Her lungs stopped hurting. Her body stopped aching.
She did not require air. She did not feel pain.
She could see dimly through the eyeholes of the Mask. The kelpie was a lean white thing—a creature of pure hate and hunger.
He dropped her, as if in shock and fear. As if he hesitated when he beheld what she now wore.
It was all Nesta needed.
She could feel them around her. The dead.
Feel their long-rotted bodies, some mere bones and others preserved, half-eaten beneath their ancient armor. Their weapons lay nearby, discarded and ignored by the creatures of the bog, who had been more interested in feeding on decaying flesh, even long-rotted.
Thousands and thousands of bodies.
But she would not call thousands. Not yet.
Her blood was a cold song, the Mask a slithering echo to it, whispering of all she might do. Home, it seemed to sigh. Home.
Nesta did not refuse it. Only embraced it, letting its magic—colder than her own and as old—flow into her veins.
The kelpie mastered himself, and bared his twin sets of teeth before he sprang.
A skeletal hand wrapped around his ankle.
The kelpie whirled, peering downward. Just as another bony hand, covered in a gauntlet cracked with age, wrapped around the other ankle.
A hand with flesh falling from its fingers gripped his mane of black hair.
The kelpie twisted toward her again, black eyes wide.
Drifting in the water, the power of the Mask an icy song through her, Nesta summoned the dead. To do what her own body could not.
Though she had fought back against Tomas, against the Cauldron, against the King of Hybern, they had all happened to her. She had survived, but she had been helpless and afraid.
Not today.
Today, she would happen to him.
The kelpie thrashed, freeing himself from one skeletal hand as ten others, at the ends of long, bony arms, extended. Their bodies rose with them. He tried to swim out of their grip, but a towering skeleton half-clad in rusted armor appeared behind him. Wrapped its arms around him. A face that was only bone peered over the kelpie’s shoulder, jaws opening to reveal pointed teeth—not High Fae, then—that gleamed before they buried themselves in the kelpie’s white flesh.
He screamed, but it was soundless. Just as the dead were soundless, surging from the murky bottom, some in marching formation, and converging on him.
Nesta let the power flow through her, allowing the Mask to do as it wished, raising the honored dead who had once been buried here and had suffered the sacrilege of serving as an endless meal to the kelpie and his ilk. The kelpie bucked against the dead, his eyes pleading now. But Nesta looked upon him without an ounce of mercy, still tasting his foulness in her
mouth.
She knew he could see her teeth gleaming. Knew the kelpie could see her cold smile as she bade the dead to rip him to shreds.
 |
“NESTA!”
Up to his waist in the black water, so inky he couldn’t see his own hips beneath it, Cassian roared her name as Az soared overhead, scanning, scanning—
He’d caught her scent at the water’s edge—her scent and urine, gods damn him to hell. She’d seen something, been attacked by something so awful she’d wet herself, and now she was gone, under this water—
“NESTA!”
He didn’t know where to start in this blackness. If he continued to make much more noise, other things would come looking, but he had to find her, or else he’d crumple up and die, he’d—
“NESTA!”
Azriel landed in the water beside him. “I don’t see anything,” he panted, eyes as frantic as Cassian knew his own were. “We need Rhys—”
“He’s not answering.”
As if the bog swallowed their messages the same way it swallowed sound.
Cassian waded up to his chest, hands blindly grappling for any sort of clue, a body—
He bellowed at the thought, and even Oorid couldn’t muffle the sound.
He hurled himself forward, and only Azriel’s hand at the collar of his armor halted him. Az snarled, “Look.”
Cassian gazed where Azriel pointed at the deeper water. The surface was rippling. Golden light shone beneath. Cassian splashed toward it, but Az halted him again, his Siphons flaring blue.
Then the spears broke the surface.
Like a forest rising from the water, spear after spear after spear appeared. Then the helmets, dripping water, some rusted, some shining as if freshly forged. And beneath those helmets: skulls.
“Mother save us,” Azriel whispered, and it was undiluted terror, not awe, hushing his voice as the dead rose from Oorid’s depths.
A line of them; a legion. Some mere collections of upright bones, jaws hanging and eyes unseeing. Some half-preserved, decaying flesh flapping over exposed ribs. Judging by their fine armor, they were warriors and kings and princes and lords.
They rose from the water, standing in the shallows near the thorny island. And as that golden light broke the surface before them, the dead knelt.
Every word emptied from Cassian’s head as Nesta, too, emerged from the water, as if lifted on a pillar from beneath. A golden mask sat upon her face, primitive but embossed with whorls and patterns so ancient they’d lost all meaning.
Water sluiced down her clothes, her hair had been ripped from its braid, and in her hand, clenched there …
A kelpie’s head dangled by its sheet of black hair, torn-up face frozen in a scream. Exactly as the King of Hybern’s head had hung from her hand.
Only silver fire burned behind the eyes of the Mask.
“Holy gods,” Azriel breathed.The dead stood motionless, a legion poised to strike. Her will was their will; her command their only reason for being. They had no self left—only her, only Nesta, flowing through them.
“Nesta,” Cassian whispered.
Nesta released the kelpie’s head. The black water at her feet swallowed it whole.
Cold power rippled toward them, and as it hit, Cassian let it surge past him, around him, yielded himself to it. Because to stand against it would be to provoke the Mask’s wrath. To stand against it would be to stand against Death itself.
Death herself.
Azriel shook, weathering that primal power.
But they were both Illyrian, whether Az liked it or not. And so they did what their people had always done before Death’s beautiful face. They bowed.
Chest-deep in the water, they couldn’t bow far, but they lowered their heads until their faces nearly touched the surface. Cassian lifted his eyes as he held the position, and watched the gold of the Mask’s reflection dance upon the water. Then that gold shifted.
He raised his head in time to see Nesta peel away the Mask.
The dead collapsed. Fell under the black surface in splashes and ripples and vanished entirely. Not one spear remained.
Nesta sank as if dropped, too. Cassian lunged for her, icy water biting at his face. He grabbed her just as she went under.
She was nearly boneless as he hauled her back to Az, who had his sword out against anything that might come crawling from that water. When they reached the shore and the grass and the tree, Cassian surveyed her pale face, ripped and scratched around her mouth and jaw—
Nesta blinked, and her eyes were again blue-gray, and then she was clutching the Mask to her chest like a child with a doll and shaking, shaking, shaking.
It was all Cassian could do to put his arms around her and hold her close, until the trembling stopped and unconsciousness offered her the mercy of oblivion.
