The rest of the bandits were gone, and now it was just Wren and Julian.
The ghost’s attention shifted and homed in on the ironsmith. He was the nearer target, and unlike Wren, he was defenseless.
He remained rigidly still, his staff outstretched—though it would prove utterly useless.
Wren had no choice but to utilize a long-range weapon, but her knucklebones would not be enough to stop a tier four, and her throwing knives wouldn’t make enough of an impact.
There was only one move that would work. Sheathing one of her swords, she took the other in a two-handed grip and raised it over her head.
She flung it with all her might, blade over handle like a throwing ax. She pushed with every scrap of magic she had left, guiding the blade so that it spun faster and faster before impacting with the ghost’s middle, slicing it in two.
There was another cry, trembling and faint. It almost sounded like the creature was trying to speak, its vaporous mouth shaping words, but then the spirit dissipated in a wisp.
Darkness descended, leaving Wren and Julian surrounded by nothing but bones and dead bodies and the sound of their ragged breathing.
FIFTEEN
Wren walked to retrieve her blade, too tired to bother summoning it.
Julian remained immobile, staring at the bandit who’d been taken by deathrot. Or so she thought. As Wren moved closer, she realized there was a second body next to it, pierced through by one of Julian’s blades. That was who he was staring at, the man he had killed despite his best efforts not to.
“Is it gone?” he asked hoarsely, his eyes shut in a grimace. Surely he meant the ghost.
It was difficult to know for sure. They were beyond the protections of the Wall, and she didn’t understand the rules here. She’d never heard a ghost scream, let alone attempt to actually speak. It would need time to gather its strength and re-form, but how much time, she had no idea.
“For now,” she said. “But we need to move, quickly.”
Something about the words seemed to irk him. His shoulders tightened, and he looked over at her. “You mean to just leave them here, where they can prey on other travelers? Don’t you…？ Aren’t there funeral rites? Things you can do to help?” He waved his hand vaguely in her direction, uncertain what those things might be, but asking nonetheless.
“In case you’ve forgotten, we are on a rescue mission,” she said. “There’s no time to dig graves and no point when there aren’t any reapyrs this side of the Wall to finish the job. The deathrotted one is gone for good, but the other’s spirit will rise eventually, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”
He looked her up and down, and she realized he might not know the difference between a reapyr and herself, but he didn’t question her. “There’s such a thing as respect and dignity.”
“You want to give the people who tried to kill us respect and dignity?” she scoffed.
He rounded on her. “You think they live like that because they want to?” he demanded, his words surprisingly sharp. “They wouldn’t have tried to kill us if you’d let me negotiate—”
“Negotiate the terms of your survival, while I stood there and waited for execution?” She laughed humorlessly. “No one this side of the Wall is going to pay for my life, Julian, friend of the so-called regent.” Probably no one on the other side, either, but she didn’t mention that. “Besides, you were losing.”
“So you decided to raise the bloody dead?”
“I didn’t raise the dead,” Wren corrected with exasperation.
“You’re telling me those bones burst out of the earth by accident? What kind of bonesmith are you?”
She pointed at the bones. “Most of these bones are not haunted. They are what I reached for—they are all my magic can touch. But when I unearthed them, I accidentally disturbed bones that are haunted. And there are probably more, given that signpost was once a gibbet, so we need to get out of here.”
“We’ll never catch up now,” Julian said, heaving a breath as he relaxed his grip on his staff, the blades retracting before he slid it into the holder across his back. He put his hands on his hips, staring off into the distance before sliding Wren an appraising sort of look. “Unless…”
The look on his face piqued her interest. “Unless what?”
“Even though this whole thing was your fault,” he began, and Wren interjected at once.
“My fault? Those bandits—”
“Set a trap that you walked into without a second thought. Then you interrupted my attempts to end this peacefully, and when I asked you to stay put so we could properly defend ourselves, you ran off and summoned a ghost.” Wren spluttered, but he just kept talking. “But, despite all that, you did dispatch it fairly neatly, and your mastery over bones may have some use…”
Some use? The nerve. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that there is one way we could catch up to the prince. One way to put us in a position to head them off and do what we set out to do. Cross through the Haunted Territory.”
Wren’s heart kicked against her ribs. Everywhere east of the Wall was considered the Breachlands—a den of traitors and undead monsters, the battlefield where wars had been fought against both the living and the undead. The site of the Breach, the greatest calamity the Dominions had ever seen.
Going anywhere east of the Wall was a bold and daring move, even for her, but crossing through the Haunted Territory? There was the chasm—the Breach itself, twenty miles long and who knew how deep—and then there was the radius of dangerous land that surrounded it, the place where the undead tended to linger. The Haunted Territory. As Odile had pointed out on her map, the landscape blocked them in on two sides, thanks to the mountains and the river, and it seemed they didn’t like to stray far from the deep wound in the ground from which they had risen.
As far as Wren knew, no living people set foot there—or hadn’t since Locke and his forces, and only Vance, Odile, and a handful of soldiers had managed to come back again.
What if Wren could do it and survive? More than survive, if she could return alive and with the Gold Prince? They’d be forced to give her the respect she deserved and admit she wasn’t the screwup everyone thought. Speak of her as they did her uncle Locke, with awe and reverence.
“It would be dangerous,” Julian was saying, drawing Wren out of her daydreams of fame and glory. “Finding a way through would be a challenge in and of itself, never mind whatever else crosses our path. There have been a lot of rumors, recently…” He darted an uneasy look her way.
“Rumors?”
He tossed his shoulder in a shrug. “Mostly local gossip. Supposed sightings of a strange woman in a veil. The Corpse Queen.”
A Corpse Queen? It was a fairly epic name, but what did it actually mean? “It’s a walking corpse? Sounds like any tier-five revenant.”
He hesitated. “Probably. Most of it sounds like the same ghostsmith stories I grew up on. Evil necromancers enslaving the undead. Bodies going missing. Ghostly specters marching together at midnight, that sort of thing. My grandfather used to always say, ‘Get back before dark or the robbers will get you.’ ”