Nightspell

Then again, he had no idea what she was capable of. You just try it, she thought at him, and his eyes widened slightly as he met her gaze.

“Don’t look so terrified,” the abomination said, and she turned back to him. His eyebrows lifted, and he leaned back in his chair; clearly, terror was not what he was seeing on her face now.

“I meant,” he said, “don’t look so terrified, because it won’t happen. There is another option.”

She clenched her hand around the cool stem of her goblet, waiting. But before Kestin could continue, Varis leaned over the table and said loudly, “Darri can tel you about the time she ruined a hunt to save her favorite dog.”

Darri’s fist clenched; she loosened it before she broke the goblet, but kept her lips pressed together. After an awkward moment, Varis coughed and began tel ing the story himself, and Kestin gave her a smal nod that clearly meant later.

The rest of the meal passed in a series of awkward conversational forays issuing from the other three people at the table. Darri didn’t bother. She had never been much good at pretending, and obviously it wouldn’t mat er; Varis expected nothing of her, Kestin didn’t intend to marry her, and King Ais was a fading power, an old king clinging to his dead son.

When the meal was final y over, Kestin stood with an easy grace and extended his hand to her. Darri looked at the blue silk covering his forearm. Her flesh crept along her hand; she tried to think of something to do, something that wouldn’t make her revulsion so evident, but she couldn’t. And she couldn’t make herself take his arm.

Kestin’s mouth tightened, but he merely inclined his head politely and let his arm drop to his side. “I was hoping you would walk with me,” he said. “I’d like to show you the castle.”

“That would be wonderful,” Darri replied promptly. “Would you take me to my sister’s rooms? I would love to see where she has been living.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Varis make some sort of movement, but she ignored him; there was nothing he could do to stop this charade.

Kestin’s eyes crinkled at the corners, reminding her that he, too, knew it was a charade. But he merely said, “Of course. You must miss her, after al this time.”

“Yes,” Darri said, and al at once was overwhelmed by how true it was. She missed Cal ie so much it was like an ever-growing hole somewhere inside her; and now that Cal ie was so close, it was worse than it had ever been. She turned abruptly from the sympathy in Kestin’s eyes, blinking fast to keep herself from tears. The wine had been a mistake; she had forgot en it could have ef ects other than lightheartedness.

They walked out of the banquet hal , turned left down a wide hal way, and walked up a marble spiral stairway. At the top of the stairs was a round, lamp-lit chamber, from which a multitude of narrow passageways led into the depths of the castle. Kestin turned down one, and Darri fol owed him. It wasn’t until they had passed several closed wooden doors, and the silence was becoming thick and oppressive, that she stopped walking and turned to face him.

“Can we talk here?” she asked.

Kestin stepped back on his heel as he turned, a lithe motion that reminded Darri of Varis. It was the instinctive movement of a trained swordsman. “These rooms are al unoccupied, so we’re safe. There’s no one who can overhear us.”

Darri gathered her hair in one hand and slung it behind her back. “No one I can see.”

“No one you can’t see, either.” Kestin raised an eyebrow. In the lamplight, his hair gleamed blue-black.

“When ghosts become invisible, their presence can be sensed; ironical y enough, it’s easier for them to hide “When ghosts become invisible, their presence can be sensed; ironical y enough, it’s easier for them to hide when they’re solid. I’d know if we had any watchers. You’l pick up on the feeling soon enough.”

Darri hoped she would be gone long before she had to learn that particular skil . . . a brief, forlorn hope, but dif icult to let go of now that she had let it in. She took a deep breath, braced herself, and said, “What is the other option?”

Kestin stepped back to the opposite wal of the hal way and leaned against a red and gray tapestry. This time, there was nothing hidden or quick about the assessment in his gaze; he watched her for a long, considering moment before he spoke. “I have a second cousin named Cerix. He’s next in line to the throne after me, and he’s alive.”

Slowly Darri said, “I don’t think a second cousin wil seal this particular al iance.”

“No,” Kestin agreed. “Your father’s armies are too powerful for anything but a royal marriage to stop him.”

A royal marriage or an army of ghosts, Darri thought; but Kestin must know the stakes as wel as—or bet er than—she did. Her father didn’t truly want to test his soldiers by ordering them to invade Ghostland; and King Ais, presumably, didn’t want to risk an invasion either. The heart of Ghostland, a three-day ride through gnarled forest, was safe enough; but its borderlands, where forest faded or was cut into field, and where a band of horsemen could ride in at sunrise and be out by dusk, was dangerously vulnerable. A few wel -timed raids could destroy a season’s harvest, which would be felt even in the deepest, darkest chambers of this invulnerable castle; and the commoners would die in swathes.

So both countries needed an al iance, and a marriage to make it stick.

“I was told,” she said slowly, “that your father considers you his heir.”

Kestin jerked his shoulders, making the tapestry shift dangerously behind him. “He does,” he said, biting of the words. “It is unprecedented, but quite legal.”

She rubbed the back of her neck. “Then what are we—”

“But I am not heir yet,” Kestin went on. His eyes narrowed. “Until I agree to the coronation ceremony, his choice is not binding, which is where my father’s trouble currently lies. I don’t want to be king, not anymore.

Not now that I’m—” He stopped, lips pressed together, and Darri knew she hadn’t succeeded in hiding her reaction. “My cousin Cerix, on the other hand, does want to be king. Quite desperately. And if I were to disappear, he would be next in line.”

Darri hadn’t the slightest clue what Kestin was get ing at. She said, “If . . .”

“If I find out who kil ed me, and avenge myself, I wil cease to be.”

“Is that what you want?”

Kestin was very stil , but his black eyes blazed. “Yes.”

Darri couldn’t tear her eyes away from his. She had been raised to understand the importance of vengeance; and she knew, oh she knew, what it was to want one thing so badly that nothing else mat ered. She leaned toward him and said, “You want my help.”

“I need your help.” Kestin leaned forward too; she could see the beads of sweat on his forehead, the sharp creases around his eyes.

Darri lifted her eyebrows. “Why me?”

Kestin blew out a short breath. “My father has forbidden any of his subjects to help me. He wants me as his heir. The dead are backing him because they want one of their own on the throne. And the living are al too afraid to help me.”

The disdainful undertone in the way he said “the living” made Darri blink. For a moment she had almost managed to forget that the man in front of her was dead.

Bile rose in her throat. She swal owed it hard and straightened abruptly. “What if you change your mind, at the end? Decide you don’t wish to just . . . vanish?”

“If I know who kil ed me, there wil be nothing to decide.” Kestin went translucent as he spoke and made a violent gesture with his arm, which went right through the wal behind him. “That’s how it is, for ghosts. It’s an obsession. As the living desire procreation, so do the dead desire justice.”

Darri wrenched her eyes away from that arm, her stomach roiling. The remnants of the wine didn’t help at al with the sudden wrenching emptiness inside of her. Because she had no doubt that Varis would accede to this plan.

Nothing had changed, she told herself. She had come to trade herself for Cal ie. She would marry Cerix instead of Kestin, and Cal ie would get to go home, and it would be exactly as she had planned. Nothing had changed just because she had dared believe, for a short while, that there was a happy ending for both of them.

Kestin’s eyes were intently watchful, and something in their dark gaze made her think he sympathized.

Which was probably his intent. She looked at his arm, stil half in the wal .

“I wil help you,” she said quietly, “if you promise me that you’l make Cal ie go.”

“Of course. She’s not a prisoner. ”

“Not let her go. Make her go.”

Kestin’s eyebrows slanted, two diagonal black lines on his ash white forehead. He pul ed his hand out of the wal and passed it across his face. “Even if she’s content here?”

She’s learned not to think about the perversion that surrounds her, Darri thought. That’s not “content.” But of course she couldn’t say that to Kestin, and in any case, she had no interest in discussing her sister with the dead prince. “Yes.”

prince. “Yes.”

Kestin nodded, and Darri drew in a deep breath. This was good, she told herself. This was exactly what she wanted.

She folded her arms over her chest. “Then we’re agreed. I’l help you find your murderer. How did you die?”

He looked up at her in surprise, his hair fal ing back over his cheekbones. She had guessed it was a rude question, but she didn’t have time for him to get around to the subject on his own. She lifted her chin and waited.

Kestin bit his lower lip. “I was strangled in the middle of the day. I didn’t even realize I was dead until I woke up in the evening, and found out it was three ful nights after I had gone to sleep.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“I don’t know. It must have been one of the dead, because my guards saw no one pass.”

“So whoever it was went through the wal s?” He nodded. “What were you strangled with?”

“I don’t know. It was gone by the time my body was discovered.”

“Can ghosts carry weapons through wal s?”

Kestin pressed both his hands against the tapestry behind him. This time, they didn’t go through. Instead he ran his fingers over the fabric, making a faint brushing sound. “The older ghosts can; they can make anything they’re holding fade with their bodies. The new ghosts . . . it’s dif icult for us to do anything we couldn’t do when we were alive.” He grimaced. “The older we get, the more powerful we become. I can’t manage much yet.”

We. I. It was impossible to forget what he truly was, a corpse guised in silk and skin. Darri said hastily, “And it happened a few weeks ago?”

He pushed himself away from the wal and took two steps sideways, his eyes remaining on her. “Yes.”

Just about the time they would have heard about Kestin’s new marriage prospect.

“And your father . . .” She said it experimental y, with no idea how she was going to end the sentence, and recognized the betrayed anger that ignited in the prince’s eyes. His father had trapped him in this state, unable to move beyond life, unable to be alive, either.

“We’l keep your father out of it,” she said, and his eyes flashed again, but this time it wasn’t with anger. He smiled at her slowly.

It was almost easy to tilt her head up and smile back. He stepped toward her, and something in the shift of shadows made his face look suddenly like a skul , white bone and bare teeth and hol ow, empty eyes. She caught her breath and looked away from him, down the dim, empty hal . When she looked back, he was no longer smiling. His forehead was creased as he looked down at her.