“Sparrow?” A call through the door breaks the heavy silence. The speaker sounds far away, like someone doesn’t want to get too close to Lysander. “Prince Hadrien requests your presence in the throne room.”
Meredy turns her intense eyes to the door. “Tell him she’ll come find him tomorrow, when she’s feeling completely better!” she shouts in answer.
“It’s an order,” the speaker says sternly. “All the necromancers are being summoned.” There’s a pause, a sigh, and then, “King Wylding is missing.”
XX
The guard who delivered Hadrien’s summons accompanies me down the hall to the throne room at the heart of the palace. He has a round, young face I don’t recognize, and perhaps his youth and inexperience are to blame for the way he keeps a hand on my forearm like I’m some common criminal being brought for sentencing.
Still, I’m not in the mood for this. Not after the past six days.
I twist out of his grasp. Startled, he mutters an apology that I ignore.
Valoria, Meredy, and Lysander follow a short distance behind us. I’m sure they’re wondering, like I am, how the king could vanish with all the extra guards stationed outside the palace’s every door. Even if he left on his own—which is about as unlikely as the Dead wanting to fly in an air balloon—someone would’ve seen him.
Unless someone inside the palace is to blame for his disappearance. King Wylding loves his sprawling family almost as much as he loves Karthia, but Vaia knows the living and the Dead alike can hold on to the smallest of grudges.
As we trudge onward, Lysander’s claws clicking against the bright tiled floor, guards press themselves against the wall to get out of his way. I turn the final corner to find the throne room doors besieged by a dark and restless sea of shrouded figures. It looks like a hundred nobles or more, every Dead person in the palace. They step to either side of the hall, clearing a path for me. Some say hello or wave, but one woman growls over the greetings, “We want you gone! Find a new home!”
“That’s incredibly short-sighted of you, isn’t it?” Meredy says coolly from somewhere behind me. “How do you think you’ll keep coming back to your jewels and power and titles without her magic?”
Stunned, I turn to thank her, but she isn’t looking my way.
“The necromancers can’t be trusted!” the angry Dead woman shouts. Despite the other Dead trying to silence her, she raises her scratchy voice to add, “They bring us back to life, but they make us weak. Why can’t they learn to raise us with our magic so we can defend ourselves from these attacks?”
Swallowing hard, I shout back, “That’s not how our magic works! You’ll have to take that up with Vaia!”
It’s only one unhappy woman out of a huge crowd, but her words cut me to the core.
In the past seven years, I’ve speared many of these nobles on the end of my blade to save them from becoming monsters and losing their souls. I’ve anointed their bodies with milk, held their loved ones’ hands as I guided them through the Deadlands, offered their hungry spirits my blood, and brought them back to Karthia. To life. As an orphan, I’ve never had a spirit waiting in the Deadlands for me, unless I count the very nobles now surrounding me.
Not for the first time, I see why so few blue-eyed Karthians want my job.
“You’re not going anywhere.” The angry Dead woman steps in front of the closed throne room doors and spreads her arms, blocking my way forward. “If you want what’s best for us, as you always say you do, you should leave now and never return.”
“Move!” Some of the other Dead shout at her, but no one dares attempt to touch her. One wrong motion, one accidental tug on her shroud or gloves, and we’ll have a Shade loose in the palace for a second time.
“What’s going on?” The princess sounds slightly out of breath as she catches up to me, having paused a ways back to say something to a guard Lysander startled. She pulls her glasses off, polishes them on her gown, then takes a fresh look at the gathering like she can’t believe her eyes. “Why is that woman blocking the door? Uncle Ty?” She turns to one of the shrouded figures for an explanation. “Aunt Arossa?”
“She wants us gone from the palace. By us, I mean all the necromancers,” I explain as the guard who brought us here tries to reason with the Dead protester. He pats the sword at his side, but green as he is, even he should know better than to draw it. “The rest of the Dead are waiting for answers, I think, just like us. But how we’re going to get them with her in the way . . .”
“Stand back,” Meredy says to the crowd of worried Dead, calmly surveying the woman. “We’ll clear the way.”
She gazes deep into Lysander’s eyes, and something unspoken passes between them. The bear’s eyes glow emerald green as he walks steadily toward the throne room doors, careful not to step too near any of the other Dead.
I wince and reach instinctively for the blade that’s usually at my side, thinking he’s going to collide with the Dead woman at the doors, but she darts away from him at the last moment like a startled crow.
Meredy and I almost exchange a smile.
Then Valoria grabs our hands and pulls us in Lysander’s wake, leaving the young guard to address the angry Dead woman now shouting at him.
As soon as we’re in the throne room, two heavily armored guards bar the doors behind us, muffling the noise outside. Meredy and Lysander hang back, but Valoria runs straight to Hadrien, who sits on the polished steps leading up to the massive throne piled high with bronze and blue velvet cushions.
“Oh, Hadrien.” The princess kneels beside him, throwing her arms around his neck. “This is a nightmare. I know Eldest Grandfather isn’t perfect, but he’s our king! And we don’t have a chance of finding him. We couldn’t even find our own mother.”
As Hadrien embraces his sister, I drag my feet toward them, trying to give them a moment alone despite my burning questions.
A shadow stirs behind the throne. The queen, recognizable only by the delicate crown of gold perched atop her shroud, surveys the cavernous room. Aside from Her Majesty, Hadrien, and several guards, we’re alone in here.
Jax and Simeon must be away, hunting that Shade-baiter Vane, or they’d have answered Hadrien’s summons. I wonder where Master Cymbre is. Hopefully with them and not still hiding from the world in her cottage.
“At least one of the Dead is angry already,” I say softly, climbing the steps to where Hadrien and Valoria sit. “She wants the necromancers to leave the palace, and while I hope she’ll be the last to suggest it, I somehow doubt that.” Pausing a few steps below Hadrien, I face the queen and bow my head. “Forgive me, Majesty.”
Her voice is bone-dry and little more than a whisper. “Whatever for, Sparrow?”