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“Don’t make me fire,” the bloodcoat snarled through his bloody mustache. “They could use someone like you in the mines on the Burnt Isles.” A guttural laugh. “Your girl, too. She looks strong enough for a shovel.”
A bullet would be preferable to the mines. Lore had heard of more than one poison runner who slit their own throat rather than be made to live the rest of a cut-short life in the dark and dust of the Burnt Isles.
Dark. Dust. Death. All of it swirled around her, coppery blood and an emptiness that abraded her sinuses. Black mist rose from Horse’s body, coalescing into dark threads that only a channeler could see, seeping from the eyes, the slack mouth. Mortem. Calling to her.
Use it.
Lore didn’t know if it was truly a voice she heard, or just the firing of her own brain, desperate to do something, to use whatever it could.
A distraction, that’s what they needed. Something that would allow her to run, something awful enough to pull the bloodcoats’ focus so Jean-Paul could escape. It was too late for her. Lore was caught, and what she did in these next few moments wouldn’t change that.
The choice was between the Burnt Isles or a pyre. In the end, it didn’t make that much difference, if it meant Jean-Paul could go back to his family.
Distraction it was, then. And as soon as Lore made the decision, her body went to work.
She took a deep breath and held it in her lungs, letting instinct take over, drive her as it had before. She’d been born to this, to the magic and the dark, and every part of her but her mind was eager.
One moment everything was bright and lurid, and the next she saw only the barest impression of her surroundings, the world cloaked in grayscale as her lungs began to burn, her body tipped toward death. The bloodcoats and Jean-Paul and the living bodies of the crowd were all surrounded in auras of white light. The outline around Horse’s corpse leaked slowly from white to black, life leaving as death took over. Threads of Mortem waved in the air like spider legs, the black corona of an inverted sun.
Lore didn’t look down at herself as she slowly let her breath out, keeping her grip on Mortem strong, because she was in it now and the current of instinct had pulled her under. She knew what she looked like—her fingers cold and corpse-pale, her eyes shifting from hazel to opaque white. On her palm, the moon-shaped scar blazed like a beacon, a black glow that was the absence of light and yet so bright it hurt to look at. Over her heart, a knot of darkness swirled, a black star of emptiness hidden beneath her shirt.
She knew what she looked like, and it was death walking.
Her hands curled, pulling the dark matter that was the power of death inward, as if her Mortem-touched heart were a magnet. The threads waving over Horse’s body shuddered, then flowed toward her. They braided in the air and attached to her fingers, magic easily breaching the barrier of her skin.
Horse’s death danced down her veins, swirled through her like tainted blood. Lore channeled the Mortem quickly through her system, pushing it through every vein like a half-frozen winter stream, fighting against her flagging heartbeat, her gone-shallow breath. Death magic circled her every organ, pausing them all, like frost on a bud at the edge of spring.
This was the part that was supposed to make you live longer, freezing your insides so they moved slower in time, so the years touched you more gently. Those who took poison couldn’t channel the death it brought to them back out, couldn’t make it do anything but curdle them into twisted immortality as it awakened the dormant Mortem in their bodies. To channel Mortem, you had to embrace death like a lover and hope it let you go, and hardly anyone ever got that far, not on purpose.
At least, that’s what Lore assumed. She’d been born with this. Born with death beside her like a shadow.
Slowly, slowly, Lore pushed the Mortem she’d channeled through herself back to her hands, like gathering fistfuls of black thread. Then she thrust all the death she’d taken back out.
Mortem arced from her fingers, death eager for a new home, and Lore had just enough presence of mind to direct it to a flower bed in the center of the road, already browned and limp from an unseasonable lack of rain. The blooms withered and dropped, the roots that held them up going dead and brittle, all of it turning gray. More Mortem cut into the rock, sending cracks spiderwebbing beneath scrambling feet. It didn’t open into a sinkhole, thank every god dead or dying, but still screams rose into the air.
Her heart seized in her chest, just once, tithing a beat. The instinct that had seized her ebbed away, leaving only fear and panic and disgust.
And with a grunting, pained sound, Horse stood up.
CHAPTER THREE
Death, for mortals, is inviolable: Any who would raise a body from the dead is guilty of the worst heresy and must be executed, so they may suffer forever in their own hell.
—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 1
Cedric had been a year older than Lore, fourteen and worldly as a prince for it. The son of a runner on Val and Mari’s team, he’d been the only child Lore spent much time around, in those months after Mari found her. Warm and kind, with wide brown eyes and messy hair that was always falling in his face. He’d taught her to swim down by the docks.
Then he got run down by a bloodcoat’s horse during a raid.
His body was a horror. Lore remembered it in vivid detail. Things sunken where they shouldn’t be, other things sticking up, making tents of torn flesh and valleys of mashed bone and organ. But his face had been untouched, those brown eyes staring into the sky as if transfixed.
She hadn’t thought. She just acted, gave in to instinct. Lore had wound Cedric’s death around her fingers like the games of cat’s cradle he’d taught her to play, spun it out of him and into her. She’d channeled it through her body and sent it down into the rock, down to where the roots of trampled grasses strove toward the sun, planting his death in the earth instead of in his body.
And he’d sat up. There’d been a terrible sound when he did—nothing within him was where it was supposed to be, and all of it squished—but he’d sat up, then turned to look at her. His eyes weren’t brown anymore. They were black, without iris or pupil.
It was clear he wasn’t going to do anything until she told him to; he was an automaton that needed winding up, needed direction. So she’d taken the ball of string they used for cat’s cradle from her pocket. “Play with me.”
That was how Val found them. A girl and a dead boy with thread woven through their fingers, acting as though nothing was amiss.
