“Emris!” she cried. “If you destroy it, I will die!” But he couldn’t hear her. He could sense nothing beyond his bubble of concentration; she could feel the surge of his power beneath her skin, fighting to master the storm spell. She had to do something—before he finished the incantation.

“By the power of Faul, I bind thee—”

Lena leaped at the storm cloud.

It exploded at her touch, lightning arcing through the chamber in bridges of unstoppable blue-green light. Power surged through her, the pain that racked her body disappearing under a jolt of pure euphoria. A heartbeat sounded in her ears. She felt whole again and breathed in deeply, absorbing the cloud back into her lungs. It settled inside her. And then the chamber cleared, and she was standing over Emris, who lay motionless on the ground, his face frozen into shock, his eyes wide but unseeing.

Constance fell to her knees, panting, the spell that had bound her now broken. “You fool, you stupid fool!” she screamed, her voice faltering as she crawled to Emris’s side. She was not crying. If anything, she looked enraged. Lena couldn’t tell if she was shouting at her or Emris or herself.

“Oh…” Lena’s voice broke as tears streamed down her face unbidden. “What have I done?”

But they didn’t have time. The dead were rising to their feet, and they had noticed the living in their midst. Lena turned around, quaking with fear at the haggard, fleshless faces, the collection of rattling limbs. The certainty that had filled her when she’d woken up was gone, but the dead man’s words still resonated in her ears.

She who spins the cloud weaves the storm.

Didn’t that mean … didn’t it suggest that she had to use the spell, to command it? But … how? How did she bring someone back from the dead? She didn’t want to animate a corpse—not like the rotting Ancestors who encircled them, closing in slowly like a knot pulled by hesitant hands. That was not life. That was the spell trying to feed itself by killing the living. She wanted Emris back, his smile, his spirit, his very self. She could barely believe she had lost him already.

“Help me, Constance,” she said. “I don’t know how to do it! Don’t you love him too? Please!”

The woman’s face might as well have been masked for all it revealed. Doubt flickered across her eyes—and quickly hardened. And then she simply said, “No.”

“No?”

Constance rose to her feet, picked up her cane. The mask lay some distance away, surrounded by a clutch of the dead, and with a little quirk of her brow she appeared to accept its loss.