“We should begin the coronation,” the prince said, his voice raised to reach the courtiers, his eyes stil on Darri’s face. “There is no reason to keep the dead waiting.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Darri said, stil with that grin.
Kestin walked into the throne room. The courtiers, after a moment of confusion, fol owed him.
Darri looked at Cal ie then, and Cal ie realized she was stil holding her sister’s sleeve. She dropped it, but Darri stil stood there, looking at her. A slow, sick fear swirled through Cal ie as she waited to hear what Darri had to say to her.
Darri smiled at her—an open, bril iant smile. Then she strode past Cal ie and disappeared through one of the doorways lining the corridor.
The unexpected smile stunned Cal ie. She almost turned to go after Darri, to—demand? yel ? plead? cry?
She didn’t know, so she fol owed the courtiers. She was tired of worrying about what Darri thought and what Darri felt and what Darri was about to do.
The throne room was large, old, and imposing. Thick stone pil ars fil ed the vast space between marble floor and arched ceiling, dwarfing the dais and the king’s golden throne. Cal ie, whose father’s proclamations were usual y made from horseback in front of a tent, stil felt awed every time she walked in.
By tradition, the floor space was reserved for the living, while ghosts twined about the intricately carved pil ars. Cal ie started to float a half inch of the floor, and stepped heavily down on the black and white marble. No one else noticed, but the impulse alarmed her.
She didn’t want to feel dead. Not yet.
Kestin walked through the crowd, and the spectators tried to bow, but most of them had no room. The room was crammed with people, living and dead. He stepped onto the marble dais, where his father was waiting, and bowed.
There fol owed what seemed like an hour of talking. King Ais publicly imparted words of wisdom to Kestin, then someone else spoke about Kestin’s virtues, then someone else said pompous things about Ghostland, and final y Kestin made a dozen long-winded vows.
When he was done at last, anticipation stil ed the restless courtiers. King Ais stepped forward, lifted the crown from his head, and held it out. Kestin bowed once, reached over, and took the crown from his father’s hands.
hands.
Al at once the air was ful . Cal ie, along with the rest of the crowd, looked up. The dead were layered one upon another, fil ing the space above the living, gray and translucent. Some of them appeared barely human; Cal ie fought an urge to look away, to avert her eyes from forms too grotesque to bear. Yet she couldn’t have said what, exactly, was wrong with them.
The cavernous room was abruptly silent. The living—and many of the recently dead—cringed away, ducking to get that much more space between themselves and the apparitions hovering above them.
The dead did nothing. They simply were, waiting, fil ing the space al the way up to the high-arched ceiling.
They outnumbered the living, and the ghosts who stil had the form of the living, at least tenfold.
The silence was dreadful. Cal ie blurred, her body fading, proving to the dead that she was one of them. She couldn’t stop herself.
Without sound, the ghosts al bowed their heads to Kestin, who looked at them without expression on his ash-white face. King Ais let his hands fal helplessly to his sides, and the first dead prince of Ghostland lifted the crown and placed it on his head.
A sound like wind rushed through the throne room, though there was no wind; a vast, approving murmuring. It was low and unearthly, and it was the only sound in the room. There was no clapping or cheering from the living.They stood as if turned to statues, watching the dead who outnumbered them so vastly.
And just like that, the coronation was over. The crowd around Cal ie began streaming toward the door— whether to get away from the ghosts, or to get to the food and wine stil waiting in the banquet hal , Cal ie couldn’t tel . She only knew what she wanted: to escape from those gray forms as fast as possible. She went solid and forced herself to move with the crowd, pushing her way between the richly dressed nobles, pausing only when one of the dead refused to move aside and she went through him. She took a moment to swal ow her bile, aware of the glares around her. Walking through a person was extremely rude.
She went more cautiously then, sliding gingerly between the crowd until she made it to the banquet hal .
Only then, with the edge of her panic faded, did she feel the tears at the bot oms of her eyes.
That, above her in the throne room, was her future. She was not going to grow old, was not going to develop aches and pains and rough skin and lose her teeth and then die. Instead she was going to forget that she was human, lit le by lit le, and become one of those things, and be one of those things forever. Because there was an end to life, but not to death.
She had known that for a long time; but everything about tonight—the pain on her sister’s face, the shock on her brother’s, Jano’s hissed warnings, the goblet she had left in Varis’s room—stripped away her defenses, the four years’ layers of sophistication and confusion she had wrapped around herself. She felt the spel holding her down, felt the anguish that had torn through her when she first realized she was dead and not gone—an anguish not blunted or faded, but merely buried, over the past weeks.
You’l learn to pretend, Jano’s voice echoed in her ear. It’s the only way we can bear being what we are.
She would learn to pretend; it was bet er, or at least less frightening, than vanishing into the unknown. Than being nothing. She would watch how the others did it, and be like them. Like Jano, and Clarisse . . . her throat clenched as she remembered the expression on Varis’s face as he snatched the goblet from her hand. Varis, at least, stil thought she was his sister, no mat er what else she was.
Which should have helped, at least a lit le bit. But al she could think was, If he can accept it, why can’t she? She knew the answer even before her mind had formed the question. Darri couldn’t accept it because Darri cared too much. Because it wasn’t enough, for Darri, to accept Cal ie; she had to love her. And how could anyone love a ghost?
Al at once Cal ie knew what had been bothering her about Darri’s smile, about everything that had passed between them in the hal . Darri had met her eyes easily, without the faintest reservation, something she hadn’t managed to do since the night she learned Cal ie was dead. As if there was nothing disgusting about Cal ie at al .Cal ie final y had exactly what she so desperately wanted. For Darri to look at her, even though she was dead, the way she had when Cal ie was alive. And now that it had happened . . .
She didn’t believe it.
Not so long ago, she herself had been ful y Rael ian, had felt her skin shrink from the very sight of a ghost.
She knew there was no way Darri could look at her dead sister as if nothing was wrong. Cal ie couldn’t even look at herself as if nothing was wrong.
Darri had just gone back to what she had thought when she first rode into Ghostland, a rider with a mission.
That what was wrong with Cal ie was something she could fix.
Cal ie swore, using a word so filthy that a passing nobleman blinked. She turned her back on him and raced through the hal and into the throne room. If anyone had been left there, she would have gone right through them without the slightest hesitation.
But there was no one left—not at floor level, anyhow.
Prince Kestin stood alone on the marble dais. The crown, a heavy circlet of ruby-studded gold, looked like it belonged on his head. It was also in danger of fal ing of . Kestin’s head was tilted far back as he watched the gray mass of translucent forms that stil fil ed the air.
The dead were in no hurry.
Cal ie was. She skidded to a stop and gasped out, “What did the Guardian tel you?”
The prince jerked his head down and looked at her. For a moment he just stared, his eyes shockingly bright.
The prince jerked his head down and looked at her. For a moment he just stared, his eyes shockingly bright.
Then he said, “Leave us.”
At once the throne room felt echoingly empty. Cal ie didn’t have to look up to know that the ghosts were gone—but she did anyhow, and felt a lightness in her chest at the sight of the clear air around the stone pil ars.
Kestin didn’t look up. He kept his gaze where it had been: on Cal ie.
“What did Darri ask him?” Cal ie demanded. It was unthinkable for her, foreign nuisance that she was, to talk to the crown prince in this tone of voice. She stepped toward him, fists clenched at her sides. “Where did my sister go?”
Kestin hesitated, then shrugged and bit his lip on a smile. “Your sister,” he said, his voice low but clear, “is ending the spel .”
Cal ie froze in place. “Ending?”
Kestin sat down careful y, placing both his hands on the golden arms of the throne. “This is what the Guardian has wanted al along: for the spel to end. It’s why he convinced my father to bring you to Ghostland.
It’s why your siblings are here. So that death in our country can final y happen the way it’s supposed to.”
Cal ie opened her fingers slowly, pressed them hard against the sides of her legs. “But what wil happen to .
. . to the dead? The ones who are already here?”
“We don’t know. We might vanish.” He leaned forward, and suddenly there was nothing regal about him; he looked like a hopeful child. “Or we might live. Real y live.”
The hope that sang through Cal ie then was sudden, and sharp, and it hurt more than anything had since . . .
since the moment she had seen her own corpse bloated with water and smeared with mud.
Graveyards. She had forgot en how much the living cared, and how much it hurt.
And until this moment, she hadn’t realized that she had forgot en.
She drew in a breath so sharp it should have hurt too, but didn’t; and she let the hope go. She knew, as the Ghostlanders did not, what a stark dif erence there was between life and death.
“It’s not possible,” she said.
Kestin sat back, eyes stil alight. “The Guardian said that when the spel is broken, it wil once again change the boundary between the living and the dead.”
Cal ie shook her head, so violently she felt her hairstyle shift. “The dead are dead.”
“But what if we don’t have to be?” She heard in his voice the same pain that thrummed through her. “She might end our existence, yes. But she might give us more than mere existence. She might give us life.” He aimed his dark eyes at Cal ie. “We don’t know what wil happen when the power in that spel is released. We could be what we were, not the hol ow monstrosities we are now.”
Hol ow monstrosities. If his adoring subjects could hear him now. Cal ie’s fingernails dug into her palms.
She released them slowly. “Where is the spel ?”
“In the realms of the dead.”
“She went alone to those caves? They’l kil her—”
“Don’t be so melodramatic.” Kestin careful y adjusted his crown. “The dead aren’t there. Not tonight. For the first time in centuries, they have something to celebrate.” He glanced up at the empty ceiling. “Even if they went straight back, they won’t get there in time to stop her.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid. But hope could do that to even the smartest people.
Kestin was silent, his lips smiling but his eyes guarded. Cal ie took another two steps toward him and stopped right at the foot of the dais’s velvet-coated stairs. “Don’t you see, Your Highness? The Guardian lied.
He of ered Darri something she wanted so desperately she would believe the impossible. My life.”
“You don’t know that.” Kestin shook his head. “You’re just guessing.”
“So are you.” She pointed a finger at him. “And you’re guessing with the existence of every ghost in this castle.”