Bid My Soul Farewell Read online

  No answer came.

  I tossed the little book onto my desk. It landed facedown, and for a moment, I felt bad for mistreating it. I was still, after everything, my father’s daughter. I brushed my fingertips over the leather, feeling the insignia stamped into the back. A rising sun with six pointed spikes to represent the six original tribes that joined together to form the start of the Allyrian Empire. This notebook had been imported from the mainland, probably from the capital city of Miraband, like most of the small luxury items in those early days of the colony, before Lunar Island had set up its own manufacturing.

  It wasn’t the book’s fault—or Master Ostrum’s—that there was nothing here that could help me. It was a feeble hope, anyway, the kind easiest to break.

  If I wanted answers, I’d have to find them myself.

  My hand ached as I clutched my tiny iron crucible. Not my right hand—my left hand, the one that had been obliterated when I’d become a necromancer. I winced in pain as I lifted my residual limb. The flesh ended above my elbow, scars stretching over the too-pink skin at the end. But a shadow hand extended past that, a dark hand made of nothing. I could see it. My revenants could see it. But no one else.

  What else could I see, now that I was a necromancer?

  I turned to my twin sister. “Fetch me a mirror.”

  Without a word she spun on her heel and raced down the spiral staircase. She could sense the urgency in my command, and it took her only moments to return, her feet pounding up the stairs. She had ripped a gilt-framed mirror from a wall within the hospital so forcefully that plaster clung to the edges. She set it down in front of me, and for a moment we were both reflected in the smudged surface. Even though she was the one who’d lost her life, I looked like a ghost next to her, my hair a shock of white after my battle with Governor Adelaide, a stark contrast to her solid black tresses.

  We used to be so similar that sometimes even our own mother couldn’t tell us apart. But it was more than just the hair now. Her eyes were hollow; mine were bright. Her skin was ashen but unblemished; mine was haggard from lack of sleep. Her body was cool to the touch. I still had my fire.

  I turned to the mirror. I had never tried to see my own soul before.

  I looked now.

  It was harder to see a soul in a living person. Life filters the light. But souls were easiest to glimpse in the eyes since light clung to the irises. And there . . . there. A bit of gold sparkling in my own brown eyes, trailing across my skin, swirling over my heart.

  Unconsciously, I raised my right hand, tugging my shirt down and exposing my breast, the heart that lay under it, the light that seemed a bit more visible there.

  I cast my eyes to my residual limb, the arm Death had taken. I held it in front of me. The shadow arm did not reflect in the mirror.

  I had used this shadow arm to pull the souls from Governor Adelaide’s crucible, breaking it and ending the plague. I had used it to grasp the governor’s own soul, forcing her to be still as I drove a sword through her heart. I had dipped the incorporeal fingers into corpses, pulling up the dregs of their souls to reanimate them.

  Now I let my shadowy fingers trail along my skin. I shuddered, my throat gagging at my own touch. So cold.

  Tears sprang into my eyes—not of sorrow, but of horror. I wanted nothing more than to break free of my own touch. But I was so full of soul, of life. Could I . . . ? I glanced at Nessie. Could I give something of myself to her?

  I forced myself to stay still. My shadow hand paused over my heart. I glanced at the mirror. My own eyes were wide with terror, sweat beading on my forehead. I swallowed, hard.

  And I plunged my hand into my skin.

  EIGHT

  Nedra

  MY MOUTH DROPPED open, but I choked on air, unable to scream the way my body instinctively longed to. The sensation split my mind in two: part of me deeply aware of the wrongness of the shadow entering my own body, sliding between my muscles, fingering through my ribs; the other part of me insatiably hungry for the sensation, relishing the way the shadow seemed to feed upon my life.

  When my hand brushed against my heart, it stopped beating.

  The color drained from my face. In the mirror, I could see myself.

  Dying.

  Some part of me had enough life left to pull my hand back, and the shadow withdrew. My heart beat—once—tentatively, as if unsure of how to operate. Then another thud, stronger, defiant.

  I gasped for air.

  My living body pulled at the shoulder attached to the shadow arm, revolting against my brain that whispered death would give me peace. I forced my shadow arm to withdraw more slowly than felt natural, and when the fingers finally pulled away from my skin, they were twined around a single golden thread.

  Not my whole soul, but a piece of it. A living person was a tapestry of light; I could afford to unravel this one string. It remained connected on one end to my heart; the other end floated as if being lifted by an ethereal breeze.

  I pulled my iron crucible closer with my right arm. I knew if I just held the thread of light to my sister’s empty body, it would fade to nothing. Souls had to travel through the crucible before my necromantic powers could affect them.

  And—my breath caught. Deep within the blood iron, I could sense the near-invisible traces of my family, irrevocably entwined with the metal. I could not touch them. Not with my flesh, not with my shadow arm. But perhaps . . .

  I poised the thread of my own soul over the crucible’s lip, then used my shadow hand to push it inside.

  My mind filled with—not images, exactly, but feelings, impossible to put into words. Chaos tumbled through me, as if the thread of my soul had opened a floodgate of hundreds of different ideas and memories and emotions and tastes and scents and hopes and nightmares and fears and loves. They swarmed over me, filling me up, drowning out myself with other.

  I felt what it was to die—over and over, from each of my revenants. I felt the loves they lost, the hopes that died with their bodies. I experienced each soul that had passed through my crucible.

  Somewhere, deep, deep in my mind, I thought, Further in.

  My parents and my sister had been the first souls to touch my crucible. They were the furthest away.

  The thread of my soul dove deeper.

  It swirled in a tornado of echoes, unable to pick apart the three individual souls of the people I loved the most, unable to find a way through to my sister. My parents were already barely a whisper within the crucible; how could I find them amid such noise?

  Love.

  I homed in on that feeling, the familiar feeling of my parents’ love for me, my sister’s hand in my own, family dinners, laughter by the fire, my father’s voice as he read aloud to us at night, my mother’s arms wrapped around me, the belief that this was eternal, the security and sense of safety that existed by their mere presence.

  And I found them.

  The other souls faded to silence.

  My soul found my parents’ souls. Nothing conscious—I could not talk to them, but I could feel them.

  I could feel their love.

  I sobbed, my back bending and my chest caving in with the overwhelming emotion of it all.

  And then I felt Nessie.

  Her soul was stronger—there was more of it within the crucible. The iron had been forged with my parents’ ashes, but it was bound together by my sister’s soul, whole and freshly freed from her body at its formation.

  Neddie, she said, her voice clear and loud in my mind.

  Take it, I thought, shoving my own bit of soul toward the incorporeal presence that I sensed was the truest part of her left. I felt resistance, though I wasn’t sure if it was her or the crucible or the limits of my untrained power. I was operating so blindly, relying on instinct. Let it be enough, let me be enough, please, please—

  And then the shell o
f my sister’s body twitched. My eyes grew round as Ernesta stepped closer. Her face—for the first time since she had died—took on life. Her eyes shot to mine, and I knew—I knew—she was seeing me, really seeing me, as clear and present and true as anything.

  I wanted to spin around and grab her, hug her to me. But I was careful to keep the strand of my soul in the crucible. It was the lifeline, the connection between us.

  “Neddie,” Ernesta said, hope and wonder in her voice. Her voice. From her lips.

  She was back with me.

  And then her eyes filled with a horror deeper than any I’d ever seen before.

  “Nedra,” she gasped, her voice already weaker. I turned to the thread of my soul that connected us—it was dimming. I shivered, suddenly aware of the cold.

  “No,” Ernesta said.

  At first I thought she meant, “No, it’s too soon to go.” Because already the light was fading from her eyes, the life evaporating from her body. I could see her consciousness slipping away.

  But then the darkness touched me, and I felt the source of Nessie’s terror. Without my noticing, black had begun to stain the golden thread of light from my heart, creeping up from the base of my crucible. Fear washed over me.

  “Don’t,” Nessie said, the word barely a whisper.

  And then she was hollow again, nothing more than a shell with no hint of her own soul.

  I stared down at the thread that extended from my heart into the iron crucible. It was turning the deepest kind of black, an utter absence of light, the kind of blackness that shouldn’t exist.

  My body shuddered.

  It was so cold.

  The blackness stretched out, swallowing the once-golden thread. I watched, as if entranced, as the darkness traveled the length of the thread.

  And up toward my heart.

  The moment the black touched my skin, my body seized so violently that I fell out of my chair. The mirror on the table slid down, smashing against the tabletop and sending shards of silvery glass over my body. A sliver sliced into my cheek and blood flowed out, so hot it seemed to steam against my icy skin.

  My eyes darted to Ernesta. For a moment—for a single, shining moment—she had been herself.

  But now her body stared at me impassively, watching me die.

  I could die, I realized somewhat dully. And Death did not, in this moment, feel like an enemy. My heart slowed. I am dying.

  Don’t, I heard Nessie’s whisper again, only a memory. But it was enough. I pulled with my shadow hand, wrenching the black thread free.

  I had watched my parents die, I had carved runes upon their cold flesh, I had torn my sister’s soul free of its body, and I had held the soul of a living person in place while I killed her. I would not succumb to this.

  Death would never claim me so easily.

  The black strand fizzled in my shadow arm, writhing like a snake whose head had been sliced off, twitching violently in the throes of death.

  Then it stilled and faded to nothing.

  I panted on the ground, the silvery shards of the broken mirror scattered on the floor around me. I had torn myself away from the dark power, but at what cost? Had I just lost a bit of my own soul for one moment with Nessie?

  If I tried it again, would I be able to break free?

  NINE

  Nedra

  MY BACK CRACKED and my neck popped as I tried to remind my body what life was like.

  Ernesta stared at me.

  For all it had cost me, I had had my Nessie back. I pushed up off my knees, standing up slowly, then reached for my sister.

  I raised my right hand to my chest, feeling the place where my heart was. There should be a scar there, physical evidence of what I had lost. But the skin was smooth.

  Brushing aside the splintered shards of the broken mirror, I peered into my crucible.

  I could see the souls inside more clearly now, picking out the presence of my parents and sister almost immediately. I wondered if it was because my power had strengthened from practicing, or because I had simply grown closer to Death that I was able to see impossibly into the tiny space, discerning the imperceptible shifts of light.

  But there . . . in the very center of the crucible, built into its base . . .

  Utter black swirled.

  It wasn’t simply darkness, although that would be the easiest way to describe it. This black was more than just the absence of light. It was its own being. And it felt strangely powerful. Much like lightning crackles with electricity, there was . . . more to the black inside my crucible.

  I snatched my hand away. Was that the price? To free my sister’s soul, would I have to sacrifice my own?

  I stared at Nessie. She couldn’t answer me.

  But my revenants could.

  I concentrated, sensing who was closest. A young woman named Kessel was just outside the hospital, standing on the steps leading to the bay.

  Come here, I ordered her, and immediately she raced inside, up the stairs, and straight to me.

  I knew every revenant on my island. Kessel was a young woman of nineteen, born in a village to the north but living in the slums of Blackdocks for most of her life. I knew that she had lost her family at a young age, and the two women who formed her team at the loom in the weaving factory had become her sisters. I had felt her pain at watching them die, months before she herself fell to the plague. The bitter regret at being raised without them lingered in my own heart. Every time I drew close to Kessel, I could feel the names of her sisters weaving through her thoughts, as tangible as the threads they once wound round the pegs of the loom.

  And yet, as she stood in front of me now, I sensed nothing.

  “Kessel?” I said.

  She blinked at me. Finally: “Yes?”

  “Who were your sisters?” I asked.

  “I have no sisters,” she said flatly.

  “I mean the women you worked with. Your friends.”

  Blink. “Mora. Bellamae.” She spoke their names with no emotion behind them, as if she were answering a mathematical problem.

  Silence blossomed between us when I didn’t answer. Before, Kessel thought of her dearest friends with the same sort of constancy that I thought of Nessie, her knife-sharp love for them never far from her mind. But now they were just syllables dripping from a dead tongue.

  I frowned, then reached forward and touched Kessel with my shadow arm, the dark fingers dipping beneath her mottled skin. My connection to my necromantic powers was always amplified when I used my arm. Where I would usually feel her thoughts, I heard instead a low, guttural moan resonating through her soul.

  “Kessel,” I whispered. “Is something . . . wrong?”

  It was a foolish question.

  Kessel’s eyes stared at me, tracking my movements as I paced, trying to figure out what was wrong. I could tell that she was struggling to speak.

  Then her gaze flicked to Nessie.

  “Oh,” I breathed. “Oh no.”

  I reached forward, cupping Kessel’s face and drawing her attention back to me. “You’re fading away, too,” I said. Just like Nessie.

  But Kessel couldn’t answer my question, and I didn’t understand why. While the few necromancy books I’d read had mentioned revenants, none of them had talked about their well-being. Revenants were a sidenote, barely a concern beyond what they could be used for. So perhaps this was just a natural progression. The souls of the dead burning out within their bodies like a dying fire.

  I remembered then a lecture that Mama had given me after a neighbor’s house had burned to the ground.

  “It’s because the windows and doors were open,” Mama had told Nessie and me. “If our house ever catches on fire,” she’d instructed, “get out as quickly as possible. But if you can, close the doors behind you. Fire spreads faster when the doors and windows
are open.”

  My mind flashed to a different house fire, the one I had started, the one that had burned Mama up, and Papa, too. I wished I’d remembered that lesson then.

  A body is a house where the soul can live. While alive, the doors and windows are closed up, keeping the soul inside. But once the body dies, all the doors and windows open and the soul escapes.

  When I raised Kessel—when I raised all my revenants—I put their souls back inside their bodies. But I hadn’t realized that a dead body probably couldn’t hold on to a soul, at least not forever. Death left the door open, and the souls were evaporating like smoke.

  Kessel’s eyes drifted back to Ernesta, silent and still. Tentatively, I tried to sense my other revenants, scattered around the island. How had I not noticed the growing silence before? But it was true—their voices were like distant echoes, slowly losing what tiny spark of life they’d had before.

  My revenants were all emptying, becoming as hollow as my twin sister.

  “Please,” Kessel said, drawing me back to her.

  What? I asked within my mind.

  Don’t let me be like her, Kessel said, her eyes still on Nessie. Communication was easier when we didn’t speak aloud. Please kill me, really kill me, before I become a monster.

  “She’s not a monster!” I roared, stepping away from Kessel. She didn’t answer me. I knew the dead couldn’t lie, and I wondered, then, if they could be lied to.

  I took a deep, steadying breath. “I want to help you. All of you.”

  I sat down, and Kessel followed suit, crossing her legs beneath her. I held out my crucible. “What is the black?”

  We have to pass through it, her voice echoed in my mind. Each of us, when you raise us. We pass through the iron. A hint of a smile crossed her face at the memory. And the darkness. The smile was gone. She raised her gaze to meet mine. The black is power. And it’s old.

  “Old? My crucible isn’t that old, it’s—”

  Parts of it are old.

  I sucked in a breath. A part of my crucible was old—the crucible cage that had melded with my parents’ ashes and my sister’s soul to make the iron bead. I thought of the larger-than-life portrait of Bennum Wellebourne in the lobby of the hospital. He had sacrificed his own hand to make that crucible cage.