Whichwood(19)

Her unwelcome helpers had arrived just a touch too late.





Laylee heaved herself up, sopping wet and weighted down, and began to peel off wet layers of clothing. Everything she owned in the world was inherited from someone already dead. Her gowns and cloaks and boots and scarves were sourced from Maman and Grandmaman—they were pieces from another era, fashionable long before Laylee was born. Everything she owned—from doorknobs to dinner plates—was little more than a token of a lost world. She let each piece of wet clothing fall into the tub with a terrific splash, pulled the cork from the drain, wrapped herself in the bath mat, tiptoed into her room, and— Oh.

Laylee had nearly forgotten.

Oliver, good friend that he was, had broken her bedroom window.




In all the hours Laylee had been gone, the wind and snow had thrashed about her private quarters with a desperate savageness. Icicles had been born along her shattered windowpanes; fingers of frost curled into delicate fists around objects tall and wide. Flurries collected in haphazard piles, half-melted flakes snaking water across her floors in skeletal patterns. She raked her nails through a layer of ice coating her single mirror and shuddered. It was unmercifully cold in these drafty quarters, and Laylee shivered on tiptoe, her muscles seizing. With shaking hands, she yanked a set of clean, moth-eaten clothes out of a warped, wheezing armoire, and tugged on infinite layers of ancient fabric.

Thick, shimmering silver stockings irreparably torn at both knees and poorly mended at the toes. A layered set of angora turtlenecks tucked into a pair of faded, fleece-lined turquoise pants. A heavy, ruby-encrusted, floor-length gown to be worn atop it all—its carefully embroidered sleeves torn at the elbows, old blood smeared across the bodice, six diamond buttons missing down the back—and a stained feather vest cinched at the waist with a string of old pearls. Finally, Laylee locked her soggy tool belt around her hips and stepped into a pair of purple work boots, dirt and blood baked into their delicate silk flesh.

Laylee had tried to sell her family heirlooms countless times, but no one in this superstitious town would buy the belongings of a mordeshoor, no matter their gold stitches or sapphires. And so she starved quietly, died slowly, and cried when no one was looking—this girl who could not help but wear diamonds as she buried her dead.

Laylee took a steadying breath.

She secured a fresh scarf over her head, fastened her red cloak over her shoulders, and made a decision.

She’d drowned her pride in the tub and left it there to die—and good riddance, too—because she was about to do something her pride never would’ve allowed.

She was going to ask for help.

Her strangers were too late to help her, of this she was sure, but they might not be too late to help the town. If Laylee could only convince Alice and Oliver to come back, they could perhaps dispatch the rest of the dead before it was too late. Laylee’s death, you see, would cause more devastation in Whichwood than anyone had bothered to realize. The foolish denizens of her town had left her to fend for herself—she was young and female and all alone, and she’d become an easy target for the stingy and the sexist and the cruel among her people—and they’d cheated her out of honest earnings, knowing full well that her blood made it so she had no choice but to take on the work.

It wasn’t always like this.

Mordeshoors used to mean something in Whichwood. They used to matter. But people had gotten used to abusing Laylee, and they’d lost sight of the risks—the consequences—of defrauding a mordeshoor.

They’d forgotten the ancient rhyme.

You’d try to cheat a mordeshoor?

You’d dishonor this noble deed?

What comes of all this wickedness?

Filthy swindlers!

Take heed:

A gentle warning to remind you

Of the things that you’ve forgot

Your mortal skin

will slowly thin

Your heart will fail and rot.

Steal from any mordeshoor!

And walk free for just a day.

Steal from any mordeshoor!

And death will make you pay.

Let me explain:

There could never elapse more than three months between a death and its spirit’s dispatch to the Otherwhere. Any longer than that, and the souls grew too attached to this world and would do whatever they could to stay.

This was what had happened to Maman.

Baba (from whom Laylee had inherited her magic as a mordeshoor) had been too distraught to wash Maman’s lifeless body and, under the pretense of finding (and fighting) Death itself, had left home and was led eternally astray by grief. Laylee, only eleven years old at the time, hadn’t known what to do. She’d only trained with Baba a short while before he left, and had been understandably horrified by the idea of washing her own mother’s decaying corpse—never mind the fact that she could barely lift the woman into a tub. So she did what anyone would’ve done in her situation: She ignored the problem and hoped it would go away on its own.

But the doorbell kept ringing.

Corpses piled up faster than she could count them, and it was all Laylee could do to drag them into her shed and keep them sheltered until Baba came home. At first she did nothing but wait—but within a month she was out of food and out of options, and soon she was scrubbing as many dead as she was able and taking whatever money she was offered. She threw herself into her work, washing bodies until her fingers bled, determined to direct her mounting fury into something productive. But every night, no matter the weather, she’d steal away from Maman’s angry ghost and sleep outside in the open air, her young heart still soft enough to hope. She thought maybe Baba had forgotten she was in there, and she prayed he would see her waiting for him if he ever passed by. She held on to hope for six months before she discovered him in town one day, counting his teeth in the middle of the street.