The Bones of the Earth

by Rachel Dunne

  “Forgive me,” Tseris whispered.

  Straz lowered his great head, two points of gray sticking from his muzzle. Within Sororra’s curled hand, a small form thrashed, screaming the mindless terror of an animal in pain. Cazi’s scales had grown darker, but he was still lighter than black, light enough that Keiro could see blood pouring over his scales from the places where his wings had thrust so proudly.

  Sororra lifted both hands and, with the empty one, touched a finger to the ichorous stump where Fratarro’s arm had been torn away. “Shh,” she murmured, the sound nearly lost in the screaming. “Shh, little one. Almost over.” Her finger came away wet, a deeper black than her burned flesh. She ran her finger across Cazi’s back, over the raw wounds where his wings had been bitten off. “There now. Shh.”

  In time, the high screams faded. From where he knelt, and with tears blurring his sight, Keiro could see no change, but he could imagine how well a god’s blood could heal flesh. Sororra set her hand to the ground, opened her fingers. Cazi fled from her palm, skittered past Straz, came to rest against Keiro’s knees. Keiro hugged the young mravigi tight, weeping unabashed, joy that he lived still, sorrow at what had been taken from him.

  “Why?” Keiro asked heavily, his head pressed to Cazi’s. Asked it of Tseris, of Straz, of Sororra and Fratarro both, of all the watching Starborn. Asked it of the world itself, the oldest question, ever unanswerable.

  Fratarro’s voice was as thick with grief as Keiro’s. “It is the only way they may live. If my Father knew he had not killed them all . . .”

  “His hatred is boundless,” Sororra said. “He would hunt them to the end of the earth, if he knew there were any left to hunt.”

  “Usually,” Tseris said, “we do it before the young have tasted the sky. It is easier when they do not know what they have lost.”

  Keiro shook his head, wordless, anger and anguish battling. He wanted to deny it, deny the necessity, say that Cazi would have been careful to go unseen in his flight . . . but he knew those were lies. He had watched Cazi fly. Watched him climb so high into the sky he was little more than a speck, high enough to be seen half the world away . . . high enough, certainly, to be seen by eyes watching the world from above. The young were careless, reckless. This was the only way . . . the only way to keep him safe. There was no other choice.

  When Keiro lifted his head from Cazi’s, he saw that Sororra’s eyes were fixed intently on him, and that Fratarro’s were fixed to the ground. “They have left us no choice,” Sororra said earnestly. “It is one of the many crimes for which they will pay.”

  Keiro ran one hand gently over Cazi’s back. His scales were still damp with blood, but his shoulders were smooth, the scales unbroken, no sign left of the wings that had borne him into the sky—not even a trace of a wound, to remember that they had been there.

  “You will help us, Godson,” Fratarro said with unexpected fierceness. “Avenge Cazi, and all the others before him, all my children who have suffered mutilation for the sake of petty jealousy. Bring the Fallen, so that we may rise.”

  “I will,” Keiro said, throat still thick, hand sticky with drying blood, cradling the trembling young Starborn against his chest. “For Cazi.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Darkness had a way of sharpening you, or at least it did for Rora. In proper dark, you could hear all the flavors of quiet. There was the waiting quiet, that wrapped itself up in a neat bundle and stayed calm as calm could be. There was the alert quiet, the one that half expected something to reach out in the dark and would be ready when it happened. There was the scared quiet, which was one breath away from a sob.

  Etarro shook where he was wrapped up in her arms, and Rora was probably being generous if she said half of it was cold-shaking. The boy had the scared quiet on him so tight not even his teeth chattered, probably held together so tight they’d burst with just a little more pressure.

  “Hey,” she said, soft enough it wouldn’t scare him. He still jumped. “It’s not so bad. They’ll come back for you.”

  “I know. But I hate the dark. I can’t see anything.”

  Rora almost laughed at that, but was glad she didn’t. Glad he couldn’t see the bit of a smile on her face when she said, “Yeah, that’s how the dark works. Comes with not having any light around.”

  An annoyed noise came out of the boy. “I know that. I’m not stupid.” A big shiver rolled through him. “In the dark, I can’t see anything.”

  “Oh.” His special seeing, that he’d convinced himself he had. “So the dark turns you into a normal person.”

  “I . . . I suppose . . .”

  “Isn’t that what the Twins want? All dark and everyone’s even, yeah?”

  He was quiet, a surprised quiet, the sort of quiet that didn’t know how to say a mean thing nice.

  Smirking a little, Rora said, “I’m not stupid either.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, and his surprised quiet faded back into the scared quiet. He seemed determined not to let his fear drift away.

  “Hey,” she said again, jostling his shoulder, hoping she could shake the fear off, “you ever hear the Song of Belora Blue-eye?”

  “No . . .”

  “It was one of my favorites as a kid. You wanna hear it?”

  She knew this quiet—it was the quiet of a kid with one foot toward being a grown-up, the quiet of someone who thought they were supposed to be better than something. The dark had a way of peeling off masks, though.

  “Please.” He still tried to make it sound all dignified, like he was doing her a favor, but his shaking had already started to slow down some.

  “Right. Well, Belora, she lived up at the top of a mountain—nothing so tall as this one, but still a mountain, and a mountain’s nothing to suck your teeth at. Some people said her parents’d left her there to die and she’d been too stubborn to listen. Other people said she had no parents, that eagles had dropped her at the top of the mountain when she was a babe and she was too fearless to think there could be a better place to live. And then there were a few who said she wasn’t human at all, that she’d clawed her way up from the mountain’s heart and was too unnatural to join the rest of the world.

  “No matter how she got there, Belora lived at the top of her mountain, and she stayed put. In all her life, she just sat there at the top of her mountain, still as death but as alive as can be, smirking on her perch as she dared the world to just try and move her. Winds blowed, but they couldn’t knock her off the mountain. A great big bird who wanted the mountain for his own perch, he challenged her, but she beat him fair and ate good bird-meat for a week. The sun snuck up close to her, trying to drive her off with the heat, and her skin burned black and cracked like tree bark, but still she didn’t move. The mountain itself tried to shake her loose, big rumbles that started in the ground and near cracked the mountain in half, but Belora, she just hung on and kept smiling.

  “Now, with her skin all sun-black, the night turned Belora into a shadow, dark as the sky. Even if you knew where to look, at night, you couldn’t see any trace of Belora on her mountain.

  “But there was one night when Belora had a bad dream, and she woke up, and her eyes were like two bright stars in the dark. The moon saw, and from so far away, he was sure he’d found—”

  “The moon’s a ‘he’?” Etarro interrupted.

  “Yeah, the moon’s a ‘he,’ now hush. Anyhow, the moon was chuffed at his luck, ’cause he was sure he was seeing not one but two other moons glowing in the night. The moon’s a lonely thing, you see. The sun never wants to stay and have a talk with him, always running off soon as the moon gets close, and stars are no good at talking. So the moon, he was sure he’d finally found a friend, and he rushed on over to Belora.

  “Now, you have to see it from Belora’s eyes. She’d just got woke up by a bad dream, and her heart was still hammering with fear, and suddenly the moon had zipped right up next to her. She got scared, and can you blame her? She got so scared
that she fell right off her mountain. She fell and she fell, a long way down, and she landed right on her face.

  “The moon, he’d started holding his breath the second Belora started falling, hating that he’d scared away his new friends before he’d even got to introduce himself proper. But when Belora landed on the ground, the moon near burst with excitement. He’d been happy to see two little moons to be his friend, but this was even better . . .

  “Y’see, sitting flat on her mountain, there’d been one spot of Belora that the sun hadn’t burned black. And now, face-first on the ground with her white-as-milk arse sticking up into the air, the moon crowed with joy because now he’d found himself two nice big friends—”

  A laugh burst out of Etarro—a good laugh, the kind that started in the belly and touched every other place on the way out. Rora grinned into the dark as the boy shook, but not with fear or cold now, just with laughing. He laughed for a long time, laughed so long his breath started gasping in, laughed longer than the story really deserved, but Rora knew that feeling. Sometimes you laughed too hard because it made the world feel a little less small and a little less dark.

  “Why,” Etarro finally asked, still gasping a bit for air, “is it called the Song of Belora Blue-eye?”

  “I never did find out either.” Rora chuckled. “My father, he used to tell us that one all the time when we were kids, and we always cracked harder’n you. I don’t know how it ends.”

  He put his hand on her arm, his fingers damp from wiping away his laughing-tears. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, his voice slipping back into serious tones.

  “Thanks.” She didn’t ask how he guessed; with some stories, you could guess the ending even if it wasn’t written out clear. Same way she didn’t have to ask if his parents were wandering around inside the mountain. Some things were drawn so deep you could see ’em even in the dark.

  “You know,” the boy said, “I think that’s the first story I’ve ever heard that wasn’t about the Twins.”

  Rora snorted. “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you grow up around crazy folks.”

  “They’re not crazy. They’re just different than you.”

  “Everyone’s crazy. We’re all cracked a hundred different ways, some people are just better at tying knots to keep all the pieces together. From where I’m sitting, most everyone in this fecking mountain can’t tie knots for shit.”

  “They’re only—”

  A sharp sound cut over Etarro’s words, made the boy swallow his voice and shrink into Rora’s side. If she’d had someone bigger to shrink into, she would’ve done the same. The noise was soft enough, but it seemed to come from everywhere, rushing down the tunnel, filling up the little chamber, snaking through the cell bars, and wrapping around Rora and Etarro. It was like grating stones, like dry leaves in a wind, like a body dragging along the ground. It didn’t sound anything like the black-robes, didn’t sound like anything she’d ever heard before. It swelled, growing louder, closer.

  Rora pushed, shoved Etarro farther back from the bars, so they sat curled around each other at the back of the cell, and Rora was shaking just as much as the boy. When there was anything besides quiet filling a darkness, there wasn’t space for much besides fear.

  The sound got closer, clear enough she could hear it was sounds, more than one, all mashing together. Rasping breaths, something being dragged, the heavy slap of flesh. Etarro let out a little whimper, and Rora scrambled to cover his mouth. She held him tight and silent, wishing for a dagger, wishing for a sharp stick even, anything so she could feel less helpless.

  She couldn’t stop the yelp that jumped out of her mouth when something hit the cell bars. There was hard breathing, heavy and wet, and something hit the bars again. And again. And again. The dragging sound, so close she could feel it in her teeth, and her mind thought up all the monsters it could be, scaled arms sliding between the bars, claws bent toward her face, teeth like knives bared against the bars, and she couldn’t see any of it, wouldn’t know her death until it wrapped around her throat, tore through her flesh—

  “Rora?” a voice rasped, hardly even sounding human, and it was a new kind of horror that it knew her name.

  Etarro flailed in her arms, writhing like he was having a fit, and his mouth twisted out from under her hand. He hissed, “Anddyr?”

  The wet sound that echoed around the cell was, Rora realized, supposed to be a laugh. “I did it,” the voice said, and it was faint but she could almost hear how it sounded like the witch. “I did it.”

  If it really was him, well, that made things easy. Rora pulled her arms out from around Etarro, and threw herself forward until she hit the bars. She stuck both hands through and, guided by his coughing, rasping breath, she found his throat.

  Digging in her fingers, Rora pulled him closer, pulled him till his face was pressed against the bars, pulled till his face was pressed against hers, pulled till she could feel his panicky breath wash over her cheeks and feel spit, or maybe blood, splatter across her mouth as he wheezed for air. “You bastard,” she snarled, and if there’d been enough space between the bars to fit her face through, she might’ve sunk her teeth into him just as another way to show how angry she was. She saw the knives, her charges, good people—or as good as Scum got—loyal and ready to follow her no matter how much Tare’d spat and glared, all trusting in Rora to keep them safe, and now they were dead because of the witch. “Fecking traitor.” She wondered which’d come first, choking him to death or pushing her fingers through his skin. Either way, it’d be a good start in making up for all the knives he’d let die. “Murdering bastard.” There was something pulling on her arm, small fingers but a stronger grip than she expected.

  More spit or blood flew onto her face, and the witch gasped, “I’m sorry.”

  “Liar.” She squeezed her fingers in time with the word, feeling how weak his neck was.

  “Rora.” The boy’s voice was quiet, much quieter’n the blood pounding in her ears, but somehow she heard it still. “Do you remember what I told you?”

  She was never good at remembering the things people said, and what did it matter anyway, the only thing she cared about was making the witch pay for what he’d done to her and the other knives.

  “I’m so sorry,” the witch wheezed.

  You won’t die, so long as you hear the truth when it’s given. That was what the boy’d said . . . And there was another thing, one she hadn’t even remembered but it must’ve stuck in her brain somewhere, and it bubbled up to the surface: You should listen to him, when he finds you.

  Her fingers slipped from flesh before she’d even decided to, before she could remind herself what he’d done and how much he deserved to die. She let him go, because just maybe the damned kid saw more than normal people and maybe he didn’t, but sometimes, when her ears caught it right, his voice sounded just like someone else’s, like the voice that kept her from tipping over into something less than she was, that kept her from becoming someone awful.

  Rora sat back, away from the bars, heard the witch hit the floor, felt the boy at her side. There was the sound of gulping breaths. The sound of crying was louder, and really, between the three of them, she couldn’t’ve said who made that louder sound.

  “I’m so sorry,” the witch finally whimpered.

  Rora had to swallow hard before she could get out any words, still thinking of all the knives, all the people she’d led to die. “Why’d you do it?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was weak. It won’t ever happen again. I promise you, Rora. I’m . . . I’m learning how to fight.”

  She didn’t want to hear any of his excuses or explanations, because those were just ways for a person to get around admitting they’d done wrong. But the boy’s voice drifted back into her head: You won’t die, so long as you hear the truth when it’s given.

  “Anddyr,” she said, and she didn’t growl it, though it was a hard thing. “Make a light.”

  There was rustling, the annoyin
g mumbling she’d forgot about, and then a soft blue light swelled up near the ceiling of the little cavern. Etarro gave a sharp scream, and Rora almost joined him.

  The witch was near as bad as all the shadow-monsters her mind’d thought up, like something that’d taken a step outside a nightmare. Half his face looked like it’d been scraped off, and most of what wasn’t raw flesh was covered in blood. His eyes were mismatched, the pupils different sizes, and that was a bad sign. He was half lying on the floor, his hands holding on to the cell bars like they were the only things keeping him this side of death, and more than a few of his fingers looked twisted and bent like fingers shouldn’t be. His shoulders and face were pressed against the bars so tight she almost thought he’d find a way to squeeze through the bars just from will alone. His clothes were ripped and bloody, and down along his leg, there was maybe a flash of white bone. Looking back, she could see where he’d dragged himself along the ground, faint blood-smears marking a line from the tunnel straight to the cell. Worse than any of that, though, was his smile, huger than any smile she’d ever seen, and all bloody teeth and broken lips.

  “What in the hells happened to you?” she gasped. It was a close thing, but she stopped herself from moving farther away from the bars.

  The witch grinned wider, though she wouldn’t’ve thought it was possible. “I told you. I’m learning to fight.” Rora could only gape, and when she looked over at Etarro, she gaped even more to see that the boy had a grin on his face, too.

  Underneath all the blood, the witch went pale when his eyes settled on Etarro. He didn’t say anything for a while, but the smile did a slow fall off his face. His voice was different, broken, when he asked real quiet, “Is it here?”

  “No, Anddyr,” the boy said, still smiling, though it was a softer thing now. “It’s gone.”

  And the grin hopped right back onto the witch’s face. “Good. That’s good. I’ll get you out—”