The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 26

twenty-six

AFELY TETHERED, GREY LED the way back toward the fortress at the highestS point of the Isle. Her body moved without her telling it the directions, sinking into the inheritance of muscle memory her brain barely recalled.

She kept one hand in Kier’s, unable to let go; the other, she draped awkwardly across his chest, making sure his collarbone had healed. Though she could not heal him with power alone on the mainland, she could feel his bones under her hand now, knitting back together as her power poured into

him.

“Do the others know? About you?”

“Brit, Ola and Eron did already.”

“I mean the High Lord. And Cleoc.”

“Oh. Yes.”

He glanced at her sideways. Grey only shrugged. She had too many emotions right now to deal with any of them, and the reality of being on Locke was closing in on her.

She could barely breathe with the crush of power swirling around the island. It was like pressure all about her—when she was young, she remembered it as a stomach ache, but that wasn’t quite right. It was like electricity in the air, crackling through her lungs when she drew breath, sticky on her skin.

Kier was not unaffected either. He looked down at Grey, her hand on his chest as she poured power into him. “I think…” He stopped, looking up at the fortress as they breached the edge of the Ghostwood, back out into the mist of the day. The fog rolled in, heavy from the sea. He frowned, and Grey treasured every expression his face made even as she wanted to rub

her thumb across his lips to smooth away any unhappiness.

“You feeling okay?”

“I feel… like everything is trying to give me power,” he said. “But that’s…” Impossible. He didn’t say impossible.

“We have a lot to talk about,” Grey said. She did not think she could look into his eyes and tell him about his death, still cold on his bones and heavy on her heart, nor the decisions she had to make regarding it—but first, she had to tell him that he, too, was Locke.

They passed through the walls, under the open portcullis, to where the hulking stone keep waited. She sucked a breath through her teeth, staring up at the great doors.

“Is it as you remembered it?” he asked, his voice still rough with seawater.

“Yes,” Grey said. Kier looked at her. Very gently, he took her hand and removed it from his chest. He no longer bore any trace of unfamiliarity at all.

She was pretty sure his ribs were stable enough for now, his collarbone mended. All over again, she was struck with the power of the Isle: it would’ve taken her hours, maybe days, to gradually do the same sort of work in Scaela, if she’d been able to do it at all.

“Are there bodies inside?” Kier asked, hesitating. Not fearful—just preparing.

“No,” Grey said, looking away. “I don’t know what’s left of them, if anything. The feast was… in the town. Further down.”

He nodded. He pressed a hand to the solid wood of the door. The knocker in the middle was carved to look like a seabird, a ring of fire clutched in its beak. The door was untouched by rot or sea, as if it hadn’t spent the last two decades submerged.

He offered Grey his other hand. She laced her bloody, wet fingers through his, then raised her other hand, set it beside Kier’s on the wooden door. Together, they pushed it open.

The wood creaked, then gave, revealing a stone entry; all these years, it had been unlatched, as if waiting just for her. Grey took it in, gaze skating over the tapestries on the walls, untouched by age; the great stone staircase with the banister she and Sev used to slide down again and again until their grandmother scolded them. The sconces on the walls still bore fat, waxy

candles, half-melted. She sucked a breath through her teeth, stepping into the home of her childhood like she was shedding time. She kept her fingers locked in Kier’s as he followed a step behind her.

She walked carefully, wet boots squeaking on the stone floor. She led him through the entry, through an archway to the right: this was the dining hall, with its great windows looking out to the sea. She pressed her free hand to the cold glass. The fog still surrounded them on all sides, leaving the world white and formless.

“We won’t be able to see anyone coming,” she said.

“I know. What do you think about this fog? Is it normal?”

Grey shook her head, thinking back to the Ghostwood. “I don’t know if the Isle is fully restored yet,” she said cautiously. “We should have some time before we need to worry.”

“It feels like we’re already shielded,” Kier said softly, curiously.

Protect me, she had asked the Isle, and it had listened. “That must be the fog. I think it’s only temporary,” she said. Even with just her power, she could feel that much.

“I can assess the shielding,” he said. He made a low noise at the force of power that hit him when he siphoned, wincing at it. “Isn’t that too much?”

Grey shook her head. She was not depleted in the slightest. “Not here,” she said. “Nothing is too much here.”

Kier was silent for a moment. She watched his face—Do you know? Do you feel it in your heart? Does death still chill you to the bone?

“I have so many questions,” he murmured finally, and Grey watched a second shield shimmer into existence. She felt it, strong and whole, a bubble of protection over only the fortress. Perhaps it would not hold, if anyone came in earnest, but it was a chance she felt safe taking. It was larger than any shield he’d cast before, by far—and it seemed to cost him

nothing.

“It’s temporary,” he said.

She turned back to him. Here, she felt oddly shy, as if he had not seen every part of her. Like this was the one thing she could not convince him to love.

What is love without freedom? She pushed the thought away before it could take root. There would be time to confront what she must choose. For now, she would revel in the simple fact that he was alive.

“Come on,” she said. She avoided the back parlor and kitchen and ballroom—there were too many memories to sort through, and she was not ready to deal with what she might find. Dull horror pounded in her heart.

She was not ready. She could not face it.

Instead, she led Kier up the stairs, up and up and up, onto the turret roof where she and Sev used to greet the sunset. The wind whipped at their hair, and the roof of Kier’s shield looked almost close enough to touch.

Grey sucked in a breath, taking in the Isle spread out below them. There was the sparse shadow of the Ghostwood, mist creeping through the trees, and on the cliffs at one edge, the crumbling remains of the old abbey. There, beyond the wood, she could see the small houses and great hall of Osar, some of them burned by Eprain’s forces; then, further down, the harbor and the half-burned town of Maerin, and the remnants of the villages dotted between the two towns. To the far side of the Isle, she took in the Barrens, the uninhabited stretch of trees and mountains; the fortress was the highest point, but the Barrens were a close second. It was all still and silent, ghost villages for a phantom lord. From this height, she could see the entire Isle.

She turned away, back to the mist of the sea. A ruined Locke, but hers all the same.

“There will be time,” Kier said, gently touching her back.

She made him sit against the wall and removed his shirt. There, where she could see the whole Isle and all that surrounded it, where she could see the first sign of trouble, she called the power to her. She felt it moving from the Isle into her middle, then radiating outward, flexing all the way to her fingertips. When she pressed her hand to Kier’s half-healed injuries, he flinched.

“That will take some getting used to,” he said, eyes sliding shut.

“Does it feel different?” Grey asked. It did to her, a bit—not in the feeling; power was power, even on Locke. It was the extent that had changed, and the quality of it. She didn’t think she’d ever find the end of it, her own middle constantly refilled by the Isle around her.

“Very,” Kier said. He pressed a hand over hers—Grey had gone back to knitting the bones of his ribs back together. This, she mused, pushing the power into him as she tried to construct them in her mind, would be something she would not have the power, liberty or skill to do on the mainland. She nudged the threads of magic under his skin. His eyes slid

open, pupils blown wide. He looked half-drunk.

“How so?” she asked.

“It feels…” He considered this, gaze rolling back, staring at the misty white of the sky. His nose wrinkled, the effect only marginally ruined by the crookedness from the last time he broke it. “It feels like you,” he said finally. “All of it. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that.”

She leaned against the stone next to him, her hand still tightly laced in his. She tried not to think of the moldering piles of bones and fabric that were waiting for them in Osar’s hall—to think of that would be to think of what those bones had once been, and every time her thoughts edged along that, it did something very odd to her heart and throat and stomach and the relationship between the aforementioned organs.

They were here, waiting. They had always been here, waiting, every moment of the sixteen years she had spent away from this place; every single heartbeat in which she was alive and they were not.

She bit it all down in one clean slice, because once she started, she would not be able to stop.

“Can you try to explain?” she asked Kier, desperate for distraction.

He made a noise low in his throat, but he was breathing easier. She looked at him, double-checking his collarbone, then went to run her finger lightly near the collagen of his left ear, where the curving top had been cut off at a diagonal.

His gaze was fixed on her, utterly reverent. He was looking at her like she held all the magic in the universe. She knew Kier, and she knew in an abstract sense that Kier loved her, but until this moment, this look, she had not considered that he loved her more than he loved magic.

“I didn’t know what it was about your power,” he said, “until that time, before we were bound, when I didn’t have you. I’d always taken you for granted—I was spoiled, growing up with you beside me, with the knowing.

But… with you—it has a scent. A feeling. It’s sharp, and honed. It smells like the sea, mineral and clean, tinged with salt. I can almost taste the force of it—I can feel it in the back of my teeth.” He took in Grey’s gaze and shook his head. “I’m not explaining it right. Anyone else’s magic is watered down. Tavern beer when the bills are catching up. But you’re a shot of liquor. And here it’s…” He took a deep breath, eyes sliding shut, drunk on magic. “It’s in the air. It’s in the land, the stones, the trees. And it’s coming

from you. It all feels like you. Gods, Grey, I’ve never felt so safe in my life.”

It took her a moment to recover. “That’s something,” she said finally, haltingly, “considering there are warships from at least four separate nations bearing down on us.”

One of his eyes slipped open. “But Scaela is still our ally?” he asked quietly, thumb skimming over the back of her hand, rubbing circles into her skin.

“And Cleoc Strata,” Grey said. “As far as I know.”

He nodded, taking it in. She focused on the cold seeping through the stones, the wet shirt pressed to her skin under her battle padding, the breeze that slipped through the spell-slits in the walls.

“I’m so sorry,” Kier said finally.

“For?”

He chewed his lip. “I didn’t know… I thought you’d listen to me, for once. That you would just let me do this. I didn’t know I was forcing your hand, forcing you into reclaiming Locke.”

“You thought I would let you die?”

“I hoped you might,” he said, the faintest of smiles on his lips, and it made everything in her ache.

She shook her head, banishing Kitalma’s words as she searched for her own. “I would’ve come for you. I’d always come for you.”

“And I you,” Kier said.

“Then you should’ve known.”

“Maybe. But all I could think was… Grey, I never wanted you to feel like that girl again. Alone. Abandoned.”

Grey looked at him, his long eyelashes and hazel eyes and the persistent stubble cropping up already on his jaw, the cut glass of his cheekbones, the stubborn silver on his temples. “I need to tell you something,” she said.

She needed to tell him a great number of things, actually, but that was beside the point as she struggled to put the least of them into words.

He caught her hand. “You can tell me anything.”

She took a breath, tried to school her features. The sky was steely gray, slipping toward darkness at the edges, a sunset without the presence of sun and gold and amber. The steady sort, like someone dimming a magelight until no glimmer of it remained. But it had been that way since they had

arrived; the darkening sky had not darkened nor lightened; instead, it had stayed in transition. Grey realized, in the back of her mind, why the silence was so odd: there were no birds.

She felt the constant pull of Kier, the thrum of taking as he transformed her power into magic. The most familiar thing in the world.

She opened her mouth to tell him about it. About his death. About her choice. The words did not come—they stayed lodged in her throat, and Kier looked at her expectantly, and she could not do it.

Instead, she said, “I didn’t know, when we bound. That it would be different for you and me. But Kier—it has made you a Locke. That’s why Scaelas and Cleoc came for you. Because if they risked you, if you figured out how to call Locke from the sea, it would’ve worked.”

That guarded look returned. “But you are…”

“I am still Locke,” she said. “Still the High Lady. But you are a part of this Isle, too.”

He glanced away, shuttering any emotions. “Do you regret it?”

“No,” she said quickly—but I fear you will, she did not say. “I did not realize… I did not know then that it was that much of a union. In more ways than I suspected.”

His gaze softened, and there was something unfair about the way he looked at her, like she was the central point in his universe—she did not know how to convey, with word or look or deed, that he was the central point in hers.

He dropped her hand. His fingers moved along her jaw ever so carefully to cup her face. “I knew, when we swore our bond,” he said, “what I was doing. That I was giving all of myself to you. It’s a gift, Grey—it’s an inevitability, in some ways, that all I am would be yours.”

She shook her head—she could not tell him about his death; she could not reveal that she had stolen that, too. “But that’s not it. I have taken everything from you, even your family name. And now I’ve put a target on your back—they will want to kill you as much as they want to kill me.”

The light came to his eyes, the mirth etched into his jaw, looking insouciant in that way he always somehow managed to. “They already want

to kill me.”

“But now, it’s real.”

“And you thought being the commander of Locke wouldn’t put a target

on my back? That mattering to you in the way I do would make me a

desirable hostage?”

“Not in the same way.”

He pulled her close, nose touching hers. “I am yours, Grey. If that makes you Seward, so be it. If that makes me Locke, then it is done. I am yours and I have been since the day we were bound, and even before that. I don’t care for the name, or the title, or even for the power. I care for you.”

She took a shaky breath and leaned in to press her lips to his. Cold— they were both cold, so cold that she knew they were possibly in shock and definitely tripping head-first toward hypothermia, and she needed to face the rest of the rooms in the fortress and get a fire started in one of the big grates; but Kier was kissing her, and they were safe under the shield, and for right at this moment, that was enough.

She needed to tell him the truth. But the Isle was still around her, and safe, and she had not felt a safety like that in years. She let him kiss her; she did not think of the cold of his lips, the frigidity of his corpse, as she tried to force him to live again.

He broke away after a moment, breathless. “What do we do now?” he asked.

Her numb fingers skimmed over the healed edge of his ear. “Now, we do our best to survive.”

He kissed her again, tasting of blood and salt water. “We’ve already

made it this far.”

But not far enough.

Though the mist made her uneasy, she was glad of the time they had away from the rest of the world. She needed time alone to handle what needed to be done next—and because Kier already knew the worst parts of her, she could permit him to see it too.

Halfway down the stairs, she said, “I think we need to start with the bodies.”

Her voice did not catch. She did not look at him over her shoulder. She only kept her eye turned down on the treacherous spiraling stone steps; and then briefly out of a passing window, where she could see the Ghostwood in the distance.

Kier’s hand touched her shoulder. “Let me,” he insisted.

She shook her head. “I have to do it. But perhaps… Clothes first, I think.”

Procrastination. She did not know how her body would betray her when they walked to the hall in Osar where she knew her parents’ bodies were, or the cellar below, to find the charred remains of Severin’s. Then there was the household guard, who used to carry her on their shoulders when she was a child so she could see the storms rolling in; the cook, Kimbra, who used to slip her pastries while she studied with her mother, and made her buttery slices of bread with thick broth when she was sick; the people of Osar and Maerin, who called her Little Locke, who pressed kisses to her knuckles when she and Sev passed through the streets.

All of them were dead. Bodies. Rubble. Bones and decaying cloth.

“None of it is water-damaged,” Kier remarked as they passed through one of the upstairs rooms, one she knew was reserved for storage. He stopped to run his fingers over the carved wood of a dresser. “It looks like it’s just been here untouched.”

“I imagine it was bubbled somehow,” Grey said, pulling open the drawers. “Maybe it’s been shielded this whole time.”

It was an assortment of clutter, old furniture and boxes of molded, moth- eaten books and half-burned candles and discarded trunks full of everyday accoutrements that a long-established family discarded but did not dispose of, left in a room after decades and decades of use.

She felt oddly exposed, even though it was only Kier. She’d basically lived at his house as a child, Pia and Laurella putting her to bed alongside Kier and Lot so often that they procured an extra mattress, stored under Kier’s bed and pulled out whenever she didn’t leave when the sun went down. She’d known his grandmothers and grandfathers when they were alive, his aunts and uncles—she knew every bit of his family history as if it was her own. Perhaps his ma and mom had told it to her, filling her with some sort of family to make up for the fact that she apparently had none of her own. Imarta didn’t mind: she welcomed the influence of Kier’s family.

She had no family left herself, and widowed as she was, it had always been just her and Grey.

But this was it, the real thing, the trappings of her life on Locke and those of her family before. She pulled out a moth-eaten tapestry from a

trunk mottled with dust, rubbing her fingers into her family’s sigil stitched into the cloth.

Would you give it all up for Kier’s freedom?

Who would she be without her power, her birthright?

“This might be our lucky trunk,” Kier said across the room, going through another one of them. They were heavy and wooden, ancient, so much nicer than any of the trunks they’d been assigned on duty, or the inherited one Imarta kept in Grey’s childhood bedroom. They were light wood, possibly cut from the Ghostwood or stock from the Barrens, carved with motifs from folklore that no one but Grey remembered.

He pulled out clothes much too big for her. She considered the shirts and trousers and socks and suspenders and leather armor as Kier cast off his own clothes and pulled on the replacements—she could not look at him, because if she did, she would see the scars and the bruises she had not yet healed, and she could not bear it right now—and said quietly, “There are clothes in my mother’s room.”

“Do you think…” He didn’t finish the sentence, so she wasn’t sure if he meant Do you think you’re ready for that? or Do you think you can handle the remnants of her? or Do you think that’s a good idea? All of it faded, and he just looked at her with an expression of open, plaintive care.

She chewed the nail of her thumb. “I’ll put on a new shirt. And there will be coats and cloaks downstairs. Then maybe we can investigate the rest later.”

He nodded, tossing her a shirt. She exchanged her sodden, bloody one for the old, soft, dry fabric. They left their wet things hanging over the railing and went downstairs. She felt like a child exploring a ruin, even though, despite sixteen years of separation, she knew the place like Kier knew every structure of her beating heart.

She hesitated on each landing, the rooms running through her head like the recitation of saints’ names on the prayer beads in the ruin of the abbey that crowned the edge of the Ghostwood, the place where Kitalma’s bones were laid to rest.

On the ground floor, she went to the cloakroom under the stairs and pulled out two of her father’s big coats and waiting swords, handing one of each to Kier. “I imagine we’ll have to dispose of Eprain’s bodies, too,” she said, strapping the sword to her belt, mostly out of habit. “I don’t want them

buried with mine, but we should give them a respectful rest all the same.”

Kier nodded, looking at one of the tapestries over her shoulder. “In Eprain, they burn their dead.”

Grey swallowed hard. She could remember, on their assignments on the coast, watching the smoke in the distance after the battles as the pyres were lit.

“Then we’ll burn them,” she said. “The tradition is similar for those on Locke who are not Lockes themselves. Their ashes are to be spread over the

sea, reunited with the gods.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do.”

She nodded. It was the least she could offer, to follow the traditions of her own nation.

“Are there bedsheets to spare? To move the bones?”

“Probably,” Grey said, peering back into the dining room. “Yes. First and third floors. There are linen closets by the stairs.”

She heard his boots on the stairs, his progress, a pause as he sorted through the linens. She pressed her face to the window in the dining room, but she could still not see past the misty white fog. The Isle remained cloaked. She could not see if warships waited for the Isle unveiled, nor what nations surrounded them.

Her fingers dug into the wood of the windowsill—despite the fact she’d been raised in Scaela, fought under Torrin’s banner for nearly a decade and was his goddaughter, this Isle and all its power still instilled in her a sense of distrust. It would be easy for him and Cleoc to betray her, kill her or Kier or both, take the power for themselves and set the Isle ablaze again. Perhaps she was a fool to trust anyone at all with this power ripping anew within

her.

“Grey?”

She turned to see him, linens piled high in his arms, and those thoughts crumbled. Perhaps she could not trust Scaelas or Cleoc, just as she could not trust the sovereigns of Eprain and Luthar and Nestria, but she could trust Kier.

She felt that echo inside of her, the acknowledgment of a devotion in the tether between them.

“Do you know how many there were, on the Isle?” he asked, setting the pile of sheets on the dining table.

She nodded, unable to speak. Her father’s coat smelled of woodsmoke and sea air and the faint hint of sweat, and it was too much for her. She was a girl again. She was dying. She had never left.

Something flickered across Kier’s face—she wondered if, on Locke, the emotions through the tether were that much stronger—and then he was in front of her, taking her hands in his. He did not say anything. He studied her like she was one of his maps, one of his diagrams of enemy movements, instructions handed down from higher command to be followed to the letter.

“You are here,” he said slowly, “because you survived.”

Grey nodded. Forced herself to breathe. But you didn’t.

She could not think it, or else she would lose any grip she had left on her sanity.

They found gloves and a cart in one of the work sheds outside, to avoid touching the rot with bare skin. Grey led the way down the little path toward Osar, avoiding the wider road that skirted around the Ghostwood— with the fresh memory of her ghostly family and Kitalma’s bargain, she could not bear it yet.

Osar was not a big town. The entire population of Locke was less than five thousand: she hadn’t understood the smallness of it until she’d arrived in Scaela, with a population in the hundreds of thousands. There had been more than five thousand soldiers at Mecketer alone. But now, faced with the reality of disposing of that many bodies, the number seemed staggering.

They reached the first of the empty streets. Grey did not look in the windows; she passed by all shadows without a second glance, focusing only on reaching the great hall at the far side, perched on the cliff.

It used to be a place of worship, an abbey to Retarik, Kitalma’s bride.

When worship of the old gods fell out of fashion, it became a ruin, much like its twin abbey across the Isle. Grey’s great-great-grandfather revitalized it for use as a meeting place when the entire Isle was called to celebrate, like on the high holy days, to divert the crowds and better preserve the wards that protected the fortress itself.

Kier left the cart at the bottom of the steps and brought some of the linens with him. He followed her up the stairs, the pat of their boots on the stone the only sound. The gulls were still absent; with the thick fog, Grey couldn’t even hear the sea crashing below.

The heavy doors were closed. Behind them, she knew, she would find

carnage. She stopped at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, her heart pounding.

“We don’t have to,” Kier said very quietly behind her. “You don’t have to.”

The motto of her family, her house and her isle was Power in bravery.

She did not feel brave, even with all the power of Idistra crackling in the air

around her.

“I do,” she said.

Kier said nothing. He only put his hand on her shoulder.

Grey opened the door.

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Iron to ashes, ashes to sea, sea to iron again. Let us rejoice at the memory of our victorious dead.

Funeral rites of the Isle of Locke

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