“We’re going to make a nutrient solution,” she says triumphantly.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Don’t just sit there. Help me.”
She goes to one of the cabinets in the kitchen and starts removing things—a bowl, a spoon, a mortar and pestle, a clear container made of glass.
“Fill this and put it over the heat,” she says, handing me a pot.
Once the water comes to a boil, we add sugar, salt, and the ingredients I brought from the bone house—a bit of bone dust, the essence of horse hoof, a small vial of tears. And then my mother pulls a sewing needle from her pocket.
“Give me your hand,” she says.
I sigh. “Why do you always need my blood?”
“Your blood is powerful,” she says, pricking both of our fingers.
“No, your blood is powerful. Mine is only ordinary.”
She freezes, one hand cradled in the other, a single drop of blood bright against her ivory skin. I wait for her to correct me. To repeat what she said at the kenning when she implied that I might have Second Sight. Or at least that’s what I think she implied. I’ve been itching to ask her about it ever since, but she’s been so focused on finding a way to heal the bone, I haven’t dared. But she doesn’t correct me.
“All blood is powerful,” she says, finally.
We hold our hands above the pot and let a few drops fall, turning the liquid light red. While I stir the solution, my mother uses the pinner to poke several tiny holes in each half of the bone.
“Is that thickening?” she asks.
“I think so?” I lift the spoon from the pot. The liquid has congealed to something resembling jelly.
“Perfect,” she says, taking the pot from me and pouring the contents into the glass container. She fits the two halves of the broken bone together and pushes them into the slightly gelatinous substance.
“What now?” I ask.
My mother wipes sweat from her brow. “We wait.”
I press a palm to my sternum and think of the tattoo there—a curve like the string of a tightly pulled bow, a line running through it like an arrow. It appeared right after my gran died as a deep midnight blue. When my father died, it turned black.
“Can I tell you something?” I ask.
My mother’s expression of surprise sends a jolt of guilt through me. I used to tell her everything, but as the kenning got closer, I pushed her away. The possibility of being matched as a Bone Charmer when I knew magic wasn’t safe with me—when I would dishonor both her legacy and Gran’s—weighed on me like a cloak of iron.
“Of course,” my mother says, her voice a little too deliberately nonchalant. “You can tell me anything.”
“I’m afraid of what will happen if the bone heals.”
“You mean if it doesn’t heal?”
I shake my head. The thought of two different versions of myself wandering around Midwood is frightening, but imagining a version of myself suddenly winking out of existence terrifies me. “No,” I say, biting my lip. “I don’t want this version of myself to disappear.”
“Oh, Saskia.” My mother folds me in an embrace. She smells of vanilla, and it’s so reminiscent of my childhood that I can’t help but sink against her. “I don’t think I’ve been entirely clear, love. If the bone doesn’t heal, all of your futures will disappear.”
I pull away from her. “How is that possible?”
She presses her lips together. “I did something I shouldn’t have,” she says. “I used a magic that—it’s expressly forbidden, and if the council finds out about it …”
“What?” I ask. “What did you do?”
“Bone reading is subjective. I wanted your kenning to be flawless.” She sighs. “I infused the kenning bones with your essence.”
“I don’t understand. You always infuse the bones with my essence.” I think of the hundreds of times my fingers have been pierced in service of one reading or another.
“No,” she says. “I had the bones prepared with your blood. And mine and Gran’s as well.” I remember now what she said at the kenning, that she infused them with extra magic so she could see my future more clearly.
“What were my other paths? What were you choosing between?”
Her eyes slide away from me as she answers. “I’m sure your first kenning had many possibilities, but you know I couldn’t see the other half of the bone once it broke.”
“But still you saw more than one future, didn’t you?”
She sighs. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not? It doesn’t seem like you’ve been sticking strictly to the rules here.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not healthy to know too much about your own future.”
My jaw falls open. “Are you serious? Do you have any idea how that sounds coming from you?” My whole life has been built around knowing everything about my future.
“It’s not the same,” she says. “There’s a reason Bone Charmers can’t do readings on themselves. Knowing too much changes your decision-making, alters your path. I can’t tell you what I saw, Saskia. I’m sorry.”
“You said …” I swallow. “At the kenning you said something about three generations of Bone Charmers?”
“I matched you as a tutor,” she says softly.
“But—”
“I believe it was one of your possible paths, yes,” she says. “I can’t tell you more than that. Your kenning is final. You can’t go through the binding ceremony now, and you’ll never be a Bone Charmer. Not in this life.”
A spasm of relief goes through me, knowing that without the binding, my potential for magic will slowly fade.
“So the bones weren’t infused with the blood from three generations of Bone Charmers?”
She twists her hands in her lap. “Not in this reality,” she says. “They’re infused with the magic of two Bone Charmers and a tutor. Which makes them much more fragile than I wish they were.”
“And if it doesn’t heal …”
“Your fate is now intertwined with the bone. I’m so sorry, Saskia. After the kenning, I planned to lock the bones away. They would have lasted for generations. I never anticipated that one would break.”
I feel as if the floor has shifted beneath my feet. I find the courage for one more question: “What about the bone in my other reality?”
“Now, that bone might be infused with the blood of three generations of Bone Charmers,” she says, “which would make your two paths very different. Every alteration has the potential to change the future in both big and small ways. Perhaps, in that reality, I’ve thought of a different solution to make things right.” She strokes my cheek with the backs of her fingers. “I can only hope I’m wise enough to fix it in one of them.”
Saskia
The Bone Charmer
Ivory Hall sits high on a hill just below the first fork in the Shard. It’s a massive structure—white and gleaming, with hundreds of windows and dozens of square towers that stretch toward the sky. Four broad lanes spill down the hill, the closest of which runs parallel to the port where our ship is docked.