The Drowned King Returns

Chapter Two: The Girl At The Grave

By noon, Nash was walking through the iron gates of St. Ansel's Cemetery with rain dripping from his cap. Sixty hours remained on the Ninth Account's clock. His first stop in Kingsreach wasn't revenge. It was his own grave.

The paupers' corner sat at the bottom of the hill, where the headstones were small enough to be forgotten. He expected weeds and a cracked slab, the kind of grave a city digs for a thief it's glad to be rid of.

Instead, the stone was clean. Someone had scrubbed the moss from its edges and trimmed the grass by hand. A glass jar at its base held a bunch of fresh white lilies, their petals still beaded with rain, and Nash stopped walking.

On their first date, he'd had eleven dollars and nothing to give her, so he'd pulled a lily from a display in the lobby of the Belvedere Grand and handed it to Elara on the street while a doorman shouted after them. She had laughed until she cried, and kept that lily pressed in a book for a year.

Someone had been bringing these for eight years. He didn't let himself think about who.

A little girl knelt in front of the stone in a yellow raincoat, her dark hair in two braids that had started to come loose. She was talking.

"I got nineteen out of twenty," she told the headstone, "but I spelled necessary wrong again. It has too many s's, it's not fair." She traced the carved letters of his name with one finger as she spoke. "And Tommy Price pulled my braids at lunch. Twice. Miss Hannah says boys do that when they like you, but I don't think that's true. I think he's just mean."

Nash stood a few yards behind her and couldn't move.

She pushed the wet hair off her forehead, and he saw it: a stubborn cowlick at her hairline that stood straight up no matter what the rain did to it. He had fought the same one with a wet comb every morning of his childhood, and lost. Juniper had told him, and he had believed her, but belief was nothing like this.

"Mommy says you're on a boat far away," the girl said, patting the stone the way someone might pat a shoulder, "and one day you'll find your way back. So I'm keeping you up to date. That way you won't be confused when you get here."

Nash had been beaten bloody in the pits more times than he could count. He had watched friends die and held the Abbot's hand while the old man took his last breath, and he had never cried, not once in eight years. Now he couldn't breathe. He pressed a fist against his mouth and stood in the rain while his daughter told his grave about her week.

He took one step toward her and stopped.

Before he could find the words, voices carried down the hill. Three men in dark suits came striding straight across the graves. Behind them hurried an elderly woman in a gray coat, clutching a watering can.

"You can't just take her," she was saying. "Miss Elara never said a word about this."

The man in front had a buzz cut and an earpiece, and he didn't slow down. "Mr. Ravell wants the girl at the Sinclair estate today. She stays there under watch until the wedding. Those are his instructions."

"Then Mr. Ravell can call Miss Elara." The old woman hurried past him and planted herself between him and the child, though she barely reached his chest. "I don't hand Ivy to anyone without her mother's word."

Ivy. Nash heard the name in someone else's voice for the first time, and it went through him like a blade.

The man sighed and shoved her, casually and hard. The old woman stumbled sideways, her hip striking the corner of a headstone, and she went down in the mud with a cry.

"Mrs. Penny!" Ivy jumped to her feet. The man caught her by the arm and yanked her toward him, his fingers digging into the yellow raincoat, and she screamed.

Nash was already moving.

One moment he stood at the edge of the path, the next he was between the man and his daughter with his hand locked around the man's wrist. The fingers on Ivy's arm sprang open on their own.

"Who the hell are you?" the man snapped.

Nash didn't answer. He turned the wrist, stepped in and drove his palm into the back of the man's shoulder. The joint left its socket with a wet click, and the man dropped to his knees with a howl. The second man reached inside his jacket, but Nash caught his elbow before the hand came out, twisted, and that shoulder gave the same way. The third swung at his head. Nash slipped the punch, took the arm across his body and levered it until it popped.

Ten seconds. Three men knelt in the wet grass clutching useless arms and gasping, and Nash's breathing hadn't changed.

He felt a small tug at his coat. Ivy had pressed herself behind him, both hands bunched in the fabric, her face buried against the back of his leg. She was trembling. To her, he was only a stranger, and the thought closed his throat all over again.

He crouched to help the nanny sit up. "Are you hurt?"

"My hip," she said faintly. "Who are you?"

Tires screeched on the cemetery road above them.

A silver sedan slid to a stop, and a woman ran down the slope in a dark coat thrown over a cream dress. Her hair was shorter than he remembered and her face was thinner, but it was her.

Elara Sinclair saw her daughter clinging to a man's coat, and then she saw the man.

She stopped so suddenly she nearly fell. Her gaze went from his face to the headstone behind him, to the name carved there, and back to his face. For one heartbeat, eight years collapsed. He saw it in her eyes, the girl who had laughed on a sidewalk with a stolen lily in her hand. Her lips parted around a word that never came.

Then it was gone. Her face went smooth and cold as ice.

"Miss Sinclair." The buzz-cut man staggered up, cradling his arm. "This lunatic attacked us. Mr. Ravell will want to know..."

"I'm sure he will." Elara held out her hand without looking at Nash. "Ivy, come here."

Ivy hesitated and looked up at him. "Mommy, he helped me. He helped Mrs. Penny."

"I don't know this man," Elara said, loud enough for every one of them to hear. "I've never seen him before in my life. Come here, now."

Ivy let go of his coat. Elara took her hand and pulled her toward the car, calling for the nanny to follow. As Elara passed, close enough that her sleeve brushed his, she spoke without turning her head, her voice so low that only he could hear it.

"Leave Kingsreach tonight, or the next coffin won't be empty."