The Bones of the Earth

by Rachel Dunne

  “I am alive.” He did not ask it. He did not even mean to say it, but the words snuck croaking from his throat before he could bite them. The truth in those words hurt, more than the pain of sitting.

  Vatri rushed to his side. Very gently she hugged him. “Thanks to Metherra’s mercy,” she murmured against his chest. “Parents be praised.”

  It took some convincing before she would leave him be. Finally he told her he wished to pray alone. That was a thing she could respect. She left, telling him she would return soon with food. And he was alone with the everflame.

  He had not expected to wake, after the snows took him once more. He had left his fourth life, and gladly, stretching toward whatever lay beyond the snows at the doors of death. But the snows had spit him out again. Always, they took that which he had built, and gave back something different. Something worse.

  It hurt, but Scal pushed himself to his feet. There was a throbbing in his side, a throbbing in his head. He had not expected to wake. Had not thought to have to face pain again. But, truly, pain had always meant little. He stood and took slow, limping steps, one hand on the wall, one on his side where bandages held tight. His travelsack sat in a corner, his sword leaning against the wall. He fell next to them, knees hitting hard on the wood floor, hard enough that his teeth clattered together around his tongue. He tasted blood. When he took his hand from his side, reaching for his sword, his fingers, too, were spotted with blood.

  His second life had ended in blood. The third had been washed with blood. The fourth had been built by blood. A fifth life, now, and beginning again with blood.

  It’s hard, little lad, Parro Kerrus had told him long ago, voice heavy with grief as they watched a patrol return with the bodies of a new batch of convicts. They had not been more than a few hours from safety when they had been cut down. They were prisoners, criminals convicted by law, but Kerrus held that all lives were worthy. Too, there had been innocents among them. Wives. Husbands. Children, who were the hardest for Kerrus to look upon. The Parents, in their wisdom or their folly, did not see fit to give us easy lives.

  Scal’s hands were clumsy, shaking, weak. But the blade clicked free, the scabbard sliding down and away, and the sword lay naked across his legs. He did not know how he would lift it, but he would manage.

  Five lives, too many for any one man to live. A life could end in blood as easily as it could begin. And then the snows would take him.

  And then the snows would spit him back.

  “If you need a reason not to,” a soft voice said into the fire-flickering silence, “you’ll make the cappo’s life easier if you’re dead. He hasn’t earned an easy life.”

  Scal’s shoulders slumped, and the pain flared in his side, and his fingers slid from the hilt. He had not ever cried in his fourth life. The tears poured from him now. A river of grief, for all that had been and had not been and would never be.

  The floor creaked. A shoulder pressed against his. The witch-man said nothing else. Just knelt beside him in his watchful silence, and shared the little strength he had.

  This new life, a fifth life, beginning in the same place his second life had begun. The second should have been a gentle life, a happy life. A priest to guide him, a friend steady at his side. It would have been good. But blood had washed it away.

  All of Scal’s lives had been shaded in blood. They had been shaped, too. Others’ hands molding him to their own ends. They had been his lives, for he had lived them—and yet, none of those lives had ever truly belonged to him.

  This new life, given unexpectedly, did not have to be the same. It could be his life, of his own choosing. Free of spilled blood.

  The door opened, cold air rushing in, and there were more steps than Vatri alone. She cried out in dismay, seeing Scal out of his bedroll. Roughly she shoved Anddyr aside, muttering, “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you to watch him.”

  It took Vatri and the witch and the twins as well to get Scal back under covers. He saw the witch-man quietly ease his sword back into its scabbard, lean it back against the wall. He thought, perhaps, that Rora saw. She said nothing of it.

  The four spread themselves around Scal. Vatri unwrapped the bandages from his middle, wrinkling her nose and spreading a poultice. Aro was at her side, passing her clean linens before she could ask. Rora, wearing Scal’s old snowbear cloak, sat with her back to a wall, her eyes and the bear’s on the door. The witch-man was across the room, watching Rora. The room was full of the everflame’s crackle and little else.

  The door swung open. Before it hit the wall Rora was in a crouch, knives half-drawn. The witch-man curled into the smallest shape he could. Joros entered, scowling.

  “How long?” he demanded of Vatri.

  She shook her head. “A week at least. Even if he heals fast, he won’t be fit for travel for some time.”

  Joros snarled and stormed. They all watched him, waiting to see how his anger would end. Vatri’s lips pressed tight, and Rora’s.

  Aro spoke, though he should have left the man to his fury. “If we could get a cart . . .”

  Joros swung to him, growling, and towered over the sitting man with clenched fists. “Do you know what the bloody convicts were doing while we’ve been trying to save Scal’s fecking life? Those idiots were butchering my horse,” he snapped. “Do you truly think they’d give us a cart?” He swung to Vatri, jabbing a finger at her. “He will be ready for travel by the end of the week. I won’t be stuck in this shit-hole any longer than that.”

  Joros had not seemed to notice he was awake, and so Scal kept his words held tight behind his teeth.

  The man swore and raged, and was ignored. Finally he left, as much a storm as he had entered. The chapel seemed to let out a held breath as the door closed on his heels. Silence fell once more.

  The witch-man was the first to leave. He slunk like a dog from the room, a small jar cradled in one hand. Aro followed not long after. Stretching, feigning relaxation. Wind whistled sharply through the closing door, cold air that bit. Vatri knelt before the everflame and began to pray. Against the wall, Rora looked on with hooded eyes, dark beneath the snowbear’s scowl. She, too, left. Out into the wind and the snow.

  “I would like to be alone.” Scal’s voice felt loud, in the silence of the chapel.

  Vatri stared at him for a long while. Trying to read him as she read the flames, to pull out meaning and purpose. She must have found an answer. “Stay in bed,” she said sternly as she rose. “There’s little enough clean linen here, and I can’t keep changing your bandages every few hours. I’ll be back at sunrise.” She stopped before the door, searching again, waiting for an answer. There was none to give. She left, and he was alone with the everflame.

  There is danger in being alone, Parro Kerrus had told him long ago. He had stared into the bottle of brandy he held, and not said anything more.

  Carefully Scal rose. In this new life, he would be gentle with his body. He would make it a bloodless life. Begun in blood, but it did not have to stay so. He felt the pain of his wounds, a constant thing, but the pain did not flare from being stretched too far. He moved like an old man, bent and limping, and he moved slow. Deliberate. He did not need to rush. He had until the sun returned once more.

  Surprise showed in Vatri’s face when she entered the chapel to find the small priest, Parro Modatho, sitting on the floor next to Scal, now upright in his makeshift bed. She did not speak, but her wide eyes narrowed in suspicion, mouth tightening. Wordlessly she handed Scal a bowl of thin porridge and knelt before the everflame. He did not think he had ever heard such aggressive prayer.

  The twins entered, Aro muttering, “Gods, these people are hard to be around.” His face flushed when he saw Modatho. “Sorry, Parro.”

  “I would speak with Joros,” Scal said to no one in particular.

  The women shared glances, and Aro snorted. “You and everyone else here.”

  “I’ll see if he’s busy,” Rora offered.

  “Tell him i
t is important,” Scal added. Rora’s hand paused on the door. She glanced at him with raised eyebrows and then nodded once, leaving. Vatri gave him a searching look, but Scal avoided her gaze.

  Three returned, Rora and the witch-man and Joros. So many bodies made the chapel feel small, suffocating. Scal could remember, from a life long ago, sitting in a chapel that looked similar to this one. A deep-voiced priest and a boy whose smile split his face.

  “What is it?” Joros demanded. It was the first he had looked at Scal, since he had been given back by the snows.

  Scal reached beneath the blanket that covered him. The pouch was heavy, almost more than he could lift without paining the gash that ran along his side. It arced through the air, a moving shifting shape, and landed near enough to Joros’s feet. A hard sound, metal against metal against the floor. More coin than Scal had ever seen in his life. More than any man needed. Slowly, clearly, Scal said, “I am no longer for hire.”

  From the edges of his vision he saw the others react. Vatri, clapping her hands over her scar-twisted mouth. Aro’s mouth dropping open. Rora narrowing her eyes, her face a mimic of Vatri’s earlier suspicion. Anddyr, with a plea in his gaze. Scal did not look at them. This new life would be one of his own shaping. He kept his eyes on Joros, and did not look away.

  The man’s face turned a slow red. The right side had been burned, before Scal knew him, and new skin had finally begun to grow, smooth and shiny and pink. The rest of his face became the same color, and darker. He, too, did not look away from Scal. Scal could see the possibilities flickering behind his eyes, all the ways to stretch and twist this moment.

  Finally his eyes snapped away and he said to the others, “We’re leaving within the hour.” The door slammed behind him. Hard enough to send dust skittering down from the ceiling.

  Vatri clutched at Scal’s arm, nails digging in. “You can’t be serious. You have to come with us!”

  Scal could not look at her. His fourth life was gone, over, behind him. But it was not so easily forgotten. The memories lingered, and the feelings. “I am not Joros’s man. I am not your man.” He wanted to give her more. Tell her how he had been shaped by others’ needs, shaped by fear of what he did not want to be. That he had never lived a life of what he did want to be. Because of his fourth life, he wanted to tell her all of it. But this was not his fourth life. In this life, he owed her nothing. The words were his alone, and his to keep.

  Rora spoke softly to her brother and then to Anddyr, and both men slipped from the chapel. She turned her anger to Parro Modatho. The parro swallowed hard, and Scal half expected him to flee. He was not a brave man. This was his chapel, though. He cowered under Rora’s gaze, but he did not leave.

  “Why?” Rora asked Scal softly. Barely a question.

  Scal could meet her eyes. He had known her less, yet she had understood him in a way none of the others had. There was an understanding, among those whose lives were shaped by the blood of others. “I do not owe you a reason.”

  “Damned if you don’t!” she shouted, and the fierceness surprised him. Her fists were clenched, and her teeth. “I near died trying to save your life, and near killed myself to save it again. Don’t fecking tell me I’m not owed anything.”

  How to tell her she had saved a different man? But looking at her, the anger and the ache, he still understood her. She was one to stand with, shoulder to shoulder, and face an enemy without fear. She would not break. Would not bend.

  “I lived here, long ago,” he said. Vatri’s eyes widened, her hand went unconsciously to her cheek. On Scal’s cheek were two lines of deep scar, making an X. The convict’s cross, that would be echoed on the face of every prisoner in Aardanel. His was on the right instead of the left cheek, and had been given by a Northman instead of a magistrate. None of them had ever asked of it. Vatri, least of all, would ever ask about another’s scars. “I was brought here as a child. I would have spent all my days here, had life gone as it was meant to.” He paused. Hoped they would see the words so he would not have to speak them. They only stared, and the snowbear’s eyes upon Rora’s head stared, too. “I have not lived as the man I should have been. I will stay here, and atone. Live here, as I always should have.”

  “Patharro protects the penitent,” Modatho intoned in his reedy voice. He clearly regretted the words as soon as they were free, when Rora’s stare swung to him once more. He was a small man. He tried to become smaller.

  “Bullshit,” Rora said to Scal. “We’ve all got a pile of regrets chewing our backs, but you can’t just go running off.”

  Scal shook his head. An unexpected sadness bloomed briefly in him. He had thought she would understand. It was not fleeing his past lives. It was trying to find the threads of the life he should have had, and knit them into something that would hold.

  She yelled at him more, when he would not answer. There were no more words to give her. Already he had given her more than he had meant to.

  Vatri held to his arm, silent. Her fingers like hooks that would drag him along. There was more softness in her face, but no understanding.

  Aro’s head poked briefly through the door. “Rora, there’s trouble brewing . . .”

  Her raging stopped. She stood, chest heaving, fury plain. She spat in Scal’s face, and grabbed Vatri’s wrist.

  “I have to help them. They need me,” the merra said softly, and desperation touched her words. The sound her voice took, when she looked into a fire and the flames did not spell what she wished them to. “I need you.” Her clutching fingers dragged grooves in his arms as she was pulled away. Something like sadness and something like anger danced in her eyes. Perhaps the trick of reading her emotions had died with Scal’s last life. “Please, don’t leave me.” The door closed, her voice shut out. In the place where his old lives sat like heavy stones, Scal ached. None of it mattered. He could not let it.

  “You have been brave this day, child,” Parro Modatho said. He was young for a parro, and awkward with authority. Not knowing the right words, or how to say them. Early as it was, his breath smelled of brandy when he leaned too close. “The Parents will surely guide you to redemption.”

  Scal ignored him. The parro had talked at him throughout the night, always saying five words when one would have done. Voice stumbling and uncertain, as though the parables were a thing he only half believed in. He would stand for Scal against the wardens, and that was the important thing. He could talk all he liked; a different priest’s words were already laid thick in Scal’s heart and mind.

  He laid his head down, finally. Lulled by Modatho’s babble, and the flicker of the everflame. Dimly he heard shouting from beyond the door. Voices swelling in anger, close to breaking.

  Scal closed his eyes. Those were the concerns of a lost life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was hard to even think over all the yelling, and Anddyr wanted very badly to be able to think clearly. The anger around him was near to boiling, so thick he felt he likely could have seen it even if he wasn’t in the grasp of a skura-induced hallucination. He knew, if he could only think it through, that he could calm the anger, set everything to rights.

  All he’d managed to do so far was clap his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut, trying to block out the yelling so that perhaps his brain could get started on the problem. It hadn’t worked yet, but Anddyr had never been one for giving up so easily—at least, not when he knew vaguely that his life was at stake. But it was so blasted hard to think clearly with long-legged insects crawling over his skin and piling at his feet, holding him rooted to the ground.

  Cappo Joros yelled sometimes, when he was annoyed or angry or bored, but he never argued. He didn’t have to; his orders were simply followed, always.

  The wardens here didn’t seem to know that.

  He was still angry about the horses, and Anddyr couldn’t blame him for that. Both horses had been wonderful and sweet, and Anddyr had named them both Sooty, after the stuffed horse he kept tucked inside his ro
bes. He couldn’t think about the Sootys without crying, and crying wouldn’t help him here. He tried to focus instead on what the cappo was shouting about, squinting through the noise and the crawling insects to find the single voice.

  “. . . plenty of meat, clearly! I will have enough of it to see me out of the blasted North—and more!” The cappo had one fist clenched, shaking it in the face of a man twice as wide as he was and thick with muscle. “That’s two of my beasts you’ve killed now, so I’m more than entitled to them. They’re still mine.”

  The big man facing the cappo wore the blue uniform of the wardens that ran the place, but there was a chain stretched between his wrists like a convict. Anddyr tried very hard to focus on the warden-convict’s face, because the chain kept coming so distractingly to life, twisting and writhing like a snake. At least the man’s face didn’t turn into anything it wasn’t supposed to be. His mouth was hard, set, and he hadn’t opened it as long as Anddyr had been watching. There was a slow storm building, and it occurred to Anddyr—a coherent thought, finally—that the storm would break, and its center was the cappo.

  Good, he thought from the dark place that lurked at his center, a hidden thing of evil and malice and claws. The darkness uncurled, stretching like a shadow. Let the storm come. Let it break him.

  A thrill of joy ran through Anddyr. He could shake his legs free of the insects and step away, melt into the crowd, and the cappo would never see him. And there wouldn’t be anyone to save him. For one shining moment, Anddyr saw himself walking out the gates of Aardanel alone, free, his head high.

  And then he thought of the long walk through the snows, and the twisting hunger in his belly, and Rora’s face, and the brief rush of joy crumbled into biting fear.

  Anddyr moved slowly through the crowd, trailing insects—not away from the cappo, but toward him. It wasn’t so easy as walking away. If the storm should break, it would break over him as well.

  Anddyr’s fingers moved as he walked, tracing the sigils for a simple defensive spell. It was one of the earliest spells he’d learned; a master had taught it to him after watching a group of older novices pelt Anddyr with rotten fruit. “You’ll earn their respect one day,” the master had offered soothingly. “Boys don’t like being reminded they’re not the smartest creatures in the world. They like it even less from a younger boy.”