The Bone Maker

by Sarah Beth Durst

  Unrolling, it looked up at her, and Kreya would have sworn it looked happy, though she hadn’t designed the rag doll to show emotion.

  “It’s good to see you too,” she told it. “Jentt and I are going to be spending the evening together. Will you stand guard for us? Let us know if we’re about to be murdered.”

  It chirped as if it understood.

  She retrieved the other two rag dolls. After she instructed them all, they chittered to one another in their singsong made-up language. “We’ll be on the balcony,” she told them.

  They followed her, tumbling out of her room and down the hallway, to Zera’s infamous balcony. One doll scurried out, climbing a trellis onto the roof, while another ducked within a potted plant. The third draped itself over the edge, disappearing from view. She was certain it was clinging beneath. She hoped Jentt wouldn’t mind their chaperones. She felt better knowing they were there. I’m not naïve, she thought. I’m hopeful. And tired of living with fear and sorrow. After everything, she deserved this, didn’t she?

  Walking out on the balcony, Kreya admired the view. Night had fallen while she’d prepared, and the mountains were cloaked in stars. Three peaks were overlapping shadows that merged into pure darkness below. She walked to the edge. The lack of edge didn’t bother Kreya. Lifting her arms to her sides, as if she were a bird about to take flight, she felt the night breeze caress her. The silk whispered around her.

  “You remember the first time I kissed you?” Jentt’s voice, behind her.

  Kreya closed her eyes and tilted her head back, breathing in the night air. “I kissed you.”

  “Sure, for our first kiss. But by the fifth, I’d figured out that you might be interested in me.” She heard his footsteps behind her and then felt his arms wrap around her. His breath was warm on her neck, and she leaned against his torso. She lowered her arms to rest them on top of his. “Our fifth kiss, the first time I kissed you, we were on top of a mountain.”

  Kreya smiled. “That doesn’t narrow it down.”

  “The very top. You’d wanted a view.”

  She remembered. “For strategic purposes. As I recall, you complained the entire climb because you hadn’t worn thick enough socks.”

  “‘Come for a walk with me,’ you said. You left out the fact the walk would be near vertical up an ice floe. I used up a third of a steadiness talisman.”

  She twisted her neck to see his face. “You did? You said you didn’t need any talismans.”

  “I was lying to impress you. Were you impressed?”

  Kreya laughed. “Very,” she lied.

  “Do we need to talk only about the past?” Jentt asked. “Or do we dare talk about the future? Our future?”

  The future. Our future. She had imagined it a thousand times, but they’d never spoken those dreams out loud, when they’d lived in stolen bits of time. The future felt too fragile, as if making plans would shatter any chance at happiness. Now, though, did she dare?

  Before she could answer, a servant cleared his throat from the doorway. He held a covered tray. A second servant carried a crystal pitcher filled with tangerine-colored liquid. Neither ventured onto the balcony.

  Kreya and Jentt crossed to them and thanked them, before carrying their dinner and drinks to the table in the middle of the balcony. Bowing, the servants retreated, obviously relieved not to be required to set foot on the open balcony. Kreya and Jentt sat. He uncovered the dishes, while she poured their drinks into spiral flute glasses.

  Both of them stared quizzically at their plates. On each was a tiny . . . Well, it looked like a squishy white square. Jentt poked it with a fork. It was framed by curls of carrot. “Vegetable, animal, or mineral?” he asked.

  “It sounded like a kind of fish? I asked for an appetizer appropriate to the night air. Probably should have been more specific.”

  Jentt began, “Do you remember—”

  Kreya cut him off. “We can talk about our future.”

  He smiled. “If Eklor gave you hope for that, then I’m grateful to him.”

  “We aren’t talking about him.” She sliced the squishy square, and it collapsed under her knife, spronging back to its original height as soon as she was done.

  “Fair enough. What do you think about traveling?”

  “Where to?” She stabbed half the square with her fork, lifted it, and examined it. It didn’t smell like fish. It smelled like herbs and vaguely of soap. She wondered if they’d mistakenly served them homemade soap.

  “Everywhere.”

  She liked the sound of that. “Are you waiting for me to try it first?”

  “Together?” he suggested.

  Together, they popped a slice of soaplike fish into their mouths. Together, they spat it out into their napkins and washed out the taste with their tangerine-flavored drinks. They laughed, and they ate the other courses while they talked about all the places they’d love to see someday and all the things they’d love to do, if they were given the chance.

  Silently, the rag doll constructs kept watch through the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Zera flopped onto a couch in her workroom, adjacent to her bedchamber. Beside her, Guine strummed on his harp. “You seem unhappy,” he said.

  “No shit.”

  “Tell me.” He played an arpeggio that should have calmed her nerves but instead made her feel like chewing on a pillow with all her excess frustration. “Perhaps talking it out will help.”

  “Definitely not. How about you strip off your clothes and then mine and make me think about anything but how much I’d like to knock sense into Kreya’s thick head?”

  He smiled but didn’t move. “You don’t want a distraction.”

  “Oh? You’re the expert on what I want?”

  “Yes,” he said calmly.

  Okay, I’ll bite. She rolled onto her side to study him. She didn’t think he loved her, not truly, but maybe he knew her. And maybe that’s better. “What do I want?”

  “Answers,” he said.

  Huh. She hadn’t expected him to be quite so on-the-nose, instantly right. But that was exactly what she needed. “You’re right. Thank you, Guine.” She’d never been the type to mope, and now wasn’t the time to start. “Gather everyone. Not my old team—they’re too busy being idiots. Summon our friends.” Getting to her feet, she proceeded to pace impatiently while Guine stuffed all of her current followers into the suddenly-not-as-spacious room.

  It only took a few minutes until the room was full to bursting. She stood up on one of her stools to be heard, holding on to Guine’s hand to stay steady. It wouldn’t do to fall off the stool.

  All of her followers looked up at her adoringly. She was pleased she recognized the majority of them. She gave them her most charming smile.

  “You all delight in gossip, don’t you?”

  A few tittered. A few looked concerned.

  “Of course you do,” Zera said. “We all do. It’s human nature to be curious. Well, we have the opportunity to delve into the juiciest bit of gossip going on right now. I assume you’ve all heard the rumors of the ‘miracle of the pyre’? Eklor has offered to extend that miracle to others. I want to know who he’s offering it to and if he’s delivering. Lurk around the grand master’s palace. Let me know who comes and goes. Pull whatever strings you can to learn who is benefiting and who isn’t from Eklor’s presence.” She thought of one specific request. “And get me a list of the recently dead. We can start there, with the hospital, with the mortuary. Especially keep an eye out for any recent dead with politically powerful relatives, but let’s be thorough. I want to know who that asshole plans to revive next and what he might gain from it.”

  She dismissed them, all but Guine.

  He stroked her multicolored hair. “You still seem tense.”

  She gave him a flat look.

  He quit petting her. “Understandably tense.”

  “I don’t trust Eklor. And now I’m not sure I trust Kreya, at least when it come
s to this. He’s up to more than ‘redemption,’ and I don’t know what it is or how he plans to do whatever it is. But whatever he plans, I don’t want it happening in my city to people I care about.”

  Guine smiled. “Like me, I hope?”

  She didn’t want to smile, but he looked so charmingly sweet that she couldn’t help it. “Yes, like you. Now scoot. Get me that list of the dead.”

  He headed for the door. “Most lovers request chocolate or flowers . . .”

  “Scoot!”

  Marso couldn’t consider any future while Eklor was sinking his teeth into the throat of the city. He tried—he desperately tried—to imagine a life without fear of him, but his brain stuttered to a halt.

  When everyone dispersed, he wandered the lush halls of Zera’s palace. He’d always seen himself as a bone reader. Before he’d even heard Eklor’s name, he’d known this was his destiny: to read the shifting shadows of possibilities and reveal the truth.

  Surely, that wasn’t over.

  He wasn’t done.

  But he felt shredded, as if he were wisps of himself. Maybe Kreya is right, Marso thought. Maybe I need to find a new way to be.

  But not until Eklor was gone.

  After an hour of fruitless pacing, his feet took him to Stran’s door. He didn’t know what his old friend could do, but he knew he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. It was too tempting to try to drown them. Safer to be with another. He knocked.

  Stran’s wife, Amurra, opened the door. “Marso? Is everything okay?”

  Yes. No. It hadn’t been okay in a very long time, and it wasn’t okay now, but he was trying. Look at me, trying. “Is Stran here?”

  “He went out again to search for any traces of Eklor’s army.” She widened the door. “Do you want to come in?” He saw she’d been having tea. A half-eaten sandwich lay on a plate.

  “I don’t want to bother you.”

  She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “No bother. I’d like the company.”

  He came in and stood awkwardly in and her Stran’s room. It was a converted music room, with instruments on the walls and several chairs for an audience—the chairs had been stacked in one corner to make room for Stran and Amurra to sleep and live while they were in Cerre.

  Sitting at a tiny table, Amurra poured tea into a second cup. “You look like you need to talk. Come. Sit. I feel like I haven’t gotten a chance to get to know you yet.”

  “I feel the same way about myself right now.”

  She nodded sympathetically. As she did, he eyed the chair and the tea and knew, with more certainty than he’d known anything in weeks, that he did not want to talk. “I want to read the bones again. But . . . I don’t want to, too.”

  She nodded again, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. “I have to confess that I’ve never been clear on what it means to ‘read the bones.’ You toss them down and mist appears? Poof? And images within it? How does that work?”

  “It . . . uh, has to do with your connection to the bones. You, well, activate them. Like how you activate a talisman. But you do it with a question, not a command.”

  Amurra clasped her hands together. “Can you teach me?”

  “I . . .” He’d never taught anyone. “It requires innate power, to summon the mist. Unlike bone wizardry or bone making, which are more skills. And art. They’re art too.”

  “Pretend I have it, the innate magic. Walk me through what I’d do to read bones.” Leaving her tea, she moved to sit cross-legged on the floor beside a marble and gold hearth. “You don’t have to read them yourself. Just demonstrate for me what you would do if you were to read them.”

  Marso hesitated.

  “Don’t read. Just teach.”

  He . . . he could do that.

  Marso dropped to the floor across from her. The carpet was plush and soft. He wasn’t sure why Amurra would want to learn if she didn’t have power, but it was nice to have something to think about that wasn’t dire and serious. He drew a handful of chicken bones from one of his pockets. “First, you need to introduce yourself to the bones.”

  He held them out, but she folded her hands. “Show me?”

  Feeling a bit silly, he lifted the bones to his lips so they’d feel his breath. “I am Marso of Vos. I am . . . broken inside. And . . .” He tried to think of what else to tell the bones, to imagine he’d never held them before. “I like chocolate. And the sound of wind in the pine trees. I once danced naked in a waterfall.”

  “Only once?” Amurra teased.

  It was commonly thought to be lucky to dance naked in a waterfall. “Did you do it more?”

  “I have three children,” she said. “I danced for luck before every birth. What else do you need to tell the bones?”

  “The more they know, the better they’ll respond to you. But these bones already know me.” He tried to hold them out to her again.

  Gently, she curled her hands around his and pushed the bones back toward him. “Tell them something new about you. Something from today. Or this week.”

  He hesitated, but she was smiling brightly and innocently at him. So he told the bones what Zera’s palace looked like, what the city of Cerre smelled like. He told them how he’d felt in the crowd outside the grand master’s palace and how he’d felt seeing Eklor again. He told them about what Kreya had said, only an hour ago, and how he didn’t need to be a bone reader anymore but that was scary because he didn’t know any other way to be. He forgot that Amurra was there and just talked.

  When he quieted, she said, “Now what?”

  Startled, he flinched.

  “If you were a new bone reader, what would be the next thing you’d do?”

  “An experienced bone reader opens himself up to the bones. And a corrupt one tries to manipulate them. That is the line one must never cross. That’s the line I thought I’d crossed, the line Grand Master Lorn said I’d crossed. But I didn’t. Because Eklor lives. I should have trusted . . .” He trailed off, caught up in the tangle of what could have been.

  “Pretend none of that ever happened,” she said. “Pretend you’ve never done this before. You’re a new bone reader, and it’s your first time reading the bones.”

  His hands shook. He knew what the first step was: throw the bones. But he couldn’t predict what would follow, what he’d see.

  “Would you like me to do it with you?” Amurra asked.

  He nodded.

  She closed her hands around his again and together they dropped the chicken bones between them, on the plush carpet. They scattered, tumbling together. Marso saw them and then squeezed his eyes shut before the visions could come.

  “A novice would ask a single question,” Marso said. “Instead of keeping himself or herself open to the visions.” He felt as if he were humming. Every bit of him was urging him to open his eyes, open himself, look at the bones, see what they wanted to tell him.

  “Ask as if you were a novice,” Amurra coaxed. “One question.”

  “Is Kreya right?” he asked. He tried again, making the question even more specific. “Can we trust Eklor to not intend harm?”

  Opening his eyes, he saw the mist rise over the bones. Images blazed in his mind, mirrored in the mist: a body rose, and another fell. A body rose, and another fell. A body rose, and . . . He swam in the vision, in its simplicity.

  One died, and another lived.

  He wondered what else he could see, who the bodies were—and the images piled onto him faster than he could see, and he was back on the plain and then in the fountain and here in the palace and back . . . until he felt as if he were ripping into pieces, and a scream burst out of his lips.

  He felt hands over his eyes. Not his mouth. Just his eyes.

  And the images went away.

  He quit screaming.

  She removed her hands, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Once I was picking apples out in our orchard,” Amurra said conversationally, as if she hadn’t just been confronted by a screaming
man and a cascade of chaotic images, “and I thought some of the best apples, the ripest and juiciest, were on the highest branches. I’d been picking apples all my life. I’ve climbed hundreds of trees. I thought nothing of it as I pushed myself up into the branches. I plucked an apple—and I don’t know what happened, but I slipped. I fell through the branches, and I hit the ground hard. My hip broke. My ankle twisted. My wrist snapped. I’d never been in so much pain in my life. More than that, I was alone. Out in the orchard, and no one was around. It was the worst feeling I’d ever experienced.

  “Soon, though, Stran found me. He carried me back, so gentle for such a big man, and nursed me back to health. It took months before everything healed, and I still feel a twinge in my hip sometimes if I twist the wrong way. But the hardest part was learning how to climb trees again. I had to do it step by step, as if I’d never done it before. I’d never had a fear of climbing trees before, so first I had to learn to conquer that.”

  “You . . . were helping me. On purpose.” He opened his eyes. On the carpet, the bones had been swept away, out of sight. Amurra had them cupped in her hands where he couldn’t read them. She was looking at him with the kind of concern he remembered seeing on his mother’s face, every time he did something that scared her.

  “You said you wanted to read the bones,” she said. “Did I help?”

  “Yes.” He thought of the vision he’d seen—the clear one, before all the shadows of his fears had destroyed everything. He could still do this. “I want to try again.”

  Zera’s people brought her word:

  He’d saved six more lives.

  Six more miracles.

  There’s a line at the guild for his services.

  Yay. Hooray. Cue the parades.

  While the people of Cerre celebrated, Zera pored over gossip papers, news reports, and every scrap of information she could find that might connect the “miracles” to Eklor. It was all very unpleasant and not at all how she wanted to spend her days, but if Kreya was going to be unreasonable, then Zera had no choice. Yet, so far, she couldn’t find anything the six had in common with either each other or the corrupt bone maker. Her followers had collected dozens of rumors and anecdotes. All of them led nowhere.