THE HOLLOW QUEEN RETURNS

The river was cold, and the cold was the first thing she understood, because the dead do not feel cold and she had been dead a very long time.

She came up through black water with her mouth already open. The Aske poured into her, silt and iron and the green rot of weed, and a body she did not know seized around it and heaved. Lungs. She had lungs. They burned like lamp oil. Her hands, which were not her hands, clawed at nothing and then at something slick and stone, and her fingernails bent back against it, and the pain was so bright and so small and so specific that she nearly laughed, which let in more river.

Stairs. They were stairs. River stairs cut into an embankment wall, green with slime, running down into the water for the boatmen who no longer used them at night. She got one elbow onto the lowest step and then the other, and dragged the rest of the stranger’s body after her, and lay with her cheek on the wet stone vomiting up the Aske until there was nothing left in her but air and shaking.

Air. She lay and breathed it. It went in cold and came out warm, and she could see it come out, a little ghost of her own heat hanging over the stone in the lamplight, and she watched the ghost form and fade and form again, and could not stop watching.

Six hundred years. She did not yet know it was six hundred. She knew only that it had been long, the way a sleeper knows a night has been long by the stiffness in her bones, and that the last thing she remembered was fire.

She turned her head.

Above her rose the embankment wall, and above that a bridge, broad-backed and many-arched, with iron lanterns hung at intervals along its parapet. Beyond the bridge the sky. It was clear, and black, and there were stars in it.

She had seen stars before. She had seen them the way the dead see everything in the living world, through the Veil, as a drowned woman sees the sun through fathoms of water: blurred, colorless, flattened into a rumor of light. She had pressed her palm to the inside of that glass for five hundred years and looked out at the living stars and tried to imagine what they were really like.

They were sharp. That was the thing no one had told her. They were not soft at all. They were hard little nails of white driven into the black, and some of them were faintly blue and one low over the rooftops was faintly red, and they trembled, because the air between her and them was moving, because the air was real. A wind came off the river and she felt it lift the soaked hair from her neck.

She said, aloud, in a voice she had never heard, “Oh.”

The voice was young. It was hoarse from the water and a little high, with the flat vowels of the river city in it, and it belonged to someone else. She put her hand to her throat to feel it move and found, instead, the bruises.

They ran all the way round. She could feel them under her fingertips, tender, raised, the particular swollen ridges a man’s thumbs leave when he presses them in and holds. Somebody had held this throat under the water until it stopped working. Somebody had done it recently. The skin was still hot.

She sat up.

It was not easy. The body did not know her, and every instruction she gave it arrived a heartbeat late, as though translated. Heartbeat. There was one. She pressed her hand flat to the wet wool over the breastbone and felt it going, fast and ragged, a small animal throwing itself against the bars. She had not had a heartbeat since before the Hollow had a name.

She looked down at herself. A dark wool dress, soaked black, the hem torn. Stockings, one shoe. Ink on the side of the right hand, old ink worked into the skin at the knuckle of the middle finger the way it only works in when someone writes all day. Narrow wrists. Long hair, brown or perhaps red, impossible to tell wet, full of weed.

“Who are you?” she asked the hands. “Who did this to you?”

The hands did not answer. But somewhere under the cold and the shaking there was a flicker, the faintest candle-end of another life still warm in the wax. A name almost said. A street. The smell of bread.

And under that, as she reached for it, something else. Not the girl. Her own. It came up out of her like the river had, all at once and choking.

Fire. White fire, blue at its heart, pouring into her chest. A man’s voice saying hold still, it is nearly done. And a door behind her, a door she had kept barred for five hundred years, standing open.

She bent over and pressed her forehead to her knees until it passed.

When she lifted her head again, a man was standing on the bridge.

He was looking down at her from the parapet directly above the river stairs, between two of the iron lanterns, so that he was lit from both sides and his face hung in the dark like a coin. A heavy face, clean-shaven, fortyish. A white cloak with a silver lamp worked on the shoulder. A sword. He was holding the parapet with both hands, and even from below and in that poor light she could see that his knuckles had gone pale.

He was staring at her the way the living used to stare into their own bedroom corners after she had passed through their dreams.

Then she did something she would not have been able to do with her own sight: she looked at him properly. It came to her the way reaching for a word comes, without deciding. The dark softened and his body went thin as smoke, and in the middle of him she could see the light of him, the small flame every living thing carries in its chest. His was low and yellowish and muddied, like a candle set in a dirty glass. And there were stains on it. Fresh ones. A smear of green river-dark, and on top of the smear, like a thumbprint, the shape of this girl’s fear.

Oh, she thought. It was you.

His lips moved. She could not hear it over the river, but she had watched a great many terrified people say the same thing, and she read it easily. No.

She stood up.

The body did not want to. But she had governed the restless dead for five centuries, and she had a long acquaintance with things that did not want to do what she told them. She put one bare foot on the next stair and then the other, and climbed, and kept her eyes on him the whole time.

He broke first. She heard his boots on the bridge, going fast, and then running.

She reached the top of the stairs and stood swaying on the embankment path with her hand on the cold wall, and the city opened around her.

Slate roofs, steep and wet, climbing a hill. A hundred chimneys. A single bell striking an hour she did not count. And above it all, rising from the crown of the hill, one tower taller than the rest, and at its very top a light.

The light was silver-blue.

She stared at it. The cold went out of her body, for one instant, and something else came in.

Behind her, very softly, the river said her name.

She did not turn. She knew the voice of the Hollow when she heard it, and she knew it was not the river talking. It was the other side of the water, the other side of the Veil, the side she had ruled, calling her home in the patient way it called everyone.

And standing on the embankment in a murdered girl’s body with the Lamp burning at the top of the hill, Morwenna, once Queen of the Hollow, understood that something on that side was watching her, and had been since she opened her eyes, and was very, very close.

She let the body lead.

It was the only map she had. When she stopped trying to steer and simply walked, the feet chose their own turnings, left off the embankment, up a flight of worn steps between two warehouses that smelled of hides and tar. The body knew these stones. It knew where one of them rocked underfoot and stepped around it without asking her. She found that she was crying a little, and could not tell whose tears they were.

The watchman’s bell rang two. She passed no one but a cat and a man asleep in a doorway with a bottle in his lap. Once a cart went by on the cross street, and she flattened herself against a wall until its lantern swung out of sight, and felt ridiculous doing it. She had frightened armies once. She had walked through the dreams of kings. Now she hid from a cart.

The street narrowed. A painted sign hung from an iron bracket, creaking: a loaf and a candle. Below it a green door with a brass knocker in the shape of a hand.

The body