Page 58 of The BoneKeeper's Daughter

“What did you mean? When you said that. What did you mean?”

He sighs, and shakes his head before looking at me. “My uncle came here as a Trader. 24 years ago. He met my aunt here, just the three prescribed days. But he couldn’t leave her, so he smuggled her out. Imagine that,” he says, voice whisper-soft, “seeing someone for a moment, speaking with them for a song, and knowing your heartbeat has changed to echo theirs forever. How could you leave them behind?”

I cover my mouth with my hand. The words are sacrilegious. Worse, almost. It’s unheard of. “They check every wagon…” I whisper, my voice trailing off. No one but the Hunters and the Council leaves. No one.

“They do,” he confirms. “But there are ways. It has happened.” He is not quite smiling — a strained grimace that mimics the smiles I grew up with — and he is unsure, but continues. “My aunt told me stories of her village though. Fantastical stories. I wasn’t supposed to come, but I had to see what made her.” His ruddy face has too much roundness and life for this place. There is too much color to him, too much vitality. He is like a bird in a small cage, flapping frantically to free itself. I would not even need to hear him speak to know he is foreign to us. I’ve been quiet too long, and his words come faster, some inner, innate cheerfulness bubbling back up, despite our situation. “She told me so many things I didn’t really believe. A wall of bone miles long. A colorless world. She even said there was a person who could hear—” but his words are interrupted by a shout in the distance, and he jerks his head up, stopping himself.

“What else did she say?” I ask quietly, and he shrugs.Someone left the village? Someone…there are pieces of our life somewhere else?I want toshake the answers out of him, but am scared of what it could mean.Where would I go, if I left? Could I leave the souls here to the silence forever? Just to play pretend at being a real girl?I feel sick at the thought.

“She said that water was precious. That pure water even more so. And she says I talk too much. In case you hadn’t noticed.” He grins at me ruefully, before grabbing his flask, and staring at me. “Um…in our land, if something is left with no claim, it’s open to anyone. Shall we try a cultural exchange of a sort?” Looking around thoughtfully, he spots a bare rock, almost a seat, curving up into the mountain, and walks over, then puts his flask on it. “I’m abandoning this canteen here,” he declares loudly, dramatically, looking over his shoulder to make sure I hear him clearly. “I forfeit all rights to it and its contents. If anyone finds this, or stumbles across it, it belongs to them free and clear.” He’s oddly formal, but teasingly so, strutting away from the flask like a chicken until he’s as far from it as he can get on the small outcropping. Then, covering his eyes, he whispers almost as loudly as he spoke, “Is that enough, Flame?” and I can’t help but laugh in response, the sound rippling down the rocks around us, echoing off the mountains, swallowed by the bone wall.

A CANDLE AND A FLAME

KADEN

Her laugh is a waterfall, and it pulls me into its dancing waters. Her laugh is a birdsong, a nightingale, soft sheets twisting in twilight rooms. It’s dusk promises and whispered words, and the iron weight of prior oaths and allegiances is broken under its feather-light sound.

Her white eyes are blank, enormous in her hollow face, cut from frosted glass, but her mouth, full and rose pink, curves up into a smile that could inspire a thousand years of love songs. She is impossible to look away from. I would never have guessed that sea fog eyes would be so easy to lose myself in, could never even have dreamed up a girl with white capped waves of hair tumbling down her back in strange twists and braids. She is completely unknown, unmapped, uncharted, and I’m suddenly and stupidly so desperate for her name that I don’t stop to think. It seems unfathomable that she’s actually of this world, and I’m overwhelmed with the very real fear that, if I don’t know her name, I’ll have no way to call her to me and bind her to the earth.

“Flame,” I whisper, and step towards her, hands outstretched. She flinches back immediately, as if she heard the silent sound of my footsteps approaching, and the laughter drains from her, all of her slowly opening windows and doors shuttered again and lockedagainst me. In the blink, I see the only color anywhere on her, two swirls of red on her translucent eyelids, almost like thumbprints, vivid blooms on a pale field. And then they’re gone, and the ocean of her eyes swallows me again. “Where…where will you take me next?”

“Where would you like to go?” It’s a gentle parry, and it’s clear that she’s unused to this sort of dance, whatever it is that we’re doing. I’m more practiced, but only with those thathavepractice.

Suddenly unsure of every step I’m taking, I shift nervously, awkward as a newborn colt. This is the kind of woman who makes men deaf, dumb, and blind to anything else in the world, and I’ve already tripped over my feet more times than I can count. I don’t know how many more chances I’ll have before I need to return to the main group. All at once three days feels like it will pass in the space of a second, and a strange, almost panicked feeling seizes my heart.

“Let’s go somewhere you love…that is special to you. Or we can have a picnic of sorts? I don’t have much on me, but we can make do. It’s your dance to lead. I’m happy to follow.”

She sways toward me, just a hint of movement, and I have to fight to remain quiet, to give her the space to make up her mind. To pull her to me when she’s off-balance would be a bitter dessert; I would rather go hungry than taste rushed sweetness. If she chooses to walk with me, I want it to be with willing steps, however slow. So I remain silent, though it takes the patience of a God, and am rewarded beyond measure when she answers, her voice sweet and low, an unexpected sound from the thin column of her throat.

“I have some few things as well…” she offers hesitantly, touching a small bag on her belt. “No one in the village wanders without a small flask or a snack pouch.” The faintest flicker of a smile lights her face. “A cultural exchange, you said? Here is an oddity of ours. We all have little…well, the adults call them ration packs to give some sort of validity to their purpose, but in reality, they’re nothing more than purses full of honey sweets. It’s an old habit from long before my time, but everyone carries them and sneaks treats to the children of the village with impunity. There’s very little purposeless pleasure practiced here, but for some reason this is one we are strangely unwilling to give up.”

The thought of the dust-covered, stoic people of the Bone Kingdom slipping clandestine candies to their children is surprising, but charming, and I grin. “You must love your children very much.”

Again, emotion flashes across her face, this time less readable, and she cocks her head, choosing her words carefully. “How a society treats their children is a reflection of their hearts, no?”

And isn’t that the naked truth, laid bare before me.

There’s no room for shadows in three days of sunlight, though, so I focus on the woman in front of me. “Perhaps…well…I’m sure I’ll get the full official tour later, but if they aren’t looking for me, can we just wander? Where would you go if it were just you? Or if you were out walking with your friends?”

Her face is blank, books filled with empty pages, and her hand drifts up again to her neck, to a necklace of carved, white pieces that she keeps tucked against her skin.

“With my…friends?” There’s a pause that’s filled with the weight of a loneliness I have never known. And then her voice warms in an alluring glimmer of some secret joke, “My friends are everywhere. They love this whole place.” Her lips twist up into an almost-smile. “Correction.Mostof them love this place. Is that better?”

It’s a strange question to ask me, but I answer anyway. “No one loves any place wholly, I’m sure.”

“Isn’t it funny? You can hate a place in its entirety, but not love it the same?” Her voice is thoughtful, almost as though she’s not speaking to me at all.

“Can you, though? Do you…do you hatethisplace in its entirety?” These are the questions I’m not meant to be asking. We were trained and told and threatened, but I did not expect to sit with a lantern-bright girl in the shadows of a bone wall and an oil black mountain, and somehow everything I know to be right is drifting away into a pair of cloud filled eyes.

Startled, she glances sideways, almost as though she’s looking around her, but not really seeing anything.

“I…I suppose not. Not really. I like the smell of hay during the harvest. And the way the sun warms the bones in the late summer evenings. The way the frogs chirp in the ponds. The mountain birds singing just before the Storms, when the air is cold and hollow and thin.” Sighing, she plays with her necklace again.

“What do youlovethough?” The question escapes me despite my better judgment, and she shakes her head.

“Love isn’t a place for me. Not this place, anyway. It’s more people.”

“Youdohave people you love?”

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