Page 79 of The BoneKeeper's Daughter

“For what, Father?” Again, she is blank, as though she is not even in her body.

“For many things said, and more that are unsaid,” he replies quietly, but she doesn’t acknowledge him. Turning to me, he flicks hiseyes between her still form and my hovering one, then, reluctance clear, says, “I’ll give you a moment to say good-bye.”

Stepping from the room, he pauses just outside the door, close enough to see, but far enough that, if I whisper, he will not hear. Gliding forward, I sink to my knees beside her bed, though she doesn’t turn to me, and rest my forehead against her back.

“I’m sorry, Wren. I came back. It took longer than I thought. It was stupid,stupidof me. I shouldn’t have asked you to leave the door?—”

“You came back?” She sounds surprised.

“Of course I did! To find the room destroyed, blood—” Choking on the words, I push forward. “I went to the Council House, demanded to see you…”

“It’s…Kaden. We carved dreams from clouds for a night, and it was beautiful, but…you leave tomorrow.” Wren pauses, then slowly, agonizingly, turns over to face me. And I know she can’t see me, but I feel like her reddened eyes are memorizing the lines of my face. “Thank you, though. I felt like someone real for a moment, and you gave that to me.”

“Come with me.” The words are ripped from me, torn from the silent, secret chambers of my heart, but I’ve never meant anything more in my life than I do in this moment. She’s already shaking her head, but I reach forward, wrapping her hands in mine, bone necklace and all. “Don’t say no.Don’t say no.Come with me. I know how. We’ll figure it out. Please.”

“You’ve known me for a breath, Trader,” she whispers against my fingers, lips brushing my skin, and I tremble.

“If you’ve been drowning for a lifetime, do you need more than a breath to know what oxygen is, Wren? Do you need more than a moment of sunshine to know its difference from rain? Come with me. You don’t have to promise me anything. I don’t want to chain you to me. Just…please.”

Wren’s face is a battle of hope and hopelessness, of wishes and weariness, and I can tell the moment when experience wins out over possibility. “I ca?—”

Silencing her with a finger on her lips, I shake my head. “Don’tanswer now. Now is not the time for it. A day ago I didn’t know you, and time has shifted since I saw you in the shadows. Who knows what will happen in the next day, or the one after? And if you don’t come with me, if you can’t…” Fighting the tightness in my chest at the thought of not seeing her face again, I continue. “I’ll walk as slowly as I’m able, until the border of my lands. I can make a week stretch to two. I’ll look for you, leave my footsteps for you to follow if you change your mind. Once I get to the border of my people, I won’t have a choice, but I will take as long as I’m able. Don’t say no. Leave me with hope, Wren. Even if it’s smoke on the wind.”

Waiting for her answer feels interminable. She doesn’t move, fingers still intertwined with my own, mouth against my skin — doesn’t pull away, but doesn’t push forward, and we are caught in the in-between until Silas breaks the silence.

“Trader. It is time.”

Nodding, I have to force myself to loosen my hands from hers, feeling like I am peeling my flesh off as I withdraw from her. She stares at me, breath shallow, face bruised, eyes bloody, and I don’t know how anything beyond this moment will be possible, how I can make myself leave without hearing her voice.

“Trader.” Silas is commanding now, all patience used, and I glance over my shoulder at him, before turning to Wren one last time. She is still staring up at me, empty eyes locked on my face.

She bites her lip, holds her breath, then, “...If…” and nothing more.

“If is enough, Wren.”

And it is. Though the swell of hope in my heart feels like knives, and walking away from her tears my soul from my body.Ifis more than I thought, and more than I deserve.

A LONG NIGHT

WREN

The air is heavy and thick the next time I open my eyes, tiny shards of shattered-glass pain filling my lungs with every breath, so it takes me longer than it should to realize there is someone in the small room with me. Before panic can overtake me completely, a deep, exhausted voice almost stumbles across the floor from the far curve of the wall.

“It is only me, BoneKeeper.” Silas is careful, subdued, trying to be reassuring, but I have had enough of waking to strange men near me, and I cannot calm the frantic skipping of my heart. The room is almost pitch-black — the only light a thin strip of flickering candle flame from beneath the door frame separating us from the front room of the tiny cottage — so he isn’t defined, rather just a shadow in darker shadows.

I’m completely disoriented; it is a peculiar trick of time, waking up in the house in which I was born, where my mother raised me, where my father decided to give his life for me. In the ink of night, I am pulled back to being a child, the stale smells old but familiar. This place is a memory box filled with long-forgotten treasures of scents and sounds that prompt a choking array of memories. Even Silasshifting in the chair reminds me of my mother sewing at night, rocking in a rhythmic creak, the steady sound somehow lulling me to sleep.

It is too much, combined with the avalanche of the last two days, and my heart cracks in painful longing for the safety of my mother’s arms, the feeling, however brief, of someone else taking the burden from my hands. The present and past shimmer over each other, a mirage of what was, what could have been, and what is, and I can’t prevent the crushing sadness of realization that, whatever version of life I am in, it is not one of my making.

Silas waits a beat, two, then speaks, his voice velvet-soft in the pressing darkness of the room, a blanket of deep sound covering me and pushing back against the weight of the memories around me. “I remember the first time I saw you,” he offers unexpectedly. Something in his tone catches my breath, though he isn’t vulnerable and there is no hesitancy. Instead it is like he has practiced this, knows the words by heart and has been waiting to say them. He is matter-of-fact, but unguardedly so. “Not the first time I met you, though I remember that as well. You were a baby, white as bone, snow hair, bloodstained eyelids. Even then you had pale eyes. They had color, just not entirely. Did you know that? Ringed in sapphire, but the entire middle was diamond blue, light and clear.” He drifts away into some private moment, long enough that my eyes start to grow heavy, and my breathing slows before he begins again.

“But the first time Isawyou, well. That is a different matter altogether, isn’t it. Because you can look and look at something and never really see it. And maybe I would never have, had things gone differently. I was too young to be named Father, no matter what your bone friends may say. The weight of a people is too much to bear for a single man, let alone a child. And though gifts in our village are not things that can be given back, I would have done almost anything those first few years to have passed it to another's hands.”

My throat is too raw to respond; I’m not certain what to say in any case. I don’t know this version of him, don’t really know any versionof him other than what I’ve seen on the stage and in the Council House.

“I — I don’t know how much you remember, Wren.” For the first time, he falters slightly, before his voice strengthens again. “I have to assume…everything. It’s not something I can forget, and I wasn’t locked in the room with you. I’ve never known — did you think I was part of it? Part of your…training…as Raek called it.” His question is fervent, begs for a response.

“I haven’t thought of it,” I whisper, and though I can’t see his face, I can hear the sorrow in his answering sigh.

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