Azria Evermoore's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

The last corpse settled into its grave. Azria stood over the pit with the chained chest in her arms. Mortimer wiped his shovel and turned toward the iron gate. He wanted them gone. But the gravedigger had said something in the fight, and Azria had not forgotten it. He knew the man who buried this box. He had watched the maker work. "You saw him," she said. "The man who wore my stone. You spoke to him." Mortimer stopped. His tired eyes went to the chest, then away. "I bury the dead. I don't tell their secrets to strangers." He leaned on the shovel. "Take your box and go." Ash sheathed his blade. He said nothing. He watched Azria the way he always did, waiting to see what she would trade. She had one thing the old man might want. She unfastened the sealed black book from her pack. Its cover was sewn shut with red cord, the pages locked beneath foreign letters. "He made this too," she said. "His hand. His marks. You've tended his ground twenty years. You'll never see another thing he touched." She held it out. "It's yours, if you tell me where he went." Mortimer's breath caught. He set the shovel down. He took the book in both hands and pressed his thumb along the red cord, the way a man tests something he thought he'd lost. "He sat by my fire once," he said. "Three winters back. Sick. Coughing blood." He looked up. "He didn't die here. He went to hide from what follows him." "Where." The gravedigger reached into his coat. He drew out a folded sheet, stained brown, the ink nearly washed away. "He left this. Said if anyone came wearing his stone, they'd earned it." He put the letter in her hand. "A hollow in the low woods. Deep in the ground, green all around, black water at the bottom. He went down into it. I never saw him climb out." Azria unfolded the mud-stained page. The writing was faint, but she made out the shape of a place ringed with roots, a pit of still dark water. Her stone pulsed once against her chest, low and warm, pointed away from the graveyard. "Then that's where he is," she said. Mortimer clutched the book to his chest. "He's not hiding from the dead, girl. The dead don't scare him." He glanced at the empty graves. "He's hiding from whoever sent them here to open. You've pulled his ward. Now the ground behind you won't hold." He turned toward the gate. "Go before dark. And don't come back through here." Azria folded the letter and the chest against her. Ash was already at the gate, waiting. The maker had left the cemetery. He had gone down into the earth, into black water. And now she knew the way.