Chapter 3
Three
The royal guards usher the last of the gawking onlookers into the palace while Jareth and Despina somberly escort the Vanzadorians to the guest suites. Leaving Mother, Father, and me in the empty, echoing courtyard. Staring at Haddesh’s body and Rowenna’s coffin.
Without all the cries and commotion, I realize Mother’s doing more than just sobbing. She’s whispering a stream of feverish words. I only catch bits and pieces, but it’s more than enough to parse out the theme.
Stronger. Promised. Failed.
It’s painful enough that Rowenna is gone, but if I’m forced to watch our formidable mother crumble to pieces and blame herself, I don’t know how I’ll recover. And worse, I don’t know how Tashir will recover.
Mother has always been the steely spine of our kingdom.
The justice to Father’s mercy. It’s why my grandparents selected her—a gritty field-worker—to be his bride.
They knew Father needed an assertive, carnivorous cobra lily to grow beside him.
Someone shrewd and aggressive enough to devour any threat, because their son was no better than a tulip—all pretty petals with a merry bobbing head.
But instead of snapping to action like Mother always has in the past, she remains draped over the coffin like a funeral spray.
Eventually, Father clears his throat and smooths his tunic with trembling hands. “I-I suppose we should call the guards and have them move the bodies to the chapel, so Father Alonzo can prepare them for burial.”
The bodies.
He can’t even say Rowenna’s name. He plans to lump her in with Haddesh and leave her burial preparations to a virtual stranger, rather than pull on gloves and wade into the mire himself.
Ro deserves so much better. She’s suffered so much indignation already. Her final moments should be spent with someone who knew her. Someone who loved her.
“No!” I blurt with surprising ferocity.
Father gapes at me as if leaves are growing out of my head, and I automatically lower my voice.
“I would like to prepare Rowenna for burial myself. Please,” I add.
“You couldn’t possibly,” Father sputters. “You don’t know the first thing about preparing a body.”
“I’ll learn,” I insist, wedging my fingers beneath the coffin. “Let me do this. Help me do this. It’s what Ro would want.”
Father chews his lower lip before shaking his head. “It wouldn’t be proper. According to tradition—”
“What about any of this is proper or traditional?” I demand, feeling it again—the twist of vicious claws and teeth, stirring deep inside me. “You sent Ro to live with those cold, heartless stone people, so it’s only fair you should deal with the consequences.”
Father blinks at me for an entire minute, as if realizing, for the first time, that I might have thorns too. That his quiet, dutiful daughter who happily tends the bagrava might be capable of drawing blood, just like Rowenna—our kingdom’s prized rose.
With a slow nod, he takes up the other end of the coffin, and we lug Rowenna’s body across the courtyard.
When we reach the latticework door of the chapel, I shoulder through without hesitation, but Father stops at the threshold and sets down his end of the coffin.
He peers warily into the dank, shadowed space, down the mossy aisle, past the cobwebbed benches, to the hewn-stump altar.
“I-I’m sorry, Indira. I can’t. It’s too much,” he says without meeting my eyes.
Then he retreats back across the courtyard to Mother’s side, where he can wallow in misery and pretend this isn’t all his fault.
I grit my teeth and drag Rowenna’s coffin through the loamy soil myself, step by excruciating step. When I reach the altar, Tashir’s lone hedge-priest, Father Alonzo, shuffles out from the shadows.
“Have you come to pray, my child?” he starts, but his milky eyes pop wide as he takes in the scene. “What’s all this?”
“Go and collect the other body from the courtyard,” I order without glancing up.
“There’s another body? Whose? What happened?” His wrinkled hands flutter to his chest in the sign of the sacred harvest.
“It’s too late to ward off evil, Father. The Vanzadorians murdered Rowenna and brought her back in this box. And they just killed Haddesh, the blacksmith’s apprentice.”
The old man clutches his bagrava seed rosary and reverently murmurs, “May Earth Mother accept their souls.” Then he totters out into the courtyard, leaving my sister and me alone in the sage-scented candlelight.
I kneel beside the coffin and watch the light from the swinging braziers dart across the wood, licking the silver chains with fire. An old key dangles on a ring beside a heavy padlock, and my breath quickens as I take the key in my hand and fit it into the keyhole.
I have never seen a dead body—not before it’s been prepared for burial.
When Chancellor Orrin died three years ago, his casket was laid open in the center of High Street, and all of Tashir came to place a shiny apple in his coffin and a fresh-cut flower on the surrounding banquet tables.
He looked precisely as he had in life—heavy-browed and jowl-cheeked, despite being cut down by sickness, and dressed in an impeccable wrap embroidered with daisies, the heritage flower of his family.
Before Orrin’s death, during the dark days of the relentless Marauder raids, the dead had been too numerous to hold individual burials. Their bodies were lowered into a pit in the fallow fields beyond the cabbage beds, and Mother forbade us from visiting.
A warning I heeded.
Rowenna did not.
Now part of me wishes I’d been brave enough to follow her and Haddesh the night they snuck out to see the pits. At least then I’d know what to expect. Though I doubt those bodies held any similarities to hers.
How does it look when someone “falls” off a cliff? When bone and muscle and sinew meet unyielding stone?
I shiver and nearly drop the key.
I don’t want to look.
I have to look.
As much as I’d like to only remember Ro’s fierce smile and laughing eyes, I need to bear witness to her suffering. I need to be the one to care for her. She’d have done the same for me. She’d have already opened the casket by now.
I wouldn’t have allowed you to go to Vanzador at all, Rowenna whispers. Not in an accusatory way. Just a matter of fact.
A sob breaks loose in my chest, and with a breath that feels both too shallow and too deep, I turn my wrist until I hear a click.
The chains slide to the floor with a jarring clank, and I throw back the lid before I lose my nerve.
Then I scream.
And scream.
And scream.
I thought I was prepared to see my sister’s lifeless face, but maybe that’s the problem…
Rowenna has no face.
She’s almost unrecognizable, with black bruises mottling her cheeks, one of which has collapsed entirely. And the skin from her slender neck all the way down her shoulders looks nauseatingly similar to the ground beef Birdie puts in her pies.
My stomach expels every bite of food I’ve eaten today.
I doubt I’ll ever be able to eat again. But I force my gaze to continue downward, taking in Ro’s long brown curls, dark with blood and matted to her back.
Her collarbone is broken, as are both her legs.
The bones stab angrily through her skin and the torn remnants of her gown—if you can even call it that.
She’s dressed in the sheer Vanzadorian fashion: black-mesh sleeves, a neckline that plunges clear to her navel, and an equally revealing skirt that cuts away to expose the legs. It’s garish, impractical, and wrong. So wrong that she was wearing this when she died.
Before I realize what I’m doing, my fingers sink into the hideous fabric—like they did a year ago, when I grabbed for her chain mail rings—except now I close my fist. With a howl of fury, I tear, wrench, and rip with wild desperation.
Convinced that if I remove all evidence of Vanzador, it will somehow bring Rowenna back.
But even once the gauze and glitter are stripped away, she lies there, shattered and bloodied, her freckles painting a dark constellation across her too-pale torso.
I trail a finger over her freezing skin, remembering how she’d steal Father’s expensive ink pens when we were little, and we’d take turns drawing pictures of blooming flowers and crawling ivy by connecting the freckles on each other’s arms. Then, when she was eighteen and I was sixteen, right before she left for Vanzador, we had identical clovers inked onto the underside of our wrists.
Permanently connecting our souls by connecting our freckles. Three leaves, not four.
We don’t need the universe’s luck—we’ll make our own, she said.
And Ro was lucky. Cunning and nimble and observant too.
Which is how I know she didn’t fall to her death.
I reach for her arm and gently turn her wrist, practically sobbing with relief when the clover shines up at me, untouched by scrapes and scratches. It looks so crisp and green, so inexplicably alive, compared to the cold, gray skin surrounding it.
Tears blur my vision as I press my clover against Rowenna’s, and I find myself murmuring the incantations I sing to the bagrava. Wishing it could imbue her with life. Wishing I could do something—anything—to bring her back.
I don’t know how long I sit there. Time serves little purpose other than to mock me—reminding me, with every excruciating tick, of the endless hours and days and years I must live without her.
When I finally run out of strength and tears, I lay my head on the edge of the coffin and try to recall everything about my sister, desperate to preserve all the tiny details time will attempt to steal from me.
Like the feel of her hands braiding my hair.
Or how her laughter whistled through her nose when she thought something was truly funny.
And the look in her eyes when she watched me tend the bagrava—as if I were the most extraordinary person she’d ever met.
Even though we both knew I’d never be half as accomplished as she was.
I don’t have a single memory without her.
Ro was my constant from the very beginning—standing on tiptoe and leaning over Mother’s bed to watch me draw my first breath.
And I fully intended to be hunched old crones together, holding hands as we wheezed our last. Maybe that’s why my lungs feel so unbearably tight.
I don’t know how to breathe without her; don’t know how to do any of this without her.
You shouldn’t have to, she murmurs, and despite the chill of Rowenna’s skin, a spark of heat flares where our wrists meet.
A flicker of fury and resolve that rushes through my body, feeding the newfound darkness in my stomach.
It feels dangerous to give it any ground, but it’s the only thing strong enough to rival the pain.
The only thing keeping me moving. So I let it surge and simmer as I roll up my sleeves and get to work.
With careful hands, I remove the last of Ro’s dress and pull off her shoes—the same muddy gardening boots she wore the day she left for Vanzador, I note with a sad smile.
Then I rummage through the annex for Father Alonzo’s oils and scrolls, and whisper a final vow to my sister as I knead the myrrh and cassia into her hardening skin.
I will live for us both. I will honor Rowenna the only way I know how—the only way she would want.
By making the Vanzadorians pay.