Page 1 of The BoneKeeper's Daughter

THE FIRST DAY OF THE HARVEST MONTH

WREN

The Earth rumbles like it’s hungry, and I have to remind myself to breathe. I know it can’t be — we just fed it yesterday — but it takes effort to force my eyes away from the pit where the pile of bones will grow steadily larger through the month. A young woman — not well liked in our village, but…still — lies there, broken and empty, waiting to be eaten. I guided her to sleep with the setting sun last night, when she was given as Offering. She is curled now at the bottom of the hollow, almost as though resting, but there is no part of her left in her skin. Comforting myself with the same words as always, I run my fingers lightly along the sharp knife tucked at my waist:This is temporary. I have her safe and sleeping. When the Earth has finally had its fill, and all the bones are bare of flesh, bleached white by sun and fire, I will return the souls home.The Earth has plenty of food…I’m just anxious with the coming Storms.

The thought of the thunder clenches my stomach, and I glance to the dawn sky — butter yellow sun in a pale white-blue sea. Cold upon cold upon cold, but no sign of the bleak winter that is due to crash over us in waves, drowning the village in the rancid taste of death we must face every year. No flesh rending to the Sun God, or Reapings to the Earth, will stall what is to come. The Storms will take their due.We learn it in school, rote memorization from the first letters.A is for Absence, Void open forever. At least those given in Offering are guided to peace. If you pass during the Storms, your soul is swallowed whole, its song rising to a shrieking scream before disappearing into eternal silence. It is a game of death — two sides of a vicious scale kept in balance by blood. The gifts we were given to survive are the same that prevent us from settling the Vengeance. Every soul bound to bone increases our payment exponentially, but every life lost to the Storms is only a grain of sand in the desert needed to fill the gaping maw of the Void.

I cast my eyes back to the girl’s empty body and sigh, trying to shake off this unusual despair, thick like oil on my skin. My face remains blank; I wouldneverallow a hint of emotion to show on its moon pale surface, but inside I am nauseous, uneasy with the way regret sits like rot in my stomach.You are not a child. You know the ways of your people,I remind myself firmly. For the good of the many, one must fall. To be chosen for the Offering is an honor in a way. You can step towards the Reaping pit with the certain knowledge that you will wake again in bone, that you will not be lost. Not all have that surety — if I am not near enough when a heart stops beating, there is no hope. Death is but a doorway if you are an Offering.An easy platitude for one who can’t be chosenmy mind whispers insidiously, but as quickly as it comes, it dissipates.

Even if Icouldbe chosen, Death is not a ghost in the night for me, a thing to be feared or shied away from. His realm is more my home than the sleepy village around me. Here I am always a step outside, more shade than citizen. There I am wrapped in memories that feel, I imagine, like a mother’s embrace. My comfort in the waking world is, as it has always been, restricted to the cool, smooth surface of the bones. No hand will ever slip into mine to offer solace, fingers curling intertwined like a basket weave, flesh giving way to accommodate my own.

Unexpectedly, for a brief, wild moment, the thought of living arms wrapped around me erupts in a bird’s wing of longing from my heart, frantically beating in my chest, before I am able to snap its neck andquiet it.What is happening today?A strangeness stirs inside me, unwelcome and unwanted.I am the Keeper.The words are a mantra, chanted to bring peace in dark hours.Born into Death before my eyes opened. To dream of softness is a wish for water.Taking a deep breath, I study the girl’s face, and calm myself.She is safely sleeping. Once her bones are stripped of flesh and her blood has watered the dirt, you will wake her and guide her home. There is no need for remorse or guilt. Her end was written in her beginning. At least she will not fall to the winter.

Leaning against the inner wall, its ivory just beginning to glint in the new sun, I rest my cheek against the night cold bone and call to it to rouse from its slumber. An unfamiliar loneliness sits heavy in my throat; I want the bones to speak to me and anchor me back to myself. But a shivering breeze distracts me, skittering down the mountain’s rock face, slipping along the femurs and jaw bones, curling over the iliums til it seems to pause when it hits my skin. It tastes of sulfurous water and sends tremors down my spine. There is still too much to do before the Storms come — the air should be thick with fresh cut grass and threshed wheat from the start of the Harvest Month, not a hint of the poisoned rains that will lock us inside our homes for the winter. Even now, with the sun barely in the sky, the village around me is stirring to life, every moment before the Storms a gift of fresh air and friendship. Most people will spend the next month lingering just a beat too long in quiet conversation, staying out until the tongue of night licks the closest gates and they are finally forced inside. There is so little time left before we are locked away that they drink up every moment like pure water, and do their best to ignore the shortening daylight and scant warmth from the sky.

There shouldn’t be this much chill in the air yet, even this early in the morning. We have the whole of the Harvest, and the whole of the Slaughter Month before the rains start. Frowning, I pull my cloak more tightly around my shoulders. Autumn warms enough mid-day that I won’t need the heavy wool by the time the sun is higher in the sky, but our home, even in the summer months, is never hearth-hot. It is always something justlessthan. Most things in our land are thatway — just enough for survival, never enough for satisfaction. Our lives are clawed from cliff faces.

The oldest bones — the ones in the far, curled corners of the village — those which were ancient already when my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather was a child, like to whisper of a time when the sun was hot, a bright flare of what looked like the Render fires, and when grass was green, as vibrant as blood but a different color. It is hard to picture their memories. I have never known the sun to be anything other than an ice yellow, almost white in its light, and the grasses around our village are muted and dusty. Their memories feel like lies, but the bones cannot lie, so I chase whisps of dreams in their words, and imagine a world much different to the one that I know now.

I am not supposed to visit those corners — the bones are too quiet now, and hold no help for the coming Storms. They did not have to feed the Earth, or burn flesh for the Sun God. Something happened in the dark times, when the Unknownwere given, when the Earth rose up like a living creature and swallowed entire villages whole, masticating tendon and muscle and rending limbs from its people. I have wandered every inch of this village, touched almost every bone for its story, but have found none that will speak from the Dark Time — not even a fingerbone. All is lost from the time between the great before and the after. And in the after, the Earth yawns open to show us the pits of hell if we do not satisfy its demands.

When I visit the oldest bones, I have to be silent, a ghost on the wind in the night, a whispered prayer, or someone will stop me and lock me away, back in my cage, a little broken bird singing only for select ears.No.I can never go back to that, so every step must be feather soft. I drift over in the near darkness and curl up against a kind rib, a cradle of sorts, and try not to breathe. Their voices are so soft it is almost like I imagine them, and I know, at some point in my life, I will be the last BoneKeeper to be entrusted with their stories. No one believes that the bones will stop speaking, but I hear the tremulous waves in their whispers, and I know.I know.Something is happening to these bones…those closest to the heart of the mountain, tothe Everfire. Something is drinking from them, draining them slowly, and one day, they will be empty of soul and memory.

I never was allowed to attend a village school, but the bones of a kind teacher taught me my letters when I was young, and I have scribbled down the stories in childish script, bound the scraps of paper in rough journals that I store in the section of bones where none but I will venture. Even my father wouldn’t go near the blood moths’ cavern, but I am determined that all the bones will be heard and recorded, that all will have a chance to share their memories.

The oldest ones are glad when I am near, their words tumbling over each other like waterfalls in the rains. Here the story of a sweet flavor I’ve tasted only in their memories, there the image of an unknown beast, enormous and colorless, two horns and a gentle face, the scent of smoke and summer hay faint on the wind. Their memories crowd me as I bask in the echoes of different lives, where their skin was cooled by the night air as they walked the open paths of the village slowly, where there were pools of clear water so wide you could not see the land on its other side. No one would believe me if I told them of these things. No one would believe that such a life existed in the before. So I write it all down in the hopes that someday, someday, the Vengeance will be paid, and the Rending and Reaping will be done. And perhaps someone will find my scratches of words and know the path of history was not always paved with flesh and blood and bone. That we were driven here to stay alive.

Though what this life is worth, I cannot say.

A THREAT AND A CAUTION

WREN

“Let me out! Please…please! Let me out!”

Little Keeper.

“It hurts! Ithurts!”

“She is just tired. Ignore her.”

There is a murmur of dissent.

“Bone shouldn’t hurt the child.” The words are anxious, uneasy.

“It will help her in the long run. Help her listen to only bone.” He is confident, and it carries the room. A long, thoughtful pause. “We could get her there more quickly if she didn’t have a mother to return home to.”

A flurry of sound, of protest, of reluctant agreement.

“She’s only just started Guiding, Raek. Earlier than any other.”

“The people have gone almost six years with no souls being safe home after losing a fully capable BoneKeeper, and now we’re blessed by a Keeper who can hold a soul barely out of the cradle? To keep her from them — they’ll rebel. We’ve lost too many.”

“They had a Keeper for nigh on thirty years, Raek. If we harm her in some way…we are knowingly sending souls to Silence.”

“The village will understand.” He is pensive, deliberate. “We will say something is happening — some unknown illness attacks her. Blights her vision. Perhaps she startedtooearly. She’s only a child. Agirl.”The disdainin his voice bubbles up like poison, and he swallows it down, replacing it with practiced concern.“Her eyes are fading. Imagine what would happen if she wandered the wrong way and got hurt, or worse? There would be no one left to Guide us home. And who knows for how long?”

“What is your proposition?”

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