THE SIX OF THEM—five living, one dead—walked through the velvety grass, making no attempt to disguise their gawking. Christopher kept his bone flute in his hand, fingers tracing silent arpeggios. Sumi stayed close to her daughter, bones clacking faintly, like the distant whisper of wind through the branches of a tree. Rini tried her best not to look back. Every time she caught a glimpse of Sumi she shuddered and bit her lip before looking away again.
Nadya reached up with her single hand and traced the outline of a pomegranate with her fingers, biting her lip and staring at the fruit like it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“Nancy said she spent most of her time as a statue in the Lady’s hall,” said Kade, pushing forward until he was in the lead. No one questioned him. It was good to have someone willing to be the leader. “I suppose that means she might be there now.”
“Is the Lord of the Dead going to be happy to see us?” asked Nadya, finally taking her hand away from the pomegranate.
“Maybe,” said Kade. “He’s got doors. He’s got to be used to people stumbling in without an invitation.”
“But you only find doors you’re suited to,” said Cora. “We didn’t find this one. We made it. Won’t he be upset about that?”
“Only one way to find out,” said Kade, and started walking.
“Why do people always say that?” muttered Cora, trailing along at the rear of the group. “There’s always more than one way to find something out. People only say there’s only one way when they want an excuse to do something incredibly stupid without getting called on it. There are lots of ways to find out, and some of them even involve not pissing off a man who goes by ‘the Lord of the Dead.’”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t be as much fun, now would they?”
Cora glanced to the side. Christopher had dropped back to walk beside her. He was grinning, looking more at ease than she had ever seen him.
“Why are you so happy?” she asked. “Everything here is dead people.”
“That’s why I’m so happy,” he said. “Everything here is dead people.”
Somehow, when he said it, it wasn’t a complaint, or even an observation: it was virtually a prayer, packed with hope and homecoming. This wasn’t his world, wasn’t Mariposa, and the only skeleton who danced here was poor Sumi. But it was closer than he had been in a long, long time, and she could see the joy coming back into his body with every step he took.
“Do you really want to be a skeleton?” she blurted.
Christopher shrugged. “Everybody’s a skeleton someday. You die, and the soft parts drop away, and what’s left behind is all beautiful bone. I just want to go back to a place where I don’t have to die to be beautiful.”
“But you’re not fat!” Cora couldn’t keep the horror from her voice. She didn’t even try. Growing up fat had meant an endless succession of diets suggested by “helpful” relatives, and even more “helpful” suggestions from her classmates, ones that suggested starvation or learning to vomit on command. She’d managed to dodge an eating disorder through luck, and because the swim team had needed her to stay in good shape: if her school hadn’t offered endurance swimming as well as speed, if she’d been expected to slim down to be allowed into the water, she would probably have joined the girls behind the gym, the ones who died slowly on a diet of ice chips, black coffee, and cigarettes.
“It’s not about fat or thin,” said Christopher. “It’s not … oh, fuck. You probably think this is about dieting, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for her to reply before he continued: “It’s not. It’s really not. Mariposa is a land of skeletons. As long as I have skin, as long as I’m like this, they can make me leave. Once the Skeleton Girl and I marry, once she cuts my humanity away, I can stay forever. That’s all I want.”
“That’s all any of us want,” admitted Cora.
“You were a mermaid, weren’t you? That’s what Nadya said.”
“I still am,” said Cora. “I just have my scales under my skin for now.”
Christopher smiled, a little lopsided. “Funny. That’s where I keep my bones.”
The pomegranate grove was coming to an end around them, the trees growing less frequent as they approached a high marble wall. There was a door there, tall and imposing, the sort of door that belonged on a cathedral or a palace; the sort of door that said “keep out” far more loudly than it would ever dream of saying “come in.” But it was standing open, and when they drew nearer, no one appeared to warn them off. Kade glanced back at the others, shrugged, and kept walking, leaving them no choice but to follow.
And then, with so little warning that Cora thought the people who lived here—who existed here—would be fully within their rights to be angry, they were in the Halls of the Dead.
The architecture was exactly what a thousand movies had told her to expect: marble pillars holding up impossible ceilings, white stone walls softened with friezes and with watercolor paintings of flowering meadows. The colors were muted, whites and pastel greens and grayish pines. They somehow managed not to become twee, but to project an air of solemnity and silence instead. The only sounds were their feet tapping against the stone floor, and the clacking of Sumi’s bones.
“You were not invited, and none of Our doors have opened, nor closed, in this last day,” said a woman from behind them: she was between them and the doorway that might have led them back to the pomegranate grove. Her voice was low and husky, like blackberry brandy given a throat. “Who are you? How are you here?”
Cheeks burning, feeling like a child who’d been caught sneaking to the kitchen for a midnight snack, Cora turned, and beheld the Lady of the Dead.
She was short and curvy, with skin the color of polished cypress and hair that fell down her back in a cascade of inky curls, stopping just below her waist. Her eyes were like pomegranate seeds, deep red and as impossible as Rini’s candy corn irises, yet just as undeniably real. Her gown was the same color, some loosely draped Grecian style that complimented every curve she had, and made Cora yearn for a fashion as forgiving.
“Well?” asked the Lady. “Have you all been struck silent by My presence? Or are you thinking of excuses? I suggest you not lie to Me. My husband has little patience for those who offer trespass and insult both in the same hour.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Kade, pushing his way forward. The relief from the rest of the group was almost palpable. Let someone else take the blame, if there was blame to take. “I know we came uninvited, but we weren’t sure how to ring the bell.”
“You taste of Fairyland, little hero,” said the Lady of the Dead, wrinkling her nose. “All of you taste of something that isn’t meant for here, all but him.” She pointed to Christopher. “Mirrors and Fairylands and Lakes. Even the skeleton tastes of Mirror. The taint lingers past death. You have no business ringing Our doorbell.”
“We’re here to beg a favor, ma’am,” said Kade doggedly. “This is Rini.”
Rini raised her hand in a small wave. She was down to a single finger and her thumb, and half of her palm had melted away, replaced by that same eye-burning nothingness.
“The skeleton is her mother, Sumi, who died before Rini could be born, and now Rini is, well, disappearing,” continued Kade. “One of our old classmates lives here with you. We were hoping she might be able to help us find where Sumi’s spirit went after she died, so that we can try to put her back together and keep Rini from disappearing altogether. Er. Ma’am.”
The Lady of the Dead’s eyes widened fractionally. “You’re Nancy’s friends,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not,” said Nadya. “I’m a Drowned Girl.”
“So you are,” said the Lady of the Dead. She gave Nadya a thoughtful look. “You went to one of the Drowned Worlds, the underground lakes, the forgotten rivers. Many of them touch on Our borders. They aren’t Underworlds, but they’re under the rest of the world.”
Nadya paled. “You know how to get to Belyyreka?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“I didn’t say that,” said the Lady. “We have no power over the Drowned Worlds. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—open a door there if you asked Me. But I know the place. It’s beautiful.”
“It is,” agreed Nadya, and started to cry.
The Lady of the Dead turned back to Kade. “You come uninvited, to trouble a handmaiden who still stings from her time in your company. Why should We grant you an audience with her? Why should We grant you anything at all?”
“Because Nancy told us you were kind,” said Christopher. He was staring at her in quiet awe, like he hadn’t seen anything so beautiful in years. “She said you never made her feel like she was broken just because she was different. You and your husband, you’re the reason she wanted to come back here and stay forever. You made this place home. I can’t imagine anyone who’d be that kind to Nancy could be cruel enough not to help us.”
“Mariposa, wasn’t it, for you?” asked the Lady, looking thoughtful. “So many different doors, and yet here you are, all of you together, trying to accomplish the impossible. I’ll let you talk to Nancy.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Kade.
“Don’t thank me yet,” said the Lady. “There are conditions. Eat nothing; drink nothing. Speak to no one save for Myself, My husband, and Nancy. The living who choose to spend their years in these halls do so because they’re looking for quiet, for peace, for solitude. They don’t need you reminding them that they were hot and fast once. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kade. The others nodded, even Rini, who looked more confused than anything else. She was doing an excellent job of holding her tongue. For a Nonsense girl in a world full of rules, that was just this side of a miracle.
“Good,” said the Lady. “This way.”
She turned then, and walked back into the door to the grove, leaving the rest of them to follow.
* * *
THE TREES WERE GONE. In their place was a long hall, the sort that belonged in a palace or a museum, its walls lined with statues, all of them standing beautifully still in their frost-white draperies. No, not statues—people. People of all ages, from children barely old enough to have shed their infant proportions to men and women older than Eleanor, their faces seamed with wrinkles, their limbs thinned out by time and trials. There was a certain vitality around them that betrayed their natures, but apart from that, they might as well have been the carved stone they worked so hard to imitate.
Rini shuddered, stepping a little closer to Kade, like she thought he could protect her. “How can they hold so still?” she whispered, voice horrified and awed. “I’d twitch myself into pieces.”
“That’s why this was never your door,” he said. “We don’t go where we’re not meant to be, even if we sometimes get born the wrong place.”
“There was a boy,” said Rini. “When I was small. His parents mined fudge from the northern ridge. He didn’t like the smell of chocolate, or the way it melted on his tongue. He wanted to be clean, and to follow rules, and to understand. He disappeared the year we all started school, and his parents were sad, but they said he’d found his door, and if he was lucky, he’d never come back, not ever, not once.”
Kade nodded. “Exactly. Your mother and I were born in the same world, and it wasn’t right for either of us, so we went somewhere else.” He didn’t ask what sort of lessons would be taught at school in a Nonsense world. His own world had been Logical, and what made perfect sense to Rini wouldn’t make any sense at all to him.
The people on their pedestals and set back in niches in the walls said nothing, did nothing to show that they were even aware that anyone was nearby. The Lady kept walking, and the rest of them kept following, until she reached a pair of wide marble doors. Leaning forward, she tapped them ever so gently with the tip of her left forefinger, and stood back as they swung open to reveal a room that was half cathedral and half cavern.
The walls were naked gray stone, unshaped, unworked, sweeping upward to a crystal-studded bell of a natural vault. Lights hung from the ceiling, their bases set between great spikes of purple amethyst and silvery quartz, and the floor was polished marble, creating a strange melding of the natural and the manmade.
At the center of the room, well away from any of the walls, was a freestanding dais. Two thrones rested atop it, and short pedestals surrounded it, three to either side, each holding one of the living statues.
The statue closest to the door was Nancy.
Nancy at peace: Nancy in her element. She stood tall and calm and strong, one arm raised in a graceful arc, her chin canted slightly toward the ceiling, calling attention to the delicate line of her neck, the organic sculpture of her collarbone. She wore a long white gown, like so many of the other statues, but unlike them, there was a wine-red, pomegranate-red ribbon tied around her neck, casting the rest of her into monochrome relief. Someone had styled her white and black hair, arranging it so that the black streaks left by the Lord of the Dead’s fingers were perfectly displayed, like the badge of honor that they were.
Christopher whistled low. “Damn, girl,” he said.
Kade said nothing. He only stared.
Both thrones were currently empty. The Lady of the Dead led them toward the dais, stopping when they reached Nancy, who must have been aware of their presence, but who did nothing to betray that knowledge.
“Nancy,” said the Lady softly. “Please move for Me. You have company.”
Nancy moved like frost melting: slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, and then with more speed, until she finished lowering her arm and chin and turned with something approaching, yet far greater than, human grace. She allowed herself to look at the people clustered around the base of her pedestal, and her eyes widened, ever so slightly.
“Kade,” she said. “Christopher … Nadya?” She looked at the others without recognition. “What are you all doing here? Is everything all right? Are you…” She stopped herself. “No, you’re not dead. If you were dead, you wouldn’t be here.”
“We’re not dead,” said Kade, and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Nancy.”
“It’s good to see you too.” She glanced to the Lady of the Dead, seeking permission. The Lady nodded, and Nancy dropped to her knees, sliding into a graceful kneeling position atop her pedestal. It was a practiced, easy motion; she had done this before. “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye.”
“I don’t think most of us would,” said Kade. “You happy?”
Nancy’s smile was brief but brilliant. Artists would have died for the chance to paint that moment of pure, unfettered bliss. “Always.”
“Then all is forgiven.” Kade gestured for Rini to step forward. “This is Rini. Sumi’s daughter.”
“What?” Nancy’s expression faded into puzzlement at the mention of her former roommate. “Sumi didn’t have children. She was too young. She would have told me.”
“She was supposed to come back to Confection and save the world and get married and make a baby,” said Rini. She held up her arm. Her hand was entirely gone now; her flesh ended at the wrist, and at the tear her disappearance was leaving in reality. “She needs to stop being dead and come home and have sex until I exist again!”
“Um,” said Nancy, looking nonplussed.
“This is Sumi,” said Christopher, gesturing to the shimmering skeleton beside him. “We were hoping you might know where the rest of her is.”
“You mean her ghost?” asked Nancy.
“Yes,” said Christopher.
Sumi said nothing, but she cocked her shining skull to the side in a gesture that was a pale shadow of her constant curious motion before she had died, her skin and flesh stripped away, leaving her in silence.
“Even if…” Nancy glanced to the Lady, who nodded permission. “Even if I could find Sumi’s ghost for you, even if she was here, how would you put her back together? You’d still be missing all the … squishy bits.”
“Let us worry about that,” said Kade.
Nancy looked to the Lady again. Again, the Lady nodded her assent. Nancy looked back to the others.
“Not all ghosts come here,” she said. “This isn’t the only Underworld. She could be in a thousand places, or she could be nothing at all. Sometimes people don’t want to linger, and so they just disappear.”
“Can we try?” asked Kade. “It seems like dying when you still had a world to save might be cause enough to stick around for a little while. And you were roommates when she was alive. Sumi never did like to be alone.”
“Even if you can find her ghost, that’s just the part of her that’s waiting to be reborn,” said Nancy. “Who she was isn’t going to be here.”
“We have to try,” said Rini. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
Nancy sighed, a deep, slow sound that started at her toes and traveled all the way up her body. She uncurled her legs and slid down from her pedestal, landing without a sound. As she fell, her skirt rode up just enough for Kade to see that her feet were bare, and that there was a ring on every one of her toes, shimmering and silver.
“Follow me,” she said, and bowed to the Lady, and walked away. Every step she took chimed like a bell as the rings on her toes struck the ground.
Kade followed her, and the rest followed him, and they left the remaining statues and the Lady of the Dead behind.
* * *
KADE STOLE GLANCES at Nancy as they walked, trying to memorize the new shape of her face. She was thinner, but not alarmingly so; this was the thinness of a professional athlete at the top of their game, the thinness of someone who did something physical every hour of the day. Her hair was still white, her eyes were still dark, and she was still beautiful. God, but she was beautiful.
Nadya shoved her way between them, demanding, “So is that all you do all day? You stand there? You left a whole world full of shit to do and people to talk to so you could stand there?”
“It’s more than just standing there,” said Nancy. “Hello, Nadya. You’re looking well.”
“I’m drying out, and this world has no good rivers,” said Nadya.
“We have a few.” Nancy shook her head. “I don’t ‘just stand there.’ It’s like a dance, done entirely in stillness. I have to freeze so completely that my heart forgets to beat, my cells forget to age. Some of the statues have been here for centuries, slowing themselves to the point of near-immortality for the sake of gracing our Lord’s halls. It’s an honor and a calling, and I love it. I love it so much.”
“It seems stupid.”
“That’s because you weren’t called,” said Nancy, and that was true, and simple, and complete: it needed neither ornamentation nor addition.
Nadya looked away.
Kade took a breath. “Things have been going well at the school,” he said. “Aunt Eleanor’s feeling better. She hardly uses her cane these days. We have some new students.”
“You brought one of them with you,” said Nancy. She laughed a little. “Is it weird that I kind of feel like that’s more disturbing than you bringing a skeleton?”
“Her name’s Cora. She’s nice. She was a mermaid.”
“Then she still is,” said Nancy. “There’s always hope.”
“Sumi used to say that hope was a four-letter word.”
“She was right. That’s why it never goes away.” They had reached another closed door, this one a filigree of silver, containing an infinity of blackness. Nancy raised her hand. The door swung open and she continued through, into the dark—which was, once entered, not so total after all.
Gleaming silver sparks swirled through the air, darting and flitting around the room, as swift and restless as the rest of the Halls of the Dead were still. They would fly close to a nose or a cheek, only to jerk away at the last second, never quite touching living flesh.
Rini gasped. Everyone turned.
Sumi was covered in the dots of light. They clustered on her bones, hundreds of them, with more arriving every second. She was holding up her skeletal hands like she was admiring them, studying the shimmering specks of light that perched on her phalanges. Dots of light had even filled her eye sockets, replacing her empty gaze with something disturbingly vital.
“If she’s here, she’s one of these,” said Nancy, spreading her arms to indicate the room. “The souls who come to rest here arrive in this room first. They dance their restlessness away before they incarnate again. Call her, and see if she comes.”
“Christopher?” said Kade.
“I play for skeletons, not souls,” protested Christopher, even as he raised his flute to his mouth and blew a silent, experimental note. The specks of light abandoned Sumi, rising into the air and swirling wildly around him. He continued to play, until, bit by bit, some of the light peeled away and returned to the air, while some of the light began to coalesce in front of Sumi’s skeleton. Bit by bit, particle by particle, it came together, until the glowing, translucent ghost of a teenage girl was standing there.
She wore a sensible school uniform, white knee socks, plaid skirt, and buttoned blazer. Her hair was pulled into low braids, tamed, contained. It was Sumi, yes, but Sumi rendered motionless, Sumi stripped of laughter and nonsense. Rini gasped again, this time with pain, and raised her remaining hand and the stump of what had been its twin to cover her mouth.
The specter of Sumi looked at the skeleton. The skeleton looked at the specter.
“Why is she like that?” whispered Rini. “What did you do to my mother?”
“I told you, we have her ghost, but not her shadow—not her heart. Her heart was a wild thing, and this isn’t where the wild things go,” said Nancy. “If it were, I wouldn’t be here. I was never a wild thing.” She looked at the shade of Sumi with regret and, yes, love in her eyes. “We’re all puzzle boxes, skeleton and skin, soul and shadow. You have two of the pieces now, if she’ll go with you, but I don’t think her shadow’s here.”
“Mama…” The word belonged to the lips of a much younger girl, meant for bedtimes and bad times, for skinned knees and stomach aches. Rini offered it to Sumi’s shade like it was a promise and a prayer at the same time, like it was something precious, to be treasured. “I need you. Please. We need you. The Queen of Cakes will rise again if you don’t come home.”
The Queen of Cakes would never have been defeated: Sumi had died before she could return to Confection and overthrow the government. Rini wasn’t just saving herself. She was saving a world, setting right what was on the verge of going wrong.
The carefully groomed shade of Sumi looked at her blankly, uncomprehending. Nancy, who understood the dead of this place in a way that none of the others did, cleared her throat.
“It will make a mess if you don’t go with them,” she said.
The shade turned to look at her before nodding and stepping forward, into the skeleton, wreathing the bones in phantom flesh. Rini started to reach for her with her sole remaining hand, and stopped as she saw that two more of her fingers were gone, fading into nothing at all.
“We have to hurry,” she said.
“You have to pay,” said a new voice.
All of them turned as one. Only Nancy smiled when she saw the man standing in the doorway. He was tall and thin, with skin the color of volcanic ash and hair the color of bone. Like his wife, he wore a flowing garment, almost Grecian in design, which drew the eye to the length of his limbs and the broadness of his shoulders.
“Nothing here is free,” he said. “Eat nothing, drink nothing; visitors are told that upon arrival. What makes you think we would give our treasures away, if we will not share our water?” His voice was deep, low, and inevitable, like the death of stars.
“What do you need us to pay, sir?” asked Kade warily.
The Lord of the Dead looked at him with pale and merciless eyes. “One of you will have to stay behind.”