Distant bells tolled, and Mother Reed sprinkled the last of her components.

“You may not need to use the crown.” Mother Reed’s voice shook, and a deliberate brightness turned her words brittle around the edges. “You may need only to find it and bring it here, home to the High King, so that it may be used at his direction.”

Ashes frowned. Was she supposed to feel relieved? If so, she was not. What came instead was a twinge of disappointment. She wanted to bear the crown and its power. She could do that for her father. She could become his Berwan Dar.

Ridiculous, of course. But Ashes was only twelve, and her dreams had long been kept small beneath the trappings of her insignificant life. Released by hope, they overflowed.

The opening prayers which Mother Reed intoned were in Keres’s name. The incense which rose was earthy and rich, and the air in the room grew somber and still. These were not unfamiliar sensations to Ashes. She had been present for enough burial preparations and rituals to recognize the unspeaking presence of Keres, the Great Mother of Death, as it settled over the room like a funeral pall.

In the distance, faint but deep, the bells continued.

Mother Reed’s words flowed more quickly. Her steps and gestures grew jerky.

The ritual Mother Reed chanted became strange. She called Keres by monikers Ashes had not ever heard, Maiden of Scorpions and Matron of Claw and Tooth and other things which sent chills scurrying down Ashes’s spine. Mother Reed drew new symbols around the circle, bloated fishes and coiling snakes, and she threw dry pointed leaves of oleander and star-shaped nightshade flowers onto the braziers. The smoke burned bitter and dark, watering in Ashes’s eyes and souring her stomach.

Then even Mother Reed’s language shifted. Arcane symbols wrote themselves across the air, flickering and then gone. A rattle like a snake’s warning or clattering bones whispered in the air.

Ashes understood nothing of what either Mother Reed or the arcane symbols had said.

The air in the room grew heavier yet. A stillness deeper even than a tomb’s fell, until Ashes felt her lungs might simply cease moving. The incense’s smoke writhed like serpents, and the scent changed yet again, although this time no one had touched the burning braziers. The natural scents of compost and rich earth shifted, becoming colder and more rancid, like flesh falling from a bone.

Ashes’s heart pounded, and she realized she was afraid. Never had she felt fear in Keres’s presence.

The bells rang. Another sound rose around them. Ashes thought they might be screams. Again, recollections from her dreams overlapped reality, ghost screams and high-pitched wailing that were not real and yet felt as real as anything in the present.

Mother Reed spat the unrecognized words so quickly that they were like hard rain against Ashes’s skin. Ashes’s heart thudded, as loud as Mother’s voice and then louder, and Ashes felt as if her spirit pounded her fists against the inside of her own body, so anxious was she to escape the fear which rose inside her.

Mother Reed’s voice rose in a crescendo that became a wail and mingled with the screams and shouts which now drowned out the bells entirely. Ashes wailed with her, wordless in her unreasoning anguish. Terror turned her blind, boneless, unable to think.

And then the terror burst, and a darkness flowed into Ashes’s veins and filled her with a sonorous energy. She felt for a moment every hair on her body, every shiver of air movement in the room, every wisp of smoke rising from the braziers. Her body thrummed with power.

And then that too faded, and Ashes felt merely present. Calm. And not alone, because a tiny whisper of presence, of other, filled a hole inside her that she had not been aware of until that very moment.

Another snake’s rattle, and more symbols shimmered visibly across Ashes’s vision. She still couldn’t read them, but she felt their meaning in her bones.

I am.

And she was. A vastness of meaning she could find no better way of describing opened beneath and around her.

But outside, the screams continued. Shouting. Clashing. Crashing. And the sweet dark smoke which filled the room began to give way to other smoke, acrid and hot.

Later, Ashes would learn that the Vithtak invasion of Lechat Leriand had begun. The invaders were ruthless and swift. By the time Ashes had inhaled the darkness and felt the crown’s presence for the first time, her father the high king and her mother and all those elder siblings who were more important than she was had been put to the sword. In the moment when she came alive, their innards spilled across the palace floors.

In the moment, all Ashes knew was that Mother Reed’s face tightened into a rictus of panic. Outside the room with its circle of blood-scented smoke and heat, the ruckus of shouts and screams and rending walls grew terrifyingly loud. Ashes lifted her hands to place them over her ears, but Mother Reed grabbed Ashes’s arm, yanked her around, and pushed her toward the door which led from the ritual chamber and deeper into the church, back to the burial chamber from which Ashes had been summoned.

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“We must run. Now.”

In the burial chamber, acolytes no longer tied herbs or counted out anchors. Most of the braziers had been doused already. Ashes glimpsed the copper of Moss’s hair and the older girl’s arms reaching for Ashes. Then the last brazier went out, and darkness fell.

But the darkness was not complete. A red glow bobbed in the hallway down which Mother Reed and Ashes had just fled, growing brighter, buoyed by the swell of stamping feet.

Sheer terror screamed into Ashes’s mind. Her chest felt frozen. She clung to Moss, and Moss’s scrawny arms around her became her only comfort.

And now, for the first time in her young life, Ashes felt the shadow of impending death, real and unrelenting.

Mother Reed’s fingers dug once more into Ashes’s shoulder but also this time into Moss’s. With an uncustomary roughness that Ashes would only later understand was borne of the same terror overwhelming her own body, Mother shoved Ashes and Moss toward the pool of dark water at the back of the burial chamber.

“Go out with the dead. Find the crown. Avenge your people.”

Avenge, Ashes had often pondered later. Not save. Mother Reed had known that she and everyone else in the chamber were already dead or as good as.

Mother Reed’s usual gentle solemnity turned fierce. In the near-darkness, her face turned briefly toward Moss. “And you—protect this child with your life. She is more precious than anything.”

Mother Reed shoved them into the water. As cold shock exploded against Ashes’s back, as water clouded her vision and deafened her ears, screams erupted more closely than ever, a piercing chorus of “Mother help me!” and “Mother save me!” but more than anything, wordless shrieks of agony.

Moss’s arms closed around Ashes’s waist and dragged her back and down. Together, they sank into Keres’s Embrace. Water filled Ashes’s ears, muffling the screams of the dying.

Beneath the waters, the dead awaited Ashes and Moss. Unanchored arms floated free, and decaying fingers dragged at their legs. Fish startled from their feeding scattered in dark clouds. The girls pushed up from the bottom and swam until they left behind the dead and could stand in the mud with their heads above water. The two of them stood side by side, coughing and gasping.

The hour was not late, but a crimson-tinted darkness hung all around them. Through black smoke and flames, curved walls appeared and disappeared, bright shades of yellow and orange and red paint streaked with soot.

And blood. There must be so much blood.

“We have to keep going.” The usual sweet lightness of Moss’s tone had gone. One of her hands remained clamped around Ashes’s upper arm. She pulled at Ashes, forcing her into a stumbling run.

Cold water swirled around Ashes’s waist. Slick mud squelched between her toes, plants tangled around her legs, fish bumped against her ankles.

Ashes would have fallen many times over, but Moss kept pulling her back up.

“We have to get away.” Moss, her brassy hair turned dark and dripping, repeated the words every time Ashes would have refused to get back up again. “We have to get away from here.”

And all the while, the weird darkness which Mother Reed’s ritual had begun continued to wriggle and writhe at the edge of Ashes’s consciousness, bitter and black and nearly tangible, overwritten sometimes with the alien symbols which shimmered before fading.

Moss led them around the shallower edges of the lake, pushing through reeds and planting her feet with the practiced motions of someone who had lived a far different childhood from Ashes and grown up learning all the small ways necessary for survival outside the protective enclosures of the city.

But sometimes, despite Moss’s knowledgeable caution, Ashes felt the slither of dank coils or brush of unseen prickly things against her leg. The sensation of darkness flared as if speaking, and the coils and prickles would recede.

We do not walk alone, Ashes remembered thinking then.

Left to her own devices, Ashes might have simply stumbled aimlessly until she fell and could not rise again. But the dark protection encircled her, and Moss spoke with a soothing calm and led the way.

The bloody, burning chaos of Lechat Leriand fell away behind the two girls, but long nights of terrifying sounds and days of slogging through marsh and over bogs followed. The larger danger gave way to smaller dangers. Ashes caught herself sometimes wondering when it would be over and life would return to something like what it had been. On the night when her young mind finally tipped past the point of no return and acknowledged that there would be no going back, not ever, and this was her life now, she broke down in Moss’s arms and wept.

In the stammering, sob-filled hours after, Ashes told everything to Moss—Moss, whom Ashes could easily have lost in the same careless way she’d lost the white anemone Moss had tucked into Ashes’s hair. Moss, who had taken Ashes away from certain death.

“I lost your flower.” Ashes had sobbed the admission as if confessing to murder.

Moss had merely shaken her head and hugged Ashes tightly. “It doesn’t matter. You will never lose me.”

Ashes showed to Moss the wound of her father’s abandonment, told her about the crown and the ritual, and confided to her that a weird darkness haunted her steps, one that did not feel like the Keres they both knew.

She did not tell Moss about any dreams that seemed to come from another time. That had ceased to matter. A child’s night terrors, and they did not survive as the crushing reality of her life obliterated them.

Ashes told Moss how the feeling of alien darkness alternately reassured and then scared her. Moss listened. A frown furrowed her brow and dug lines around her mouth. She soothed Ashes to sleep, but when Ashes awoke in the deepest part of the night, Moss remained awake and staring into the night.

The next day, Moss led them on a decidedly southward passage. At the end of the day, Moss asked Ashes if she still felt the darkness.

And Ashes realized that while she did, it seemed somehow less.

The next day, Moss led them directly east. At the end of the day, she asked the same question. Ashes gave the same answer.

And so their daily treks continued, south and east and south again, out of the Wandering Tears and into the more heavily wooded wetlands of the southern Meres. And each day, the lingering darkness that had touched Ashes’s soul faded a little more.

Ashes was relieved to feel a lessening of that alien black touch against her mind. But with relief came twinges of guilt.

Find the crown. Avenge your people.

If the darkness called Ashes toward the crown, then shouldn’t she be travelling toward it instead of away from it?