Dagger of Bone

by R. K. Thorne

  Dagger of Bone

  Legends of the Clanblades: Book 1

  R. K. Thorne

  Copyright © 2019 by R. K. Thorne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Edited by Elizabeth Nover, Razor Sharp Editing at www.razorsharpediting.com

  Cover and interior designed by Damonza at www.damonza.com

  Map drawn by Terrance Mayes

  Version 1.0

  Created with Vellum

  To all the members of my D&D group, you are an endless inspiration. Thank you for all the fun. And all the desserts, beer, gorgeous miniatures, taco bars, inspiring crafts, moving stories, tense negotiations, and raucous laughter.

  Never thought I’d end up a tank.

  Contents

  1. Imprinting

  2. Den of Bones

  3. Honor the Dead

  4. Wear the Mantle

  5. Wishful Thinking

  6. Deluge

  7. Wild

  8. Vindictive

  9. Curses and Locks

  10. Empty

  11. Thief

  12. Brave

  13. Sort of Dead

  14. Underground

  15. Birthright

  16. Feast

  17. The Wind

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by R. K. Thorne

  Chapter 1

  Imprinting

  “You’ll never be a swordmage. Stop fighting it.”

  Nyalin narrowed his eyes from the other side of the dim room. “Isn’t that for the Council to decide?”

  “You know what they’ll decide.” His foster father Elix was stopped in the doorway, his lips thinned.

  “No, I don’t.” He did, in fact, know what they would decide. But that didn’t mean he had to like it, or that he would let Elix off easy for it. “How do you know what they’ll decide? Because you’re twisting their arms behind their backs?”

  The bearded face that stared back was expressionless. “There’s lots of paying work for scribes.” He turned to go.

  “I never thought you’d give up this easily. On me or on her.”

  Elix stopped and went still. But he didn’t turn. The misty dawn light made him a dark silhouette, a hulking bear suspended in time like an insect in amber.

  He folded his arms across his chest. “For my sake, I don’t care. But everyone said you cared about her.”

  “Nyalin—”

  That got the old bear to turn, but Nyalin wasn’t hearing it. He turned his back and walked away—down the hallway, then the back servant’s stairs, and then out into the street. No more excuses. It was better to get out of any conversation with Elix while he was still ahead.

  He had somewhere to be anyway.

  Each week, he woke before dawn for this trek. He always reached the graveyard before the sun rose above the city walls. This week was no different, except the early hour usually guaranteed solitude.

  Today, his luck had run out. In more ways than one.

  A single set of footprints marred the white pebble footpath between Nyalin and his mother’s grave. He glared down at the dents in the sea of smooth stones.

  He started forward, his worn boots crunching fresh prints into the milk-white pebbles. He scanned the graves for the interloper but spotted no one. Heard no one. If he’d had magic, he might have sensed no one, but that was precisely his problem.

  Why did he keep doing this—showing up to visit a woman he’d never known? Maybe it was a misplaced search for answers. Or a longing for scraps of truth about a past forever lost. Some weeks, he came out of duty. Others, out of habit.

  Today, though, he’d come to apologize. He’d failed.

  The only thing worse than being in the royal graveyard was being here with an audience. He ran his hand through thick brown hair. It flopped right back down into his left eye, and he sighed.

  The air felt charged. This place made his skin itch, like the souls of the dead were dragging nails across his skin and tugging at his very core. He scratched at his thigh, the black linen of his crossover rough against his fingers. No silk for him, not like his so-called family.

  His whole future was being decided by that family and the Obsidian Council in the meeting across town. He hadn’t been invited, and there was little he could do to argue his case any more than he already had. Only one thing was left to do: to say he was sorry. To apologize.

  He’d never known his mother, but he owed her this much.

  The Feast of Souls was coming in a few weeks. In preparation, paper lanterns had been hung over the dead; crimson, teal, gold, and emerald globes swayed and knocked in the brisk wind. The decorations had so little regard for the mourners that they bumped cheerfully in the sunlight, soft taps filling the air with a strange, percussive rhythm. Summer was only just waning, but the wind was already sending a chill through him.

  He studied the prints in the gravel path again as he neared her grave. The footprints were small, like a woman’s, and recent. He reached the final turn toward the grave, and the footprints turned with him. Damn. The monks who tended this burial ground smoothed the pebbles each morning and again and again throughout the day, so someone had been here. And not long ago at all.

  With his luck, it’d be a pilgrim. No, a family of pilgrims. With ten children. By the Twins, he’d hoped to be alone today.

  He gritted his teeth, then swallowed and tried to calm himself, the way he did when he needed a steady hand to write. It wasn’t their fault the pilgrims were so annoying.

  He listened. A fresh gust of wind sent the lanterns tapping again and him shivering. No hymns, no snaps of prayer sticks, and no crunches of feet on pebbles. Birds sang, and the wind teased the holy chimes hung in the cardinal corners of the cemetery, bronze characters in the holy language standing for peace, harmony, and, of course, the afterlives.

  No one.

  He continued on.

  His mother’s gravestone stood alone. He blew out a breath. Thank Seluvae.

  The white marble was inundated with gifts, the hope and suffering of many expressed in azalea branches, roses, chrysanthemums, and white flowers he didn’t know the names for. Most of the blooms were too fine to have been purchased. The poor who flocked here had likely stolen their tributes from the gardens that surrounded the emperor’s palace. Nyalin could understand. He had little gold or even copper to his name, and only his continued residence in his foster father’s house gave him any resources at all.

  And who knew if he’d even have that come evening?

  What solace did pilgrims find here? His mother had only been a person, albeit a rare and powerful one. Not a goddess. Not someone to pray to.

  Clearly the pilgrims disagreed.

  Tracking down the basket the monks used, Nyalin filled it with the oldest, most wilted flowers. Slowly, tenderly, he uncovered her name. He slid his fingers along the smooth indentations, tracing the elegant holy characters carved into the marble. He left the best blooms. It would be full again soon enough.

  When the flowers were cleared and he’d dusted off the stone, he knelt in the soft square of sand set aside for prayer.

  What had he hoped to say? Should he ask that the Obsidian Council make the right decision? They wouldn’t. This was all doomed to failure. Should he pray that Elix would change his mind? As if his foster father ever had before.

  He was trapped, and there was nothing his mother could do to help him, powerful or not, alive or not, whether he prayed to her or not. And the secret of who
his real father had been, if the man was even still alive, had gone to the grave with her. If he could have asked her for one thing, it would be his father’s name. But those were idle wishes.

  “Sorry,” he murmured into the music of the chimes, the lantern tapping, the quiet birdsong, the morning air. “I failed you. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t convince them to keep trying.”

  What else was there to say?

  She had been the greatest talent of her time, the hero who’d saved so many, who’d shot fear into the hearts of the evil Mushin. Her victories had led to the unification of the clans, to unprecedented peace, to even the construction of this city around him. Unification had turned a rickety trading post near two salt mines into the one place in the empire where the six clans strove to coexist. Mostly. No one had expected peace or an end to the war, and she’d found it. Fought for it. Forced it on them, even. And she’d given it all up in the blood of birth, for what?

  For him?

  For nothing, then. Her torch had burned bright, and he’d dropped it.

  He hated disappointing Grel; his dutiful foster brother believed in Nyalin almost blindly. But even more, he hated to disappoint her. There was no one else to disappoint.

  “They would’ve listened to you,” he whispered. “By the dark dragon, I wish there was some other way.”

  He shook his head, staring unseeing at the sand as the wind knocked the lanterns about. His hand closed into a fist.

  “I’ll just have to find something. A way to make your sacrifice worth it.”

  How exactly he’d do that, he had no idea. He had nothing but time to figure it out.

  A quiet sob floated toward him on the breeze. He winced. There—the other mourner. Not alone after all.

  He should go. The longer he stayed, the more mourners would appear.

  He rose and brushed the dust off his knees. If he left by the thin strip of grass and not by the pebbled pathway, maybe he could avoid calling attention to exactly who had been whispering like a madman to the dead. Even though Elix and Grel’s awful younger brother Raelt thought he was dirt, many people in the city did not feel the same. Much to his chagrin.

  Nyalin bowed to his mother, then stepped carefully to the grass that cut a line between rows of milky headstones. A low hedge at the end of the path marked the north exit of the cemetery, the holy symbols for harmony tinkling away above an arbor.

  He hurried the last few steps—and almost tripped over the source of the sobbing.

  A young woman sat curled on the grass just beside the hedge. One arm hugged her knees to her chest, the other covered her eyes. With her head bent down, only a violent blond tangle of corded ropes and braids and locks was visible. The shining mass of her hair shook with the quaking of her shoulders.

  She wore a crossover the color of bone—finely embroidered at the edges with soft ochre thread—and leggings of the same shade. Bone Clan, then? Someone of some wealth and standing, though, even amid the poorest clan. He couldn’t see her ear stud beneath her hair to be sure. No charms or blades hung at her belt, not that he would have expected any on a woman. Her crossover hung loosely and too short and revealed nothing of the shape of her body. It contrasted sharply with the tanned skin of her hands, tough and strong hands that gripped her elbows like a dragon clutching its prey.

  Given the shaking of her shoulders, she was still crying, but she made no further sound. Had she missed his quiet approach in the grass? Apparently.

  She didn’t want to be noticed either, did she? He should slink away now, and they’d both get what they wanted. He knew as well as anyone—dead was dead. He could try to offer words of comfort, but what was the point? There was no comfort but time. If that.

  But wouldn’t it be cruel to simply walk away? As if her display didn’t matter, as if it didn’t hurt to see her hurt, as if the suffering of another was as insignificant as a blade of grass swaying in the wind?

  That was the way Elix treated people. Irrelevant. As if suffering was only significant based on who felt it. Or Raelt, who would delight in an opportunity to revel in someone’s misery, especially that of a woman with social standing lower than his own.

  He wasn’t like them. He aimed to be as different from them as possible. And her silent sobs were not insignificant to him. His chest panged again as another wave shook her shoulders.

  He glanced around, looking for something, anything to offer. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his crossover and discovered a clean handkerchief. Before he could second-guess this rare moment of boldness, he crouched down and tapped her elbow with a finger, offering the soft black cloth.

  Her head snapped up, eyes catching on his offering and widening. Ah, the dark color of the handkerchief told her much before she even took him in. She glanced up, fire sparking in her features and tingeing the sadness. Hmm, or was that despair? All familiar feelings.

  “Are you all right?” he asked softly. Stupid. It was obvious she wasn’t.

  Her eyes stopped him short. Like everything else about her, they were a golden brown. They stared out at him like deep wells, intelligence alight amid a maelstrom of emotion. Her delicate, pale lips were parted on the edge of a word. Tears had slipped down each cheek, leaving a faint trail.

  In a fit of certain madness, he reached forward and brushed the most recent teardrop aside with his thumb.

  She froze. Her skin was warm and smooth under his. The pad of his thumb tingled at first and then stung sharply, a spark of energy knifing up the nerves of his arm.

  She jerked back, scrambling to her feet. Had she felt it too? She backed away a few steps and must have worried she had snot coming out of her nose—which would have been completely normal considering the circumstances—as she snatched the cloth from his hand and covered her face.

  He straightened too and took his own steps back to give her space. “Pardon the interruption. You looked—”

  “I’ve—” she cut him off, but then stopped just as quickly. “I thought I was alone.”

  “So did I.”

  Her eyes flicked down at the handkerchief, then widened as she realized she could not simply hand it back to him. Damn. Her eyes darted around, as if she suspected a trap.

  “I’ve got to go,” she blurted, and she sprinted past him, around the hedge, and out of the cemetery, taking the handkerchief with her. The scent of cedar brushed past him, as if chasing after her. Strange, there was no reason for such a scent here.

  He sighed. That had gone well. He had such a way with people.

  Shoulders slumped, he trudged out of the cemetery and back toward the Obsidian complex to await his fate.

  Lara sniffled and jammed the Obsidian’s enchanted black handkerchief into her pocket as she strode over dew-covered cobblestones. The last thing she needed was to be seen with it. An item from another clan so sopping with magic would raise lots of questions she didn’t have the answers to. Stranger still, it didn’t seem to carry any particular spell—just energy. It was just like an Obsidian to throw around magic like they threw around gold. And what had been that strange spark that had hit her when his finger brushed her cheek? Every clan practiced the same spells, and she’d never learned anything like that one. And what could be the purpose of shocking a crying girl anyway? Probably just a stray charge, built up by accident, nothing more.

  She sighed and squared her shoulders. Time to put the tears—and the handkerchief—behind her.

  Smoothing her hair back, she marched herself through the gardens and up the path toward her father’s workshop. She had made a lot of good memories in the little building that squatted behind the Bone Clan’s mansion, in a corner of the estate near the far back wall. Their estate was odd in that the place was only walled on three sides, something she had never quite understood. It left the grounds more secured than no walls at all—and looking slightly more important than the residences around them. But it still invited the average clan member in, without a fancy gate or some such snobbery to stop them.


  Hopefully that was the original intent. It was either that, or they’d run out of money.

  Was that Obsidian boy going home, even now, to his family’s ornate iron gate, nodding to some butler? Most Obsidian-District estates were walled and held only single families, and rich Obsidians dwelt in houses larger than any in the Bone District, her own included. Meanwhile, building Da’s estate had required the pooled resources of the entire clan—and that probably hadn’t been the wisest use of funds, considering all their other needs.

  But no one was asking her.

  Then again, her home served a dozen purposes. It housed classrooms, meeting rooms, diplomats. What did a single Obsidian family do with all that space? Employ a legion of servants?

  Yes, certainly. Her clever-eyed, black-clothed benefactor was probably strolling merrily along a line of servants even now. All were gorgeous women clothed in black—probably scantily. They’d shower him with figs and wine and nuts and treasures. What else did one employ a legion of servants to do? Perhaps please him in other ways?

  She frowned. Her jealous fantasies weren’t usually this… suggestive. She put a hand over her stomach as it gurgled. Hmm. Figs and nuts sounded delicious just now. These bizarre thoughts were clearly just the product of extreme hunger, nothing more.

  After all, all the poor man had done was give her a handkerchief. And be wealthy. And have those… wonderful eyes of his. Bright and piercing, intelligent and concerned. They were engraved on her eyelids they’d hit her so powerfully. Like something inside her had shivered and sprung to life.

  Like he’d actually seen her, when no one else did.

  How dare he try to be kind. He didn’t deserve her bitter imaginings. She sighed, smoothed down her hair again, and quickened her pace.