Page 20 of Mistress of Bones
“Excuse me, sirese,” she said politely. “Do you know where they keep people’s bones? Is it at the fortress?”
The man spat at her feet, and Azul took a hasty step back.
“Bones?” he said in a rough, unpleasant voice. “Leave me be and take your problems with you.”
Something unpleasant crawled up her insides toward her throat,but Azul refused to acknowledge it. If this man wouldn’t speak, the next one might.
“Hold,” she heard Nereida say, but she paid her no attention. She had spied someone else to ask—a boy of about twelve selling dried flowers out of a cart.
“Hello, there,” she told him. “Could you point me to Monteverde’s ossuary? The place where they keep people’s bones?” she added, because when she was his age, she was too busy learning to spelldamnto worry about fancier terms.
The boy wrinkled his nose as if Azul’s words had the smell of a dozen chamber pots. “We don’t have that here.”
But they did. She remembered the innkeeper’s words as clearly as if she’d heard them five heartbeats ago:Monteverde, of course.
“Are you sure?” she insisted. “What do you do with your dead, then?”
“Same thing you do,” he answered a little belligerently. “Pay the Temple for a prayer and hope it’s enough to win the gods’ goodwill. You going to buy flowers or not?”
“I might if I knew where I could offer them to the dead.”
“Then you got a long way to go,” the boy said. “They’re all down in the capital.” He looked around, then leaned in, adding in a whisper, “Mom says they eat them for dinner at the court, and that’s why the gods struck down Girende.”
“They’re at the capital?” Azul pressed, her friendly smile forced so deeply into her cheeks she might never carry another expression again.
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
Well, it couldn’t be. Abandoning the boy, she focused on another citizen making her way along the street.
“We should—” Nereida began.
“No.”
Behind her, the boy’s cursing filled the air, damning their souls to Fellman’s End for wasting his time and leaving no coin.
“Sirese, if you please,” Azul asked of the passerby. “Is it true the bones of the dead go to Cienpuentes?”
“Ah yes. To Cienpé, they go. I was born there, you know.”
Azul didn’t know, didn’t care. With a murmur of thanks, she walked on.
She felt Nereida keep up with her hurried steps and realized her own breath was coming out in uneven gasps. She stopped, biting down on her fist as if gnawing her hand to the bone would somehow make Isadora’s own bone appear under her flesh.
Cienpuentes! How could that be?
Ah, if only she had pressed harder back at the inn.
Belatedly, she realized she had come to a stop by a statue of the Lady Dream. The goddess’s hands rested on her hips, her legs standing apart, offering plenty of room for the ribbons tied around her limbs.
As children, Azul and Isadora had embroidered such strips themselves. Isadora had wished to slay monsters—the ones that came at night out of caves deep in the earth to steal people’s bones—while Azul hadn’t known what to wish for. So, she had embroidered some gibberish and tied it to the legs of the statue along with Isadora. She had figured,I will think of something later, come back, and redo my stitches. Of course, she had forgotten. But now the memory was a thick ball in her gut. She should’ve wished for Isadora’s safety. What a selfish child she had been; why had she not thought of this?
“Cienpuentes,” she said as if it were a curse rather than a destination. She looked at Nereida with sudden hope in her eyes. “Perhaps the local ossuary is kept a secret?”
“What would be the point?” Nereida ignored Azul’s crestfallen expression and looked at the darkening sky. “It’s too late to travel. We must find an inn to stay the night.”
Azul wanted to contradict her, but she knew Nereida was right. She tried to instill reason within herself. Cienpuentes wasn’t so far—three days of travel at most. It wouldn’t make a difference to Isadora’s bones, which had been lying there for near a decade now.
But the emissary’s death…
