The only one who didn’t seem upset was the man whose existence she had just threatened. Kestin’s face was cool and relaxed as he fol owed the Guardian out of the hal . Like her, he had seen Clarisse in the back of the hal , staring at Cerix’s dead body. The gamble had paid of , as far as he was concerned; Cerix was dead, and Clarisse had not vanished. So despite her holding a knife to his throat, Kestin had no reason to hate Darri.
Darri did care whether he hated her—there was no point, anymore, in pretending she didn’t. She had proven that she would do what she had to anyhow. But it had been harder than she had thought it would be, holding the dagger and watching Kestin’s face go slack with shock. Even though she wouldn’t real y have kil ed him.
Even though he was already dead.
The Guardian led them around the base of the spiral stairs, which gave Darri a chance—when the others were hidden from sight by the stairs—to stoop and dig out the coin hidden in the side of her shoe. She kept it pressed against her side as they walked through the hal s into a large, gold-paneled room with a few wooden chairs and tables set out on the marble floor. Dozens of chandeliers hung from the ceiling, but only half of them were lit, giving the room a gloomy glow.
Halfway into the vast golden room, the Guardian turned around to face them. Darri braced herself, but he said nothing. His iron mask, she noticed, was crisscrossed with a thousand tiny scratches.
Somehow, that made him seem less omnipotent. She clenched her fists, curling the tiny silver coin into the curve of her fingers. It was slick with sweat. “I did what you wanted,” she said. “I kil ed Cerix. Now I want you to fight the Defender.”
“I cannot.”
Darri stepped toward him, her hand swinging by her side. He watched her without moving. “Then tel me another way to set my sister free,” she said. “You owe that to me. It’s your fault she’s dead.”
And she threw the coin right into his eye.
Her aim was good; she had been practicing since the night before, when she had thought of this plan. The coin flashed sideways, right into one of the dark rectangular holes in the iron mask.
The Guardian cried out and stepped back. Inside his mask, the coin rat led – an incongruous sound, except that it was fol owed by silence. The Guardian lifted one iron-gloved hand to cover the eyehole, but made no sound. Even though the coin must stil be in there, nestled against his skin.
Darri fel back, her arm swinging hard against her side. “You’re not a ghost,” she whispered.
The Guardian dropped his hand. “No.”
“Then what are you?”
The spaces behind the eyehole were as black and expressionless as before. “I am the Guardian.”
Kestin stepped up next to Darri, so close his sleeve brushed hers. “The Guardian is an iron uniform,” he said.
“How many men have worn that costume over the centuries? You’re just a living person, it seems, behind that mask. And I want to know who that person is. Take it of .”
The silence stretched for what felt like a very long time. Slowly, the Guardian lifted his iron-gloved hands to his face. “You are wrong, Prince Kestin. There are those of us who don’t fit your perception of what the living and the dead are. Who came before the dead and the living could coexist. You are bet er of not knowing about us.”“Stop stal ing,” Kestin said. “And who’s us?”
But Darri already knew the answer.
“You and the Defender,” she whispered, and the Guardian turned toward her as his hands came away from his face, holding the scratched-up mask.
“The spel required two,” he said. Released from the iron mask, his voice stil sounded exactly the same: hol ow and metal ic. “One to live. One to die.”
A moment passed before Darri realized that what she was looking at was a face. The flesh seemed to have poured itself into the neck, the cheeks and nose eaten away, the rest of it horribly soft. It was like a wax model of a face that had partial y melted.
The eyes, nearly hidden by the pasty white flesh, made her try to control her expression; but despite herself, she made a strangled sound as she swal owed her bile. The gloved hands went back up to the ruin of a face, and no one said a word as the mask went back on. It looked at Darri, shiny and black and blank.
“You can see,” the Guardian said, “why my brother preferred to be the one to die.”
“Your brother?” Kestin repeated, after a long moment. The triumph and certainty had been wiped from his face, replaced by pure horror.
“There were six of us, original y,” the Guardian said. He turned and strode partly across the room, stopping next to a delicate wooden chair. For a moment, Darri thought he was going to sit. Instead, he placed one iron- next to a delicate wooden chair. For a moment, Darri thought he was going to sit. Instead, he placed one iron- gloved hand on the back of the chair and turned again to face them. “Four brothers and two sisters, children of an ailing king. My brother and I were the youngest, born to a foreign wife—a sorceress from across the sea. She taught us her magic in secret, and it al owed us to survive when the factions at court chose their champions and moved with the deadliness that has always been part of our country’s tragic history. Over the course of a year, my father watched both our brothers and one sister die.”
“Kil ed?” Kestin asked, after a moment.
“We don’t know. There was no way to know, back then. That’s why we did what we did. We cal ed on dangerous powers and set our spel in stone and earth, so that it could never happen again. So that there would always be punishment for murder.”
“Seems a bit drastic,” Darri noted.
The empty iron eyes turned on her. “There was no other way to end it. Assassination and treachery had been our way for hundreds of years. What would you have had us do, Princess—gather the court for an inspirational speech about why it wasn’t nice?”
Darri opened her mouth, then shut it.
“We gave up more than you can imagine to change the nature of death in our land,” the Guardian said. “The spel could easily have kil ed us. Instead it keeps us alive, forever. My brother became the first of the dead, even though there was no one for him to take vengeance on. I remain trapped in life forever, so that the spel can continue to be channeled through my mind.”
“Channeled?” Darri said.
“Magic is a powerful force, but it requires a living human mind to shape it.” The Guardian’s fingers tightened on the back of the chair, and Darri heard wood crack. “For every creation of a new ghost, every time our spel snatches a spirit away from death, it draws upon the magic that runs through me.”
“Was it worth it?” Darri demanded, stepping away from the prince and toward the Guardian. “Was it worth what you did?”
The Guardian took his hand of the chair. Darri glanced at it swiftly, and saw a jagged crack in the polished dark wood. “You of al people should know, Princess, what price is worth paying for the end of violence and bloodshed.”
Any price. It was what Varis had told her, in his tent long ago. Though even Varis hadn’t been thinking of evil magic that twisted the natural order of life itself.
“But it started going wrong a long time ago.” The Guardian pushed the chair away with a sudden movement, and it slid a few inches across the marble floor. “The ghosts were supposed to avenge themselves and vanish, not remain among us for hundreds of years. We had created creatures who were immortal, had great power, and were almost impossible to imprison or kil .”
“So you became the Guardian,” Kestin said. Darri glanced over her shoulder and saw that the prince was standing in the center of the room, feet braced wide, hands clasped behind his back. “To protect the living from the dead. And your brother . . .”
“Insisted that the dead needed protection as wel .” The Guardian inclined his head. “I believed him, for a very long time; even once it should have been clear to me that his true goal was to increase his own power until even the living would obey him.”
“Then do what I’m asking,” Darri said. “Stop him.”
“I cannot. I don’t know, after al this time, which of us is more powerful. And besides . . . he is my brother.
Whatever he has become, we did this thing together.”
This thing. He said it with such disgust that al at once, Darri knew what Cal ie had been brought here to do, and what she had been kil ed to stop.
“You want the spel to end.” She said it almost in a whisper.
The Guardian’s head moved, just a fraction: a movement so smal Darri might not have seen it if she hadn’t been staring at him so hard. Up, and then down.
Kestin’s voice was barely audible. “Can it end?”
The Guardian kept his iron face turned toward Darri as he replied. “It is a powerful and fragile thing, our spel , like life itself. Set in stone and earth, but delicate as glass. It can be broken easily enough, if you can get to it.”
“And you can’t get to it?” Kestin demanded.
“Not I, nor my brother, nor any of the dead. No one af ected by the spel can touch it without being destroyed.” He hesitated for barely a moment. “Only someone who is stil alive can do this.”
Darri leaned forward. “But no one in Ghostland would do it. They would see it as mass murder.” Her fingers curled inward. “You needed someone foreign. Someone who understands that the ghosts are already dead.
That’s why you convinced King Ais to accept my father’s of er. Not for al iances. For this.” The room blurred.
“And when the Defender figured out what you were doing, he kil ed Cal ie to make sure she wouldn’t end the spel .”
“I believe so. When I urged King Ais to accept your father’s second of er, I overplayed my hand. My brother realized what I was after.”
“And you wanted us here because Cal ie was no longer of use to you. Is that it?” Darri’s throat closed up around her words, grief and hatred intertwined. This—creature—had stolen Cal ie’s life away for his own around her words, grief and hatred intertwined. This—creature—had stolen Cal ie’s life away for his own purposes; and then, when it hadn’t worked, had decided to steal Darri’s life as wel . “She was too young, when she first arrived. And then she was no longer foreign enough. You didn’t think she would do it. That’s why you advised the king to accept more foreigners into Ghostland.”
The Guardian nodded.
Darri pushed down her fury with an ef ort; she was amazed when her voice emerged cool and composed.
“And then, once we arrived, the Defender tried to kil us, too.”
“He did,” the Guardian agreed. “But I warned him of , and he isn’t ready to at ack me directly. Not yet.”
Darri sucked in her breath. Nothing the Defender had said in the caves was true. He had nothing against needless kil ing. He hadn’t kil ed Cal ie, even when she begged him, for one simple reason: because as a ghost, Cal ie gave her siblings a reason not to end the spel .
So he must have thought.
“I’l do it,” she said.
Kestin’s arms dropped to his sides as he turned toward her. The Guardian didn’t move.
“I’l do it,” Darri said again. “I’l do it for my sister. To free her from what your spel has done to her.”
“It’s not quite as simple as that,” the Guardian said. “Ending the spel might not end her existence.”
Darri stepped back and looked at his iron face squarely, trying not to picture the decayed remains of the real face behind it. “What do you mean? Won’t the ghosts al vanish, when the spel is gone?”
The Guardian’s fingers curled into fists, metal scraping against metal. “Our spel blurred the boundary between life and death. Where the new boundary would form is impossible to know.”