The Bones of the Earth

by Rachel Dunne

  Joros kept playing with the little seekstone, the one Anddyr’d given him, like he thought they’d somehow lose the column if he didn’t keep an eye on them. Aro’d tried to poke the witch into a lesson, but Anddyr was in one of his storms, scratching shapes into the half-froze ground while he muttered. He was scraping his fingers bloody. Rora didn’t start a fire, and since she was the one who usually did, they didn’t have a fire. It was just warm enough they didn’t need one.

  It felt like a long time ago, but really it’d only been a few months—but there was a time when Rora would’ve been happy as coins, sitting with her brother and a few other people, relaxing and enjoying the winter melting away. That seemed like a different person. That was someone who hadn’t abandoned her pack, who hadn’t led a bunch of her pack to their deaths. That was someone who’d only known about the Twins as old stories that’d make people hate her, if they found out what she was. That was someone who’d known where she fit, who was as balanced as a good throwing dagger. It was hard to believe Rora’d been that person.

  “You said the grass was tall?” Aro’s voice was small and hesitant—someone who still didn’t know how he fit. “Couldn’t we hide in it? I know it wouldn’t be as good as trees for cover, but . . .”

  “Close as we’d have to be to keep on their path,” Rora said, “they’d see us for sure. And if we got far enough away they wouldn’t see us, we wouldn’t be able to follow ’em.”

  “Oh.” He stayed quiet after that, watching Anddyr scratch at the ground.

  Rora didn’t have any ideas better’n that, and Joros was just glaring south—maybe he was trying to think up an idea, but Rora didn’t really think so.

  That old Rora, the one she could remember like a hurting tooth, she would’ve been happy for a rest. She wouldn’t’ve minded not doing anything important, would’ve told half-truth stories about all the things she’d done or pulled out some dice or maybe crossed daggers with one of the other knives. She couldn’t count the times that she and Aro, or she and some other knives, had gotten bored and gone sneaking through the Canals, knowing where some friend or half-enemy was headed and hiding there, waiting for the sounds of feet on stone or splashing water to tell them the target was near. It was a good day, when they could make the person piss themselves with fear—they’d laugh so hard they came near to pissing themselves, too, sometimes.

  But that was a different person. This Rora, now-Rora, sitting still made her twitchy. She knew there were things she should be doing, important things. She knew enough to be scared, and was scared enough to worry she was making things worse by not doing anything. Maybe the old Rora’d had some good ideas, though. “Do you know where it is they’re all going to?” she asked Joros.

  He didn’t look at her, still rolling the seekstone in his fingers, still staring south. “I have an idea.”

  “It’s something like that hand, though, right? Another . . . piece?”

  “Another limb, yes.”

  “Could the witch find it like he found the hand?”

  Joros did look at her then, and there was something weird in his eyes. He left off the stone for a minute, putting his hand instead down to the pouch on his belt. The big pouch, where that ugly, awful toe was. “He could . . .”

  “So what if we got there before the others?”

  They left not too long after that, cutting a bit east before turning back south. They didn’t even need the witch yet, which was good because he was a crying mess when they dragged him away from his scratchings. If they pushed hard, if they could get ahead of the column fast enough, then it was just a matter of staying ahead.

  Rora kept her job as scout, jogging ahead for a while until she had a good lead on the others. It felt good, the wind in her face and the grass brushing her shoulders. It felt like being free, like not having any worries at all.

  She turned after a while, heading toward where the column would be, and taking it slow. She didn’t want to actually stumble over any of them, but sound traveled weird in the wide-open place. The other day, she would’ve guessed from the sound of it that the column was still a lot of lengths away, and then she’d near run into someone walking through the grass. That’d spooked her real bad, and maybe it was just someone drifting off to take a piss, but maybe the grass held on to sound tight as a lover. This time, soon as she heard any sound from the column, she turned back. She wouldn’t get caught out again.

  She went farther ahead, walking fast, air burning good in her lungs, and she hardly felt the little cuts of the grass stalks as they brushed past her. This wasn’t proper sneaking, was more like a game of hide-and-chase than anything else, but it was loads better’n being in a freezing dungeon or the freezing North or a cramped room where one of her oldest friends’d just sawed off her ear. Maybe it was the best place she had left, and maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

  Finally, on one of her turns toward the column, with her ears straining, she caught the sounds of chatter and footsteps and breaking grass, but the sounds weren’t coming from ahead of her—they were coming from her right. She’d finally made it up ahead of the whole damned column.

  She was grinning as she jogged back to Joros and Anddyr and Aro, grinning even broader because of a big fat bird she’d managed to kick up and put a dagger in, grinning right up until she smacked straight into a really fecking solid bit of air.

  She muffled her cursing as she picked herself up off the ground, swatted at Aro’s hands as he tried to help her up. “I’m so sorry, Rora,” he babbled. “I couldn’t dispel it fast enough—”

  “You did that?” she demanded, and then she punched him on the shoulder. He didn’t bother trying to keep his yelp quiet, so she punched him again.

  The witch made him yelp a third time when he grabbed the shoulder Rora’d just punched. “You need to maintain your control.” At least he had the sense to keep quiet, hissing into Aro’s face. “Your edges were unstable, and if you had good control of it you could have dispelled it in seconds. You need to learn this, there’s so little time—”

  Rora grumbled and growled, any good feelings she’d had gone like a stomped-out fire. It seemed like Joros was in the same sort of mood, and she couldn’t blame him—she’d probably be even madder if she was stuck around her brother and the witch for so many hours. Maybe the good news would make him happy at least. “We’re close to the front,” she told Joros while the witch kept babbling at her brother. “Another day of pushing, and we’ll probably be pretty safely ahead of ’em.”

  “It’s about damned time,” Joros snapped, so it seemed like everyone was doomed to be pissed off.

  Wasn’t too hard of a choice to go back to ranging up ahead.

  After a few days, being ahead of the column made Rora five kinds of twitchy. She had trouble falling asleep, sure that the column would catch up with them, and when she did manage to sleep she didn’t get much, waking up at any sound, sure it was black-robes come sneaking through the grass.

  She pushed her pack harder when they traveled, because the more distance they got, the longer it’d take the black-robes to catch ’em up. Rora herself moved in constant, big circles around their little group, making sure there was no danger ahead, swinging back to make sure the column wasn’t in sight or sound. Made her damn exhausted when they set up camp, and no matter how many times she grabbed Joros’s seekstone to make sure the column wasn’t moving either, she was still sure they were taking a break instead of a full stop, that they’d keep pressing forward while Rora slept on blindly, and she’d wake up with a nasty knife planted in her neck.

  Long and short, Rora was starting to feel like she looked as crazed and worn out as Joros did.

  It got even worse when they reached the hills.

  They were just small lumps at first, like the ground had burped a little, and those weren’t any kind of problem. But the hills got bigger, and the grass got shorter. Creeping up to the top of one of the hills to scout, Rora felt like a big painted target standing there. She di
dn’t see the column, from the quick look she took before she got too spooked, but that didn’t mean much when you were looking out at nice tall grass that could hide anything. She stayed off the hills, instead winding her way through the valleys between them, and she made the others promise to do the same.

  “I could cloak you,” Aro told her once, with his big puppy eyes. “Anddyr says I’m starting to get good at it, and it’d keep you safe.”

  “No,” she said, and made sure she didn’t say anything more’n that. Aro just wanted her approval, he always had, but she couldn’t give it to him, not for this. Still, that didn’t mean she could bring herself to crush him like a bug. He was her brother—her stupid, headstrong, foolhardy brother—and she’d love him no matter the idiot choices he made. Didn’t mean she had to approve of his showing off the thing she’d worked her whole life to keep hidden—well, one of the two things she’d been keeping hidden. She could hate him and love him at the same time. It was like that boy-twin in the mountain had said, Without me, she’d tip. He’d been talking about his own sister, but he might as well’ve been talking about Rora. Without me . . . she’d mean nothing.

  Coming around the soft curve of a hill, a flicker of something caught Rora’s eye, and instinct sent her stretched belly-flat to the ground. She could feel her heart thumping in her mouth as she finally fixed on what’d spooked her brain, and she wasn’t sure if she should scream or cry or run until her legs couldn’t take her any farther.

  Somehow, the black-robes’d gotten back ahead of her, because one of them stood at the top of the biggest hill she’d seen so far.

  He was still a ways away, far enough maybe he hadn’t seen her yet, but she could tell by the way he moved that he was looking, looking out over the hills and the plains, searching for something. For her, maybe. Or for her brother and Joros and the witch . . .

  She stayed on her belly, using knees and elbows to push herself backward, slow and easy, trying to pretend she was like the grass around her, just moving with the wind. Soon as she was back around the hill, soon as she couldn’t see the black-robe anymore, she sat up and curled herself into a little ball, her back to where he was standing. She knew she should get back to the others and fast, warn them before they got to somewhere the black-robe might see them . . . but it was like she was back in the mountain cell, frozen so cold she couldn’t get her body to do anything. All she could do was sit there and listen to the blood pound in her ears.

  Rora squeezed her eyes shut and focused on that sound, focused on it and made herself take even breaths. Slowly, her heartbeat started to match the breaths, steady and not panicked—or not so panicked at least. It was a trick Tare had taught her, way back, after Rora’d made her first kill for the pack and realized that killing someone to save your life was a lot different from killing someone for money.

  She got to her feet, and stayed low to the ground, and it was one of the few times she’d ever been happy she was so short. She snuck through the hills, careful to keep one at her back as often as she could, and always looking over her shoulder first if she ever had to cross into sight of that big bastard of a hill.

  The witch was having one of his fits when she found them, which was good because it meant they weren’t moving toward the hill, but bad because the witch usually wasn’t quiet about his craziness. It looked like he was at the start of the storm, twitching and muttering and scratching at his arms like there was something under his skin. One time she’d heard him moan, “I can feel them, they’re in my blood,” and it’d turned her stomach so bad she’d nearly puked. She hadn’t asked who “they” were, didn’t want to know.

  “Can you make him stay quiet?” she asked Aro, first thing she said to any of ’em. “Or make it so no one can hear him?”

  Aro’s eyes got wide, and maybe it was because he could guess why she’d ask something like that, or maybe she looked as scared as she felt, or maybe he was just surprised she’d ever ask him to do anything magic. “I . . . I think . . . maybe?”

  “Do whatever you can,” she said, and then she turned to Joros. “They got ahead of us, somehow. Saw a black-robe on a hill up ahead, keeping lookout. Didn’t stick around to see how many of his friends were around.”

  Joros’s face looked like thunder, and Rora had a mad moment of her own to think it was no wonder Anddyr had problems with storms, being slave to a living one. “Where?” he asked.

  Rora looked over her shoulder, down the beating-heart path she’d come. Every part of her screamed not to go that way, fear pointing like an arrow. She lifted her hand to point the same way.

  Joros ground his teeth. “How? How could they have gotten there ahead of us?”

  “Tricky bastards,” Rora said. “However they did it, plan’s off. There’s no way we can get to whatever limb’s there first, don’t know if there’s any way we can get to it at all now.”

  Joros ground his teeth some more, and looked kind of like he wanted to hit her. She’d like to see him try—with the way her blood was running high, she figured she could take him, easy. He didn’t hit her, though. Just stared the way her finger’d been pointing, the same way they’d been traveling the last few days, weeks, however fecking long it’d been.

  “So what do we do?” Aro asked quietly, always the one to ask that stupid question, to remind them they didn’t have any plan, and not having a plan meant probably dying in some awful and foolish way.

  “We go around,” Joros finally said. “We come from the side, where they won’t be looking. We watch.” His eyes fixed back on Rora, and she didn’t like what she saw there. “We do whatever we can.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Keiro stood atop the tallest hill, feeling the pulse of the Twins beneath his feet, and he watched the great serpent of the Fallen wind its way through the hills. He had known of their coming for a handful of days now, knew it by the way the grass murmured, by the scent carried on the wind, by the whispering certainty in his mind. He knew it because the Twins knew it.

  The wind tugged at Saval’s robe, making it dance around Keiro’s legs. It felt strange to wear the black again, after so long naked, and so long in tatters before that. It was a right sort of strange, but still strange. He had washed the robe half a dozen times, turning a clear pool of water pink, and sewn closed the giant rents with a bone needle and grass-stalk thread. Don’t think of that. He needed to look the part he was to play.

  Keiro stood alone atop the hill. He was meant to be alone, knew that down to his bones. He was at peace with it. Saval and Nerrin were gone, buried, made two sad hills among all the others. He’d wasted his time burying them. The plainswalkers were together, back at their tribehome. Maybe they had a part in what was to come, but perhaps they’d already fulfilled their purpose. They’d stood guard and held their secrets close through the long centuries, but the time of hiding and secrets was gone. This was the time for revealing, and for shouting.

  There was a rustle to his left, and Keiro’s head turned instinctively, hopefully. He’d been doing the same for days now, but it was never Cazi. It still wasn’t—only the wind, a warm breeze blowing at dry stalks. He hadn’t seen Cazi since that day below the hill, the day that—Don’t think of it.

  The Fallen drew slowly closer. Bring them all, Sororra had said, and it looked as though Saval’s attendants had listened well. Keiro had never known how many the Fallen numbered—he’d wondered, sometimes, if anyone had known. With so many of the preachers inclined to long wandering, it was hard to guess. He supposed the Ventallo would know, have some catalog, have shelves upon shelves of seekstones, one for each preacher, but it was beyond his knowing. He was not of the Ventallo, and the one he could have asked was gone.

  He wondered why he, an apostate, had been spared over a Ventallo. He had asked Tseris, when she had found him sitting beside the two mounds of fresh-turned dirt. “You hear what most do not,” she’d told him. “You see the world, and you see what lies beyond it.” His throat was too tight to ask for a better an
swer, and so he still wondered—and more, he wondered how he would explain it to the other Ventallo, that he lived while one of their number had been given to the gods.

  They drew closer, step by steady step, and Keiro stood waiting. There was nothing else for him to do.

  The first to reach the base of the hill weren’t true preachers, though the clothes they wore were dyed black—they were fighters, mercenaries, faithless hired swords. They approached with their weapons drawn and, unexpectedly, Keiro felt a spark of anger flare in his heart. He stood straighter, and he looked down at the half dozen men.

  “Hail, brother,” one of the mercenaries called out. “We seek Essemo Noniro or Saval Tredeiro. Are they here?”

  He would give them no more than what they asked. “They are not,” Keiro said flatly.

  The speaker hesitated, exchanging glances and whispers with his fellows. “Were you with them? One of their attendants?”

  “I was not.”

  “Then . . . who are you?”

  Keiro stared at the man, stared at each of them in turn, and he could see their hackles rising at his silence—not in true anger, but in fear. It was the usual response of strong-handed men faced with the unfamiliar. Finally he said, “I am Keiro Godson. I speak for these hills and all that lies in them. I will speak to the Ventallo.”

  More murmured conversation, and then one of the mercenaries broke off, loping through the curving valleys between the hills, heading for the long black snake. The Fallen had halted some distance away, sent these scouts ahead, no doubt, to question the strange man on the hill.

  The other mercenaries tried to question Keiro more, but he stood with his back and his arms straight, looking high over their heads to watch the mass of the Fallen. Occasionally he would repeat, “I will speak to the Ventallo,” in answer to their gruff questions, and finally the mercenaries fell silent. They did not sheathe their blades.