Page 95 of The BoneKeeper's Daughter

“No. No no no!” Her moan makes us all jump; she doesn’t sound like herself, but an older version of herself, and I realize it must be her mother’s voice. “Cover your ears! Ceridwen, cover your ears!”

Wren’s face crumples, confusion and naive terror clear — it is the face of a nine year old girl who knows terrible, terrible things are about to happen.

“Mama?” Her voice is young and shaking, and I have to clench my jaw to fight against the tears unexpectedly pressing against my eyes. Across from me, Rannoch swallows hard. The Miller is stone still, his fingers laced through hers. He startles like a spooked pony when she jerks her hand away suddenly, wrapping her hands in a white-knuckled grip on the bone around her neck. Something pulled her out of her memory — I’m guessing Lorcan — and though her breathing is fast and shallow, she simply closes her eyes before continuing.

“My mother grabbed me in skeletal hands, thin from the fasting of the Crone’s month. Locked eyes with me, flint glinting in their depths. Commanded me, voice sharp and biting with more life than I’d ever heard from her, and I obeyed as quickly as I could.” There is a long pause; none of us move. “She tried. She tried her hardest.” Her voice drops to a horrible whisper of sound, a rasp of longing, a terrible acceptance. “But she did not understand the pull of bone….The scream from the man in the street was unearthly, high pitched — full of panic and pain. It was a shivering, eerie sound that overwhelmed even the steadily increasing Storms, carried down the streets on gusts of wind that whipped it around corners and through cracks in houses, filling the entire inner keep with the shaking, trembling cry.”

She’s drifting again, and though I see it, see her disappear, the hairs on my arms still stand on end when she shrieks, a ghostly wail of unearthly pain. “‘Ahhhhh! Ahhhh! No! Save me! BoneKeeper, save me!’” She makes a gurgling sound, a bubbling noise from her throat, and I swear I can taste the blood and acid. “‘Help me! Help me! I can’t see…my skin, my skin, my skin! Oh Gods, Gods! Keeper! Keeper! Keeper!’”

She is wild now, head tilted back, neck stretched and corded. Everything else is silent; I don’t know what to do. Slowly, slowly, her screams fade, and she sighs, nodding in response to some unspoken call.

“I’m alright. I’m alright,” she whispers. “I can finish. Thank you.” Now louder, directed toward us again. “I was nine, and his bones were calling me. He wasso nearto our house, groaning and retching. His cries pushed against our walls, knocked on our shuttered windows. Ifonly he’d beencloser. We would have let him in, let him stay with us, but he was still in the street, stagger-stepping toward our home, flesh melting from his body as the rains came down, faster and more fiercely than any in memory, as though the respite had been but a trick to lure out the weak and wavering.” She swallows hard, but continues. “He was frantic, words falling over each other, rising in pitch until they were shrieks in the cold dawn streets. And then he was at our door, flesh squelching as he pounded with rotting fists against the wood. I could hear it, hear the cracking of his finger bones as he clawed violently against the barred entryway.

“One of my mother’s hands dug into my shoulders, keeping me in place. Her other arm wrapped around my head, covering my ears, trying to block out the sound of the man disintegrating on our doorstep. ‘Keeper!’ he pleaded, voice garbled and ruined. ‘Keeper! Guide me home, please Gods, Guide me home! Don’t let me go to the Silence!’.”

She looks at each of us helplessly, then pulls her hand from her necklace and stares down at her fingers.

“I was nine….I ripped my mother’s hands off me, ran to the door, tried with weak hands to lift the bar, but she pulled me back, wrapped her arms around me again, binding me. ‘You can’t.’ Tears running down her face. ‘You can’t. The winds. We couldn’t get the door shut again. And the rains. You’d be….you can’t. I’m sorry. He’s lost already. I’m sorry. I’m sorry….’ She was crying against my head, and I was crying too, sobbing out to the man,justoutside, so close I could touch him if we could open the door. But I was on one side, face pressed against the wood, and he was on the other, a mirror to me. He was clawing to get in, long, wet sounds on the wood, and I was clawing to get out, skin torn and bleeding as I tried to carve my way to him.

‘Help me, help me, help me,’ he cried.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I’d echoed, and it lasted for a long time. Too long. Much too long. Long enough that there were streaks of blood dripping down our door from my hands, that there were tiny, half moon cuts in my arms from where my mother held me back, bruises from the force of her grip red and raw on my skin. And whenthe wind reached its pinnacle, when the rain was endless and unceasing, I lost my mind, just for a moment. You understand? Just…just for a moment.”

Still staring down at her fingers, she clenches them into tight fists, nails cutting into her palms. “I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to help. He was in so much pain, for such a long,longtime. And his bones…they called to me. So…I called back. I didn’tmeanto. I was just trying tohelp. I didn’t…didn’t know you could pull bone through flesh, from a living body, didn’t realize the agony of it.” Tears are streaming down her face, cascading down unchecked, her breath hitching as they drip off her chin onto her bone necklace. “I thought I was helping, I swear.”

“His soul finally started singing, a stark, crazed song like I’d never heard before, one full of the promise of violence and retribution and hatred thick and muddy, so heavy it clouded even the glow of his fading light. Souls aren’t meant to carry the pain of their life to the Guiding, but he did, and all of it was directed at me, at failing to open the door, failing to guide him to bone, failing as the Keeper of our village. Even had I been able to open the door, there would have been no bone left to tie him to — the second I pulled his bones from him they started corroding.”

This is a truth long known in our village. The Storms take any bones and any souls which are tied to flesh and blood at the start of the season. I don’t know why they don’t wash away the exposed bone walls that have stood for centuries around us, only that, if bones house a soul, they are safe together, though sleeping, during the Storms. Even had she been able to open the door, I don’t think she could have Guided him back to bone. I’m not suresheeven has the answer to that.

She sounds so small now, so terribly small. “I wasnine.” She says it as though looking for forgiveness, as though offering an explanation and repentance all at the same time, and I suddenly feel sickeningly sad for her, and the things that she has carried. “I took the weight of his death into my heart, breaking a little, in small, seemingly insignificant ways, little cracks that mimicked the nail marks on our door.And my mother shattered right beside me, crying in a different way, for the loss of her husband, the loss of her daughter, holding me with equal parts blame, and love, and despair, and guilt. Blame for my father’s death, guilt because it was not my fault but she couldn’t help but fault me, despair for what my life would be as BoneKeeper, and love, thankfully love, that balances and blanks all other emotion. Love for her child that was strong enough to keep her breathing when she wanted to stop; love that forced her feet to move, her hands to gather, her voice to sing, her arms to gentle. Love that suffocated all other emotion enough that she could take my face in her trembling hands, tears coursing down her face like the poisoned rains, and say, ‘It was not your fault, Ceridren. It was not your fault.’ But I was nine. I knew everything and nothing, and you cannot always choose the pieces of you that become cornerstones in your foundation. And the silence in the winter Storms are always, for me, filled with the memory of his screaming.”

Taking a deep breath, she locks eyes with me, suddenly fierce and ferocious, a winter fox with teeth bared and snapping. “I carry no extra weight or guilt for Nickolas, andif, ifI had his screams in my memory, they would be a lullaby that would send me to a dreamless sleep. Do with that what you will.” She wipes her face with a hand, then runs it over her necklace, before standing in one smooth and graceful moment. “And that is all the answer you will ever get from me. Father. Councilman.” She nods coldly to both of us, then glances down with cautious eyes at the man beside her. Her voice is now hesitant, as though she’s unsure of what his reaction will be. “Tahrik?”

He stares up at her as though she is the sun and moon and all the Gods in between, and her face gentles to such a degree that she no longer looks like an ethereal, tethered ghost, only a painfully hopeful girl. In one sudden and terrible moment I realize who herfriendsin the village are.

I’ve been blind.

“Wren,” he whispers back, so softly it’s barely a breath, but the room is small and silent, and her name is a song. He smiles at her with such singular sweetness that everything narrows to the space of thatmoment, that smile, that breath. When her lips curl at the corners in answer, their curve cracks my heart.My friends call me WrenI hear her say,My friends.But she said it was the bones.Did she though? Did she?And I realize that, no. I had just assumed. I saw her sway into their cold comfort, and accepted that as her answer.My friends. The Bones.

“Will you walk me home?” she asks, and does not even glance behind her as they leave.

Rannoch and I exchange long looks in silence, then collapse as one into the chairs beside us. We stay there, unspeaking, until the fire dies in the grate, and our bodies are stiff from the cold night.

SILENCE AND FURY

WREN

“Afull half of the Council is gone.Gone!” Raek is wild with anger; all his tight control died with his brother, and he’s incendiary on the stage, incandescent with rage and fury. Rather than scaring the people in the square, it ignites them, spilling like Everfire from one to the next, a madness passing from villager to villager. “We are being punished by the Gods for forgetting the ways of our people! Empty silos, early Storms, absent Justice, and now—” His voice catches, and the barbs in it rock the listening audience forward on their toes, “— now, an errant BoneKeeper, refusing to Guide souls because she cannot paint her face in pretty patterns. When will it be enough?” For all the darkened crevices of his soul, he speaks with a golden tongue, and it draws people to him. “When will it beenough? My brother…my brother…” The heartbreak in his words is clear, pulling sympathy from those around him like a fish on a hook from a pond.

Turning, he points to me with a shaking hand. “Will you condemn our people further? Waiting for yourmissingCrown—” Disdain and suspicion drip from him like poisoned rain. “Waiting for your simple sigils? You’ve Guided enough souls without them — we’ve allseenyou Keeper. It is too much!Too much!Do younot want to see our people safe through the Storms? Offerings must be made, andyouwill be the one sending them to Silence if you refuse to Guide them. No one else. Their souls will die inyourhands. It is as it has ever been — if the bones refuse to speak, the Council must take the task.” He raises his voice again, as though it were not loud before, as though it was not already echoing from the stone walls in the keep square, so crowded with people that too deep of an inhale would brush your chest against another’s back. “We will not let you drive us starving and helpless into the depths of the coming Storms! The Offerings have been named, and will be Reaped and Rendered with or without you, Keeper. We cannot failallbecause you choose to failsome.”

Silas steps forward, face dark, hands raised. “Brother Raek?—”

But Raek turns to him, sneering, three of the remaining Council standing behind him, a black, cloaked wall of support. Rexus, old and weary, is bent like a weak willow in the middle, and only Rannoch stands beside the Father. “You were named very early, Father.Veryearly. By a BoneKeeper who knew, perhaps what grew in his wife’s belly. Who is to say? But you are so often gone from our village, choosing to leave with the Hunters, choosing to stay outside our walls — there are those who question if you even want to take care of our people, or if you’d rather walk into the winter Storms like the Father before you.” He leans forward, the crowd leaning with him, faux concern on his face. “Canyou lead us, Silas?” The crowd draws in a breath as one; to address the Father so…but Raek pushes forward. “Canyou make the hard decisions? The ones that steal sleep from you at night with their weight? The ones that crease your face with their memory?Thatis what it takes to lead this village. And if you do not have the mettle in you to draw from, well — this is already a path we have not walked in the history of our people. What is one more thing?”

Silas opens his mouth to speak, but Raek has turned from him, despair and grief wrapped around him like a cloak, worn on his face like a masque, but the people are too desperate now to care. When the Council Bell called us to the square this morning, it was to announce that a further measure of grain had fallen prey to rot, that we hadeven less than thought, that starvation was not a threat this winter, but a promise, that the coming famine of the coldest months will send more to the Silence than ever heard of in bone memory. The hollow faces of the children will cave into sharp, gaunt slices of bone beneath flesh and then further. No toddler or infant will survive; there is just no way to keep their bellies full enough, and even if a parent gave all they had, how would someone in their milk teeth care for themselves when their mother or father lay empty on the floor, unable to continue through the Storms.

“If the Trade had happened…” Raek lets his voice trail off, glancing at me, the implication clear, and the weight of thousands of eyes follow his, pushing me into the wall of the Council House behind me. I’m not on stage with the Council, but low behind them, beneath the pillars and the massive overhang, having been told curtly that my presence on the raised platform with the Council was not required today. “If the Trade had happened,” he repeats, trying to be heard over the growing discord in the square, “perhaps we would not have to make this choice. Perhaps we would not have to beg the Gods for forgiveness.” Eyes white-ringed with fanatic energy, he turns his face to the yellow-grey sky above. It’s a strange, sick color, like a fading bruise, the late light of our weak sun flicking in and out of churning clouds. On the stage, Raek falls to his knees, hands stretched up in dramatic supplication, fingers grasping at the air as though he could pull the Sun God down from the injured heavens. “But I will beg, if that’s what it takes!V is for Vengeance, the payment still grows! Well, we will pay, and pay, and pay! We will do it with willing hearts and hands, until the streets are red enough for the Gods to give us grace to make it through the storm season! If it takes ten, or ten sets of ten, is that not better than a thousand? Two thousand?We will pay!” he screams to the chaos above him; the sky roils in response as though it hears him, the grey clouds racing, winds whipping through the square.

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