drift like seaweed. She sees braids and the hints of gowns, dresses from times long ago. They were no different than Katharine and Arsinoe once. Their ends no less unfair than Mirabella’s.
“They’re past saving,” Arsinoe murmurs, reading Katharine’s thoughts through their joined blood. “We have to banish them. Permanently.”
“Look out!” Pietyr cries as the body of Rho Murtra climbs over the battlements.
Not all of the queens gave her up after the mist was done with her. After it left her shredded and torn from a hundred cuts. After it hollowed her eyes. A few of them were clever, and suspicious. And after the mist had eased, they climbed back inside the dead priestess like a suit of armor.
Arsinoe flinches as the thing that used to be Rho raises an ax and brings it down hard on the stones. Katharine pulls her sister out of the way, and they fall against the rooftop, scuttling backward as the dead queens jerkily advance, clumsy inside the dead skin.
“What in the Goddess’s name is that?” Arsinoe asks.
Katharine clings to her as they stare wide-eyed at the horror Rho’s body has become.
“It must be stopped,” Katharine whispers, and Arsinoe lets go of her to carve another rune into her other hand.
Before Katharine can object, she darts forward, quick as a cat.
“No!” Katharine scrambles to her feet and moves to help, but Pietyr takes her shoulder.
“Please, Kat,” he says. “Let me.” He dashes past her and throws himself onto Rho’s corpse. A sound comes from deep inside the rotting, greening skin, almost like a wheeze, a bellow from lungs full of holes.
Frozen, Katharine watches as Arsinoe ducks the swing of an undead arm, trying to press her hand against the corpse’s forehead. Pietyr hauls the arm back, but he does not see Rho’s other arm swing hard with the ax.
“Stop!” Katharine shouts as it catches Arsinoe in a glancing blow, the blade slicing into the meat of her hip. It sends her flying, crashing to the stones, to roll all the way against the wall of the battlements. Katharine runs to her.
“You are bleeding.”
“Yes,” Arsinoe says, and grimaces as Katharine helps her up. She flexes her hands, squeezing more blood from the runes. “But I still have enough.” She takes a deep breath and heaves off away from the wall, leaping again for Rho’s corpse as Pietyr grapples with the dead queens who still hold fast inside it. They rake their undead fingernails down his perfect cheek and he growls and shouts in pain.
“Arsinoe, the ax!” Pietyr wraps his arm around Rho in a crushing embrace and Arsinoe kicks hard against the hand that holds it. She must kick twice more before the ax clatters to the stones.
“I need the head!” Arsinoe bares her teeth. But as she tries to reach it, seeking to climb Rho’s massive arm as if it is a tree branch, the corpse jerks its neck and connects with Pietyr skull to skull, sending him to the ground. Katharine holds her breath as Rho’s darkened, broken hand wraps around Arsinoe’s throat. She will see her sister’s windpipe crushed. See the life ebb out of her.
Katharine runs forward. In one fast, smooth motion, she scoops up the ax and swings hard, with a guttural howl. Then she blinks. The blade is buried in the corpse’s chest. As the dead queens stare at her in shock, Arsinoe rises and slams the rune into Rho’s dead forehead.
The last of the dead seep out, the corpse’s jaw hanging as if dislocated. It takes only a moment, and then it collapses into a pile of meat and empty eyes. Katharine, Arsinoe, and Pietyr stand over it, breathless.
“Don’t ever, ever make something like that again!” Arsinoe shouts at Katharine, and starts to laugh, bent over with one hand on her knee, the other pressed against the deep cut in her hip. Pietyr begins to chuckle, too. In the face of the reanimated Queensguard Commander, they have momentarily forgotten about the cloud of the dead hanging in the air.
But Katharine has not. Her eyes flicker to them as the dead queens contract, desperately holding themselves together. They need a queen in order to remain. They need a body. And they sense that Arsinoe has been weakened enough.
Katharine does not have time to warn her. She jumps to her feet and throws herself in front of Arsinoe as the dead queens dive for her throat. The impact of them knocks her off her feet. The brush of the battlement stones