“You cannot run from me.”
The dancers part to let him through. Beneath his tattered coat, his skin is broken in a dozen places, one for every missing piece. The three soldiers follow in his wake, and the dancers close behind them and fall still.
“I know what they have told you. That this is a prison, and I am the prisoner. But they are wrong. I am not a monster to be caged.”
He catches Olivia’s bandaged hand.
“I am simply nature. I am the cycle. The balance. And I am inevitable. The way night is inevitable. The way death is inevitable.”
He runs a bony finger down the line of the cut across her palm.
“And you, my darling, are going to let me out.”
Olivia twists free, turns away, but there is nowhere to go. The dancers stand still as cell bars, the soldiers spaced between them.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
She turns back toward the voice as he tosses two bones onto the ballroom floor.
Olivia watches as the bits of bone twitch on the patterned wood and begin to grow. Each a seed, the ash twining up like weeds until it forms limbs, bodies, faces.
Until they are right there in the ballroom.
Her parents.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Even though their clothes are faded and their skin is pale, even though Olivia has just seen them conjured out of bone and dust, even though she knows that they are not really there, that they are dead, they look so solid.
So real.
Olivia stares up into another version of her mother’s face, not the girl in the portrait or the ghoul in the bed, but Grace Prior as she must have been when she first stole beyond the wall, in a summer dress that skims her knees, her hair braided up into a crown.
Look at me, thinks Olivia, willing her mother to meet her gaze, but she has eyes only for the other conjured shape. Her father. He stands several feet away, a helmet in his hands. He stares down into its metal face. And then his gaze drifts up and Olivia sees her own eyes staring back, her own charcoal hair curling across his brow, the pieces of herself she could never place.
“He was the first of my four shadows,” says the master of the house. “I made him. I made them all, of course, but he was my first. My favorite.”
Her father lifts the helmet and puts it on, the metal curving against his cheeks. And the master stares at him, anger etched across his face.
“The longer a shadow lives, the more it becomes . . . itself. The more it thinks for itself. Feels for itself.” He glances at the other three soldiers. “A lesson I’ve since learned.” His white eyes drag back toward her father. “He was stubborn, headstrong and proud. But he was still mine. And she took him.”
As he speaks, her parents begin to move like puppets in a play, drifting toward each other across the ballroom floor.
Why do you stay in that place?
Her mother lifts the helmet from his face. He takes it from her, sets it down. She pulls him close.
If I gave you my hand, would you take it?
Her father bows his head toward hers. She whispers in his ear.
Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.
He glances back at the master as her hand finds his. As she draws him in her wake.
I don’t know what it feels like, but I want to find out.
Don’t you?
And there is no garden wall, no conjured set, but Olivia knows what happens next.
We made it. We are free. And yet—
“And yet, puppets cannot live without their strings. I could have told her that.”
Olivia does not want to see what happens next. But she cannot look away.
Something is wrong, her mother wrote. And it is. In the room, her father stumbles, unsteady on his feet.
I can see you withering. I am afraid tomorrow I will see straight through you. I am afraid the next, you will be gone.
“I tried to tell her,” says the master of the house. “I whispered in her head. I shouted through her dreams. I told her she must bring him back to me. Or . . .”
Her father staggers, collapses to his hands and knees. His skin so thin over his bones, his body withering before her eyes.
Olivia rushes forward, but the master catches her wrist. “Watch.”
Her father looks up then, and for a moment, just a moment, his eyes meet hers, and he sees her, he sees her, she swears that he sees her. His mouth opens and closes, forming her name.
“Olivia,” he says, and it is the master’s voice, not his, but the sound of it still cracks her open, wraps cold hands around her heart.
And then, as she watches, as her mother watches, as they all watch, her father crumbles, a plume of ash by the time his body hits the floor.
“She should have brought him back to me.”
It wasn’t her father. She tells herself it wasn’t her father, just a mimic, an echo, but her hands are still shaking. The bit of bone sits in the puddle of ash.
“Perhaps I lost my temper then.”
Her mother stares in horror at the empty space. She sinks to her knees on the ballroom floor.
“I did not make you, but I made the thing that did, and I could feel you out there, like a piece of me. A missing bone. You are mine, and she refused to bring you home.”
Her mother presses her palms against her ears as if something is screaming inside her head.
Stop, thinks Olivia, as her mother folds forward, running her hands through her hair, the braided crown now loose, her body thin and brittle.
Stop.
“If she had only listened.”
STOP.
Her mother collapses back into dust, leaving only a sliver of bone on the ballroom floor. Olivia stares down at the ashes, hands clenching into fists. Tears burn her eyes, angry and hot.
And then, the master of the house does something worse.
He brings them back.
A flick of his thin fingers, and the ashes bloom around the bones again, until her parents are on their feet, exactly as they were before, her father reaching down to take up the helmet, her mother watching him with wonder. All the fear and horror has been wiped from their faces. They look to each other, as if for the first time, and the horrible play begins again.
Olivia tries to back away, only to feel armor plate against her shoulders. The wisp-thin soldier blocking her way.
“Do you know what you are, Olivia Prior? You are amends. You are atonement for your father’s defiance and your mother’s theft. You are a tithe, a gift, and you belong to me.”
Her parents drift together on the ballroom floor. Their hands entwine. Her mother leans in to whisper in her father’s ear. Olivia cannot stand to watch it all again.
Why are you doing this? she thinks, tearing her gaze away.
“This?” He sweeps a hand at the ash-born players, and they stop, mid-stride. “This is what I’m offering.”
Olivia shakes her head. She doesn’t understand.
“You are not just a Prior,” he says, stepping toward her. “Here, you are something more.” He looks down at her with those white eyes. “I can shape death,” he says, gesturing to the conjured figures. “But you can give it life.”
Understanding washes over her like cold water.
Her parents turn to look at her. Waiting.
“You belong here with your family. And for a drop of blood on an old iron door, you can have them back.”
Her father embraces her mother.