Part 3The Omen in My Voice

Cassian's personal guard, Tobias Vance, hid me inside a side chamber of Hollowcrest Mausoleum.

Only after I'd stripped off the burial dress did I realize the cloth bundle I always carried was gone.

It held the urn with my mother's ashes.

I grabbed Tobias by the sleeve. "Where are my mother's remains?"

He looked startled. "You weren't carrying an urn when they brought you in."

Northcott Hall must have kept it to keep a grip on me.

I'd found a way out of the grave only to feel it close again.

Every humiliation, every swallowed grief, lodged in my throat.

I'd walk straight back into death before I left my mother in that house.

Tobias blocked the doorway.

"Lady Elara, don't do anything reckless."

I shoved him aside.

"Move. Before my mother died, she held my hand and made me promise to take her home to Veyra.

"Everything I've survived was for the chance to keep that promise."

Conflict crossed his face.

"The city's crawling with the Dowager Queen's informants."

Cassian coughed behind the curtain and came out, one hand braced against the doorframe.

Tobias dropped to one knee. "Your Majesty."

Cassian didn't stop me. He handed me a bronze authority token.

"The charity morgue outside the eastern gate. Go."

Then he added, "Northcott Hall will be there to identify a body and collect the reward."

I turned toward the exit. Cassian lifted one hand.

"Take two guards. Come back alive."

A Northcott carriage stood outside the morgue.

From behind a curtain, I heard Moira Northcott sobbing with extraordinary force.

"My poor Elara. She was baseborn, but I raised that girl with these two hands."

Beatrice covered the corner of her mouth with an embroidered handkerchief.

"Don't grieve, Mother. Elara's luck was cruel, but dying for the Crown is an honor."

Through the gap in the curtain I saw a woman's body under a white cloth.

My father, Cedric Northcott, stood nearby wearing an expression of deep sorrow while his eyes kept sliding toward the reward ledger in a palace official's hands.

Moira covered her nose and dropped her voice.

"The smell is unbearable.

"If I'd known, I'd have starved her a few days before we sent her off, so there'd be less filth in her."

Cedric warned her quietly.

"Keep your voice down. Don't let the palace men hear you."

Beatrice put out one polished shoe and kicked the covered corpse.

"She was a disaster alive, but at least she picked a useful time to die. Once the Dowager Queen pays out, I'll have a reason to enter the palace mourning rites."

Anger burned through me.

"Cry that falsely and your painted face will split open."

Moira screamed.

Powder peeled off her cheeks, showing the raw, scratched rash underneath.

Cedric recoiled and pointed at the corpse.

"The body's cursed. Get a priest. Bring salt and holy water."

Moira scrambled behind him and pulled my mother's urn out of her sleeve.

She held it over the burning brazier.

"Elara Northcott, I know your spirit's here.

"Show yourself, or there won't be a grain of your foreign mother left."

Reason snapped. I threw the curtain aside and ran into the yard.

"Give me my mother."

All three of them went white when they saw me alive.

To cover her fear, Moira pitched her voice loud enough for the crowd.

"You cursed creature. You're still alive?

"You killed Grandmother Adeline years ago, and now you've come back to destroy the rest of us."

I looked at her and laughed coldly.

"Did I really kill Adeline?

"She was poisoned for months with cinnabar stirred into her sleeping draught."

The morgue examiner was standing right there.

At those words he stepped over to the older set of bones laid out on the ground.

After a long inspection, his expression changed.

"These bones are darkened, and the residue in the joints matches long-term cinnabar poisoning."

My father's first instinct wasn't to investigate his own mother's murder.

His eyes went red as he waved the household guards forward.

"Shut that cursed girl's mouth before she spreads another lie."