I’m back with another short fic. This one you’ll possibly recognize if you participated in the preorder campaign for A TREASON OF THORNS–access to it was one of the preorder incentives. It’s a story that’s always felt special to me, about a peculiar necromancer and the once-dead love of her life and how they deal with darkness.
I hope you enjoy it. As always, it comes with content warnings, which you can view by highlighting the following:
(Raised In Full contains a brief depiction of miscarriage, and mention of infertility)
Raised In Full
by Yours Truly
In truth, it was a miracle that Dulcie had raised so many dead this past year without renewing the Merchant’s interest in her sooner. Or so Dulcie thought, as she sat at Widow Wickins’ bedside and quietly traded her ability to taste in exchange for the Widow’s soul.
The trade had to hurt for it to work properly, you see, and Shep had arranged to have a lemon and rosewater cake brought to their lodgings that night, to celebrate Dulcie’s thirty-fifth nameday. The day itself had passed by unremarkably the week before when they’d been apart—Dulcie raising a pair of stillborn twins in Alster, Shep putting down a trio of haints who’d been following them on the road.
Dulcie had considered trading her ability to sing for the Widow, but she’d never had much of a voice anyway and the Widow had been dead two weeks by the time Dulcie arrived in her village—it was unlikely her singing voice would have been enough. And if she’d tried and it hadn’t, the raising would have gone wrong, and Shep would have had to put down the Widow’s haint. After that, there’d have been no bringing her back.
Dulcie hated that. She hated to fail, and so, as always, she hedged her bets and bartered away the ability to taste lemon and rosewater cake and Shep’s mouth on hers afterwards. She wouldn’t tell him what she’d given up—she never did. He’d guess anyway, though—he always did.
Next to Dulcie, the Widow stirred, and opened her eyes.
“Are you the nurse?” she asked faintly, voice crackling with age.
“No,” Dulcie answered, holding out her hands to help the Widow to her feet.
The old woman got up readily, steady and bright-eyed. It was like this with the older ones—the raising gave them a temporary flush of health, a new lease on life for five or six or sometimes even ten years. But Dulcie never could do more than postpone the inevitable. Death came for everyone, in the end.
At the sound of Widow Wickins’ voice the door to the adjoining parlor flew open and three women, a decade or so older than Dulcie, burst into the room.
“Mama!” one of them sobbed, and then there was the usual chaos of embracing and weeping, and things reached a fever pitch as half a dozen grandchildren tumbled into the bedroom as well.
In the midst of it, Dulcie slipped out the back door.
Shep leaned against a nearby wall, waiting and brooding, thin smoke from his antiquated pipe hanging on the frosty autumn air. He’d already collected their payment, and Dulcie preferred to leave as soon after she’d done her work as possible. It was dangerous to stay in one place for long, and besides that, getting caught up in the aftermath of a raising complicated things. She didn’t like the way people looked at her, or the gifts they gave, or the prayers they whispered and the signs they sketched with surreptitious hands.
“Ready?” Shep asked.
As Dulcie went to him, he put an arm around her shoulders. She was always cold after doing her work—something about the incantation and the trade chilled her blood. Shep knew it, and for fifteen years now, he’d been lending Dulcie warmth after she raised the dead.
“It went well?” he asked, halfway down the lane to the bare-bones inn they’d lodged at. The inn was a little, comfortless place that stood away from the village under the eaves of the forest’s skeleton trees. But Shep and Dulcie had stayed in worse, on more occasions than either of them liked to count.
“Mm.” Dulcie gnawed at a hangnail. “Quite well. And on your end? No one followed us from Alster?”
“No. I think—I think we may be in the clear for now.” Shep said it cautiously, because they were never really in the clear—not with the Merchant still viewing Dulcie as a lost investment. But sometimes his interest in her faded, or he grew too busy with other things, and the run ins with his henchmen and barterers stopped for a short while.
“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Shep changed the subject quickly, as if he didn’t want to push their luck by dwelling too long on the fact that the Merchant might leave them alone for a few weeks, or months if they were lucky. “Nothing big, of course, but it’s waiting at the inn. It was your nameday, after all.”
Dulcie smiled, and said nothing. She wasn’t supposed to know about the cake, but it had worked out well for Widow Wickins that she did.
As they approached the inn, everything seemed quite rosy. They’d a bed for the night, free of vermin, even if the mattress did have more lumps than a toad. They were together, after a brief and trying stint apart in Alster. And Dulcie had Shep’s surprise to look forward to. Whether she could taste it or not, it was a gift.
A few horses stamped in the innyard, and smoke rose in a welcoming plume from the chimney. All seemed ordinary and peaceful, but a few yards from the door, Dulcie stopped. A sinking feeling lodged in her belly, as the hair on the back of her neck rose and ice nipped at her fingers.
“Shep,” she breathed, and at the single word he had his sword out, the ensorcelled blade gleaming dully in the late afternoon light.
Only Dulcie’s deathsense gave her the creeping horrors like that. If she’d been a proper necromancer, the sense would have filled her with elation, but she’d never done her job quite rightly. She was meant to raise the Tainted Dead—haints and revenants and gaunts, foul and soulless creatures who’d witlessly do the bidding of whatever master Dulcie bound them to. But she’d lost her ambition and her stomach for the dark arts, halfway through a course of arcane study that had been funded by a shadowy patron. Dulcie knew now it had been the Merchant, and could hardly wonder at the fact that he refused to leave her be. She was, after all, profiting at his expense—making a living with the knowledge he’d purchased for her—though to be fair, Dulcie had made the magic her own. No one else in Ridelmar could raise the dead back to full life like she did, though Dulcie had tried a few times, over the years, to teach the knack of it to someone else.
As Dulcie’s deathsense sent warning after warning singing through her limbs, Shep took a step forward, putting himself between her and the inn, from behind which a pair of gaunts had emerged.
It had to be gaunts. Haints were straightforward, malicious creatures, all leftover ill-will and bad intention. Revenants were simpler yet—shambling things still tightly bound to their decaying human bodies, where haints were mostly vengeful spirit and teeth.
Gaunts were different. Manifesting as columns of shadow with gas-lamp eyes and yawning mouths made for gnawing living souls out of a body, they had enough wit left to be dangerous. They were clever, and vicious, and entirely without mercy. Raising her first gaunt and watching it wreak havoc was what had turned Dulcie irrevocably away from the work of a necromancer, and set her on her current path.
Shep waited, sword raised, every line of him tense with expectation and confidence. He’d been fighting the Tainted Dead for nearly three hundred years now, barring the time he’d spent in death himself, and he’d made an art of something that might otherwise be gruesome. Even from behind Shep, Dulcie could feel his welcoming smile as the gaunts came towards him. However clever they were, however vicious, they would soon find true and lasting death upon his blade.
The gaunts made a wild keening sound as they threw themselves at Shep and his sword cut effortlessly through the insubstantial stuff they were made from. They formed and reformed, twisting around him like a wreath of smoke, but however quickly they moved, Shep’s sword danced faster. At last, the tip of his blade found its mark—the first gaunt fell to ash as he pierced one of its staring eyes, the second as he thrust his sword into its yawning mouth.
Wiping sweat from his forehead with one sleeve, Shep turned to Dulcie. “Well, so much for being in the clear. He’s getting bold, isn’t he? Gaunts at a roadside inn—what’ll be next, haints roaming unchecked in the capital?”
But Dulcie only swallowed. Her deathsense hadn’t calmed. In fact, it had grown stronger when the gaunts turned to ash, as if their presence had only served as a mask for something worse.
And then, Dulcie spotted him. A stranger, in a long dark cloak, lurking in the shadows of the stable which closed off one side of the innyard. If it hadn’t been for a particularly difficult raising two years back where she bartered away her ability to smell, Dulcie likely would have caught the scent of his magic on first stepping into the yard—gunmetal and decay and grave earth.
The stranger was a Nightshade—a master of the arcane, who could both raise the dead and ensorcel the living. Dulcie knew it from the feel of his craft and the way the gaunts had made straight for Shep, rather than growing distracted by the warmth and life and sounds of ready prey emanating from the inn. They must have been recently raised, and still strictly under the Nightshade’s control.
This time, it was Dulcie who stepped in front of Shep.
“Dulse—” he said in an anguished tone as three more cloaked figures stepped out of the shadows around the innyard.
But Dulcie was beyond fear now, finally living in a moment she’d been caught on the edge of ever since scorning the Merchant’s patronage. She’d always known that someday he’d grow tired of waiting. That eventually, he’d reclaim her by force.
“What is it you want?” she asked the first Nightshade. “We’re only travelers. We’ve little enough to our name, but you can take what we have if you’ll let us be.”
It was a bold-faced lie, but all Dulcie had left to her was falsehood. They’d no hope of standing against four Nightshades, though Shep would surely try, and die yet again in the process.
The Nightshade laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “The blade your companion holds is worth my life twice over, yet you say you’re common travelers with little to your name?”
“It’s just a sword,” Dulcie said flatly. “A family heirloom. Do you mean to tell me it’s worth something?”
Weaponry that could put down the Tainted Dead was a rarity now, but during the Riven Wars two and a half centuries ago, blades like Shep’s had been far more common. He’d been buried with his sword, and raised with it, and it often seemed to Dulcie like an extension of his body.
The Nightshade pushed his hood back, revealing eyes that glowed like embers and a shorn head inked with the Merchant’s mark.
“Why doesn’t your companion speak for himself?” he asked. “Is he slow-witted?”
No. But they’d arranged things between them, Dulcie and Shep. He dealt with the Tainted Dead, and whenever possible, she handled the unscrupulous living. It was easier that way—less bloody. And Dulcie hated to see a death when she didn’t have to.
The Nightshade approached Shep, who stood with his unsheathed blade lowered, breath coming hard and fast. He’d never been able to hide what he felt, and while Dulcie loved it in him, it had proved a liability more than once.
“You’re the soldier, aren’t you?” the Nightshade murmured. “The one she raised by mistake?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dulcie said from behind him, fixing her eyes on Shep. “His grandfather was a soldier, but he’s only an everyday cooper, aren’t you, my love?”
Tearing his gaze away from the Nightshade, Shep looked at Dulcie.
“Yes, of course,” he repeated woodenly. “A cooper from Marsh End, further north.”
The Nightshade hesitated. The thing about the arcane arts was that the further you immersed yourself in them—the more you wallowed in things no human should rightly be able to do—the less you could tell right from wrong. It didn’t only dull your conscience, either—it stunted your capacity to sense truth or falsehood in other people as well. So, though Dulcie’s lies were very thin indeed, they were enough to bewilder the Nightshade. And any hesitation on his part was a chance at freedom, because the Merchant liked things tidy. He did not like mess, or gossip, or collateral damage. He’d not dwelt so long in the shadows and amassed so much power by stirring up scandal and ill-feeling. He was clever and quiet and sly.
If Dulcie and Shep were only travelers, as she insisted, and the Nightshade harmed them in any way, he’d certainly be punished for the error.
“We’re only here because we’ve been visiting a cousin of mine in Alster. But you know what the roads are like these days, and that’s why he brought the sword, not that he’s much good with it,” Dulcie pushed.
Indecision wrote itself across the Nightshade’s hawkish face, and Dulcie began to think that perhaps the world was a fair place, after all. Though she’d given up much in her pursuit of bringing the dead back to life, the Merchant and his servants had lost valuable pieces of themselves, too.
With a jerk of his head, the Nightshade beckoned to his companions to step away. Dulcie and Shep stayed where they were, not moving a muscle, as the Merchant’s emissaries drew back.
But before they’d left the innyard, a wavering voice cut through the tension that still hung on the air.
“I beg your pardon?”
With dread turning her limbs weak as water, Dulcie turned and found Widow Wickins standing at the head of the road that led through the yard and up to the inn door.
“My girls told me you’re the one that worked my miracle,” Widow Wickins said, oblivious to the electric charge running between the figures in the yard, or the way despairing tears had already begun to pool in Dulcie’s eyes. “I came to tell you how grateful I am, and to give you this.”
She stepped forward, and pressed a small, beaten-silver icon on the end of a chain into Dulcie’s hand.
“It’s Saint Imelda,” the widow explained. “Patroness of remembering, and of forgotten things. She’s been with me all my life, but now I think you should have her.”
“Thank you,” Dulcie said, though she could not keep her voice from trembling.
The widow clucked, a small, reassuring sound. “Here now. It’s only a little thing. I’m sure you’ve plenty of troubles I don’t know of, but I hope Mistress Imelda can help you with them.”
Dulcie nodded wordlessly and slipped the chain over her head. She could feel Shep at her back—he’d shifted a few steps, putting himself once more between her and danger.
“Well, I’ll take my leave then,” Widow Wickins said, and began to make her way slowly down the road. As she went, the air grew warmer, heating with magic as the Nightshades gathered their power.
When the widow had disappeared among the skeleton trees, Dulcie spun on her heel and wrapped her arms around Shep’s waist. She could feel every line of him, taut and terrified and frustrated, and she whispered a prayer.
“Don’t move. Please. Just keep still, Shep. Do it for me. Please, please, don’t move.”
While she murmured to him, the Nightshades’ power built and built as they chanted an incantation that sounded like brushfire and started blood trickling from Shep’s ears.
“Don’t move,” Dulcie begged with more urgency as the Nightshades sketched figures in the air with their Merchant-marked hands. Shep was shaking now, hands on his sword white-knuckled as he fought against the instinct to surge forward and die in an attempt at cutting the Nightshades down. “I need you here. I need you to live. I’d be lost without you. Please, Shep. As you love me, don’t move.”
There came a flash of blue fire, followed by the unbearable searing sensation of raw magic, and then all went dark.
#
Dulcie woke in chains, with Shep shackled to her. He was unconscious still, but breathing. A familiarity with the arcane dampened the effects of sorcery on Dulcie, but Shep had no such protection.
Sitting up with a small whimper at the way her head ached, Dulcie bent over Shep and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
“Come back to me,” she pleaded. “Come back.”
And because time and trouble and fate had knit the two of them together in a way Dulcie could never quite explain, he woke. She helped him to sit up, with his back against a dry stone wall that cut across the barren, twilight field they’d wakened in. He was grey and sweating, eyes unfocused, but then his vision cleared and he took in their surroundings with a single devastated glance.
“Death’s hands, Dulse,” Shep said. “I know where we are.”
“Where?” she asked. There’d been so many fields over the years, so many barren campsites as they moved from place to place. They’d all run together in Dulcie’s mind, one much like the other.
“This is Bronnaward,” Shep answered in a bleak voice. “This is where I died.”
With a sinking feeling, Dulcie glanced over one shoulder. Yes, there was the thicket she’d made her camp by fifteen years ago, not knowing she’d stumbled onto the site of the Riven Wars’ most infamous battle. There was the little stone cairn she’d missed in the darkness that night, with its engraved reminder that in this place, many had fallen, casting down a great evil and defeating scores of the Tainted Dead.
There could only be one thing behind the mist ahead of them, then. The Mound. The earthen barrow where Bronn the Ever-Risen had finally been cast into death, and his name proved a lie. He’d been the greatest and most dangerous necromancer the world had ever known, and even in death enough of his power lingered that the Tainted Dead occasionally rose on Bronnaward, and drifted off to harry the living.
As Dulcie peered into the fog, the four Nightshades that had overpowered them materialized. Threads of sorcery still bound them to Dulcie and Shep, for Bronnaward was a four day journey from the distant inn and its overhanging, leafless forest. All that time, the Nightshades had been renewing their magic, keeping their charges in a bewitched sleep.
Dulcie watched numbly, one arm thrown around Shep in an instinctive, protective gesture, as the Nightshades stepped aside, forming an honor guard for another figure who stepped out of the mist.
“So here we are, Dulcie,” the Merchant said. “And it’s taken us long enough to get to this point, hasn’t it?”
Dulcie said nothing. The Merchant was not at all how she’d pictured him. She’d imagined someone tall, ascetic, emanating arcane energy. But this man of middling height and faded hair was entirely ordinary to look at. Forgettable, even. Had she passed him on the street, she’d never have known he was the cause of the half the trouble in Ridelmar. In fact, she likely wouldn’t have noticed him at all.
“What is it you want?” Dulcie asked, wishing she were stronger, braver, that her voice did not waver with fear. “Surely you’ve realized by now that I’ll never be one of your dirty hands. If you expect me to fall in line and raise the Tainted Dead for you, you’re better off killing me.”
The Merchant laughed, a commonplace laugh, a tinker’s laugh. “I have a thousand Nightshades across the country ready and willing to raise lesser dead things for me. Why would I go to so much effort to get ahold of you for that purpose, when any of them can do the same?”
“To prove a point,” Dulcie said. “To send a warning to anyone else who might cross you.”
“I’ve never been much of a one for proving points. Too expensive. Too much trouble. I’d have let you be, you know, if it weren’t for the fact that I need you.”
“Don’t ask him why,” Shep muttered to Dulcie. “It’s what he wants.”
The Merchant ignored him. “You see, I want a raising done that none of my Nightshades can manage. Two dozen of them have already died attempting it over the years, but I know you’re the one for the job. And if you do it for me, I swear to you I’ll let both you and your ill-mannered soldier alone, to live out your lives in peace and grow old, and someday die with your children and grandchildren about you.”
Dulcie winced as the Merchant struck a nerve. There’d be no future like that for her and Shep, whether she did as she was ordered or not.
“And if I refuse to do what you want?” Dulcie asked.
The Merchant shrugged. “Then I will keep you in chains, and cut your soldier’s throat while you watch. When that is done, I will raise him as a gaunt and you will continue to watch as he becomes everything he’s hated and fought against, and does unspeakable things to the living.”
Shep was absolutely silent. Motionless. Breathless.
Dulcie let out a sigh. “It’s the Ever-Risen you want to bring back, isn’t it? There’s no other reason for us to be here.”
“Of course,” the Merchant said. “But it’s been so long since he died. None of my Nightshades have been able to bear up under the cost of raising someone who’s been two and a half centuries in death. You, though, my wayward lamb. You’ve already done it.”
“That was an accident.” Dulcie glanced at Shep. He shook his head, nearly imperceptibly, and mouthed a few words to her.
Don’t do it. Let me go.
She turned back to the Merchant. “And if I do as you ask, you’ll let both of us be?”
“On my honor,” the Merchant said. “If you raise Bronn as a gaunt and bind him to me, I will never trouble you again.”
“Dulcie, no,” Shep rasped. “You never saw him in life. He was…a horror. Anything good in him, he’d traded away for power, and he brooked no rivals. Brought back like that, he’ll be the wickedest and most powerful dead thing the world has seen since the wars.”
“I’m counting on it,” the Merchant said.
“Alright,” Dulcie answered, before she could falter in her resolve. “I’ll do as you ask.”
“Then let’s get you to your work,” the Merchant said briskly. “I’ve waited near twenty years for this, I see no reason to wait any longer. Virien, watch the soldier. If he tries to escape, kill him.”
The Nightshade Dulcie had spoken with in the innyard stepped forward, releasing her from her shackles and casting a wary glance at Shep. Ignoring the sorcerer, Dulcie knelt before her one happy accident, her single stroke of good luck, and cupped Shep’s face with her hands.
“Listen to me,” she told him, voice tense with the import of what she had to say. “I love you now. And I will love you again. Remember that, my darling.”
Shep opened his mouth to speak, but Dulcie leaned forward and kissed him, and the words were lost between them.
“Alright,” the Merchant groused. “That’s quite enough. I’ll have a great deal to do after this.”
“I’m sure you will,” Dulcie said quietly, as she got to her feet and went to his side.
The three remaining Nightshades fell into pace behind them and they stepped into the fog, beyond which lay the burial mound.
#
The night Dulcie raised Shep had been the worst of her life.
For three years after fleeing the Arcanium, she’d drifted from place to place, entirely alone, living off her strange ability to raise the dead in full. It set her apart in people’s minds—they were afraid of her, in a way they were not afraid of ordinary necromancers, who were dangerous, but a known quantity, at least. Dulcie was different—she did something undeniably good with a skill meant for wickedness and avarice. It made people suspicious, or overawed, and so she kept in constant motion.
There was the matter of the Merchant’s messengers too, who’d begun to dog her steps. They never did her any harm, but it unsettled people even more, to see her arrive in a town with haints following in her wake, or a Nightshade arguing the Merchant’s case at her side. Dulcie wanted nothing more than to be rid of the Merchant’s emissaries, yet she could not shake them. Between her uncanny talent and her deadly followers, she found herself utterly and abysmally alone.
And then, on her twentieth nameday, in a fit of self-pity, she let a man whose brother she’d raised take her to his bed. She’d thought it would show him that she was no more or less than anyone else, but the whole thing was a disaster—his every touch was an act of worship, and at the end of things, he wept. Dulcie left before he woke, unable to bear another wondering glance, another prayerful acknowledgement of his good fortune.
Four months later, she hadn’t bled, and her belly was swelling. The prospect of attempting to manage her rootless, hand to mouth existence with a child tarnished her every waking moment. So she wandered aimlessly, in the wild places between towns, until one night she bedded down near a thicket on a barren, fog-shrouded field.
Lying in the darkness that night, with no more to her name than a handful of coins and the future stretching long and bleak ahead of her, Dulcie wished for death. And when she fell into sleep, she dreamed of it. Of the incantation that burned her throat like fire when she raised the dead. Of the trades she made to bring them back to full life, bit by bit chipping away pieces of herself in exchange for a miracle. Of the life-sapping cold that followed a raising.
She woke chilled to her core. Blood was slipping down the insides of her legs as she lost her child, and, though she would not learn it till later, the ability to carry another.
Shep sat nearby, with his head in his hands.
“Send me back,” he’d said bitterly. “I don’t want to live again.”
Dulcie had been able to do nothing in response but curl up on her side and sob. It was the sight of her entirely undone that brought Shep the rest of the way into life—into the will for life. He’d banked Dulcie’s fire, and made hot tea, and changed and washed her linens when she bled through them. They stayed together for three days on the cheerless heath of Bronnaward, and by the end of it there was an unbreakable bond between Dulcie, who could raise the dead, and her soldier, who could put them down, and who had known death himself for over two hundred years.
No moment in which Shep walked the earth could ever be quite as dark for Dulcie as the time before he came to her. She held to that, as she followed the Merchant deep into the heart of earth, traveling down and down through a tunnel whose doorway was set into Bronn’s burial mound. At last they came out into a great, subterranean chamber, and Dulcie caught her breath at the sight of what was waiting there. An army of Nightshades, and of the Tainted Dead, their eyes glowing like balefire, all preternaturally quiet in this nether world.
Torches guttered as the Merchant and Dulcie passed through the gathered horde, to where a stone tomb stood at the center of the chamber.
“Is there anything you need?” the Merchant asked, as Dulcie stepped up to the tomb and pressed a trembling hand to its ponderous cover.
“No,” Dulcie said. Everything she needed was aboveground, waiting on the heath.
“Go on, then,” the Merchant urged. “Do what we’ve come for.”
Dulcie cast about herself, taking in the stone chamber and the silent, waiting army. She thought of how long the Merchant had laid his plans, shored up his power, ensured that in the end, he’d be given what he wanted. One final, terrifyingly strong dead creature, to bend to his will. To use as a weapon, though for what, Dulcie did not know, nor did she care to. She’d heard enough from Shep about the Riven Wars—that dark and hopeless time when the dead fought the living, and life was often only a slow way of dying. She could not return the land to such brutality.
But neither could she bear to see her soldier tormented for disobedience on her part.
Dulcie pressed one palm flat against the surface of Bronn the Ever-Risen’s tomb. With the other, she clutched the charm she’d been given by the Widow, of Saint Imelda, mistress of remembering, and of forgotten things. And she began the incantation to raise the dead.
At the first words, tension and anticipation rippled across the chamber. Soon all Dulcie’s attention was absorbed by the task of speaking the necessary syllables, of forcing them from her mouth when her lungs and throat rebelled, scorched by the heat of the incantation’s power. She spoke for what felt like a lifetime, power rising around her to a maddening crescendo.
When it had reached its height, everything stilled. Dulcie found herself caught in that silent, eternal moment within which she made her choice. To give of herself, rather than taking from death. To sacrifice something worth an act of restoration. This was the precipice. This was where she might give the Merchant his dark heart’s desire, or turn aside.
For fifteen years, Dulcie had chosen sacrifice. She’d given her true name, her ability to see colors, her shadow, the memory of every book she’d ever read. The capacity to sleep through a night without waking, to be greeted with kindness by a dog, to feel the wind against her face. So many other pieces of her, left along the way, when the only thing she truly wanted to be rid of was this terrible gift, of cheating death and bringing those it had claimed back to life.
But Dulcie could not trade her talent away, because it would have been the purest relief to her, and a trade had to hurt. As long as she possessed it, too, she felt an obligation to use it—to do what she could for those around her, who grieved for their dead in a way Dulcie could not yet understand.
Her incantation hung on the air, pulling at the veil between life and death. It would be so easy, to let the magic choose for her, and raise Bronn as a vengeful gaunt. The sorcery would steal from her for the raising, taking as much of the good left in her as it required.
Or she could cut her power off, let the magic die, and the Merchant would ensure that Shep died with it.
You never saw the Ever-Risen in life. He was a horror, Shep’s voice said in Dulcie’s mind. Anything good in him, he’d traded away for power.
And he brooked no rivals.
So Dulcie made her choice. She completed her work and stepped away from the tomb. The Merchant surged forward eagerly, gesturing to the nearest Nightshades to push the stone cover aside.
When they did, it was no gaunt who rose from that long and cursed resting place. It was Bronn the Ever-Risen, restored to himself, raised in full as only one person in all the world could have managed. The cost of her sacrifice and the force of his power was enough to drive Dulcie to her knees.
He was a horror.
And he brooked no rivals.
Through the chaos that ensued, as Nightshades and the Tainted Dead fell upon Bronn at the Merchant’s orders, and were scattered or broken by his sorcery, Dulcie crawled away. The cavern shook with blast after blast of arcane fire, dust trickling from the ceiling, pieces of stone falling, until the earth roared, and collapsed in on itself, and Dulcie fell into a place like death.
#
Somewhere, a bird sang.
The sound of it was grating—tuneless and unmelodic.
Dulcie knew that birds sounded sweet to other people, and that there was a reason their song turned to discord for her, but she could not remember what that reason was.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a shaft of sunlight cutting across the clean white coverlet of a bed. Her hand lay on the counterpane, though the sun did nothing to warm her skin, and she knew there was a reason for that, too.
“Dulse?” a ragged voice said, and she turned her head to find a man, seated in a chair beside her. A sword rested on his lap, and there was a charm around his neck—it took Dulcie a moment to make out the figure. Saint Imelda, Mistress of remembering, and of forgotten things.
“Yes?” she answered.
“Death’s hands, I thought you’d never wake. What happened down there? Everything caved in from up above, and it took us two days just to get you out. There was nothing and no one else left, living or dead.”
Dulcie frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”
The man leaned forward. “The Merchant? The Ever-Risen? Bronnaward? Don’t you remember any of it?”
“No.” Dulcie gnawed at her lower lip for a moment as the man searched her face with concern. “Who—who are you?”
The man went dead-white, and for a moment she thought he might be sick. “Dulse, it’s Shep.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know a Shep. I know a James Shepton, who’s to study at the Arcanium with me come spring…” Her voice trailed off. “No. That’s not right. There—there’s been more since then, hasn’t there? But it’s just gone, when I try to think of it. I’m sorry, should I know you?”
To Dulcie’s horror, the man at her bedside, with his capable look and stern air, buried his face in his hands and began to sob. She waited a moment, torn between discomfort and compassion, but the softer side of her won out in the end.
It always did.
“Here now,” she said gently, reaching out to brush his fingers with her own. It felt like habit, that reaching, though she couldn’t have said why. “Whatever’s gone wrong, I’ll help. You’re going to be alright. We’re going to be alright.”
Outside, the bird continued to sing, its jangling music tuneless but joy-filled. And though the sun that shone on Dulcie did not warm her, the absence of warmth made it no less bright.
“I know,” Shep said, his voice breaking on the words. “Believe me, Dulse. I know.”
