Buried Above Ground

  Unless Emilie had been mistaken. Unless jealousy had made her see betrayal where there was none. Lord Ardun had told her that, the one time they fought about it. He had sworn that she was different, that she was special, that he truly loved her as he had loved no woman before her. She had allowed herself to believe it, for a while. It was true that he had never stayed with anyone else this long. . . .

  But it wasn’t true that he would stay with her forever, no matter how heartfelt his promises were. In her more clearheaded moments, she knew that.

  Even so. It wouldn’t hurt to check Lady Bianca’s hands.

  She let go of the bedpost and whirled to face Annette. “I want you to fix my hair. And then I’m going back to the ball.”

  “Yes, my lady,” Annette murmured.

  Her tone made Emilie look at her sharply. Many of the other maids had begun to envy Emilie as soon as she caught Lord Ardun’s eye, and then to pity her—a mean, satisfied sort of pity—when they believed he was growing tired of her. But Annette had never seemed to care. That was why Emilie had chosen her as a maid in the first place.

  Annette, more than anyone, had known for months of Lord Ardun’s diminishing interest, had helped Emilie undress, alone, on the growing number of nights when he had neglected their assignations. She had been there once when he had apologized, speaking of his rising status at court, his increasing responsibilities and lack of time. Annette had watched all this without changing expression or seeming to care. Which meant the muted sympathy in her voice now was for something else.

  There was only one other thing it could be.

  Emilie hesitated, then concentrated on letting her body fade away. After a moment, she felt lighter, less substantial; her hair no longer tickled her neck, and her gown no longer stuck to her armpits. She glanced down at her hands, saw that they were transparent, and looked swiftly at Annette.

  Whose expression had not changed. She gave a brief, unsurprised curtsey and said, “My condolences, my lady.”

  Despite all that she could not feel, Emilie imagined she could feel the blood rush to her face. Well, what had she thought—that Lady Ardun would keep it a secret? “Does everyone know?”

  Annette opened her mouth, but before she could speak, a woman stepped through the door behind her. She didn’t bother to open the door first, just walked right through the dark wood and went solid once she was inside. She was dressed for the banquet as well, in a low-cut green gown that made her eyes look emerald and her tumbling auburn hair look like it was on fire.

  “Well, my dear,” Lizette said. “I hear we have more in common now than ever.”

  It took half an hour to tell Lizette everything, because Emilie had to keep fending off questions about why, at every step of the way, she had neglected to come to Lizette for help. Lizette tried to make the questions sound joking, but Emilie suspected she was really hurt, which made a sick feeling twist low in her stomach. In some sense, she owed Lizette everything.

  At the very least, she owed her the truth.

  So finally, in response to another pointed criticism, she twisted her hands in her lap and blurted, “I was ashamed. All right?”

  Lizette lifted an eyebrow and leaned back against the rose-embroidered cushions of Emilie’s couch. “Ashamed of being a ghost? Is that supposed to make me feel better? I’ve helped you more than you even know, and all this time you’ve thought of me as someone you would be ashamed to be?”

  “Ashamed of being stupid enough to get myself killed.” Emilie put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward—a mannerism she had worked hard to train herself out of since the moment she arrived at the castle. But it no longer seemed to matter. “You warned me against being complacent, but I was. I thought all I had to concern myself with was holding Lord Ardun’s interest. If I had been more cautious, looked around more carefully . . . maybe I could have prevented this.”

  “I don’t see how,” Lizette said with a languid shrug. “Since, so far, you can’t even figure out who did it.”

  “I will,” Emilie said fiercely. The need for vengeance was a constant simmer by now, racing through her blood. She hesitated, then blurted, “How do you bear it?”

  It was not what she had meant to say. She had always known that being dead was a sort of agony, an endless existence of frustrated vengeance, an eternity spent trapped in a world where one didn’t belong. But she had never before understood that the need for revenge could actually hurt, almost as much as dying had, almost as much as the constant hunger and cold and discomfort she once would have done anything to escape. She had never thought about what it meant that Lizette had lived with that pain for longer than Emilie had even been alive.

  Lizette pressed her lips together. She had always refused to talk about the agony of being dead, preferring instead to present a façade of endless merriment. But that had been when Emilie had been alive. Now she said, “I bear it because I must. A person can get used to anything, Emilie.”

  The bleakness in her voice made Emilie look away. She knew Lizette wouldn’t appreciate pity. A choking panic rose in her at the thought of suffering as Lizette had, of never finding rest or peace. Never. “Help me. Please. I know it wasn’t Lord Ardun who killed me. . . .”

  “No,” Lizette said. “You only know that he didn’t do it with his own hands. He might have paid someone to do it.”

  Emilie hadn’t thought of that . . . and she should have. She didn’t need to see the disappointment in Lizette’s sharp eyes to know it. She swallowed hard. “But he had no reason to do that. I can do nothing to him except tell some of his secrets, and I can do that just as easily now that I’m dead.” At last she dared meet Lizette’s eyes, and was relieved to see that the façade was back. Lizette’s green eyes were calm and steady. “No. This was jealousy. And if it wasn’t Lady Ardun . . .”

  She hesitated, waiting for Lizette to challenge her and explain how it could have been Lady Ardun. To her surprise and disappointment, Lizette didn’t.

  “. . . then it had to be Lady Bianca,” she finished finally.

  “Except,” Lizette pointed out, “that if court gossip is correct, Lady Bianca had no reason to be jealous of you.”

  Emilie got to her feet. “Maybe the gossip wasn’t correct.”

  “Emilie . . .”

  “I’m not deluding myself,” Emilie snapped. “I know he was interested in her. But it was taking him a while to leave me for her, wasn’t it? Maybe she didn’t know her victory was sure. Maybe . . .”

  A sudden memory popped into her mind: Lord Ardun in this room, handing her a goblet of a rare wine he knew she loved, eyes soft as he watched her unfeigned delight. The way his smile had played about the corner of his lips. Later, he had told her it was one of the things he loved about her, her complete joy in the small pleasures he had learned to take for granted. She hadn’t told him that this was one of the things she loved about him, as well, that her enchantment with all the things she had never thought she could have spilled over to the man who gave them to her.

  “Maybe her victory wasn’t all that sure,” she said.

  Lizette sighed.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Emilie said tersely. “When I was alive, I accepted that I would have to lose him eventually. But now I’m dead, and there must be a reason for it. If Lady Bianca killed me, it could only have been because she saw me as an obstacle.”

  “Emilie,” Lizette said, almost gently. “He was going to leave. Even if he did love you—and you did a remarkable job with him—men don’t change their habits that easily. He left a girl in order to take up with you, and he left the girl before that. . . .” She stopped, watching Emilie’s face. “What?”

  “I never asked him who the other girls were,” Emilie said slowly. She had never thought much about the girl before her, who must feel the same way about Emilie as Emilie did about Lady Bianca. And she should have. “Even though I knew I wasn’t the first.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Lizette said. “You
were the first to last more than a month.”

  Emilie couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride at that—even now. She wondered if Lady Bianca would last three whole years.

  “Besides,” Lizette said, “those girls were all just beautiful commoners, like you, using him for what he could get for them. He helped them rise at court, as he did for you. None of them loved him enough to care what he did after he left them.”

  It sounded like a reproach, and Emilie flinched slightly. Lizette had warned her many times about letting her emotions get tangled up with a nobleman. She opened her mouth to defend herself, but she couldn’t focus. If she was right, if Lady Bianca had killed her . . . Her fingers curled into fists, and her breath quickened.

  “In that case,” Emilie said, “only one person had reason to be jealous of me. I want to speak to Lady Bianca.”

  Chapter Four

  Lady Bianca wasn’t at the banquet, which surprised Emilie. It was the biggest party of the season, and no one of any importance at court was missing it. Besides, Lady Bianca was a marvelous dancer—the one skill Emilie had never managed to learn, after a childhood in which there had been no time for dancing. The dances at the party would have been an excellent way for Lady Bianca to flaunt herself in front of Lord Ardun. Lately that was the sort of opportunity she never passed up.

  Impatience shimmered through Emilie. She took a bite of a pastry, but could barely taste it. She felt like a falcon deprived of its prey. If Lady Bianca wasn’t here, where was she?

  She rudely ignored a greeting from Lord Darchel—a duke who had once slapped her when she was a maid, but no longer remembered that—and found Lizette, who was flirting outrageously with Prince Asrin. The dead could not love, neither physically nor—it was rumored—emotionally. Those desires were replaced by the others. As the living desire procreation, the adage ran, so do the dead desire justice. But that didn’t necessarily keep them from playing the games of love that formed such a large part of the court’s amusements.

  Emilie caught Lizette’s eye. Her friend dismissed the prince with a comment so ribald it made him blush through his laughter, then joined Emilie at the wall.

  “No sign of her?” she said. Stray auburn tendrils moved away from her face, tucking themselves back into her hair without Lizette ever touching them. “That’s very odd.”

  Emilie nodded shortly, rubbing her hands across her legs. It was hard to stand still when vengeance was so near. “Where could she be?”

  Lizette tilted her head to the side. “I just heard a rumor that Lady Bianca has been seen at Lady Visir’s card games this past week.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her.” Lady Visir was one of the oldest of the dead, but unlike Lizette, she was perpetually bitter about it; her lost chance for vengeance ate at her, and she never tried to hide it, lashing out at those who didn’t have to suffer as she did. Her card games were known for their high stakes and cruel penalties, and more than one had ended with a death. Everyone knew the murders were Lady Visir’s favorite part of the game.

  Lizette shrugged. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to check.”

  Just last night, Emilie would never have dared attend one of Lady Visir’s parties, even with Lizette at her side. Now she followed her friend deeper into the castle without a tremor of fear, without anything but impatience at the thought of making her killer pay. There were advantages, as it turned out, to being dead.

  The card party was in the sitting chamber of a long-dead prince, windowless and lit by low lamps that left the corners in shadow. It was attended mostly by the dead. They floated in a circle several feet above the worn maroon-and-gold rugs, tossing their cards down when the game called for it.

  Lady Bianca was one of them, the skirts of her blue gown draped over her legs and trailing nearly to the floor.

  She’s dead? Emilie’s whole body clenched. She started forward just as Lady Bianca turned and saw her.

  Their eyes met. Then Lady Bianca’s delicate triangular face twisted in rage. She lunged down at Emilie, her cards falling in a shower around her.

  The full weight of her now-solid rival knocked Emilie to the ground, and then a ring-studded fist slammed her head sideways. Blinded by pain and shock, the instincts of her childhood rose through her confusion. She tangled the fingers of one hand in Lady Bianca’s gleaming black hair and pulled with all her might, using her other arm to block the noblewoman’s grab for her throat. She jerked one knee up into Lady Bianca’s stomach, using the momentum to roll on top of her, pinning her to the floor.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw more cards drifting down as the players abandoned their game to watch this new entertainment. But no one seemed inclined to interfere, so Emilie kept her focus on Lady Bianca’s cursedly beautiful face.

  “Don’t try to fight me,” Emilie spat. It was unbearably good to finally have the upper hand against this woman she had been slowly losing to for months. Revenge, she thought, and the sense of triumph thrummed sweetly through her. “I’m not some noblewoman who will slap your face and think I’ve done something shocking. I will destroy you.”

  “Too late for that,” Lady Bianca said, and she faded into nothing under Emilie’s grasp. Emilie fell another inch to the floor, pain shooting up her wrists as her hands slammed down on the rug. A moment later, a translucent Lady Bianca floated right up through her.

  Emilie had just enough time to turn before a now-solid foot slammed into the side of her face, snapping it sideways. She fell over and leaped up into a crouch, just as Lady Bianca’s arm wrapped around her neck and pressed into her throat.

  The garrote cutting into her windpipe. Her vision going black. The memory seared through her, reminding her that she was dead, that she no longer had to breathe at all.

  But Lady Bianca, apparently, didn’t know that Emilie was dead.

  Emilie’s body faded. Lady Bianca fell right through her, and when she was on the floor, Emilie pivoted, went solid—it got easier each time, switching back and forth—and kicked Lady Bianca’s side with every bit of strength she had.

  One strangled gasp, and then Lady Bianca was translucent again. She floated to her feet, turned in midair, and stared at Emilie through wide powder-blue eyes.

  “It would seem,” Emilie said, “that we have more than one thing in common.”

  Lady Bianca raised a trembling hand and looked at it, as if noticing for the first time that she could see right through it.

  “I don’t like you,” Emilie said. “I’m sure you don’t like me. But I suspect the same person killed both of us, so I think we should—”

  Lady Bianca let out a short, anguished cry, which stopped Emilie mid-sentence. She blinked, watching Lady Bianca’s face twist.

  “When did you die?” Lady Bianca whispered.

  “What?”

  “Your murder! When did it—”

  Emilie hesitated and glanced at Lizette, who was leaning against the wall and watching the two of them with narrowed eyes. “This afternoon. Why—”

  “I should be gone by now,” Lady Bianca said, and began to cry—not the slow welling up of tears in fashion at court, but an uncontrolled torrent, the sort of sobbing that marred the beauty of even a face like hers. “I made a mistake.”

  Before Emilie could respond—or even think of a response—Lady Bianca whirled and dashed right through the wall, the hem of her blue gown and the tips of her black hair the last parts of her to disappear.

  Outside, in a narrow hall lined with fraying tapestries, Emilie paced back and forth while Lizette leaned against the wall, watching her.

  “Did you hear what she said?” Emilie asked. “‘I should be gone by now.’ She thought my murder would set her free.”

  “Apparently,” Lizette said.

  “That means she thought I was the one who killed her. And she also thought she had avenged herself.” The victims of ghostly vengeance didn’t come back from the dead; that was justice, not murder. Lady Bianca must have realized her error as soon as she
saw Emilie fade into translucence. “She killed me.”

  And she was already dead. Which meant vengeance was beyond Emilie’s reach forever. Her chest constricted.

  “You’re making the same mistake you made earlier,” Lizette said calmly. “Why do you think she asked when you died? Because she arranged the killing and had to be sure it had already happened. Do you really think Lady Bianca would stoop to kill you with her own hands?”

  Emilie stopped pacing, turned, and faced her old friend. Hope forced its way through her despair. “If someone else did the deed, then I can still take some sort of vengeance.” Oh yes. The person who had strangled her, pulled the garrote and watched the life drain out of her, that person deserved to pay just as much as Lady Bianca did.

  Lizette shrugged. Her hair lifted itself up to her head and coiled into a bun, even as her hands remained at her sides—a habit of hers Emilie had grown used to, though it was something Lizette usually did only when she was nervous. “History has shown that killing either the one who did the deed or the one who ordered it will lay your spirit to rest. That has been a source of frustration in the past to ghosts who wanted to kill both.”

  “It’s a source of frustration to me,” Emilie snarled. “I finally have an excuse to kill her, and somebody beat me to it.”

  Lizette arched an eyebrow. “I’m sure Lady Bianca is just as frustrated. Now she has to start all over again to find out who killed her.”

  “I hope she never finds out,” Emilie snarled.

  “You can hardly blame her—”

  “I blame her for everything. She didn’t need him, you know.” Emilie blinked back a sudden stinging wetness in her eyes. “She was born noble. She has everything she wants. She would have taken him from me and thrown me back to the gutter, when he was nothing but a plaything to her.” She realized that her fists were clenched, but that she couldn’t feel her fingernails biting into her palms. “You’re right. I don’t blame her for thinking I killed her. I wish I had killed her.”