Page 16 of The BoneKeeper's Daughter

“It’s not a request.” The room is grave silent, except for the click-click-click from my arms, and she nods slowly. “You understand?”

“I…I understand, BoneKeeper. But, the Councilman…”

“That is my business. Yours is here.”

She nods again, and looks sick to her stomach, but I don’t care. To move any,anyof the bones in this village without my approval is…it’s unthinkable! Where have Ibeenthat such a thing happened?You are always in the Council House or away with the dead,my mind whispers insidiously.You have spent too much time on the wrong side of the veil.

It is where I belong!I argue back with myself.With the living bone. It is more my home than anywhere else.

Is it? Is it?The question rings in my head, unanswered, and a shiver runs down my spine.Is it?

If it isn’t, then there is no place for me anywhere on this earth, now or in the next life. If I am not meant for the dead, and not meant for the living, perhaps…perhaps…

Perhaps I am not meant to be.

At all.

WANING AND WAXING

WREN

By the time I reach the edge of the square, the ten members of the Council who did not join the hunt have emerged from their cocoons, little blood moths with teeth flashing white in the morning sun, their black cloaks wrapped around them. No one is looking for me yet, so I stay where I am, tucked just at the entrance where the last of the white wall remains before the boneless plaza. Pressing myself against the ribs and sternums, I seek comfort from their familiar cold surface. They greet me with affection, a stark contrast to the men on the stage in front of the Council House. There is nothing welcoming aboutthem, despite their plastered smiles. I am sure not a one of them, even the best of the lot, are happy to have the Father and the others back in the village. Everytime the Father leaves the members who remain behind take two steps forward into his power, and only step back once when he returns.

The mood in the square is cautiously optimistic, however, and it is both heartwarming and heart wrenching to see how the Hunters are met with the soft eyes and sweet lips of their wives, the grasping hugs and hands of their children. They’ve been gone for longer than usual this time — just over a full month — were absent for the last of the Dancing and the full scope of the Haymaking, which in any other yearwould have been unthinkable. It is the only truly joyful time in our village, and is a testament to how desperate our situation must be if the Hunters missed it.

Narrowing my eyes, I realize for the first time how long the Council must have known about our plight without telling us — the last of the Dancing month, and the entirety of the Haymaking Month?Why they would have delayed the information until the start of the Harvest Month, when there is not enough time left, not really, to correct course?Above the mountain rumbles, a hollow, lowing sound, and the bones against my hands keen quietly. The earth and ivory response to my questioning is unnerving, and I am not sure if I should ask more, or less. Neither mountain nor marrow offers any guidance.But..ifthey knew a month, or even two, in advance, we could have planted more of the quick crops. More root vegetables, or even the tender, fast growing weeds — the purslane, or sorrel, or sunbursts. Granted, they wouldn’t have lasted through the Storms, but they would have given us more time before we had to bite into the winter storage.Why would they have kept such a thing from us? For what purpose? The Month of the Earth is so close now…And the bones moan again.

Oh Keeper, Keeper. The end or the Ender by the twist of the year. You must figure it out before the Month of the Crone. Be watchful, be wary. Be watchful, be wary.

What do you mean?Ibegthem for an answer, but they have fallen silent, and a sick, shivering sensation settles in my stomach. The bones have never spoken so before, and for the first time in my life, I feel as though they are keeping things from me. I coulddemandanswers from them — perhaps I should — but the price of forcing bone is steep. And permanent. And though I still have time, the Storms are approaching, and the death days are screaming down the mountains like carrion birds, wings spread and beaks gaping. I do not have long. The Crone is coming.

Our calendar follows the waning and waxing of the moon, from full moon to full moon — twelve months to the year, twelve years to the turning. The year opens with the Month of Marrow, a time when we quietly remember those who have passed to exile or the silence.It’s not for those who have been guided home to bone; we do not need to remember them, as they are still with us. Month of the Marrow is for the souls lost to us forever — the Silent who died during a time when no BoneKeeper was there to guide them, and the Exiled, whose own bones were hollowed of marrow and burnt to ash, never to provide respite to their souls. The Exiled souls are locked in foreign bone and awakened, kept from any peace for the rest of time. It is a period of contemplation and darkness; we are unable to leave our homes but for a few, short moments a day, and spend the rest of the month holed up, trying desperately to protect ourselves and loved ones from the Storms.

After Marrow is Month of the Sun God, which marks the first time the sun usually reappears in our sky after three months of almost total darkness and storm. The sun does not stay — it makes short bursts of pale light in a rain drenched sky — but it offers hope to those, who, as every year, doubt the coming of Spring after so much death and darkness.

The third is the Month of the Maiden, when the acidic downpours from the sky finally cease, and we have a month of pale, flowering herbs and nettle blossoms. It is a month of rebirth, but also a month of trial. We have been inside for so long that, as a people, we are weak, and tired, and usually at the end of our supplies. The new herbs lure those who have the most hollow stomachs with the promise of flavorful soup, or sparse salads. Every year we lose someone to the crushing weight of hunger — a villager who barely made it through the storm season and whose mind broke when the first blooms appeared. All children are taught from their milk teeth — the first bloom is deadly; it still holds too much poison from the rains. The water has not had time to filter through the dirt and stone. The first bloom is a beautiful dream turned nightmare.Don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch.Like the Maiden, the first bloom holds the lure of sweetness, the crescent moon, the coming bounty. But also like the Maiden, people forget, in its beauty and promise, lies death.

Next follows the Month of the Mother, when our village’s Midwives are working over hours to bring into this world all of thechildren conceived during the previous year’s Dancing Month. Full of music and revelry, of open fields and wide spread blankets under star filled skies, the Dancing is an echo of a time before bone walls and Offerings. Even the blood moths are silent in paper-thin cocoons during the Dancing, so few people go inside during the cool, moonlit nights. The result from such feasting are an expanse of full bellies brought to bear all within weeks of each other. And every year, during the Month of the Mother, there is a Birthing Day, where any born on that lucky day, under the right star, will be spared from the Rending and Reaping until after their own first born appears. Those born on the Birthing Day are Sun-kissed, and never chosen by the Sun God for his Offering.

Children’s Month is next, where all of the children born to the village are named and noted in the Council’s tomes. No child is officially named or noted until Children’s Month. While infants born outside of the Month of the Mother may have nicknames or pet names in their families, they are not recognized by the Council until they are recorded.

After Children’s Month is Feasting Month, when the crops begin to bear fruit, and the hunger of the Storm months begins to fade. For the first harvest, early in the feast month, we do not dry or save our food, but are permitted to eat our fill and beyond. It’s a sluggish time, when the air is warm, and the nights are still cool, when people stay up late, past the moonrise, and tell stories of days past around blazing fires. The sun during Feasting Month is always the closest it comes to a before-time color, one that I see in the memories of the bones. Rather than the pale butter yellow it is for the rest of the year, it is something close to the brightness of a new fire. Not vibrant, not blazing, but more than its usual soft-churned color. The blood moths stay in their caves for most of the Feasting Month, laying eggs then dying in a mulch of decaying bodies on the cavern floors, the first food for their ravenous offspring.

Feasting Month leads to Dancing Month, the highlight of the year, a time of merriment and joy. In previous lives, the Traders always arrived in Dancing Month, at the height of our village’s happiness andgreatest prosperity. The wagons were heavy, the drinks unending, the songs ceaseless. To have the Traders come during the Dancing was a great blessing, for during the Dancing, as during the Trade, all personal commitments are forgotten for the length of the celebration. It is a time of freedom and forgetting, for shedding the last of the pain and despair from the Storm months, which seem eons away in the echoing laughter of the Dancing Month. Many blankets are shared during the shadows of the Dancing, and people take their pleasures where they may, with no regret or recrimination.

After the Dancing comes the Haymaking Month, the Harvest Month, and the Slaughter Month. With each passing month, as we get closer to the Storms, the golden joy of the Feasting and Dancing months fades steadily, until it is just a candlelight of warmth in our memories. The first rains begin in the Month of the Earth, a cold warning to retreat inside, to bar our doors, to patch our walls and windows, lest the toxic liquid seep in and corrode our skin, stripping it bare, exposing bone to likewise be pockmarked and then washed away. The skies stay grey, no sun lends even cold comfort, but there is still some time outside, hours here or there where the rains stop briefly, just long enough to take care of our livestock, to visit the silos, to get water from the cisterns. You cannot count on those moments though — some years the Storms have descended from the mountains like Gods of old, ravaging our village, knocking down homes and burying people beneath mud and stone. They tear through our streets, wailing like the souls of the Exiled, winds strong enough to flay skin from bone. In those times, people who are ill prepared face the choice of starving to death in hopes of a break in the ceaseless thunder — a long, painful death — or they go willingly into the streets, dragging their emaciated bodies into the path of the Storm, where at least they will go quickly. As Keeper, I cannot save either. Those souls are lost to me and our village forever; if I am not there when they pass, or soon enough after that I can still hear their soulsong, then I cannot guide them home.

The last month of our year is the Month of the Crone — a cold, lonely month where the Storms are at their fiercest, where you cannotleave your home, even a footstep outside, or you will be ripped limb from limb and flung to the four corners of the bone walls. There is no help and no hope in the Month of the Crone. It is the turning of the year, when the days are at their shortest and darkest, the death of what has been and the birth of what is to come, all at once. And we are locked inside for the whole of it, wondering if life still exists somewhere outside of the walls of our homes, wondering if anyone is there, if we have somehow descended into hell without knowing.

The minutes are hours and hours are days in the Month of the Crone, and the only ceasing from the howling winds and relentless downpour is every night, in the midnight hour, when there is a sudden and hollow silence which echoes through the village Streets. Long enough that your pulse becomes a drum beat, that your shallow breaths become shuddering noises, long enough, every single time, that you allow yourself a moment of hope, ofmaybe. Maybe it has stopped. Maybe we’ve been forgiven. Maybe I can go outside, replenish our stores…maybe, maybe, maybe. But it is never true; inevitably, a slow drip-drip-drip starts, and the winds increase, and we are swallowed again by the Storms.

Every year, during the Crone’s Month, we lose people to the Storm. People who fall prey to the promise of maybe, people who are driven mad by the constant sound, or whose despair is so great that they walk into the streets, seeking relief. Every year there are souls, gone forever, that I cannot save. And every year I relive, over and over again, my worst memory, my living nightmare, from the last Storm season I spent with my mother.

I was nine.

Nine.

Still a child.

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