“How do you know?”
“Because I heard her. It’s where she asked to be taken.” Fawkes watched the last of the king’s retinue disappear around the houses. “If anyone else heard, they didn’t listen. They think Melborn was there to kill her. We know better. He and Blackwater are trying to save her. She thinks she’ll be safe at the abbey—that she can hide up there and recover. Then she’ll return. Melborn probably expects a reward. Thinks the countess will be so indebted to him that she’ll pay a fortune, grant him a title, or give him an estate or some other prize.”
“So what are we doing?” Knox asked. Lightning flashed and in one instant revealed every strand of hair plastered to his head; rivulets of water streamed off his stubble. His eyes were angry, harsh and violent. That was the nature of the man. The truth of him shown to Christopher by the light of Novron. This, too, was a sign for Christopher, who needed such a man now. He needed an animal to help him kill, but Knox was merely a beast, something to be ridden then discarded when no longer of any use.
“We go after them,” Christopher said. “We finish that bitch. Then we’ll claim we arrived too late. Explain that they took her for ransom but she died during the trip. We’ll be seen as heroes for killing them. If we don’t catch up before they reach the abbey, if the monks witness anything, we’ll have to take care of them, too. I trust you don’t have a problem slaughtering monks?”
“Not for a worthy cause.”
Spoken like a true monster—but at least he’s my monster.
“Oh—you can trust it will be, my friend. I’ll take very good care of you,” Fawkes said even while he thought, I’ll slit your throat when you’re not expecting it and tell King Vincent you were the one who hired the rogues—that you split off from the rest at the market and, being suspicious, I followed you.
“You’d better,” Knox said.
“I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Long Story Short
Nysa Dulgath was indeed dead. Royce checked: no pulse, no breath, her skin cold. Not chilled, not clammy, but milk-jug-left-out-in-the-rain-over-night cold. He didn’t panic or have an overwhelming need to put space between himself and the unexpected corpse he was pressed against. This wasn’t the first dead body he had held. Corpses didn’t upset him—still, talking ones were a new experience.
Royce leaned backward, holding her out to the full extent of his arms and glared into eyes that were staring back at him. He no longer supported her—its—head. He didn’t need to. She—it—was holding her—its—own head up.
“Hmm. I’m not on the ground, and you’re not galloping away,” Nysa’s corpse said. “Does that mean you’re willing to hear the rest of the story?”
“First, tell me who or what you are.”
“My name doesn’t matter. Won’t mean anything to you. I was a Fhrey; that’s what our kind was called in the days before Nyphron. Before the First Empire. Elf is a human word, not ours.”
“You were an elf?”
“Best if you let me start at the beginning or this will get very confusing.”
Nysa’s corpse waited, watching him as the horse continued to plod.
“Okay,” was all Royce could think to say.
“Who I really am is too long a tale to tell just now. I wouldn’t mind explaining everything, but we don’t have the time.”
You’re already dead so, what’s the hurry? Royce thought.
“The first thing you need to know is that Fhrey are nothing like you think. We are an ancient and noble—and granted, also an arrogant—race. We once ruled the world. Even this place was under our dominion.
Royce smirked. He wasn’t about to be intimidated or hoodwinked, even by a talking corpse.
“It’s true. There’s evidence everywhere. Those smooth bluish stone ruins on Amber Heights above the Gula River near Colnora…that was once a Fhrey fortress called Alon Rhist. And words like Avryn, Ervanon, and Galewyr are Fhrey words. Rhenydd, too—at least the ydd part. The oldest of my kind can live for more than three thousand years.”
“So is that what’s going on here? You’re practically immortal. You can’t die?”
“Oh, no—I already died. My body turned to dust thousands of years ago. But I broke Ferrol’s Law, and you need to be careful not to do the same. Ignorance of the law won’t protect you, and having a little human blood won’t either. You are part Fhrey, and as such you are forbidden from killing another Fhrey. Ever.”
“Unlawful killing of anyone is called murder, and universally frowned upon. Unless you’re at a higher social level than your victim, in which case it’s called justice.”
“Not the same thing. Humans have laws against killing one another, laws made by men. The law forbidding one Fhrey from killing another is made by Ferrol, our god, and it is he—not other Fhrey—who dispenses punishment for that crime. Ferrol’s will is the cornerstone of our society, and since the dawn of time only a few have violated his sacred law.”
Royce couldn’t hide the sarcasm in his voice. “The punishment for murder in any society is death. What more could Ferrol do?”
“If a Fhrey kills another Fhrey, they are forever denied entrance to Alysin, the Sacred Grove, the afterlife. You might know it as Phyre, Rel, Nifrel, or even Eberdeen. For us, there is no greater loss. It means we are outcasts and will never again see the ones we love, and those who love us.”
Royce, who’d never had much use for religion, didn’t know any of those terms beyond how to curse with them, as in Go to Rel or I hope you burn in Phyre, which until that moment he’d assumed referred to a funeral fire.
“So you’re a ghost?”
“Sort of.” Nysa’s shoulders shrugged.
Realizing this wasn’t Nysa, Royce imagined a marionette and grimaced.
“What you think of as ghosts are actually humans who through stubbornness or ignorance refuse to go to their reward. But it’s true we are both disembodied spirits unable to interact with this world in any meaningful way.”
“You seem to be interacting just fine.”
“In a body I can, as any spirit does. With a body I’m as capable as everyone else—more so, in fact.”
More so? Like her comment, We don’t have much time, this jumped out at Royce, but he kept quiet.
“The problem is, bodies don’t last, and it’s rare to find one unoccupied. I was lucky with Maddie Oldcorn, sort of like a squirrel moving into a bird’s vacant nest. Caught in a blizzard, Maddie died, but her body was mostly intact. Toes were never right, but I was able to live with that.”
“So Nysa isn’t in there with you?”
“No, she was gone before I arrived. If she had been alive, even lingering between worlds, I could have saved her. Same with Maddie. I can’t enter a body unless it’s vacant. A body with a spirit is like a candle with a flame—the original spirit must be extinguished before the body can be relit.”
Royce had heard many bizarre tales over the years. Most he didn’t believe, but he’d actually seen a few things that made him wonder. He’d watched a four-day-old corpse sit partway up, burp, and then lie back down. And he’d watched a dead man shaking his head, although that turned out to be a rat rolling around inside an emptied skull. He had personally witnessed the fight on top of the Crown Tower and couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been any bodies at the bottom afterward. That last one still haunted him. But, if he were really talking with a three-thousand-year-old dead elf, this bizarre conversation took first place.