The men at the Council’s long table were staring at her, Lord Stevenson still noticeably absent, as was her own Lord Astraea. “Are you quite well?” one asked, though from his tone she knew he did not care—he was merely speaking the words. Following proper societal protocol.
She hated that. Especially bound as she was. Innocent as she was. Punish her for any wrong she had done and punish her appropriately—that was well and good. But this?
“No,” she said, her voice carrying to fill the room. “I feel quite ill. About these proceedings and the way such things might damage a woman’s reputation.”
“Well,” he said, picking up one sheet of paper and holding it to a light for better inspection. “You need not suffer such indignities for long.”
Chloe let out a breath she felt she’d been holding for days, her eyes wide and thankful, her hands clasped in victory now instead of prayer.
“You, Chloe Erendell, previously of both House Kruse and Astraea, have been found guilty.”
The word shot through her like the burn of a bullet and she reeled, stumbling backward. “Guilty?” she whispered, disbelief hanging from her lips with the most horrifying word she had ever heard applied to herself.
“Guilty of manslaughter, three cases on behalf of the Kruses, and guilty of inciting a Weather Witch–related incident on behalf of the Astraeas.”
“It is not…” She was staring straight ahead but seeing nothing. “Not … possible…” The words sounded as soft as her head felt. Her brain had become a pudding in her skull, thick, useless, and overcooked.
“The penalty for such crimes is death.”
She fell to her knees and bent at her waist, her cheek to the cold, hard floor as water poured from her eyes. “I did nothing…”
But the Councilman continued. “We sentence you, Chloe Erendell, to be hanged by the neck until dead on Wednesday hence. May God have mercy on your soul.” He snapped down the gavel. “This Council and court is hereby adjourned.”
The automatons moved in, awkward hands curling under her arms, their broad tails counterbalancing as they hauled her back to her unsteady feet.
There, in a puddle of her tears, was the native crushed beneath the other man’s boot. They had been cheek to cheek and eye to eye. Her sobbing renewed as they half hauled and half pushed her back to the most narrow of the Council’s hallways and down the winding staircase full of tilting stone stairs until they came to the cell where she would wait out the last bit of her life.
In dampness.
And darkness.
The door clanged shut behind her and, falling into the straw she curled there, knees to her quivering chin, her eyes leaking in treachery.
Her left hand reached up and touched the ragged remnant of her ear and for the first time in her entire lifetime, Chloe Erendell knew hate and wished some way to escape.
Holgate
When Meggie was deeply asleep in her small room for a welldeserved afternoon nap Bran determined to bury Sybil’s skull himself. Back in the burlap bag, Sybil’s skull felt far heavier in his hands than it had when the bear of a watchman delivered it the night before. He trudged to the spot on the slope where he’d left her body not so very long ago. The earth was still torn up, a pile of lifeless dirt, marking the place they had buried her.
The ground grew moist here, as if a swamp had crept up the hill to saturate the area. That was good. Soft soil was heavier but easier to move. He set the bag down atop the recently disrupted dirt, determined to leave the skull out of view for as long as possible. He found a shovel leaning against Holgate’s imposing outer wall and set to work, his feet straddling the hole he dug. For every bit of earth his shovel’s blade moved, his feet sank in equal increments, boots squishing into the wet substrate.
Something moved in the muck threatening to suck his boots free of him and Bran watched as earthworms wriggled along the sides of his feet, pulling free of the muck to crawl up and over his boot tops. He tried to step back, tried to tug his feet loose, but they were only sucked farther down as more worms roiled out of their loamy kingdom, sparkling wetly in the sun.
“Ugh!” He snatched up the bag and shook it into the hole, the child’s ivory skull quickly devoured by darkness.
The worms ceased their palsied movement, slipping away into unseen capillaries in the ground as suddenly as they had come.
Bran managed to step back from the small pit he’d dug, his feet no longer mired. He plunged the shovel’s blade in the discarded lump of dirt, ready to bury Sybil’s skull as much as he was ready to bury the failure of her death. But as he swung the shovel back across the pit to dump the dirt, he heard something moving in the dark maw he’d dug. A noise like a thousand anxious fingers sifting through the muck rose to his ears and he set down the shovel, leaning forward to peer into the shadowy recess.
Eyes wide and mouth agape, Bran Marshall of House Dregard stared in morbid wonder as a twisting mound of earthworms, maggots, grubs, and centipedes writhed and rose together from the hollow, the skull on the living hill’s crest.
Not far down the slope the cattails rustled, giving voice to the jawless specter. “They commmmme…”
The undulating hill stilled a moment.
As did Bran’s heart.
The earth trembled and the hill erupted, launching the skull into the air—and into Bran’s arms. He held it before him a moment, the jawless thing still somehow managing to grin in death in a way he’d never seen the child do in life. His vision spiraled into nothing and he collapsed.
He woke to one of the local men leaning on the shovel and staring down at him, the man’s tongue working along the inside of his lips in thought. He popped his lips together and nodded at Bran before revealing a mouth devoid of most teeth to say, “It’s a bitch burying that thing. Poor Wendall ruined his pants twice trying. Determined bastard, he is. Best be taking it along with you, master Maker. Seems to wish to watch over you.”
The man reached down a hand and helped Bran regain his feet. “Watch over me?”
The man released him and shrugged. “Or scare the piss out of you at random intervals,” he offered, lips smacking as he sucked on one of his remaining teeth. “Far be it from me to speculate on the designs of the dead.” Taking the shovel with him he strode away, whistling a merry tune.
With shaking hands, Bran slipped the skull back into the bag and hurried to his laboratory, where he cleared a space in his shadow box–style shelves and nestled the skull as far back in it as he could.
Chapter Thirteen
What dreadful hot weather we have!
It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
—JANE AUSTEN
Holgate
“Move them along,” Stevenson commanded, gazing at the sky. Unloading the wagon, chaining the prisoners, and moving the horses was taking far longer than normal. “It seems as if our good Maker is in the process of bridling a Weather Witch and I’d rather not be caught outside in the rain.”
Jordan followed his eyes up, as did a dozen other prisoners. On the tallest tower on the largest building in the walled compound was a snapping banner and, near it, a longer metal pole. The pole plunged into the sky, gashing open its gut, a circle of thickening clouds seeking to close the wound. Invisible fingers tugged dark cotton filaments from the sky and pulled them together to be spun into something stronger, wisps clumping together to build imposing thunderheads.
“Move them along,” the Councilman demanded again.
But they were all rooted in place, as dull as trees, transfixed, by what was going on in the sky and on the tower top far above them.