Chapter One
Even in death, Celia Carlyle was beautiful. Sculpted features backed by a pool of blue-black hair gave her an unearthly appearance and long eyelashes stood dark against skin that was likely pale before death.
Ward pushed his copper-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his nose as he considered the young woman swathed in silk sheets on a monstrous canopy bed. Because of her beauty, her death must have been an emotional, political, and possibly financial blow to the family. But that was none of his concern. He was here for his own emotional, political, and financial gain.
He tugged on his red velvet physician’s jacket and brushed a quick hand along his hairline to ensure his curled and powdered wig was straight. Despite the slight breeze that blew in from the open windows, Brawenal City’s summer nights were too hot for such things, but he had an appearance to maintain and a job to do.
Setting his bag at her feet, he leaned in to better examine her face. In his summons, her father, Lord Carlyle, had said she had died of a sudden illness, but there was no abnormal discoloration on her cheeks or around her eyes, nor any dried mucus around her lips or nose, which would have suggested an imbalance of her yellow bile.
Ward reached out to push back an eyelid, but stopped himself in time. This was not a necropsy on a body he’d stolen from a graveyard. He hadn’t been hired to determine her cause of death. This was a wake. All the family–the powerful family–waited a wing away for word that they could have their final fifteen minutes with a beautiful and cherished daughter. And besides, when he woke her he could just as easily ask what her symptoms were before and during the illness–even if that was cheating.
With that decided, he opened his bag and removed a vial of cow’s blood. He eased the stopper from the vial, dipped his little finger into the dark liquid, and drew an open goddess-eye on her forehead. He imagined the power of the cow’s spirit igniting the innate gift within him. His grandfather said it felt as if the entire body tingled with pins-and-needles, but Ward had never experienced the sensation. He was blind to it, unable to sense the ebb and flow of life energy, but still able to manipulate it. Perhaps that was why he struggled to perform anything more difficult than a wake.
Or better yet, he wasn’t destined to be a necromancer, but a surgeon. Surgery, however, had yet to be made legal, and his expulsion from the physician’s academy had ended his prospects at being a doctor.
And with that thought he resigned himself, yet again, to his situation. He placed his left hand over her heart and his right hand on her forehead then closed his eyes. He called on knowledge from the Light Son, power over the dead from the Dark Son, and grace and well-being from the Goddess. He envisioned the veil between worlds, a gauzy film of writhing mist–or so his grandfather said–opening, and the spark of her spirit flying through back to her body.
She gasped. Icy blue eyes flew open and examined him, her gaze jumping from his face, to his wig, to his jacket, and back to his face. Then her eyes narrowed and her hand snaked under her pillow.
“It’s not wise to enter a lady’s bedchamber without her consent,” she said.
Ward plastered on his calmest, gentlest expression. The newly-wakened dead often assumed they had just roused from sleep. “You’ve been unwell.”
“Unwell? Hardly. Is that what my father told you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” She wasn’t acting the way she was supposed to. Noblewomen were demure or haughty. They weren’t suspicious.
“Well, I’m fine, and I’m sorry my father troubled you.” She threw back the covers and stepped onto a thick rug. “Now go, be a good doctor, and tell my family I’m healthy and sleeping.” She punctuated her last word by pulling her nightdress over her head, revealing a slim waist, athletic muscles, pale skin marked with the purple bruises of livor mortis along her back, and no other clothes.
“But. . . .” He flushed and spun around to face the wall. “What are you doing?” No. Wait. What was he doing? He’d seen a dead naked woman before. Just never like this.
She chuckled. “I’m going for a walk.”
“A what? No– You can’t.” Now she really wasn’t acting the way she was supposed to.
“I beg to differ.”
The situation was spiraling out of hand and he had no idea how it had gotten there. Damn it, he had to take control. He was the necromancer, she the newly awakened, she was supposed to listen to him.
He turned to confront her. Thankfully, she was fully dressed–in men’s clothes, but at least she was dressed. “Listen, I–”
She slipped her hand under her pillow and removed a sheathed dagger.
Great Goddess! She kept a dagger under her pillow. What had he gotten himself into? He inched toward the door to block her escape without appearing obvious, although he had no idea what he’d do if she fought him. Why did he have to be stuck with the difficult corpses? His grandfather never mentioned anything about noblemen’s daughters with daggers insisting that they were alive.
She shoved her feet into well-worn boots, grabbed a bulging rucksack from a nearby chair, and headed to the window and not the door.
He scrambled after her. “No, wait.” His voice cracked and he gulped air, doing nothing to still his rising panic.
She pushed open a window and hopped over the sill into the shadow of a lilac bush.
“Please. Stop. You’re dead.”
“I don’t feel dead,” she said over her shoulder in a singsong voice as she eased through the leafy branches.
He scurried out the window and crashed through the bush to keep her in sight but tripped over an ornamental rock covered in dark moss, landing on his hands and knees in the coarse grass at her feet. The sharp chirp of crickets and the high-pitched buzz of cicadas suddenly stopped, leaving his ears ringing at the silence. Behind her was the dark rim of a reflecting pool, its semi-circle pressed against the stone wall of the tiny garden and guarded by red and white roses.
“You took ill,” he said, before she could climb the garden wall.
“Ill?”
He nodded.
“You were sick. Do you remember?”
She stared at him as if unable to understand. His heart pounded and he waited for her to say something, anything. Instead, her expression stunned, she sagged onto the rim of the pool.
A breeze rustled the leaves on the rose bushes, making them hiss and sigh, whispering secrets.
“Then they’ve done it already.”
“Done what?”
“Killed me.”
A cricket gave a shrill chirp as if to punctuate her words.
“Excuse me?” What an insensitive thing to say. She’d just said she’d been murdered.
Her expression softened. She knelt before him and cupped his chin in her hands. “I need your help.”
“You what?” He’d barely worked his mind around the thought that she was murdered, and now she wanted help, his help. No, no. This was all wrong. She was all wrong. One moment she was suspicious, the next begging for help.
But her bottom lip quivered. She was so close her breath caressed his forehead and her subtle heady perfume intoxicated him. Was it roses or lilacs? It was so difficult to keep his thoughts straight. He’d never had such a beautiful woman pay this kind of attention to him before–or any attention to him, for that matter.
“Please. The Goddess sent you to me, she must have.” She grabbed his hand and held it tight. “There isn’t much time. My father will discover we’re gone and. . . .” A single tear traced a line down her cheek.
He felt miles away from his body, but her words didn’t seem real, there was something wrong with them, he just couldn’t concentrate enough to figure out what that was. Perhaps he didn’t want to believe she’d been murdered. It seemed preposterous that she would ask him for help, regardless that he really was the only one around.
“You were ill,” he said, one final, weak protest.
“I wasn’t, and you know it. Do I look ill?”
He shook his head, although she also didn’t look as if she’d been beaten, or strangled, or stabbed. Some illnesses showed no signs or symptoms, but as soon as he thought it he knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t know how, he just did.
“Please. My father is sly,” she said as if reading his thoughts. “Probably a rare poison, but I need proof.” Her eyes begged him to say yes and he didn’t know if he could resist any more of her pleas.
“But you’ll only be awake for fifteen minutes.” It broke his heart to say it, but it was the truth.
“I can prove it.” Her eyes shimmered with more tears.
Goddess, how could he say no?
He swallowed. She was just so beautiful and so desperate, he had to do something. “There is another spell, a Jam de’U.”
“Then cast that.”
“It requires time and components.” That, and he’d never attempted it before. He didn’t know if he could cast it, but he had to try.
An angry yell from within the house startled him, breaking the spell between them. “What am I saying? If I’m caught–”
She pressed his palm to her cheek, her eyes wide and filled with fear. “Please. You have to believe me. I’m the only one who can bring me justice. My father is too powerful.”
Could she really prove her own murder? This was ridiculous. She had to go back to her room. If they found her in the garden they’d accuse him of body stealing. He reached for the goddess-eye brand on the back of his neck. It burned with remembered pain. Was there room for another Inquisitor’s brand or would he lose a body part this time?
“If you’re a doctor, too, then you’ve taken the Oath.”
He nodded, not understanding her words.
“Then I ask you on your Physician’s Oath.”
His breath caught in his throat. Not the Oath. Did it apply when the person was already dead? It said he couldn’t refuse any soul in need, but he didn’t think the Master Physicians had meant soul in a literal sense. Of course they didn’t have the mystic senses of a necromancer. Would the Goddess see the distinction when it was his turn to cross over? If he refused her and her soul counted as part of his oath, he’d face an eternity of torture for being an oath-breaker.
“Don’t let me die a tormented soul.” She stood and met his gaze. Her eyes were still desperate, but there was a hardened determination there as well.
His heart contracted. He was ten times a fool and there was nothing to be done about it.
He nodded. Up down. Side to side. It didn’t matter. He followed as she climbed the garden wall, his hands finding holds in the stone, his body, of its own volition, dragging him up and over. All the while his mind, like a chorus in a mummer’s tragedy, jeered and moaned the end of his career on the slim chance he’d saved his eternal soul.