Held, Part 1

If Laura turned one of her heads as far as the chain at its throat allowed, she could see the rim. So she turned it, and watched them finish.

The ghosts were laying the last of the household down along the edge of the ash, with the blasted trees of the rim at their backs. They did it as they had done all of it, in pairs and without hurry, their long hair lifting in a wind nobody else could feel. Emi lay on her side with all six arms folded under her. Claire’s notebook lay open on the ground a little way from Claire’s hand, its pages stirring. Sam lay flat with her jaw locked and her hands at her sides, holding still as she had told everyone else to hold still. Beyond her, Chloe had curled a fist into the hem of her sweater. Then the last pair rose off the line. The whole loose wheel of them swung round toward the middle of the ring, toward the throne and the three kneeling in front of it, and came back.

The chains moved.

Nothing touched them. A few minutes ago they had been fog, gray and low round her wrists and her throats and the backs of her knees. Now they drew outward like a tide going out. Slow. Patient. No hand on them anywhere. The pull started at every wrist at once. Her knees slid on the scorched stone. Her three bodies went apart from each other. Myra went one way at the end of the row, and Riley the other. The links ran out to their full length and stopped, taut, and held.

When it was done the three of them knelt in a line with a gap between each and the next. It was not a wide gap. If Laura stretched the hand nearest Myra, it would have come within inches of Myra’s fingers. Inches was the whole of it.

Not long ago she had been holding both their hands at the edge of the hollow, all of her. The knot had been so tight she couldn’t tell whose fingers were whose. She could still feel the shape of it in her palms.

Riley tested her own chain. Laura heard the links snap tight and stop.

“Assigned—” Riley’s breath caught on the chain at her throat. Her voice came out dry and cracked at the edges. “Seating. Course there’s… assigned seating.”

Nobody laughed. Laura heard what it had cost her to try, and loved her for it.

“He likes things…” Myra had to stop and swallow. “Where he can see them,” she finished, from the other end of the row.

Then Nergal turned his face to Laura.

There was no blow. Nothing touched her skin, nothing broke, and there was no place on any of her she could have pointed to and said there. It started in the middle of her and went out to every edge at once. It came from nowhere on the body’s own map. It was in all three of her together.

Her three bodies jerked against the chains together. The chains held all three.

Myra’s breath tore in and didn’t come out. At the other end of the row Riley made a sound through her teeth, low and ugly, the sound of somebody refusing to scream. Laura’s hands went out to them before she could stop them. All six reached, toward Myra’s fingers and toward Riley’s and toward each other. They curled shut on empty air, inches short.

Under the pain, she heard his voice. He had leaned forward on the throne, and he pitched it low.

“And what you offered here tonight is remembered by no one,” Nergal was saying. “Nothing given in this place ever is.”

It wasn’t meant for her. She heard it go to the two beside her—to Myra and to Riley and to what they had walked out here to give. It went into her worse than the pain had.

Then he stopped. He did not speak again. He sat back with his great hands along the arms of the throne and his face on her, heavy and level. He left the rest to the dark.

The ghosts came down.

They drifted in low over the five of them, close enough that their cold lay on the backs of her necks. The whispering that had been a crowd behind a door all the way across the ring opened, and was here.

“Poison,” the voices said.

Not one voice. Dozens, near and far at once, laid over each other, every one of them pitched to her ear and nobody else’s.

“—poison, you were always—” “—worth nothing—” “—worth nothing, three of you, and it’s still nothing—” “—three times nothing—”

“Everyone who ever loved you has paid for it.”

“Andy first.” “Andy first, Andy first, Andy—”

For a heartbeat she was on the path again, coming up to the rim with Emi and Claire and Dawn behind her. Every face in the household was turning to the empty space beside Emi where he should have been.

She had said that word out loud before. She had said it to Myra the first time, when she still believed it was the plain truth about herself and only needed somebody to hear it. She had said it again at the lagoon to both of them, crying so hard she couldn’t finish the sentence. They had stayed. They had put their arms round her and held on until it stopped.

Nobody could hold her now. The chains had seen to that.

All three of Laura’s heads went down.

“L.” Riley’s voice came hoarse across the gap, through her own pain. “L—listen. Whatever they’re… it’s not—”

The voices changed under her.

“Your mother.”

“—your mother needed a Wish—” “—needed a Wish to make anyone love you at all—”

“—and he loves you—” “—he loves you because she wished it—” “—made, it was made, all of it was made—”

Laura stopped breathing.

She knew this one. She had found it herself, sitting with her mother’s letter. She had turned it over with Andy in the dark the night before the wedding, until neither of them could stand to turn it any more. Built or grown, they had said. Keep it either way. She had asked Arabella straight out whether she had been there when the Wish was made. But Mildred had come through the door before the answer could, and the answer had never come back. She had stopped asking. She had told herself that was a choice.

The voices didn’t argue with any of it. They only said it again, softer, as if they were sorry for her.

“—made—” “—all of it—”

Her three bodies went slack in the chains. She didn’t decide to let go. She just stopped holding herself up. All of her, at once. The links took the weight at her wrists and her throats and held her there, kneeling, hanging a little forward on them. She could hear Riley still saying something. She couldn’t hear what. Her breath came back in short pulls that didn’t reach the bottom of her lungs.

Then Myra made a sound. It wasn’t a word. It was the sound the pain got out of her, thin and high and quickly bitten off. A second after it Riley’s chains rang as she jerked against them. Every one of Laura’s heads came up as if the sound had pulled them.

Myra was kneeling at the end of her links with her tails rigid behind her and her blind face tipped up and wet. Her mouth was shut hard. Her cane lay on the ash a long way out of her reach. Riley’s shoulders were hunched round the pain, her hair dragged down into the fog at her back. Her eyes were open and fixed on Laura, as if Laura were the thing she was holding on to.

They had knelt down in this for her. They had walked out across the ash and knelt in front of him on purpose, and she had said no, and they had done it anyway.

Laura reached down the bond. He was there. He was alive, and afraid, the reading sitting where it had sat all night, here and impossibly far at once. He had stayed down there for a reason. He was doing something. She held on to that as she had held on to their hands, with everything she had, and it held.

She could take the chains, and the voices—all night, if that was what he needed. The thing she couldn’t take was not hers at all, but the sound Myra had just made, and Riley jerking against her chains. For her.

“Take it—” It came out of all three of her mouths at once, cracked down the middle. “Take it back. Both of—please. Your offers. Take them…” She could hear her voices shaking and couldn’t make them stop. “Mine. Let it be—just mine. All of it.”

Myra’s face turned toward her. Riley’s didn’t move.

“Not giving up,” Laura said. “I’m not. I swear. I’m holding—holding on, I’ve got it, I—” Her breath went, and she dragged it back. “Can’t watch you… I can take him. Whatever he’s—I can’t take you hurting. For me. Please. Asking you. Let me… alone. Let me have it alone.”

Myra had felt the request coming before Laura’s mouths opened on it.

Laura’s light had been indigo all night, the deep, old blue her fear always was. Through the last minutes it had gone darker and darker, until there was almost nothing else in it. Then it changed. A warmer color came up through the blue, like blood coming up through water. Soft rose, turned outward, toward the two ends of the row. Myra knew that color. It was the love Laura wore when she was about to give something away.

“No,” Myra said.

It came out of her low and torn. Her throat was raw from not screaming.

“Laura. No. Not—not taking it back.” She turned her face toward the nearest of Laura’s bodies and kept it there. “He’ll—he’ll take you in… in a blink. You don’t get to… this one’s mine. I gave it. It’s given.”

She felt the rose flinch, and swirl into the indigo, and not go away. All three places Laura’s light burned from had gone tight at once, the same fraction of an inch, as if one hand had closed in three places.

Then the pain came again. It came from him. Nergal sat on the throne above them like a cold white lamp. Through the white ran a dull dark red, low and patient, and a thin thread of pale gold that might have been anticipation—hunger, held on a short leash. She had read it in him from the rise, before any of this, and it had not changed by a shade. When the pain went out of him it came into her from nowhere and everywhere at once, with no skin to come in through, like countless needles threading and tearing through her whole body. Her back bowed. Her breath locked at the top and wouldn’t come down. Her tails went stiff as rods behind her. Her ears pressed flat to her skull. The ash under her knees, which had been lit faintly by everyone kneeling on it, went the color of her own pain, a hot white edged in red. The fingers of her right hand curled hard round the chain at her wrist, as if holding it could make it hold her less.

The voices were already at her ear. They had been at her since the Fourteen came down low—a press of whispers with no breath behind them, dozens laid one over another. She couldn’t have said where one stopped. They had been saying the things they said to everyone at first. How cold it would be. How quiet. Now they found the place they had been looking for, and settled there.

“Marie.”

“—your mother, Marie—” “—sitting in the Gentle Hearth right now—” “—right now, by the door, waiting for you to come back—”

“—and they’ll tell her you’re dead—” “—somebody will come in and tell her you’re dead, and she’ll have to hear it—”

The Gentle Hearth, with the people who couldn’t fight, safe in a place the Fourteen had already broken their teeth on once tonight. She had kept her Mom there in her mind like something held in a closed fist, all the way up the path. Now the voices opened the fist for her and showed her what was in it. Mom by the door with her hands folded, as she had sat in the front row while Myra said her vows. Chin up. Waiting. A woman forced to give up her daughter, living with nothing but sorrow and regret for twenty-five years, only starting to heal that wound ten days ago, only holding her child again then.

Mom had walked her across a bridge. Halfway over, every feeling on the island had come at Myra at once, a whole wedding’s worth of joy and nerves and old grief. She had stopped dead in the middle of the planks. Mom had put a hand under her elbow and said a few quiet words, and they had gone on together. Afterward Myra had said “I love you, Mom” out loud in front of everyone, and meant it, and not taken it back.

“—kneeling here—” “—kneeling here to buy a place beside her—” “—a place you were never owed—” “—you were never owed it, you know you weren’t—”

“—it’s the six-year-old—” “—still six, still choosing for you—”

“—still not good enough to keep—”

That one went in clean. She had said it herself, out loud, once, in a voice she had never let anyone hear before. The part of her that was still six years old hated that she hadn’t been good enough to make her mother keep her. She had said it, and then she had gone and met her mother the next morning anyway. She had thought saying it was the end of it. The voices spoke it back to her now in her own words, gently, almost fondly, as if they had been there in the room.

Myra’s breath went short and shallow. She was a doctor. Part of her stood a little way off and noted it, rate and depth, out of habit. Part of her had flensed herself for sixteen years and knew pain for an old friend. The rest of her knelt in the chains and listened.

A place beside her.

She turned to check. She couldn’t not. She had taken too many things she wasn’t owed to stop checking now. She turned the whole of her sense on Laura.

Up close, Laura was all three bodies at once—one light in three places, the way she always was to Myra and always would be. The indigo had drowned nearly everything. The rose was still there, turned toward Myra, toward Riley, toward the two of them and nothing else. And through all of it, through every one of her, ran the silver.

It was thin. It had been thin for days, even thinner since Erin's date night. But it was still there, threaded through the dark blue as it had been in the Garden after the Hall, and at the wedding before that, steady, not flickering, not going anywhere. Andy’s. Myra had never once found it in herself, and never expected to. It was the one silver thing in all the world as she knew it, and it lived only in Laura and Andy.

It was right there. It was close enough to touch.

Myra stretched out her bound hand toward it. Her arm went out across the gap before she had thought about it, as far as the chain would let it, and then a little further. The iron cold of the fog bit into her wrist bone and stopped her. Her fingers spread. The silver was inches past the tips of them. She could feel the warmth of Laura’s nearest hand there in the dark, curled shut on nothing. She could not close those last inches by so much as the width of a fingernail.

She held her hand there anyway. She held it until her shoulder shook.

On the climb up the path, a lock of Riley’s hair had wound round that same wrist and stayed there, light and warm, all the way to the rim. Myra had let it, and said nothing, and been glad of it. The fog had it now. There was nothing round her wrist but cold.

Above her, the Howling Ones pressed in. She had felt them before, at the Garden, coming at the line out of the dark. It had hurt then to be near them. It hurt worse now, with them this close and this many and nowhere to turn her face from them. Livid purple and furnace red and the drowned gray of something that had been under water a long time, all wound together so tight that no single color would come free. Pain, and rage, and under both of those a grief so old it had gone gray. It pushed on her from above and from both sides and from behind, a weight with no edge, like deep water. She had never been near anything that hurt so much. She could have placed every one of them without trying. A pair hung low over Laura, close enough to stir the hair on Laura’s necks. One drifted at Riley’s back. The rest went round and round above the throne in that slow loose wheel, their pain dragging behind them like weed in a current.

It was not anger at her, but anger with nowhere left to go. She could tell the difference. It didn’t help.

The whispers kept on at her ear, smaller now, patient, going back over the same ground.

“—Mom—” “—six years old—” “—never owed—”

Myra brought her hand back in, slowly, because her arm had begun to tremble too hard to hold it out. Her fingers found the chain again and closed on it.

At the far end of the row, Riley’s breath caught.

It was a small sound. Myra's face turned toward it before she had decided to turn it. Riley’s light had been coral all night, a deep, fierce coral, the color she went whenever somebody she loved stood near a cliff edge. Now there was a hole in it. Something gray and sick had come in from outside and was spreading. Whatever they had found in her, it had just landed.

Myra didn’t know what it was. She didn’t need to.

“Riley,” she said.

She reached for the voice she had used at a thousand bedsides in the hour before morning, when the only thing left to give anybody was somebody else’s steadiness to borrow. The pain broke it into pieces before it was out of her. She gave Riley the pieces.

“Riley. I’m—here. Breathe out. All the way… out. Let it—let it come back. I’m here. Got you.”

Myra’s voice came to Riley across the whole length of Laura, low and broken, pitched to reach her and stop there.

“Riley. I’m—here. Breathe out.”

Riley had stopped breathing at all a few seconds before, and hadn’t noticed. She noticed now. Her chest was locked at the top of a breath like a fist round a coin. The voices had only just started on her, two words, three, and her breath had caught on the first of them and stuck there, because she knew those words.

She opened her mouth to answer Myra. The voices came in before she could.

“—a lamp—” “—you’re the lamp—” “—the lamp nobody has space for—”

They were everywhere. They came from the left and the right and from inside her own ears. A crowd of them talked low over one another with no breath behind any of it, and every one of them knew exactly what to say. Riley had heard them in the Garden, at her ear the whole time she fought, every death they could think of for her. That had been nothing next to this. These had stopped bothering with deaths.

“—put you in the guest room—” “—out of duty, only out of duty—”

“—and left you there—” “—they’ll leave you there, they always were going to—”

She saw it. She couldn’t help seeing it. A spare room with the bed made up tight and nobody’s things on the dresser. A lamp on the nightstand, switched off, its cord wound neatly round its base so it wouldn’t be in the way. It was the picture she had given Chloe once, in the dark, the worst thing she knew how to say about herself.

Chloe had sat straight up in the dark when Riley said it, and told her she was wrong, flat and furious, and kept on telling her until Riley ran out of things to argue with. Riley had believed her. She had believed her ever since.

Then they found JJ.

“—JJ—” “—your boy—”

“—he’ll grow up in a house that doesn’t miss you—” “—won’t miss you, none of them will—” “—a nice house, a full house, and nobody in it missing you—”

It was not the lamp that undid her, but his name in their mouths. Riley’s whole body went rigid in the chains.

The pain came again under the voices, from nowhere, the same no-place pain as before. She jerked against it, and her hair dragged at her scalp where the fog had bound it down at her back. Her hair had become the first thing she reached with when she was frightened. Tonight the fog had it, and she couldn’t so much as curl it.

Down the hill, JJ was exactly where he had been all night. She didn’t have to reach for it. The sense of him sat in her like a compass needle and never moved, inside the Gentle Hearth, still, probably asleep with his fist up by his face, as he always slept. Safe. She knew he was safe down to the inch.

And she heard Chloe say yes. She heard it exactly, as she had heard it at the end of the line not an hour ago. “Yes.” At once. Before Riley had fairly finished asking, as if the word had been waiting behind Chloe’s teeth a long time for somebody to ask for it.

She had noticed it then. She had noticed Chloe’s face, sad and certain and not surprised at all, and filed it away in the part of her that filed everything, and gone back down the line. Now the voices said “nobody in it missing you,” and the fast yes came back up out of the file, and turned over, and showed her its other side.

But Riley remembered Chloe’s face crumpling from the mouth up. Chloe’s fist pressed flat to her own breastbone as if something there needed holding in. “I don’t want to do it without you. I wanted to do it with you.” Chloe’s palms warm on her face and their foreheads together and Chloe asking, “Is that what you needed?”

All of that was true. She had been there for all of it.

The voices didn’t say any of it wasn’t. They only kept saying the other thing, softly, on and on, as if they had all night.

“Riley.” Myra again, from the far end. “Breathe… just—breathe.”

Riley breathed out. It shook all the way down, and the air that came back in was cold and tasted of ash. She counted the next one out, slowly, to four, and the one after that.

“I’m—here,” she said. Her voice came out rough and too sweet, as it always did when it was hurting. She checked the next part before she let it go. “Breathing. That’s… all I’ve got. But I’m breathing.”

It was true. She felt it go, and nothing caught.

She set her jaw, hard enough to feel the hinge of it ache, and kept it set. Then she turned her head as far as the chain at her throat would let her, toward the three of Laura kneeling between her and Myra.

Riley had heard every broken word of what Laura asked. Let me have it alone. Not giving up. She had listened for the lie in it, out of a habit older than her own mouth, and she couldn’t find one. Laura meant every word of it.

Laura was looking back at her with all three faces. They were wet, all three, and gray in the gray light, and every one of them had the same look on it. Riley had never seen that look on anyone. She had only pictured it, more times than she could count, on a girl of thirteen walking out onto a footbridge in the rain, alone, because Riley had sent her.

“No,” Riley said.

All three of Laura flinched together, as if Riley had struck her.

“No, L. I heard—all of it. I heard you.” Riley’s throat was closing and she talked through it anyway. “It hurts. It’s bad, L, it’s—it’s really bad. And I’m still not… not taking it back.” She dragged a breath past the chain at her throat. “You asked. I’m saying no. Wouldn’t say different. Not if I could.”

Once, she had encouraged Laura to confront Andy at the footbridge because she wanted to protect her, but really she wanted Laura for herself. Today she was not going to let her go. So both offers stood. Myra’s at one end of the row and hers at the other, out in the cold air in front of the throne where they could not be called back, with Laura kneeling between them.

Riley strained toward her. Her bound hand was already reaching across the gap, the fingers open, wide open, for anything at all of Laura’s that would come and touch them. The chain ran out. It bit into the bone of her wrist and stopped her. She leaned into it anyway, all her weight, until the links at her throat pulled tight under her jaw and she had to tip her head back to breathe. Somewhere past the ends of her fingers, inches away, was the hand that had held hers on the walk out so tightly her knuckles still ached. She stretched for it until her shoulder burned.

At the far end of the row Myra was doing the same. Riley could see her past the three of Laura, strained out to the end of her chains with her hand open toward Laura, her tails rigid, leaning so hard the fog creaked.

And Laura strained back.

All three of her at once. She leaned toward Riley, and toward Myra, and toward herself. Every one of her bodies pulled against its own links toward the bodies beside it, six hands open and reaching into the cold air between them. The chains drew tight on all of them together. Riley heard them go. Five sets of links, singing taut in the gray light—and not one of them gave.

Every reaching hand stopped short. Inches. A few inches of nothing between each of them and the next, all down the row, and the cold of the fog in every one of those inches.

Riley knelt there with her arm out and her hand open, and held it there.

She could have found any one of them in the dark with her eyes shut. Laura, there. Myra, there. Chloe, a fixed bright point at the edge of the ash, close and burning. JJ, down the hill in the Hearth. Every one of them exact. She knew where all of them were down to the inch. But she couldn’t reach any of them.

---

Nothing was holding Chloe down, and she couldn’t get up.

Her body kept refusing to believe it. When the ghosts laid her on the ash they had pressed her flat with their long cold hands, and then they had lifted away and gone back up into the dark, and the cold of their hands had stayed. It lay on her like wet sand, on her chest and her arms and her legs. It was the kind of cold that made the roots of her teeth ache. She could turn her head. She could work her fingers, still knotted in the hem of the oatmeal sweater, right where the loose thread was. But every time she tried to lift anything more than an inch, the weight leaned down on it, patient and heavy, until it lay still again.

Katherine lay on her right. Marissa lay on her left, then Liesa, then Eden. All down the edge of the ring the rest of the household lay the same way, Sam and Sumiku and Norah and Erin, Emi and Claire and Dawn, and at the far end Emily, a pale gold shape in the gray.

In the middle of the ring, Laura and Myra and Riley were kneeling in the chains. Chloe turned her head as far as it would go and kept her eyes on Riley.

The chains had dragged the three of them apart. Riley knelt at the end of hers, her arm stretched toward Laura as far as it would go, and she couldn’t reach. Chloe could see Riley’s shoulder shaking with how hard she was trying.

The whispers were everywhere and they were all for her. A crowd of voices, laid one over another, close against her ear.

“—at the quarry, under the ice, with your boots still laced—”

Black water and a white ceiling, and her own hands flat against it.

“—in a classroom, at the little sink, while the paint water runs and runs—”

Red and blue swirling down a drain, and small chairs, and nobody coming.

“—old, in a room nobody visits, with the television on—”

“—here—” “—here, on this ash, before morning—”

Every breath brought a new one. They came faster than she could hear them out, each one cutting off the last, and under all of them ran a fear that wasn’t about anything. It had no shape. It sat cold in the pit of her stomach, like a missed step in the dark.

Chloe clenched her teeth on it. Down the line she could see the others doing the same. Erin’s jaw was locked so hard the muscle stood out. Sam’s lips were moving on nothing, her eyes shut. Norah had pressed her mouth flat against her own shoulder. Nobody cried out.

Then Nergal leaned forward on the throne with his face full on the three in the middle, and Laura and Myra and Riley flinched together against the chains.

Riley’s whole body jerked. Chloe’s own chest jerked with it.

“Now,” she said.

She kept it low, for the four beside her. Her voice came out shaking and she let it.

“Now. While he’s looking at them. We start now.”

“Okay,” Marissa breathed beside her. “Okay. I’m with you.”

“Am ready,” Liesa said, from beyond her.

On her other side Katherine turned her head on the ash, met Chloe’s eyes, and nodded once.

The ghosts came low over the line on every pass, close enough that their hair trailed across faces, and one of them came lower than the rest. She was gray and ragged and drifting, her face twisted up with rage, her claw-hands half open, and her path took her straight across Katherine.

Katherine’s body caught her. It happened almost too fast to see. Katherine barely moved under the weight; she only rolled her hip and shoulder up into the passing gray, and the gray snagged on her like cloth on a nail. The woman twisted and howled. She didn’t pass through. Katherine held her there, low over the line—set her teeth, and didn’t let go.

Marissa turned her face toward the howling woman. Her lips moved. Chloe couldn’t hear a word of it, and wasn’t meant to. The howling thinned, a little at a time, like a kettle coming down off the boil.

Past Marissa, Eden arched her back up off the ash, as high as the weight would let her, and rolled her hips, slow. The woman’s eyes followed the movement. Chloe watched them slide on down to the sweater, and catch.

Chloe held still and let them. It was the one thing she had that worked without hands. The woman’s eyes went still on her. They stayed. Chloe felt the hold take. She didn’t look away and didn’t cover up, and the woman hung there in Katherine’s grip and couldn’t look anywhere else.

Liesa spoke. It was no language Chloe had ever heard, low and old and full of soft stops, and Liesa said it gently, as though to a frightened animal. Then, in English, without taking her eyes off the woman: “Ask her to listen. Only listen.”

The woman hung at the line with her claw-hands open and her mouth shut.

Then Nergal’s face turned.

It came off the three in the middle and went along the line, slow, and rested on Katherine with the woman caught over her. It stayed there long enough for Chloe’s heart to slam twice. Then it went back to Laura—as if what he had seen weighed about as much as a fly on a sleeve.

“Drain them,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice. It carried anyway, flat and even. “Any one on that line who is a trouble to you. Drain the life out of her. Let her not be ended, but let her not wake.”

The wheel broke.

The ghosts came down along the line, and they came through. Chloe felt the first one go into her chest and out through her back. Cold. Not the cold of the hold, but deeper, the cold of something pulled out of her and carried away. Every one that came down made it deeper. Her teeth started to chatter and she couldn’t stop them. Beside her Marissa made a small sound. Liesa’s breath went ragged. Eden’s hair stirred on the ash as they went through her too. At some point Marissa’s shoulder had come to press against Chloe’s, as hard as the weight would let it. Chloe didn’t think Marissa knew she had done it.

They went through Katherine again and again. Katherine’s body shook under it. Her bare skin had gone gray-white and her lips were turning blue, and she kept her hold. The woman in her grip had begun to twist again, slowly, and her open hands were closing, finger by finger, toward Katherine’s shoulder.

Chloe’s fingers tightened on the thread.

“Chloe.”

Marissa’s voice, right against her ear, though Marissa hadn’t moved. Only for her.

“Chloe, wait. I’ve got something. I forgot I had it.” A breath, shaking with the cold. “From J. I never used it. I kept meaning to, and I never—just take it. Please. You’re the one who’s talking.”

Marissa’s hand moved at her side, and it wasn’t empty anymore; she had called the thing up out of her Inventory. Then she was working her hand across the inch of ash between them, slow, against the weight. A light, cool weight slid into Chloe’s fingers.

A circlet. Plain metal, thin as a bangle. Wisps of flame were dancing round it, and they gave off no heat.

“Put it on,” Marissa breathed. “Run your finger round the rim. Then go.”

Chloe brought her hands up. The weight leaned down on them and she pushed against it, and tucked her chin and curled her head down toward her hands as far as her neck would bend, until the circlet touched her hair. She worked it up over her forehead with her knuckles. It settled there as if it had been made for her.

She ran one fingertip along the rim.

The flames woke up. They rose off the metal all at once, bright and clean and cold as starlight, and a calm came into Chloe with them that she had never once in her life been given.

It was not courage, but something older and steadier underneath it, a kind of standing up inside herself. She had been scared every minute of tonight. The fear went small now, and far off, somewhere behind her where it couldn’t reach. Flat on her back in the ash, teeth chattering, she knew all at once that she could have looked any king in the world in the eye like this. She could have done it with nothing on. She wouldn’t have been ashamed of a single thing.

Across the ring, beyond the throne, Anna had begun to walk. She came out from the far edge without hurry, across the ash toward the woman caught in Katherine’s grip, with her hands open at her sides.

Chloe pulled the thread.

It came loose in one long, easy pull, the whole length of it, and the sweater gave something up as it went. Her chest opened. Her throat opened. The words were there, all of them, waiting.

She lifted her head off the ash with the cold flames round her brow, and she looked across the ring at the man on the throne, and she spoke to him over the whispers in a voice that carried to the far rim.

“Nergal! You don’t know who you’re looking at.”

The whispers didn’t stop. Her voice simply went over them, clear and level.

“Every woman on this line came to this island alone, one way or another. Every one of us. Some of us were broken before we got here, and some of us got broken long before then, and none of us had anybody. I know, because I was one of them. We were each sitting alone in a room nobody visited, waiting to find out we didn’t matter.”

She took a breath, as if she had all the time in the world. Nobody cut into it.

“And then we found each other. Here. In this place. Not because anybody made us, and not because we were told to. We found each other one at a time, and we stayed. We sat up with each other. We held each other’s hands in the dark. We are a family now.”

Nergal’s face turned from Laura to her. His mouth opened.

Chloe went on speaking, and nothing came out of him.

At the far end of the line, Emily turned her face toward Nergal and kept it there.

“Look at us,” Chloe told him. “Look at what you laid down in the dirt. Look hard.”

---

Anna walked the last stretch of scorched ground with her hands open at her sides.

Twice already tonight she had walked out like this, calling, and nobody had answered. So she kept her hands where they could be seen, palms out, empty, as anyone comes up on a creature that has been hurt for a long time, and she walked.

She had left Arabella at the far edge of the ring with her hand shut over the old scar. The way across had taken Anna past the throne and past the three kneeling in front of it, strained out in their chains toward each other, every hand open, every hand short. She had passed within ten steps of him. He had not turned his head. His face was on Chloe.

Chloe’s voice went over the whole ring, clear and level, over the whispers and the howling and the wind that was not there.

“You walked into our wedding and looked at us like a shelf of things to take down. We’re not things. Every one of us has a name.”

The whispers turned to Anna before she was halfway.

“—here, on the ash, with your hands open like that—”

“—at his feet, where they taught you to kneel—”

Warm stone under her knees, a long time ago, and her eyes down where she had been told to keep them.

“—in the flats, in the dark, roped to nobody—” “—last of all, the only one left who knows our names—”

That one she stopped on, for half a step. It was the only one of them she believed.

At the line, Katherine shook. The drain was still going through her. The Fourteen were coming down along the line in long cold passes, through Katherine and through Chloe and through the three beyond them, and every pass took something with it. Katherine’s lips were blue. She had one of them caught on her body, held low over the ash, and she had not let go. Anna did not know how she was doing it. She was doing it.

Beside her lay Chloe, with a ring of pale, cold fire round her brow and her head lifted off the ash, speaking to the throne.

“Their names are Laura,” Chloe said. “And Myra. And Riley. Say them. You’ve never once said them.”

The one Katherine held was Ninbanda. Anna had recognized her at the reception from across the whole Hall. She knew her now from ten steps off, in the dark, with her face twisted up in rage and pain. As Anna came on she twisted in Katherine’s hold and howled at her, a long, raw, wordless sound, and the drain went through Katherine again and shook her from head to foot.

Anna stopped an arm’s length from the line and did not reach out.

“Ninbanda,” she said, softly. “Puabi. Sabit. Silili. Nisaba. Ninki.”

Behind her Chloe had said three names to him. Anna said six, in the order she had said them first at the Arches, to the one in front of her and to the wheel overhead and to nobody, all at once.

“My sisters.”

Ninbanda’s hands uncurled from Katherine’s shoulder, finger by finger, and hung open in the air. Her mouth closed on the howl.

Anna knew that face. She had seen it laughing. An evening early in that first season, before any of them knew what kind of man they had been given to: the six of them on the steps above the warm shallows with their feet in the water, Anna a step below them with Alla’s head on her shoulder, a bowl of dates going down the row, and Ninbanda laughing so hard at something Puabi said that she had to hold on to Sabit to keep from going into the river. She had laughed with her whole body. She had not known how to do it any other way.

Overhead, four of the Fourteen broke off their passes. They came down out of the wheel and hung at the line beside Ninbanda, close enough to touch, and Anna did not touch them. Puabi. Sabit. Silili. Ninki, slowest, her head coming round toward Anna, and staying.

They howled. It was not the howl they had brought into the Hall. It came back at her name for name, ragged and broken and answering.

“You can put us in the dirt,” Chloe was saying, under it and over it. “You can make us lie still. You can’t make us stop being theirs.”

Anna remembered the night Salura was carried back to the women’s house with her face turned the wrong color. The other five, plus Alla and herself, had sat up with her on the floor of the long room until morning. Ninki held her head. Sabit kept the cloth wet. Silili sang to her the whole night, the kind of song that was only ever for keeping someone company in the dark. Alla ensured she was warm. When Salura opened her eyes in the gray light, the first thing she found was seven faces bent over her. Anna had sat at Salura’s feet with Alla against her side and thought, clearly, that whatever he did to them he would never have this.

Nisaba came down last, slowly, alone, and hung beside the others with her ragged hair moving round her face. Then her howl changed. It dropped, and steadied, and bent, until it was not a howl at all but a tune. Low. Wordless. A tune for working a field, the kind you hum to keep your hands moving and your feet in a line.

The breath went out of Anna. Her eyes filled with tears. “Nisaba,” Anna said. “It was you. Thank you.” Her voice broke and she did not stop. “For the hand in the dark. Thank you.”

Nisaba went on humming. Her eyes stayed on Anna’s while she did it.

Along the line, the drain stopped. The long cold passes broke off. Katherine’s body sagged against the ash, and her chest rose and fell. She found Anna above her and, only slightly, against the weight, she nodded. Overhead, the remaining seven slowed in their wheel, drifting, as if they had lost the thread of what they had been doing.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Chloe said. “I’m lying in the ash in an old sweater with my teeth chattering, and I’m not afraid of you.”

The six drew together in front of Anna. They did it without a sound, as they had once come down the steps to the water, and stood in a line before her: Ninbanda, Puabi, Sabit, Silili, Nisaba, Ninki. The original ones, with her and Alla, their hands hung open. Their hair settled round their faces as if the wind that was not there had dropped.

Anna watched the rage go out of them, slowly. It drained away now until there was none of it left. It left behind pain. Only pain, old and plain, and deeper than the rage had ever been. Then their eyes came to her. All six. They held on her and did not move. They could not speak. But they were asking.

Anna knew what they were asking for. There was a bond on each of them, his harem bond, tied in Dilmun and pulled tight ever since. She could not cut it. She had turned it over every hour since the Hall, and it was not hers to cut. Only his ending would end them. If he were destroyed, they would be let go, all of them, into a death that stayed death. Nothing she had would do that for them tonight.

But she could send them down.

Down to Irkalla, to Alla’s house, where the dead lay still and he could not call them up. Not forever. The bond would hold, and in time it would pull them back to him. But not soon. Years, it might be. In years, a great deal could happen to him. Someone might end him while they slept below. Then they would never have to come up again.

It was not rest. It was all she had.

“I cannot cut what binds you,” Anna told them. “I am sorry. I cannot. But I can send you down. To Alla’s house. Out of his reach, for a while. Go down, my sisters. Sleep. And if the world is kind while you sleep, you will not wake to him again.”

She turned her open hands over, palms to the ground, and said the old word for going down. Then she looked at them, her heart in her eyes. “I am sorry I could not save you. I love you, my sisters. I will never forget you.”

Under the six, the ash went dark. They sank into it slowly, upright, their faces turned up to her the whole way. Ninbanda’s mouth moved once, on no sound. Nisaba was humming. Anna heard the tune go down with her, lower and lower, into the ground, until the ash closed over the last of it and there was nothing in front of Anna but scorched earth and the cold.

She stood there with her hands still turned down and tears down her cheeks. The whisper had been right about one thing. She was the last one left above the ground who knew their names. This time she had chosen it.

A few feet along the line Chloe’s voice was still going, steady and unbroken, carrying over everything.

“Any one of us would be out there with them. Any one.”

Anna lifted her hands, and left them open at her sides, and turned toward the voice.