Give the Dark My Love(31)

I grinned at him. A part of me was still sad to be without my parents, but this street festival was far larger than anything my village had ever put on, and it was a good distraction.

Old men and women walked through the crowd, handing anyone unadorned a bright red poppy-bud flower. Grey tried to offer the woman who gave him a flower another copper, but she spit at the ground, shaking her head.

“You don’t pay for that,” I told him, taking the bud from his hands and pinning it to his jacket.

Grey looked confused, but it was too loud to explain. How did he not know the traditions? The crimson flowers represented the blood of the war; you cannot pay for blood with coins.

“How do you celebrate Burial Day?” I asked. We were close to the dock now, and the intoxicating smell of a fish fry was drowning out the sweet, warm honey from the carts uphill. I pulled Grey to a bench that faced an empty wooden platform that had been built in the street from used pallets. The pubs along the docks had flung open their doors, serving pints on the street, but they started calling for last orders.

“It’s just a day out of school,” Grey said. “A break before midterms.”

I gave him a dubious look.

“I know what Burial Day is for, obviously,” he said. “It’s just that no one celebrates it.”

The chimes rang six times. The music died down, the dancing stopped. The loud celebrations faded away to nothing in mere moments.

“What’s happening?” Grey asked me in a whisper I wouldn’t have been able to hear a minute ago.

“Today’s not about the party.” Holidays were also holy days.

The crowd in the street parted, everyone moving to the sidewalks, leaving the cobblestone bare. A moment later, the doors of all the church halls up and down the street opened, and the Elders of each one formed a small parade, walking solemnly down the center of the lane. They mounted the wooden platform and dropped to their knees, the soft thuds echoing as loudly as bells tolling.

I slipped from the bench, letting my knees hit the paving stones. Everyone in the crowd did the same, including, after a moment of looking around, Grey.

The church halls in this part of the city comprised people from the north who’d moved south to work in the factories. They kept the old ways. The Elders chanted the prayer of Peace in Death, and my lips formed the words, murmuring them along with the hundreds of others who had gathered for the celebration. Beside me, Grey kept his head bent respectfully, but he stumbled over the words until he finally gave up. Even though the Empire’s official religion was Oryon, it was clear the north was more reverent than the south.

The words were the same that my family spoke every year on Burial Day. I shut my eyes. I pretended that I was home, my knees in the dirt instead of on paving stones. I imagined that it was Nessie beside me, not Grey.

As the prayer ended, I touched Grey’s elbow, letting him know we could stand again. “That was lovely,” he whispered into my ear. His warm breath sent chills down my spine.

In my village, now would be the time the blacksmith passed out iron rings, and we’d all go to the burial ground and place a circle on a different grave. Burial Day was about remembering the history of Lunar Island and promising to never make the same mistakes again. Maybe that’s why the north remembered it more than the south; during Bennum Wellebourne’s revolution, he took the bodies of the northerners, raising them from their graves.

There was a story about it in my great-grandmother’s journal. When she was alive, there were still people who remembered seeing the dead claw their way up through the earth, their fingers bloody and broken, their eyes rotting from their heads, their jaws slack. Bennum Wellebourne needed an army to lead against the Emperor, and necromancy provided one.

Before he was captured, Wellebourne had been sailing across the Azure Sea with his undead soldiers, intending to take over the whole Empire. Because his army was dead, he let them drag along the boat behind him. They would not drown. When Wellebourne hung for his crimes, his revenants died again—the necromancer’s power died with him. The bloated corpses floated to the shore, and the tides brought them to the center of the island, the place where Dilada had gotten a job to clear the forest. Villagers had gone down, identifying which of the corpses had been their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. They returned them to the graves they’d left and placed iron circles over the raw earth in the hopes that the old superstition would keep the dead where they had been planted.

But there were no graves in Northface Harbor; the city was too cramped to waste space on empty earth, aside from the Gardens. Cremation was more common here. As I wondered what would happen next, the Elders and acolytes of the church halls started to pass out small iron rings. A teenage boy handed Grey and me one each. A single nail, bent and hammered into a curved circle.

“What do we do with this?” Grey asked, looking at the ring in his hand. He stuck two fingers through the metal and wiggled them.

My attention, however, was on the wooden platform up the street. While the Elders were still passing out the rings, someone else had arrived at the stage. “That’s the governor,” I said in awe, recognizing her from the news sheets. A ripple of murmurs spread throughout the crowd; everyone shared my shock that the governor would come to the Burial Day celebration at the docks herself.

Governor Adelaide was maybe a decade older than my mother. Slender and tall, she carried herself with assurance and grace. She wore the embroidered pallium that marked her position as governor. Her hair was done up in a crown of braids; a more traditional style, one favored by farmers and factory workers—and me.