I turn my face toward the bonfire, let myself be mesmerized by the way the flames consume everything in their reach, at the wooden logs in the center that started out enormous and strong but will soon be reduced to ash. That’s how I feel inside—on fire. Like no matter how strong I am, soon there won’t be anything left.
Except bones.
When everything else is destroyed, the bones always manage to survive.
Saskia
The Second Kenning
My mother is holding two halves of a broken bone.
Smoke clouds my vision, and I fight the urge to let my eyelids slide closed again. I’m sleepier than I should be. The Marrow is too warm, and sandalwood incense snakes through my nostrils, making me light-headed. I rub my eyes and study Gran’s blackened finger bones scattered across the white carpet among bits of ash. My head throbs lightly, and I wonder if it’s normal for the kenning to be so much more draining than a typical reading. But it’s not until I focus on my mother’s face that the disoriented feeling turns to alarm. She’s staring at the fractured bone as if it’s her own broken heart she’s cradling in her palm.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Her head snaps up as if she’s surprised to see me here.
“Oh, Saskia.” There’s a reprimand in her tone that I can’t make sense of. Is she still upset that I wouldn’t say I trust her? Did the bones tell her something terrible about my future? I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. She turns her attention back to the bone, her lips pressed together in a thin, pale line.
“Mama,” I say, suddenly feeling small. “You’re scaring me.”
“We’ve done this before,” she says.
A chill inches down my spine. “Of course we have.” She’s given me readings dozens of times—they’re as familiar as the berry-filled tarts she makes each year on my life-celebration day.
She shakes her head. “We must have argued,” she says. “You must have broken this.” She sets the two parts of the bone down carefully beside the others.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “No, I didn’t.”
She’s not making any sense. But then again, that bone wasn’t broken a moment ago. I’m sure of it. And tipping it onto the carpet couldn’t have caused a fracture like that.
My mother sighs and covers her face with her hands. Her slender red tattoo—the one that etched itself over the contours of her wrist bone when she fell in love with my father—stands in sharp contrast against her skin, which has gone unnaturally pale.
“These bones were special,” she says.
“Because they were Gran’s.”
“Yes, that too.” Her hands tremble as they fall to her lap. “But there’s more. I infused them with extra magic—the blood of three generations of Bone Charmers, each with a different Sight.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her. “We don’t even know someone who has the Second Sight.”
Gran had the ability to see the past and my mother can read the future, but the present … and then it dawns on me. “My blood? I have the Second Sight?”
But how would she know? She hasn’t finished my reading yet.
“The additional magic made them more powerful—they were supposed to allow me the ability to see your future much more clearly. The bones were from a close family member. They were woven with context from the past and the present—but it also made them more dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?”
She swallows. “I’m worried … Saskia, I don’t see the path for you that I was expecting to see.”
The band of tension that’s been tightening around my heart suddenly snaps and I feel lighter.
“Oh, well, maybe the bones just surprised you. Maybe my path is different from what you thought it would be.”
“You don’t understand … Look at the bone. Do you see how one side is blackened around the edges and the other looks like it’s never been touched by flame? Something changed. The extra magic … It’s possible that because this bone fractured, your future has actually split in two. Instead of possibilities, the path this bone represented may have become realities. That’s why I’m not seeing what I thought I would. Because the path of one half of the bone is invisible to me.”
I examine the broken bone. She’s right—the two halves look different.
“But nothing terrible happened, right? We’re still sitting here. Only one set of us and not two.”
She gives me a look that makes my stomach squirm. We’ve done this before.
“You don’t mean …”
“I think you’re already living in an alternate reality based on the reading I gave you before.”
All the breath leaves my lungs. “Which was what?”
“That’s the thing,” she says. “I don’t know.”
A tremor goes through me as if the earth has shifted. As if it’s still moving. “How could you do this? Why would you make the bones more powerful?”
My entire life has been held captive by the iron fist of my mother’s readings. I’ve had so many that my freedom has been peeled back layer by layer, like an onion, until I don’t have any choices left. I can’t imagine why she would need to increase the strength of the bones when they’ve already built an inescapable cage around me.
A piece of hair has loosened from one of her braids and blows across her face in time with her shallow breath. My mother is usually as unruffled as a lake on a windless day, but right now she looks more unhinged than I’ve ever seen her. She doesn’t even seem to realize I’ve spoken.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
It takes her a long time to answer, but finally her eyes meet mine.
“My only option is to choose the best path from what is left. I can’t read something I can’t see.” She takes a deep breath and studies the bones in front of her—not just the broken bone, but all of them. “I have to find a way to fix this. But I have no way of knowing what I selected for you before. Not for sure.” The sadness in her voice sends a shock of guilt through me, even though I’ve done nothing but sit here.
She studies the bones for a long time, as if she’s choosing between dozens of possibilities. Then, finally, she tucks the stray hair behind her ear and lifts her head. She sits up a little straighter. “You’ll be apprenticed here in Midwood as a tutor,” she says. The next words seem to take more effort, and she can’t quite meet my gaze as she says them. “Declan will be your partner.”
I step out of the Marrow in a daze and squeeze my eyes closed. The morning is aggressively bright and cold in contrast to the overheated darkness I just left behind.
The girl at the front of the line bounces on her toes. “So?” she asks. “How did it go?”
I open my mouth to answer, but then I find I have nothing to say. I got both the apprenticeship and the partner I wanted, and yet I’ve never been more worried for my future. My mother said we’d discuss it later, but I’m not sure this is something that talking can fix. The girl is watching me with an expectant expression, so finally I give her an answer. “Fine,” I lie. “It went just fine.”