Whichwood(21)

“Hi, Laylee.”

“Hiiiii, Laylee.”

“Hey, Layl.”

“Hello,” said Laylee with another sigh. She sat down in the slush and pulled a coffin into her lap, counting dead fingers and toes. Satisfied, she shoved the wooden box back onto the snow, plucked a business card from her belt, and tucked one end of the triangular card into the soggy mouth of the corpse.

THIS BODY WAS WASHED AND PACKAGED FOR THE OTHERWHERE BY LAYLEE LAYLA FENJOON

“You look tired,” said Deen. “It’s really not fair that you have to do this all alone.”

“I’d help you if I could, azizam,” said Roksana. “You know we all would.”

Laylee smiled as she pulled herself up to her knees. She had an important relationship with her ghosts, but it was a curious one, too; Laylee often felt like their mother, doing her best to keep them in line as they arrived and departed, always afraid for the day they got too bored and did something regrettable to the living. Normally she’d make more of an effort to keep their spirits low, but today Laylee was simply too exhausted to do more than address their most basic concerns.

There was so much work left to do.

Laylee struggled to keep her head up as she moved, pushing through a mental fog so thick she could scarcely remember the steps she’d left undone. It took a great deal of effort, but eventually all fifteen clean corpses were lying in their coffins, business cards tucked between their lips, and now she was nearly ready to nail tops and bottoms together. Laylee allowed herself a quick sigh before reaching for her pliers.

“Oh, gross,” said Shireen, one of the older girls. “I hate this part. It’s so, so gross, Laylee, ew.”

“Close your eyes,” said Laylee patiently. “You don’t always have to watch.”

And with an efficient, practiced hand, Laylee spent the next several minutes pulling all the fingernails and toenails off her corpses. Once done, she added the human claws to the ever-growing collection she carried in a copper box on her belt. She gave the closed box a firm, swift shake, and then popped the lid, closed her eyes, and chose six nails at random. This was a key step in the burial process, as human nails were the only kinds of nails that would keep a coffin permanently closed.

Laylee unhooked the brass mallet from her tool belt and, hands still trembling, carefully hammered dirty fingernails into the wood. She was grateful that her limbs had temporarily ceased their more vigorous shaking; the larger tremors came in waves, she was realizing, and she was happy to take advantage of the respite now.

Once all the lids had been properly nailed shut, Laylee unsheathed her branding iron and blew a gentle, warm breath onto the metal; the iron glowed orange in an instant, softly steaming in the crisp air. With a robotic proficiency, she stamped the closed coffins with the mordeshoor seal and then, finally, dragged the hefty wooden boxes into the cemetery where, one by one, she melted them directly into the ground.

This last bit was possibly the most fascinating part of the finishing process, because it involved a simple and simultaneously intricate facet of Laylee’s magic. Once the dead were ready to be sent off to the Otherwhere, Laylee knelt before each coffin and gently pressed the cargo into the earth. Once in transit, the bodies were no longer her business.

Except—

Well, there’s one more thing.

The very final act of the mordeshoor was the ghosts’ favorite part of the process, and they swarmed around her now, eager and proud and grateful, to watch as Laylee did her last bit of magic.

The mordeshoor fell to her knees where the dead had been buried and, for each person gone, she summoned a red rose petal from between her lips. These, she then planted into the ground.

In moments, the petals had broken the earth and blossomed into fully grown flowers. It seemed a simple bit of magic, but the roses planted by a mordeshoor would live forever—surviving even the harshest seasons. And they represented a single, unwavering truth:

That a person had once lived.

Laylee’s cemetery was a sad and stunning sea of endless red roses—tens of dozens of thousands of them—that marked the memories of every soul she and her family had touched.

And when she finally fainted backward into the snow—exhausted beyond words, hands and arms silver and trembling beyond recognition—her forty remaining ghosts gathered around her, whispered their words of thanks—and then, well, then they did what they always did when Laylee fell asleep on the job. They called for help from the birds nearby.

Not moments later, a dozen feathered friends swooped down, caught Laylee’s clothes in their talons, and carried her back to the castle.





Laylee woke up with a start.

The sun had moved a little to the right and snow had descended upon the hills in huge, thin flakes. Laylee was sitting slumped outside her castle door, and she had no idea how long she’d been asleep. Gone already were the earlier rays of warmth, and as she stifled the impulse to shiver, she realized she’d lost another hour of the day.

She staggered to her feet.

There were still forty corpses in her shed, and Laylee would have to hurry up and find Alice and Oliver before it was too late. She had no idea how far the pair had gone or how long it would take her to find them, but she was certain she’d have to leave her property in order to do so.

But leaving home meant she had to bring her bones.