answer I could think of in that moment, at least not any that wouldn’t include going back to face the angry alchemist on the beach, and so I added my voice to hers.
One after the other, we spoke the awkward intonations of the hex.
And together, we carved a tunnel into the sea while the monster raged above us.
18
GENEVIÈVE
Ifelt the bodies of the corpse army dismembered and returned to the waves. Even then, I could rebuild them. Necromancy was not so easily overcome, but I needed my energy for other things. So little by little, my magic let others of the dead fall to lifelessness before they were ripped apart. I was glad that they were distracting Chester, but the energy it took to hold the hexes as we tunneled toward the sea meant I had to either risk being buried alive in the tunnel or shift magic away from the dead army that Chester was shredding.
I chose not to be buried alive.
There was a chance Chester would notice that the sea took back bodies we’d reanimated, but I hoped that the arrogant piece of vermin vomit thought that his rage had simply overpowered our necromancy.
Dissembling the dead shouldn’t make them crumble into bone dust that the tide swallowed back into itself, but for all that Chester knew—and it obviously was a vast store of knowledge he held—he had not noticed in any obvious way. My hope was that the rage he’d fallen prey to was clouding logic.
Behind me, Iggy cradled the apparently neither-dead-nor-alive woman in his arms, and my suspicion that I finally understood the cause of his death grew. He looked at her the way Eli looked at me. Iggy loved the woman he carried—a woman married to the man who murdered Iggy.
Chester’s murder of Iggy wasn’t about knowledge after all.
“You loved her,” I said finally.
“Yes.”
“And that’s why Chester murdered you?” It wasn’t a great time to chat, but I felt myself stumbling as we reached the last few steps before the sea. I wanted a distraction. My feet were unsteady from exhaustion, and I felt vaguely as if each hex to create this tunnel was somehow using my own muscles to shovel the soil, sand, and rock.
Beatrice had not begun to stumble, but her stride had slowed.
“Pause.” Eli stopped. “The sea begins here.”
He placed a hand on the earth, as if he could touch the water there. Maybe he could. My understanding of fae magic was still new.
“We have no other choice,” I whispered, even as I shuddered in fear. The thought of being in cold saltwater after my near-drowning was not much more appealing than going back to face Chester.
