She had bolted because she couldn’t bear to be in the same space as Sarg—but now she had nowhere to go.
Hyderlin walked in the direction her feet chose.
The rain was pouring. The sound of the battered earth groaning was mournful. She pushed the hair off her face that the rain had plastered there, and felt a sudden sense of déjà vu.
The day of her execution.
For Hyderlin—who had spent four years sleeping—those four years felt no different from a few days ago. The memory of that day was still vivid and immediate.
The walk toward the executioner’s block. The cold rain that stripped the warmth from her body. Both were clear.
And the blade of the axe separating neck from body.
It might have been better if things had ended there.
Body and head separated, sleeping forever.
Unbothered by how the living chose to live, fulfilling the only obligation of a corpse.
Waiting for the world’s end, rotting slowly down to a handful of dust.
If that had been her fate, she would never have had to see Sarg in the state he was in now.
“That idiot. He must have gone completely insane.”
Hyderlin bristled with a flare of sudden irritation.
When you die, you will surely fall into hell. I pray for the eternal destruction of your soul.
From some point onward, Sarg had shown her almost nothing but hatred and contempt.
And yet that same Sarg had stood before the King and Queen and argued for Hyderlin’s innocence—well, that fell within a range she could understand. He likely believed it was wrong for a person to be condemned for a crime she didn’t commit. Given his nature, that was not out of character.
But resigning from the Holy Knights was foolish. Instead of returning to his family’s estate, taking up lodgings beside her grave and playing the drunkard was lunacy. And coming out with something like a declaration of love now, of all times, was worse than a cheap joke.
He was simply mistaking guilt for love.
He felt responsible because she had been executed for a crime she hadn’t committed.
He had always had an unusually naive quality to him—this was simply that.
Hyderlin rubbed her forehead and eyelids with restless hands. She wanted to scrub away every trace of where his lips had touched.
The rain struck her face with ferocious energy, taking the last of the man’s warmth and breath from the surface of her skin. But it couldn’t reach what had settled somewhere deeper.
“Fool. Don’t let yourself get swept up in that idiot’s foolish delusion.”
She warned herself, but the inside of her chest was still loud and disorderly.
She didn’t want to be carried away by soft and blind emotions. In the hopes of calming herself, she had been walking aimlessly near the graveyard, and now she came to a stop before her own grave.
The soil was all exposed where Margarite had dug it up. In front of it stood a small, flat gravestone with a familiar name carved crookedly into it.
Hyderlin Biche
Her baptismal name Pharamasa and her royal name san Lotsa were gone.
Hyderlin crouched before it. Rain-born rivulets ran down the face of the stone. She smiled, but bitterly.
“Whoever ordered this carved—it’s a curiously apt coincidence.”
She, with her tainted origins, had no right to a baptismal name. And carrying not a single drop of royal blood, she had no claim to the name san Lotsa either.
At one time she had thought she would be laid to rest beneath the cathedral. If she hadn’t been executed on false charges, she would have lain—an impostor through and through—beside kings and queens.
But she had been buried with the poor and the criminal and the condemned.
“Perhaps things have found their way back to where they belong, going all around.”
Hyderlin looked at the names and death dates of the neighbors sharing this graveyard with her—one by one. Grave markers ran the range from rough-hewn wood to something approaching a real stone.
After wandering about in the cold rain for a while, the noise inside her gradually quieted. She grinned at the graves of the paupers, the thieves, the swindlers, the criminals, and the various miscreants buried around her.
“Though you may have been condemned criminals, take it as an honor that you share your resting place with the Countess Hyderlin Biche—whose name was known throughout all of Lotsa. When else would the likes of you get to lie in the same bed as me?”
She even managed a crude and self-deprecating joke. After laughing to herself for a good while, she felt something almost like good humor.
As reason took up the space emotion had vacated, she began to regret having bolted from Sarg’s house.
I’m worried about the little princess. Is it safe to leave a baby in the hands of a deranged drunkard?
Hyderlin clicked her tongue lightly.
Instead of running away like this, I should have knocked him unconscious.
She had been quite naturally blaming Sarg when she came to a stop before one particular grave. And noticed something strange.
A grave that was several decades old had signs of the earth being turned over.
It could have been the ground giving way under all the rain that had fallen. But could rain flip wildflowers upside-down so that their roots were facing the sky?
This was not the only disturbed grave. Here and there—a dozen or so of them, roughly—patches of soil showed signs of having been dug up. All of them belonged to people who had died anywhere from a few years to several decades ago.
This was peculiar. Most of the people buried in this graveyard were paupers—there would be no burial goods worth stealing. There was nothing worth the effort of digging up a grave.
“Nothing except bones.”
The Hyderlin of before her death would not have concerned herself with such a thing. Whether someone dug up the graves of poor, unknown people and made off with their bones was none of her business.
But as someone who had been forcibly dragged out of her coffin and given a life she had no particular use for—it bothered her considerably.
Going back to crawl into Sarg’s house at this point would be a bit awkward. I might as well check whether my grave-companions are lying peacefully where they should be.
Even if someone had stolen the bones and run, there was nothing Hyderlin could actually do about it. At best, she might offer a word or two of hollow consolation to whatever remains were currently rattling around above ground against their will.
Not as though I have anything better to do. Call it a reason to swing a shovel…
Come to think of it, she had noticed a shovel, some rope, and a lantern lying in a corner of the ruined cathedral. The groundskeeper’s tools, she had assumed.
Inside the ruined cathedral she found the tools she had been expecting. And something she had not expected at all.
In the middle of the cathedral stood a withered figure.
Not a person.
Could something with no muscle, no flesh, no skin be called a person?
It was a skeleton.
Undead? A skeleton?
Hyderlin’s hand flew reflexively to her hip. The sword she had purchased after coming back to life was hanging there. She had apparently grabbed it out of habit when she’d bolted from Sarg’s house.
In places where priests no longer tended the land—such as the northern mountain ranges where white dragons slept—it was not uncommon for the dead to crawl out of their graves.
Not in their living, healthy forms—they rose in states of advanced decomposition, stripped of reason, retaining only instinct, and they attacked whatever was living. People called these wandering corpses by the general term undead, and distinguished between types based on their degree of decay: those with flesh and muscle remaining were ghouls; those with nothing left but bone were skeletons.
Ordinarily, undead were rare in Nadirotsa. The city lacked the strange abundance of power found in the northern ranges, and a cathedral with priests occupied almost every district.
Well. This is a rare thing to see. Has a skeleton crawled out of its grave?
That would explain the disturbed earth in the graveyard.
Faint light from a distant house seeped through the ruins and revealed the skeleton’s shape. The bare bones were draped in a fairly clean set of clothes, and the hands were holding a broom. The posture suggested it had been sweeping up until just moments ago—but it was now completely motionless.
The skeleton and Hyderlin faced each other without moving, like two statues. A strange standoff.
The rain drumming against the cathedral roof grew gradually thinner.
Then the hand gripping Hyderlin’s sword hilt moved. She pushed off from the ground.
Clang!
The sharp steel sheared cleanly through the skeleton’s yellowed knee joint.
A moment later, the skeleton collapsed in the fashion of a house of cards struck at its base—all at once, and completely.
The human shape vanished in an instant. Over the piled heap of bones, an old piece of clothing fluttered down and settled.
The taut tension snapped with an almost comic ease.
“Well, now…”
A normal skeleton, even if its body collapsed, would quickly begin reassembling itself as long as the key joints were intact. For this reason, Holy Knights typically used hammers or lances to break the major joints, then gathered and burned the larger pieces. Left alone, a skeleton would relentlessly reassemble and resume attacking the living.
But this skeleton, despite many of its joints being fully intact, showed no sign of trying to put itself back together. Even when Hyderlin poked through the pile, even when she pressed the tip of her blade into the eye socket of the skull—nothing.
Strange. But she decided to proceed with caution regardless.
Hyderlin pried a long piece of wood from her own coffin. She raked the tip of her sword hard against the stone floor, striking sparks.
After two or three failed attempts, the piece of wood caught fire. Hyderlin used it to light the lantern. She carried the lantern toward the collapsed heap of bones and looked.
In clear lamplight, the clothing on the skeleton came into better focus. She found it oddly familiar.
It was the clothing of the groundskeeper she had met before. The broom, the shoes—they were unmistakably that old man’s.
Hyderlin had a sharp eye. She couldn’t be wrong about this.
Had someone dressed a skeleton in the groundskeeper’s clothes? Or…
“Has the groundskeeper turned into a skeleton.”
She said it flatly.
But that made no sense either. She had encountered the groundskeeper barely a day or two ago. It took a minimum of a month for a human body to become fully skeletal. It was logically impossible for the groundskeeper to have become a skeleton in that short a time.
But then, Hyderlin’s survival was equally impossible by any logic.
If a skeleton could become a living person in an instant, then a living person could become a skeleton in an instant.
But how? The reason I went from skeleton to person was Margarite’s intervention. There’s no reason for the groundskeeper to spontaneously go from person to skeleton unless—oh.
There was one thing Hyderlin and the groundskeeper had in common. Had the groundskeeper not also encountered Margarite?
The idea began to circle: perhaps all of this was connected to Margarite in some way.
What if Margarite had revived someone other than me before—the groundskeeper, say? What if the twelve weeks allotted to the groundskeeper had run out and he had reverted to skeleton?
Hyderlin turned the thought over briefly, then picked up the lantern and shovel and walked back outside. She began digging up one of the disturbed graves.
If the coffin was empty, it meant some set of remains had been pulled to the surface.
And perhaps—just perhaps—whoever it was might be in exactly the same circumstances as Hyderlin herself.
Maintaining a life that was never properly hers. Neither dead nor alive, with a body dull to pain and fatigue.
A body that needed no sleep, no food—hers wasn’t one, but a body like that, maintaining a life not its own.
The grave-digging was not as exhausting for her living-but-not-quite-living body as it might have been for an ordinary person. But the muddy water that rushed into the hole each time she dug, and the clothing that kept adhering wetly to her skin, were deeply annoying.
How on earth did Margarite manage to dig up my coffin? That must have been beyond even her.
The idle thought dissolved in the inevitable fatigue of repetitive labor.
At about five feet down, a coffin appeared. Its lid was broken. Soil had gotten inside as a result.
Hyderlin used her hands to scoop out the dirt that had packed in. The muddy water kept flooding back in, making it slow work.
Something was lying inside the coffin, but the interior was too dark to see clearly. She lit the lantern and held it over the dark interior of the coffin.
Inside the coffin was something that should not have been there in place of what should have been. Where only bones should have remained, a figure lay with the full form of a person.
Hyderlin pressed her back teeth together and brought the lantern close to the face.
Its cheeks and forehead were dirty with mud, and the lips were pale. It looked entirely without vitality—and yet it did not feel like a corpse. It felt, instead, closer to a person who was asleep.
A familiar face.
Hyderlin knew this person’s name.
“…Leone Collozzo.”
At that moment, his eyelids twitched.
