Page 99 of The BoneKeeper's Daughter

She falls.

“Rann!” My agonized scream rings out across the Keep. Anyone else would think it for the horrors happening in our village, that I am calling for help from the Council, that my paralyzing fear is for my people. But Rannoch hears it, his head jerking up from where he’s desperately helping people to their feet, shielding them from the rocks still raining from the heavens, pushing people away from the shaking walls. He hears it and freezes, turning to me with dread on his face. I can only point to the gaping maw that is open and undulating in front of the Council House.

“Wren…” and it’s not even a sound, just a mouthed word. I am too far away, can’t get past the pillars and bones that block me, the duty that binds me. Rannoch, though, is already at the edge, already peering down into the ragged abyss. His entire body tenses, pulled taut like a bow, and then he looks up at me and meets my eyes with sorrow and regret beyond anything I’ve seen before. Raising a single hand, he shrugs, half in apology, half in farewell, then, tearing a horrified noise from my throat, he steps forward and follows her.

“Father! Father!” The voices surround me, begging and pleading for help, guidance, direction, but my heart and throat were ripped from my body the second she disappeared into the pit. “Father, please!” Their faces pulse in and out with my heartbeat, shimmering on the edges of my vision as I try to breathe through the suffocating terror and push it to the sides. Around me is nothing but wailing and shrieking, bodies rushing by me, scraped and bloody, pulling at me, yanking at my clothing. “Father! Please!” But I can’t speak until I hear someone close to me yelling over and over again, “Father! Where is she? Where is the BoneKeeper?”

Everything suddenly comes into sharp, painful focus. He’s shouting, trying to get my attention. “I saw her, for a moment she was there and then she just–” The man in front of me is panicked, beyond panicked, looking around him, eyes frantically sweeping the chaos. He looks like he saw the Ender himself rise up from the Everfire, and I know him. Vaguely, I know him. Herfriend.

“Miller?” I’m stupid, confused. “Wren?” My throat constricts on her name; it is impossible to make it sound like anything other than a prayer.

It’s enough to pull him from his mindlessness.

“Father?” He stiffens, raising his head, and turning to look at me with a sort of agonizing carefulness. “What did you just say?”

Even now, he’s cautious, respectful, a true son of the village in a way that I never will be. Even with her having been swallowed by the Earth, even with mountain bursting open, he treats me as though I am a step above him. And that is where we differ, because if I were him, and someone was standing between me and myfriendwith the answers trapped in his throat, I would tear them from his neck with my teeth.

Tahrik is trembling in my silence, almost vibrating, and somethingin him breaks free as he leans forward, eyes wide and wild. “What. Did. You. Just. Say.”

Ah,I think.Perhaps we’re not so different after all then,and I point silently to the open pit on the far side of the keep.

“You can’t get there, though,” I mumble numbly, and he shoots me a disdainful look.

“Youcan’t–” he begins, but then takes in the carnage around me, the weeping people screaming my name, the Renders and Reapers fleeing like scuttling rats fleeing to safety, not sparing a thought for the people we’re meant to be leading, and his tone changes. “Youcan’t,” he repeats, but quietly now, and with such sympathy it makes me want to scream. He spares a second to lay a hand on my shoulder, then without another word, turns and nimbly climbs up and over the pillar, the bones, the bodies. And though his hands are torn and bloody by the time he reaches the pit, and though his face is bruised and clothing ripped, hedoesmake it. For a long, long moment he stares down; his shoulders collapse, his lungs emptied of breath, and my heart seizes in my chest.

He is seeing her body,I think,her broken and battered body, with no one to Guide her home.

So when he starts climbing down, not leaping as Rannoch did, just descending over the sharp edge, hope strangles me in almost suffocating fingers. His head hovers above the drop for long enough that I wonder what he’s doing, until I realize he’s staring at me, waiting to make sure I am watching him. Once he is certain, he nods once, then gives me a quick, flat smile before disappearing.

It is nothing, but somehow enough.

If her feet walk anywhere on this earth, Iwillfind her. And Rannoch will keep her safe until I can. I’ve learned not to trust anything in this cursed world, but I know his mind and I know his heart, and if he’s alive, then she’ll still be breathing. If he isn’t, then the only family I have left is gone, and it all becomes meaningless anyway. I just can’t look too deeply at what happens next. Once I fix this. After she returns home to the village.

One thing at a time, Silas. There is no space in this moment for the next.

Straightening, feeling the weight of fifteen thousand people on my shoulders, I look around. “Away from the walls!” I yell, voice echoing over the square, and thank the Gods they listen, lost sheep needing a shepherd. “Go to the fields! Down the center roads on the high ground! The rain has stopped. Avoid standing water!” Barking out orders, I take control, directing the few Hunters left in the square, encouraging the wild and paralyzed people to move. The Earth is still seething and surging, heaving beneath my feet as though it’s gasping for air, and I know we don’t have long before it will be impossible to leave. Taking a few, frantic moments, I do everything I can to loose more boulders, freeing anyone with life left in them that I’m able to, trying desperately to avoid the rocks raining from the mountain. It’s not enough, it will never be enough; there are still villagers screaming for help from the far sides of the square, squealing beneath stone like pigs at the slaughter, but I try, hands slippery with blood and ash, blinded by dirt and mud.I try.

And fight every instinct in my body to go back toward the Council House, to follow Rannoch and leap into the pit where my heart was eaten with a white haired girl.

THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN

RANNOCH

There’s very little space between waking and sleeping. Deep in the heart of the molten black tunnels, veined thickly with raw minerals, life itself seems a dream, and this pressing prison of stone a living nightmare. We’re guided only by Wren’s blank eyes; truly blind now she pulls us forward at a frantic pace, letting us stop just long enough to regain strength before she pushes on. When she is certain, we don’t have time to think of all that could go wrong. It is only in the pauses, at the forks of long, hollow tunnels, where our blood runs cold — air stagnant in some, in others pushing out and then sucking back in like an unknown creature is breathing just beyond the bend. At these, when she freezes statue-still, head tilted, eyes closed, and listens to something only she can hear, the Miller and I exchange long glances.

We are at such a place now, and have been for a full five minutes. Wren is nervous; her pale fingers barely visible in the darkness, playing with the wet bones around her neck, wrapped like a choker.Lorcan, I correct myself.He is Lorcan. Not just bones.

Everything has been phantoms and fear since the rain fell. Longer than that, actually. So long that I can’t remember the last time it didn’t feel like fist clenched around my heart, burning ash filling my lungs.I’ve lived for the past few weeks surviving only on the memory of a sharp, citrus sting and soft, sweet lips. It’s enough to keep my feet stumbling forward though; hope is a powerful elixir, poison and cure all in one, depending on the dose.

When I saw her body at the bottom of the pit…shudders run through me.No. Don’t dwell on it — on her white hair red with blood, on the way her spine was twisted, on her empty face.I followed her down almost without thinking, only pausing to say as much of a goodbye to Silas as I could. The panic-stricken look on his face is burned in my memory, though. My body didn’t give me a choice; it moved without me knowing, really. I would have gone anyway, would have done the same again without hesitation, but the acrid taste of betrayal still coats my tongue. He needed me, and I abandoned him. I made him a promise and broke it. For so long we’ve only had each other, chosen brothers in a deadly family, and I’ve left him, willingly, at the worst possible time. I don’t know how he’ll ever forgive me. But I don’t know if I could have forgiven myself if I hadn’t jumped after her.

From the tunnels there is a long, wet, sucking sound, like a drowning man trying to breathe, and I’m suddenly pulled into the memory of my feet sinking into the damp ground by her crumpled body.

Hitting the ground awkwardly, sliding on oily shale, I ignore the pulling protest from my muscles, and scramble over to her.

“Wren, Wren, Wren—” Over and over I whisper, a plea and a prayer, the only word my mouth can hold. She seems wholly unmoving; I can’t see her chest, and her back is immobile in the darkness of the cavernous room. Gently, as though she’s made of glass, I turn her over. She must have slid down the wall of the pit in her fall; scrapes and bruises litter her skin like she’s crawled through thorns. Somehow, though, she’d landed on a pile of soft sand and dirt, no rocks or sharp stones under her.

“Wren, Wren…” I beg again, frantically running my hands along her arms, her shoulders, pushing her damp hair back from her face. The tiniest flutter of a pale blue vein in her neck caves my heart in; inhaling deeply, burying my lingering terror deep at the back of my mind, I force myself to calm down, to do a real assessment of her. Meticulously, I check her ankles, knees, wrists, elbows — everything I can, this time with analytical hands, not willing to miss anything because I let myself become stupid with fear. Wren needs me focused; anything else can wait.

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