Forbidden

Mildred stopped a little more than an arm’s length from Abi-Eshu, on the bare ash where nothing grew, and folded her hands in front of her.

She looked as she always looked: the plain uniform, the hair pinned back, the smooth face. There was no badge at her collar. From where Andy stood he could see that the face wasn’t as smooth as it used to be. Something had settled into it—a softness around the mouth, the kind of warmth that comes into skin after a long time near a fire.

Abi-Eshu didn’t see her at first. He was still turned toward the Queen’s back, his lips still moving on whatever he had been saying to it, one great hand pressed flat over the place where Caledfwlch had gone in. Erin’s vine ran taut from his ankle to the rim. Then the folded hands came into the edge of his sight, and his head came around, slowly, as if it weighed more than it had an hour ago.

Around the Ring the household had turned to look. Andy felt it more than he saw it, a stillness going outward across the ash: Sam’s head up over Thrustworthy’s handle, Sumiku’s wings drawn in close, Norah with both sticks hanging forgotten at her sides. A few paces past the kneeling man, Ereshkigal turned her head, and her black eyes came to rest on Mildred and stayed there. At the edge of the Ring, Arabella turned too.

Andy stayed where he was. He still had both hands of the one of Laura nearest him. Sarah’s arm was around her daughter. Through the bond he could feel Laura watching with every one of her eyes and holding herself still, because he had asked her to trust him and she was doing it. He tensed, ready to act.

Abi-Eshu looked Mildred up and down. Something moved in the black beard.

“Geshtinanna’s—” The breath caught on the wound, and he waited it out. “Geshtinanna’s furniture. Walking about on its own. Go and— go and stand somewhere else. I’m busy.”

He turned his face back toward the Queen. At the rim, Arabella’s face didn’t change at the name, though her open hand, still red across the palm, drew in a little at her side.

“Abi-Eshu,” Mildred said.

To Andy's surprise, the voice was angry. He had never heard her angry. It stayed level all the same, and every word came out of it whole.

“What you did tonight,” Mildred said, “you did to the only flesh-beings I have ever met who cared for me. They cared for me before I knew any better. Before I knew what it was they were doing.”

That’s us, Laura sent. It came small and unsteady, as if she had only just worked it out. She means us.

Abi-Eshu’s head came around to her again. For a moment he only looked at her. Then he laughed, or began to; the wound took hold of it and made it a cough, and he bent over his own hand until it passed.

When he could, he lifted his head. “Cared. For you. You’re furniture. Nobody— nobody cares for furniture. You use it. You go past it.”

Mildred let it go by. There had been no question in it for her to answer.

“You came here for Consort Laura,” she said. “You put her on her knees in your chains, all three of her, at the wrists and at the throat. You hurt her until she screamed from every mouth she has. Then you came down off your chair, and you put your hand into her, and you tried to tear her soul apart.”

Laura flinched. It went through all three of her at once and down the bond into his hands, a small hard jerk, like a rope taking weight. Then she held. Sarah’s arm drew in tighter, and her chin came down on the top of the nearest of Laura’s heads and stayed there.

The cold came back into Andy as he listened. It was the same cold that had walked him across the Ring with a sword in his hand, level and quiet all the way down, and he let it sit where it was. Under it the other thing, the vast calm that had risen in him when Laura said always, lay still and listened too.

Mildred’s eyes went along the ash to Myra, and came back. “You chained Contestant Myra beside her.” Her voice hadn’t changed. “On her knees, with her cane rolled out of her reach across the ash. You hurt her. You told her that what she had offered here would be remembered by no one.” She let a breath go by. “I remember it.”

A little way along the ash, Marie drew Myra in closer. Myra leaned into her mother’s arm and let it hold her. Her face was turned toward Mildred, and it was wet.

I keep all the warm things, Mildred had told him in the field, plainly, as if she were telling him where the towels were kept. He had understood it then without knowing what it was for. He understood a little more of it now.

“You bound Contestant Riley’s hair in your fog,” Mildred said, “so that she could not even reach for her sisters. You hurt her while her son lay asleep in the Gentle Hearth, and she could feel exactly where he was the whole time, and she could not go to him.”

Riley’s hair came up off her shoulders. She sent one lock of it out past her own arm, toward the trees at the rim and the long slope down to the Hearth, and drew it back again. Sandra’s hand tightened on her shoulder.

Abi-Eshu’s eyes stayed on Mildred.

Andy had heard most of it already, standing a pace from this man with a sword in his hand while Marissa and Riley and Sam told it to the Queen. He hadn’t heard it like this. They had told it as something that had happened to them, a piece at a time, in the order it came. Mildred was laying it down in front of him one item after another, not as an account, but as a bill.

Mildred turned her head toward the far end of the rim. “You struck Contestant Emily down with one sweep of your hand, while she lay pinned on the ground and could not lift herself an inch. She has not woken.”

At the far end of the rim, Emi bent lower over the girl in her arms until her black hair hid both their faces. Katherine had come around on her knees to take Emily’s limp hand, and she kept it. A few paces from the kneeling man, Ereshkigal’s eyes left Mildred for the first time. They went across the ash to where Anna lay with her head in Chloe’s lap, and stayed there a while, and came back.

“You had Harem Queen Sam laid down in the ash,” Mildred said, “and held there, where she could do nothing but watch you hurt the women she leads.”

Sam’s jaw worked. Her hands didn’t move on the handle. “Yeah. I watched. Every second of it, you son of a bitch.”

“You defiled Harem Queen Erin’s Sanctuary. It was beautiful, and peaceful, and she had made it with her own hands, and you destroyed it.”

Behind her, a line of fire ran along the edges of Sumiku’s wings, gold going to red, and Sumiku let it run.

“And the others,” Mildred said. “Every woman you had your Fourteen drain where she lay, again and again, as though she were nothing.” Her eyes didn’t leave his face.

At the rim, Erin’s arms were shaking in long, slow waves. She didn’t let the vine go. Near the edge of the ash, Chloe had one hand spread in Anna’s hair, and Liesa, kneeling with Claire beside Emi, had gone gray around the mouth. Marissa lifted her chin and kept it there.

Abi-Eshu had straightened as far as the wound would let him. His face had gone back to granite while she talked, flat and gray, as it had gone when he first looked at Caledfwlch and decided it didn’t trouble him.

“The Law,” he said. “I was— I am in the Law. Nothing on this island can touch me. The Queen’s Edict covers— the Queen’s—”

He stopped.

His eyes had gone past Mildred, to the bare pale back a few paces off and the crown of bone-white gold above it, and they stayed there.

Ereshkigal kept her back to him.

Mildred watched him look. “She has taken her hand off you,” she said. “I saw her do it. Everyone here saw her do it.”

Abi-Eshu’s eyes stayed on the Queen’s back.

“You were a Master,” Mildred said. “You died. What is left of you now is a Master’s animus, and nothing is over it any more. Not her Edict. Not her favor. Not the Hotel’s protection. Nothing protects you at all.” She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, in the same warm, level voice, “I wanted you to know whose they were. First.”

Andy? Laura sent. She had felt him go still. Andy, what is she—

Hold on to me, he sent back. Her hands tightened in his, and she held.

Abi-Eshu turned his head and looked at Mildred again, and Andy watched it reach him. It didn’t come all at once. It went into the gray face a little at a time, like water finding its way into a crack: the folded hands, the uniform without a badge, the woman standing over him on the ash who had never once stood over anything. Then whatever he saw behind her. Then the contempt went out of his face in one piece. It simply wasn’t there any more, and what was left under it was the face of a man who had understood, at last, what was standing in front of him.

He tried to get away from her. He went back on his knees across the ash, one hand still clamped to the wound and the other clawing at the ground, dragging that great weight of himself backward a foot, two feet. Erin’s vine came taut at his ankle with a sound like a rope on a dock post, and held him there. At the rim, Erin’s arms locked straight out in front of her, and her feet set themselves in the ash, and she didn’t give him an inch.

Sam saw him reaching out with one great hand and try to grasp the vine, and she took two steps forward. Her grip on Thrustworthy's handle tightened, and the sword came down, piercing through Abi-Eshu's hand and pinning it to the ground. Abi-Eshu cried out, staring at the blade that held him, incredulously. “You aren't going anywhere, you bastard,” she whispered, eyes hard.

His other hand came off the wound and went out toward the Queen, open, the fingers spread, reaching for a back that was nowhere near his reach. “Alla.” He said it to the bare back. It came out of him high and cracked, nothing left in it of the man who had spoken down to her a few minutes before. “Alla. Alla, look— turn around, look at— Alla—”

Ereshkigal didn’t turn.

Abi-Eshu screamed.

It went up out of him and kept going. It was the loudest sound Andy had heard all night, and it didn’t stop for breath. Across the ash Myra flinched hard and turned her face into her mother’s shoulder. Whatever was coming off him now, she could feel all of it. Norah took a step back without seeming to know she had.

For a moment, Mildred opened.

Something came out of her from everywhere at once and from nowhere Andy could point to. It was long, and it was many, and nothing in it bent as anything with bones would bend. It went around behind Abi-Eshu, all the way around, and never crossed the ground between him and her to do it. In the dark at Mildred’s back there were eyes, more of them than the dark had room for. Every one was open. Every one was looking at him.

Andy had seen this once before. In the field, the same reaching had gone around a thread of light as carefully as hands closing on something small and alive, and it had been the gentlest thing he had ever seen done. It was just as careful now. It closed around Abi-Eshu, and his scream was filled with terror.

It pulled him, his pinned hand tearing as Thrustworthy cut through it. He went into her.

Not into her hands. Not into her mouth. He simply went, all of him at once, the funeral robes and the beard and the spade hands and the scream. The scream stopped in the middle.

The reaching was gone. The eyes behind her closed, or went somewhere else. What stood on the ash was Mildred, in her plain uniform, with her hair pinned back and her hands empty at her sides. She looked down at them for a moment and turned them over, as she had in the field, as if she half expected to find something in them. Then she let them fall. The softness was still in her face. Nothing in it had changed at all.

For a while there was no sound on the Ring at all. Erin’s vine lay slack across the ground, wound around nothing, and at the rim Erin’s arms came down. Sam’s sword point hung an inch off the ash. Norah had a hand flat over her mouth. Over by Emi, Liesa had both arms wrapped around herself, and Claire’s ears had gone back flat against her hair and stayed there. At the edge of the Ring, Arabella had gone still, stiller than she had been all night, and her open hand had closed.

Andy waited to feel sorry for him. He knew what he had just watched. He had watched a man go into something that had no mouth to go into, screaming for a woman who wouldn’t turn around, and he waited, and the pity didn’t come. He didn’t go looking for it.

The shock came down the bond from Laura all at once, through all three of her, not as fear, but as something wider and blanker than fear, like a step that wasn’t there in the dark. Her hands went rigid in his. Sarah hadn’t looked away once. Her face had gone white to the lips, and her arm stayed exactly where it was.

As Abi-Eshu went, the Fourteen went with him.

Andy hadn’t known he could feel them. He found out in the instant they let go. The thing that had risen in him when Laura said always had opened something in him that wasn’t sight and wasn’t hearing, and through it he felt them go, every one of them, at the same moment. Some were far down, deeper than the island went, deeper than he had words for. The rest were close. They were under the ash of the Ring, under the soles of his own shoes. Somewhere in the far-down part were the ones Anna had called by their names and sent into the ground. All of them let go together, with a sigh of relief.

Then he couldn’t feel anything of them at all. He stood with that for a moment and didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know where they had gone. He wondered whether there was anywhere left for them to go.

What was that? Laura’s voice came down the bond, thin. She had felt it go through him, if nothing else. Andy, I felt you— what was that?

The Fourteen, he sent. They’re gone. All of them.

He felt her take it in. It went down through all three of her slowly, and through the bond there was relief, and something that ached, and under both a kind of exhaustion so deep that her knees gave a little and Sarah took her weight without a word.

He looked across at Ereshkigal. She had bowed her head. Her eyes were closed, and her face was turned down toward the ash at her feet, and her hands hung at her sides with the fingers of the left one curled in a little. She stood as straight as she had stood all night. Andy could see that she had felt it too. He couldn’t tell what it had done to her. Something had gone out of her shoulders, as if a weight had come off them, and something else had come into her face that didn’t look like relief at all.

At the edge of the ash, Chloe had bent down over Anna, as if Anna might have felt it too. Anna didn’t stir.

Another of Laura’s hands found Andy’s wrist and closed on it and held on. He let it.

Nothing of Abi-Eshu was left. There was no thread of the funeral robes on the ground and no mark of blood. There were only two shallow hollows in the ash where his knees had been, and the drag-marks running back from them a couple of feet, and the vines lying across them, and Thrustworthy stabbing the ground.

Andy let the quiet go on. Nobody seemed to want to be the one to end it. Sam leaned on the handle with both hands, breathing hard. She spoke at last, to the ash in front of her, without lifting her head. “Okay. Cooper. Tell me that was on our side.”

“It was,” Andy said.

Sam nodded slowly, still not looking up, as though she were filing it somewhere she could take it out and look at later.

Then the ground jolted under Andy’s feet.

It came up through the soles of his shoes all at once, a single hard lurch, and then the whole island began to shake. Not a tremor. The ash jumped on the bare stone in little gray spurts. At the rim of the hollow the blasted trees swayed and groaned, their dead limbs knocking together overhead, and from somewhere below the hill came a long low grinding, as if something large were turning over in its sleep. Everyone standing on the Ring staggered. Sam grabbed Norah by the arm. Sumiku’s wings snapped open for balance and beat once, hard. Marie’s arms locked around Myra, and Sandra and Riley went down to one knee together, holding on.

Laura’s alarm went up the bond in a single spike. All three of her grabbed for something, and the something was him and her mother. Andy set his feet and kept them, and kept her. Past Marie’s shoulder he saw Riley fling her hair out in a long red-brown rope toward the trees and the slope beyond them, toward the Hearth, and hold it there, pointing, until the ground went still.

“Andy.”

It was Arabella. She had raised her voice to carry across the Ring, every word of it exact. “The binding on her is broken. A ward is going up.”

Something in him that hadn’t been there an hour ago heard more than the words. There was almost nothing behind her voice. It carried, and it was hers, and there was so little under it that he could feel how little, as surely as he could feel the ash shaking under his feet.

He already knew. He had known since Mildred folded her hands. Horun had said it at the edge of the memory, in the same breath as the Forbidden Resolution. If the Deep ever breaks loose, by that road or any other, the ward goes up.

Andy found Arabella’s eyes across the shaking Ring, and he nodded to her, once.

The shaking stopped all at once, as it had started. The ash settled. The dead limbs at the rim knocked together a last time and hung still. Someone let out a breath on the far side of the Ring, loud in the new quiet. Mildred lifted her face to the dark over the hollow and held it there, as if she were listening to something none of the rest of them could hear.

“Master Andy.” Her face stayed lifted. Her voice was as warm as it had been, and low. “It’s closed,” she said. “Every way off the island. All of them at once.”

Then she screamed.

It tore out of her in her own voice, the one voice, high and raw and nothing like the level, careful thing she had used on Abi-Eshu. She folded over in the middle. She went down onto her knees in the ash with both arms wrapped around herself, and she went on screaming.

Across the Ring heads came around. Emi’s face jerked up from Emily’s hair. Claire’s ears went flat. Every part of Andy wanted to go to her, as his legs had once gone two steps after a girl walking out of a mudbrick doorway in the wasteland, and he stayed where he was, because going to her wasn’t what she needed from him.

Andy was ready.

He didn’t see anything. There was nothing to see in the dark over the hollow. But with whatever had opened in him when Laura said always, he felt the ward come down around the whole island at once, not as a wall, but as a closing: every side of it drawn in at the same moment, from the far beaches to the water off the Hotel’s terraces to somewhere high over the hollow, until there was no way through it anywhere. And he felt it turn inward. It bore down on Mildred from every direction there was. It went into what she was and began to cut, steadily, without hurry, paring her down toward something smaller.

Horun had told him that too. And the ward goes on wounding her until there’s nothing left of her but her core.

He remembered the rest of it word for word. Nothing on the island leaves it, and nothing on it reaches past it with any power it has, until the power of a first-generation Host chooses otherwise.

Andy let go of Laura’s hands. He reached down into himself for the thing that had risen there. It was where he had left it, vast and calm and unhurried, so much larger than he was that he still couldn’t find an edge to it. It was his. It was him. He had stopped being surprised by that. He turned it outward, onto the ward.

For a moment he had all of it at once. The ward, standing around the island’s edge, and everything inside it: the dark Hotel at the bottom of the hill, the beaches, the gardens, the long corridors, every living thing in the place laid out under him as clearly as a room is laid out under a lamp. Down in the Gentle Hearth, beyond the ward, there was a small, warm, sleeping weight he knew was JJ. Here on the Ring were his own—every one of them, each where he had last seen her. He had no time to look at any of it. He looked at the ward.

The ward knew it. It stood all the way around the island, old and patient and strong, and when what was in him touched it, the ward went still under the touch and waited, like a dog that knows its own name. It had been made to answer to this. He didn’t understand how he knew that. He knew it as he knew where Laura was.

He told it two things. He didn’t say them aloud. He willed them, plainly, and meant both.

Stop hurting her. Stay shut.

Mildred’s scream broke off.

It stopped in the middle, as Abi-Eshu’s had, and for one terrible instant Andy thought he had done it wrong. Then he felt the pressure come off her, all of it, all at once. Nothing was cutting at her. Nothing was bearing in. And all the way around the island the ward stood exactly where it had stood, closed on every side, not one inch of it given. It had listened to him. It had done both.

He had done that. He hadn’t moved. Nobody on the Ring could have seen him do anything at all. He stood in the ash with his hands empty at his sides, and he had just done something with what he was now, for the first time, and it had been easier than lifting his arm. That frightened him a little, now that he had a moment to notice it. He wondered what else it would be that easy to do.

Was that you? Laura sent. She had felt the calm in him go out and come back. Andy, was that—

Yes, he sent.

“Andy.” That was Myra, from across the Ring, her face lifted toward Mildred over her mother’s arm. “She’s coming back. Her colors. They were going out, all of them, one after another, and now they’re— they’re coming back in.” She swallowed. “The gold first.”

At the rim, Arabella hadn’t moved. Her bloodied hand hung open at her side, and she was watching him, her lips a little apart, as if she were watching someone else pick up a thing she could no longer lift. He didn’t know what it cost her to stand there and watch. He didn’t know if she would ever tell him.

Mildred stayed on her knees in the ash, bent over, shaking.

Laura got to her first. All three of her went at once, out of her mother’s arm and away from Andy and across the ash in step, and she knelt around Mildred in a close ring of herself. Claire came from where she had knelt by Emi, running, and Marissa came too.

“Mildred.” Laura said it from three mouths at once, low, in her one voice. “Hey. Hey, it’s stopped. It stopped. We’ve got you, okay? Can you— lean on me. Lean on us.”

Two of her got their hands under Mildred’s arms. The third took her by the shoulders. Claire dropped to her knees on Mildred’s other side and took Mildred’s hand in both of hers and held it hard. Down the bond he shared with her, Claire wasn’t frightened. She was fierce and close and steady. When Laura lifted, Claire lifted too, and between them they brought Mildred up onto her feet.

She swayed. Marissa’s arms were around her before Marissa seemed to notice she had moved, one arm across Mildred’s back and the other across her front, her cheek against Mildred’s pinned hair.

“There,” Marissa murmured. “There. It’s gone now. It’s gone. You’re all right.”

Mildred’s shaking began to ease. Not all at once. It went out of her slowly, from the shoulders down, until she was standing on her own feet between them with Claire’s hands around hers and Laura’s three bodies close on every side, and only her breathing still not quite right.

Andy came across the ash to her. She lifted her head when he reached her. Her face was wet. The softness was still in it.

“I’m sorry,” Andy said. It came out rougher than he meant. “I’m sorry it hurt you. I should have— I didn’t know how fast it would be.” He made himself go on. “And I left it shut. It’s still shut, all the way around. I’m keeping it that way for now, and that’s my doing, not anybody else’s. It's not for you. I’m sorry for that, too.”

Mildred looked at him for a long moment.

“Master Andy,” she said. “I told you once that I had wanted to go home since before your species learned to make fire. And I told you in the wasteland that I didn’t think it was true any more.” She looked down at Claire’s hands around hers, and at Laura’s, under her arms, and something in her face settled a little further. “Keep it shut as long as you need it. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Laura made a sound that was almost a laugh, from all three of her, and leaned her nearest head against Mildred’s shoulder.

“Good,” Laura said into her shoulder. “Good. Then you’re stuck with us.”

Ereshkigal had watched all of it. Andy hadn’t seen her move while the island shook, and he hadn’t seen her move since. She had stood straight in the ash and watched Mildred go down screaming, and watched the screaming stop. Now she turned, and her black eyes came to him and stayed.

“What has happened?” she said. Her voice was level. “Something has closed.”

“There’s a ward around the island now,” Andy said. “The whole island. Until it comes down, nobody can leave it. And nobody’s power can reach past it.”

Ereshkigal’s eyes left his face. They went past him, over his shoulder, to the blasted trees at the rim of the hollow, and to the dark beyond the trees, and rested there a while.

Then they came back to him.

Mildred was on her own feet now, among the women. Claire still had her hand. Marissa had let go of her a little at a time and stood close at her back, and Laura was close beside her on every side, all three of her, as if Mildred were something she had found on the ash and didn’t mean to put down.

Andy could still feel the ward. It stood around the whole island as he had left it, shut, patient, not pressing on anything now. It had gone quiet the moment he told it to, and it was waiting to be told something else.

While Ereshkigal looked at the ward, Andy looked at Laura. He didn’t mean anything by it. He looked at her because he always looked at her, because she was the first place his eyes went when anything happened, and had been since before either of them could walk. The bond was wide open between them, and he looked at her down the bond as well, and that was how he found it.

It was in her.

The thing that had risen in him when she said always. He knew it at once, as he would have known his own hand. It was there in Laura, all the way down, vast and unhurried and as certain as the ground, not lent to her or passing through her, but hers. It sat in all three of her alike, quiet as breath.

He looked past her, to the edge of the ash, where Riley stood inside Sandra’s arm with her hair loose around both their shoulders. It was in Riley. He looked at Myra, held against her mother’s side with her blind face turned toward him, and it was in Myra too. Her face left him for a moment and went down to her own hands, as if she had caught a color there that had never been on her before, and then it came back.

Andy reached along the harem bond, as he had never thought to reach along it before, and it was in every one of them. In Sam, leaning on her sword, warm and steady and strong and fierce. In Sumiku, with her wings half folded and the last of the fire gone out along their edges. In Norah and Erin, Liesa and Claire and Marissa. In Emi, bent over Emily, and in Katherine beside her, and in Emily herself, who still hadn’t woken. In Chloe and Dawn where they knelt over Anna, and in Eden kneeling with them. Every woman of his harem, wherever she was on the Ring, carried it now.

He had crossed, and he could feel now that he had brought every one of them across with him—whether they had wanted it or not. He didn’t know yet what that would cost any of them. He didn’t know if he had any right to it.

All three of Laura turned her faces toward him.

Andy. It came down the bond unsteadily, as if she were feeling for the words. There’s something in me. It feels like you. Like the calm, when I said— Andy, what is it?

It’s yours, he sent. I’ll tell you. After.

He turned back to Ereshkigal. She was watching him with her black eyes and her composed, straight face, the crown of bone-white gold sitting level on her hair. She had seen him look at Laura, and at Riley, and at Myra. He didn’t know what she had seen in him while he did it.

“Laura’s out of your reach now,” Andy said. “So are Myra and Riley.” He kept his eyes on hers as he said their names. “What came into me at the First Gate is in them too. It’s in all of them. And the Law has no jurisdiction over gods for a mortal debt.”

It was Claire’s sentence, out of Claire’s notebook. He had read it aloud at that same lunch, and he gave it to the Queen of the Great Below almost word for word. Beside Mildred, Claire’s ears came straight up at the sound of it.

Ereshkigal looked at him for a long moment.

“If that is so,” she said, “then the debt is not ended. A debt is not ended because the one who owes it is out of reach. It moves.”

“I know.” And he did. He had known where it would move since that lunch, and he had known one more thing since a few minutes ago, when he turned what was in him onto the ward and had the whole island under him at once. His parents weren’t on it. None of the guests were. The family tables in the Dance Hall had emptied in the space of a breath, his mother’s camera left lying on the cloth, his father’s chair pushed back. Arabella had promised that the instant she felt the collector coming, every family would be pulled clear. He hadn’t known if it was true. He knew now.

“While the ward stands,” Andy said, “nobody’s power reaches past this island. Yours included. So her family off the island is out of your reach too. Her aunt Kelly and her uncle Isaac. Her cousins, Shannon and Anthony. Her grandparents, James and Dorothy. They’re home in Harvey.” He let a breath go. “And my mom and dad. Carol and Jim. They’re family to her by marriage, and they’re in Warrenville, with the rest of the guests who got sent home tonight. JJ, too. The Hollow Garden is outside the ward. You can’t reach any of them.”

Ereshkigal’s eyes widened.

It was the first thing in her face that had moved all night, apart from her eyes going to Anna. It was small. He had danced with this woman at the masquerade, her hand cold in his and a mask over the mole by her eye, while she told him he was not to blame for what was coming, and he had never seen her surprised by anything. He saw it now. Then her gaze went past Andy, over his shoulder, to the edge of the ash, and found Sarah, and found Marie.

Andy had known it would. Both of them were standing here on the Ring, inside the ward, where the Law could still find them.

All three of Laura moved at once.

She left Mildred to Claire and Marissa and crossed the ash in step, quickly, not running, and stopped in front of her mother, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, between Sarah and the Queen. Sarah put out a hand and laid it flat on the back of the middle one of her.

“Laura,” Sarah said. Her voice was still thin from all the years of not using it. “You don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do, Mom,” Laura said, from all three of her, without turning around.

A little way along, Myra let go of her mother’s arm and stepped out in front of Marie, and Marie took hold of Myra’s hand behind her back and kept it. Marie’s jaw had set hard. She looked at the Queen over her daughter’s shoulder and kept on looking, and her eyes didn’t drop.

Riley reluctantly left Sandra and came to stand at Myra’s side, and as she came Andy saw her face change. It went white all at once, the way a face goes white when someone has finished a sum in their head and doesn’t like the answer. She sent a single lock of her hair out toward the trees at the rim and the long slope down to the Hearth, and held it there, pointing. She turned her head and looked at Andy, and her lips moved on one word with no sound in it. He knew what the word was. JJ was Greg’s blood as much as she was, and she had not realized what it could have meant, before. But he was safe now: the Hollow Garden was outside the ward.

Andy held her eyes, and let nothing into his face but what was already there.

“No,” Laura said, from all three of her mouths at once, in her one voice. It shook, and it held. “You look at me. Not at her. You don’t get to look at her like that. Not ever.”

Myra’s blind face was lifted toward the Queen. “You’re grieving. It’s all over you. I can read it from here. Gray, mostly. Gray and deep blue, and something under both of them I don’t have a name for.” Her hand tightened on Marie’s behind her. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t have her.”

Ereshkigal didn’t answer either of them. Her eyes stayed where they had gone, on the two mothers, and the daughters standing in front of them.

At the edge of the Ring, Arabella spoke quietly. She didn’t need to raise her voice; the Ring had gone so still that every word of it reached the middle of the ash. But it was thin, thinner than Andy had ever heard it—the kind of voice that carries in an empty house, with almost nothing left behind it.

“Alla,” Arabella said.

Ereshkigal’s eyes stayed on the mothers. Something in the set of her bare shoulders listened all the same.

Arabella went on as though she had been answered. “Either of them would satisfy the Law. Laura’s mother. Or her mother’s sister. You know that, and so do I.” She let a breath go by. “But both of them passed through this Hotel. They were Contestants, in Greg’s season. I was their Host. And so did you… when you were Alla. You passed through it long before either of them was born.”

At the edge of the ash, Sarah’s head had come up at I was their Host. She looked at Arabella over her daughter’s shoulder, the first time Andy had seen her look at Arabella at all, and whatever was in her face, she kept it there. Marie’s eyes stayed on the Queen. Her hand stayed locked on Myra’s.

Arabella took a step forward from the rim, onto the ash, and stopped. Her palm was still dark where the drop had come out of it.

“No Contestant, no Master, no one born of this place may cause the death of another who has passed through it, or was born of it,” Arabella said. “It is the oldest rule we have. You know it as well as I do. That is why you sent Abi-Eshu instead of coming yourself at first, is it not? If you take either of them, you break it.” Her bloodied hand closed slowly at her side. “And it may destroy you.”

Andy had been waiting, and hoping, to hear those words. He had known since the lunch who the Law would look at next, and he had known since the office why it couldn’t have them. None of it was news to him. He stood in the ash and stayed steady, and down the bond Laura felt him stay steady and leaned on it.

“Then she can’t.” Laura said it from all three of her at once, and it broke in the middle. “She can’t. She can’t touch my mom. She can’t touch either of them.”

Behind her, Sarah’s hand pressed flatter against her back.

Andy felt the hope go up in Laura, bright and sudden, through all three of her. He didn’t go up with it. He had stood in a gray hall at the bottom of the world and listened to this woman rule against her own sister, and he had watched her face while she did it.

But it would give her pause. Pause enough to ask the question.

Ereshkigal turned her head.

Her eyes left the mothers, and Laura, and Arabella, and went across the ash to Anna. Anna lay where she had lain all night, on her side, with her head in Chloe’s lap and Dawn kneeling over her and Eden close beside the three of them, her long hair spread out on the ash, and she didn’t stir. Ereshkigal looked at her for a long time. Chloe lifted her head and looked back at the Queen over Anna’s hair, her face drawn and gray and her voice still gone from her, and held the look as long as Ereshkigal did.

There were tears standing in her black eyes. Andy could see them from where he stood. He had seen regret in that face once, on a stone seat at the bottom of the world, plain enough that he couldn’t mistake it. He had never seen it wet. The tears didn’t fall. Her face held exactly as it had held since she came, composed and straight, and the tears stood in her eyes as if they had nothing to do with the rest of it.

“I told you once, Andrew Cooper,” Ereshkigal said, “that there is no blame in the Law. Only the Law.”

She said it to him, though she was still looking at her sister, and nothing in the voice gave way, though the tears stood in her eyes and her sister lay a stone’s throw off on the ash.

“I did not write the Law,” she said. “I keep it. I must keep it, even if keeping it destroys me. The Law does not bend because bending would be kind. If it is not kept, nothing is kept, and everything falls into chaos.” She was quiet for a moment. “Everything.”

Nobody answered her. Across the ash Myra made a small sound and turned her face aside, as if the color coming off the Queen had grown too strong to bear. Sam’s knuckles had gone white on the handle. Over Anna, Eden had pressed in closer against Chloe’s side, her long hair spilling across both of them. At Mildred’s side, Claire’s ears had flattened, and her hand had tightened around Mildred’s, and Mildred let it. Mildred was looking at the Queen. There was no fear in her face at all, only something that looked a great deal like sorrow.

Andy looked at Arabella. She was standing a step in from the rim, where she had stopped, with her closed hand at her side, and her face was hurting. It wasn’t her Host’s face—nothing in it was arranged. It was hurting for the woman on the ash in front of her, plainly, all the way through, and Andy knew what she was remembering, because he had been there.

He had stood inside that memory in her own body, at the bottom of a long stair in Irkalla, in a low gray hall with the dead written on the walls. He had felt Ama-Bila’s bare feet in the dust and her breath held, and heard the new Queen on her seat, with Alla’s face already gone pale, rule, in the voice he had just heard, that Dumuzid was dead and hers to keep. She had said she was sorry. It hadn’t changed a word of it. When the memory let him go, back in the corridor, he had said one word himself, barely louder than a breath. Alla. Just the name, as Arabella had said it now.

Afterward, walking on through the corridor with the lit rooms going by on either side, Horun had told him the rest of it. She knew. She ruled anyway. The Law was hers to keep. And then, to the corridor ahead of him rather than to Andy: It cost her her sister.

Her sister was lying on the ash in front of her, and she hadn’t been able to go to her. And she was going to keep the Law again, here, tonight, if it destroyed her to do it, and Andy could see in Arabella’s face that Arabella did not want her to die. Not as a Host wanting a rule obeyed, but as someone who had once been the only person to come all the way down a stair to ask.

Ereshkigal turned her eyes from Anna. They came back across the ash, slowly, and found Sarah and Marie, and stayed on them.

All three of Laura stood where she had planted herself, shoulder to shoulder in front of her mother, with her chin up. Myra stood in front of Marie with her hand held tight behind her back, and Riley at her side, and none of them gave an inch of the ash they were standing on. Marissa’s arm was still around Sarah’s shoulders, and under it Sarah had stopped shaking.

Andy stood a little way off from all of them—the ward shut around the island where he had left it. He could have opened it with a thought. He kept it shut. He was steady. He had been steady since Mildred started walking. He knew a way through this, every piece of it in its place, and none of what had happened since had moved a single piece of it. So far, so good. He still couldn’t be sure of it. He didn’t know who would pay, if he was wrong. The next part was his to say, and it wasn’t time yet.

She’s going to do it anyway, Laura sent. It came small down the bond, from under the chin she was holding up. Isn’t she. Even if it kills her.

She thinks she has to, he sent back. But I can show her she’s wrong.

He could feel all of them along the harem bond, every woman on the Ring, with the same vast, quiet thing sitting in each of them that sat in him. None of them had asked for it. All of them were holding.

Behind Laura, Sarah’s hand stayed flat on her daughter’s back.

---

Author's Note

I'm still evaluating whether the contestants will receive final transformations or not. These are supposed to help them re-enter the world more easily and (positively) complete the path towards the archetype or harem role they started. I'm accepting suggestions, so if you want to propose something, please post it here:
https://forms.gle/eVeMajyDk8dXR9SNA
If I decide to implement final tranformations, options from the form will be picked (although I cannot promise all of them would be).

In addition, AMAs for both yours truly and the cast, post-season finale, are starting to accept submissions, here:
https://forms.gle/RxGQi6ifxidKPq359
The questions will be answered after the final Epilogue, so you have a bit of time. You can ask as many questions as you wish, and you do so anonymously or indicate who you are, as you prefer.

If you ask questions of the cast, please indicate who the question is for, unless it's for everyone.

Thank you!