Page 105 of Revels on an Angel’s Grave

Nothing was there, but she swore laughter rolled along the breeze. With it, her chest tugged. Once, twice.

The third was more demanding, like whoever stood on the other end of that rope was clamoring for her attention.

“What is it?” Emmeline whispered.

No one answered. Serchus went on with his song, and slowly, Emmeline backed away from the ghostly breeze and toward his perch.

The tombs do rise,

To Her heart’s demise,

Oh, the graves do call,

So, Her life’s work fall.

A streak of silver-edged lightning sliced through the sky, and Emmeline jumped. In the distance, carved stone monuments rose as if from the earth itself, a palatial structure beyond them. Grapevines wove to life, Serchus’s song amplified among their rows, each note wrapping the grapes and statues and even the iron bars between them, sprouting from the ground one by one.

This time it wasn’t Serchus’s words that played on the air, but ones from a reading just days ago.

Tombstones and ribbons of flesh,

Candles and tears spread mourning.

Feathered remnants for reliquary memories,

Seek and be sought, child.

“Tombstones,” Emmeline whispered. The unmarked tombs before Serchus’s tree…

Her mind raced, sprinting down the path to an answer.

With a second streak of lightning, a familiar face stood behind the iron bars.

“Graves?” Emmeline whispered to herself. A third strike of lightning brightened the details of the stones. “Graves…” And there it was, gifted to her by the Fates.

She breathed, “A graveyard.”

“Tonight?” Myrella asked, where she sat on the floor of the two-bedroom apartment Lola had helped her and Desmond move into in the Ninth District.

It cost an exorbitant amount per night thanks to the tournament, not that it was furnished well enough to deserve the steep coin, but it had an old sofa, a settee, and large cushions in one corner and room for them to gather around the wooden table in the tiny kitchen, the legs carved with initials of former residents.

Myrella and Lola were sorting the books they’d collected, all of them agreeing they had to split their focus on preparation for the second trial and this new clue from the Fates.

Desmond sat with his feet propped on the table, arms crossed as he listened to Emmeline, crankier than usual. He’d barely spoken since she and Lola arrived.

“Tonight,” Emmeline confirmed. “Serchus has now hinted at tombs and graveyards twice, and I’ve gotten other hints before. It has to be urgent if he’s being so blatantly repetitive.”

“He didn’t say anything else, though?” Myrella asked, wary. “Whether it was about Dryvius or the trials?”

“No. I don’t even know if he knew I was there.” The way the Fate had sung to the stars, perched in his tree, flashed through her mind. She sighed, twisting her ring around her finger. “But I’m willing to risk going in with little information to find out what it means.”

Call her reckless, but she would do anything to get answers about Dryvius, clear Roremar’s name, or give him a leg up in this tournament.

“Do you know where the graveyard is?” Myrella asked.

Lola dropped a book entitled A Woman’s Killing Methods on top of one of their piles and said, “It has to be the one beyond the Twelfth. You said you saw vineyards, too, right?”

Emmeline nodded.