Years slowly passed, and I was ten, then twelve. I became a better fencer than Henry and won eight duels out of ten. Sometimes, Henry, Tom, and Rick all banded together to take me on. I loved that; it was a challenge both for me and them.

Martha marveled at my necromantic prowess. She realized very well that I could easily raise all the dead bodies in the neighborhood and put them down without breaking a sweat. Controlling any undead or summoning any demon, whether a war demon or run-of-the-mill succubus, came naturally to me. I felt all-powerful. And one day, it almost killed me.

I got a new teacher out of that.

***

Rene Ghirr urged his horse on until it dropped dead. Then he waited an hour, and the animal recovered. The zombie was starting to smell, but the advantages were obvious: an undead horse was not as fast as a live one, but it never tired and could gallop even with broken legs.

Unfortunately, its rider wasn't tireless himself. By the third day in the saddle, the necromancer was indistinguishable from the corpses he could raise. To put it simply, a once good-looking, forty-year-old man looked very much like a vampire—pale, red-eyed, with sullen cheeks, complete with unkempt hair and a black cape. Black was practical, after all—you'd have to launder a white one every day, while black would serve until it turned grey.

Rene, as you've already guessed, was a necromancer—a proper, powerful one, and also a scientist. Well, actually, he was a scientist first. He even taught art history at the Royal College of Heraldry.

As for necromancy, if you're born with a gift for magic, you can't just bury it—you can only nurture it. Or it will nurture itself, whether you like it or not. Fire outbreaks start happening around fire mages, rivers flood and rain falls wherever water mages live, and necromancers... If a necromancer doesn't know about their gift, various forms of the undead will always gather within his reach.

Rene learned about his gift early—he was nine. Jok, his favorite dog, had just died, and the boy spent all evening crying, repeating the same phrase. "I don't want Jok to die! I want him back!"

Rene learned to be careful what he wished for that very night when he found his dead dog, all smeared in graveyard dirt, right on top of his blanket. The boy's scream woke his parents.

Marghit and Weiss Ghirr were wise people. They didn't start shouting, "Demon!" "Unholy spawn!" "Dark Tempter!" or, to top it all, "Necromancer!" They just realized their child was...well, the very same one. Still, as educated people, they decided to figure it out by themselves.

They didn't wish for little Rene to grow up confined to a convent, or even worse, to be burned at the stake, accused of any and all troubles, from a crow nestling on a roof to a poor turnip harvest in the neighboring village. Even in convents, necromancers were burned. Rene's parents had different plans for their child.

Which is why Marghit spent the entire night by his bed, convincing him that nothing bad was going on. Yes, this is Jok. He was just tired and left you for dog heaven, my dear. But you called him from there, and now he'll have to stay in a dead body, poor boy. You should just release him. You love him, don't you? Then don't make him suffer anymore.

With the first rays of the sun, Weiss headed to the bookstore, where—he knew for a fact—they sold books on magic under the counter. That is where he bought his son Rene's first necromancy textbook, "Notes of a Practicing Necromancer Alfred Lucius. My First Steps, Mistakes, and Improvements". Rene learned that book by heart, cover to cover.

Jok spent the day in the boy's room. After nightfall, Rene put him back in his grave—and somehow, without realizing it, released his soul. Who says animals don't have souls? Rene could have sworn that upon flying away, Jok's soul gave him a cheerful yap, and he almost felt a cold nose poke into his palm. Don't be sad for me, boy. One day, we'll run on a green lawn together, just you wait.

Rene started to learn necromancy in earnest. He did it in secret, of course—his official field of study was art history, like his father's. After Rene turned twenty, Weiss Ghirr died, and his son inherited his position at the Royal College of Heraldry. Soon, however, he realized that it wasn't enough. Not enough money, not enough options, and not nearly enough ways to use his gift for necromancy, or he risked accidentally releasing magical energy. Rene didn't waste too much time thinking. Putting on a mask and a hooded cape, he knocked on the door of an amulet shop, offering his help to those on the other side of the law. He performed various services: he could summon a ghost, raise the deceased, call a demon, find out if a person was alive or dead, cast or dispel a hex—it's hard to list everything. The only thing he had never done was use his gift for murder, but simply having that gift was enough for him to be treated like a criminal.

Rene was thirty-five when Marghit, his mother, passed away, leaving him all alone in the world. He still had a house and money in his pocket, though. Rene didn't want to marry, reasonably suspecting that his potential wife might disapprove of his...hobby. And by then, necromancy was being punished with death by burning. He wanted to live more than to marry, and women of easy virtues from bawdy houses were enough to satisfy his base urges.

Rene got caught when he fell for the young Cassandra Likeworth. She was a niece of Hermann Likeworth, one of the theology professors, a stern and religious man who was Rene's constant objector during his classes. Something that the necromancer considered normal and even a prerequisite for new students—such as being absent-minded, being easily distracted, having failing attendance, and forgetting homework—in Hermann's eyes was akin to a crime. Waving his arms around, he listed the transgressions of his victims in front of the whole college and sent them to the stables to be punished and straightened up. The students nicknamed him Praying Mantis. As for his daughters, Hermann kept them in a convent and planned on making them nuns.

Rene knew all that very well, as he did about Hermann's views on religion, on necromancers, and not to mention, on women.

Cassandra was the daughter of his recently deceased older brother. Unlike Hermann, Alexius Likeworth had appreciated the finer aspects of life, like good wine, rich fabrics, and beautiful women. He had lived life to the fullest and hadn't denied his daughter anything. Until she was seventeen, Cassandra had been treated like a princess. And then, Alexius had a heart attack, and for five years, she became her father's caretaker. Over this time, the family lost some of its money, but not too much. Cassandra still had enough for a dowry. Yet she had refused to get married or to stop looking after her father—she loved him too much for that. And after his death, all of his fortune went to his brother, as their father had stipulated. Cassandra only got a dowry to be given to her upon marriage.

Hermann didn't really forbid his niece to marry or force her to become a nun. He knew that it was too late for that, and it would be against the wishes of his brother, too. But he wanted to find her a husband who conformed to his ideas of what a good man should be: a pious boy from a respected church-going family. That wasn't what Cassandra had in mind. Over the years of her father's illness, she had gotten used to full autonomy, not to mention her father had viewed religion pretty much the same way as he had earthworms. I walk, they crawl; we don't interfere with each other, but there's no point in crossing paths. What for? What would a human discuss with a worm?

During the years of Alexander Radenor's rule, such treatment of the Church had been common and even encouraged. It was Rudolph, Tempter take him, who had started to slowly oppress everyone who was indifferent toward religion.

As for Cassandra, she was the same as her father. She didn't care about the Bright Saint, and it never occurred to her to wake up in the wee hours to get to morning prayers. Pray? Why would she? If the Saint was good, he should already know she had never harmed anyone. If he was not, no point in praying, really.

She never said that out loud to her uncle, of course. She was smart enough to realize what kind of person her guardian was and to pretend to be a humble and god-fearing young woman. She covered her all too vibrant hair with a scarf, ordered simple clothes of dark colors, and passionately recited the Testament of the Bright Saint, all the while silently making fun of her uncle.

What were her reasons? She couldn't fight him anyway. If she ever tried to rebel, her uncle could beat her, lock her up, declare her to be mad, or confine her in a convent, as he did with his own daughters. Rudolph's justice gave him all the cards. All she could do was feign obedience and wait in the wings—find a man to marry and get rid of her detestable relative.

But what person would she choose? That was the first question. The second was finding the right man, since her uncle associated such exclusively with the same creatures as himself, all crusty and obsessed with their faith. Cassandra couldn't bring herself to call them people. They seemed inhuman, with empty eyes, the Testament of the Bright Saint on their minds, and a prayer on the tips of their tongues. For some, this might have been normal, but for her, it was pure poison.