Chapter One
Kreya always wore her coat with many pockets when she went out to steal bones. As she pulled it on, she inhaled the familiar dusty smell. The leather had faded from brilliant blue to indistinct gray, and the hems were frayed, but then, after all this time, she felt faded and frayed too.
She checked the pockets:
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
Bear claw, with knuckle bone.
She drew it out and examined it. A fracture ran from the knuckle to the tip of the claw. Worse, the carving for strength was cracked and the inlaid gold had fallen out. “Useless,” she muttered at it. She tucked it back in its pocket anyway. In another pocket, she found a talisman carved from the femur of a mountain sheep, bearing the symbols for steadiness. The grooves were worn but intact. Can’t weather an avalanche with this, she thought, but okay for a climb. “You’ll do,” she told it.
She patted more pockets, stopping when she found a third talisman, marked for stealth, and a fourth for strength. She found a few others, mostly drained or damaged from overuse. She used to have hundreds of them—high-quality ones, not the cheap, ten-minutes-then-done variety—but over the years, her supplies had dwindled. She’d have to replace them soon.
But that required gold she didn’t have. A problem for later, she told herself. Right now, she had a task. She’d heard whispers of a death in the village of Eren, a child who had slipped off the edge of a cliff while chasing a stray goat and fallen on her neck. The body would be burned at dusk, which meant Kreya had four hours to cross the mountain, sneak into Eren, and position herself to liberate the beautiful bones before they were destroyed.
She raised her voice. “Weather?”
Gears whirred as one of her constructs—a birdlike part-metal-and-part-bone creation—hopped onto a windowsill. As wind whipped inside, it wobbled but didn’t fall. Papers on Kreya’s desk fluttered, and a quill was blown onto the floor. Reaching out a bony appendage, the construct snagged the weather monitor from the hook on the outside of the tower. As it turned to deliver its prize to Kreya, another burst of wind puffed into the room, and the skeletal bird tumbled off the sill. Kreya lunged forward to catch it, felt a muscle in her back twang, and missed. The construct crashed onto the stone, and a bone in its arm snapped.
Squatting, Kreya scooped it up and cradled it. “You aren’t as spry as you used to be either, are you?” It whirred as it tried to right itself in her arms, but she cooed to it. “Calm, little one. Let’s see what we can do to fix you up.”
Ignoring the fresh ache in her back, she carried the unnatural bird to her workbench, cleared a space with a sweep of one arm, and laid the construct down. It twisted its skull head to look at her with its empty eye sockets. She’d forgotten how long ago she’d made this one, but it had served her well.
It whirred at her, the gears within its rib cage rotating. She’d added them to help its mobility—when she’d first created this construct, it had tried so hard to fly, but without flesh and feathers, it couldn’t. Once she added the gears, though, it could propel itself around the tower as fast as it pleased. Deftly, Kreya wrapped the snapped bone in a strip of bark and secured it with resin, smearing it liberally. The resin would harden after a day or so. “You be more careful.”
It spun its gears as if it were agreeing with her.
Kreya was never quite certain how much her constructs understood—not much, her old teachers would have said—but that didn’t stop her from talking to them. She set the skeleton bird back onto the floor, and it hopped over to the fallen quill. It pecked at the feather, while she examined the weather monitor it had retrieved.
Moisture, normal.
Wind speed, normal.
Stability, high.
There hadn’t been a tremor on the mountain in weeks, which boded well for her journey. She left the monitor on the workbench, picked up the fallen quill, and sidestepped around the bird construct. It continued to peck at the carpet where the quill had been, adding yet another hole to the threadbare fabric.
As she descended the spiral stairs, she paused on the third level to check on her husband. He lay, as always, carefully wrapped in white linens. “Tomorrow, we’ll watch the sun rise together,” she told him. “You’ll say something that will make me laugh, and I’ll make willow tea that you’ll ruin with too much honey. And then we can do whatever you want. Walk in the woods. Mend that step you’re forever tripping over. We’ll have time.”
A construct made from a rag doll and animated with dog bones trotted over to his bed. It patted the linen sheets, smoothing them with its floppy hands.
“Keep an eye on him, please,” Kreya told it.
She continued down the stairs, sidestepping another construct. She’d made this one to clean the tower, but it had malfunctioned months—was it years?—ago, and it scrubbed only a single step. Smooth and concave, that one stone gleamed like polished silver. Kreya hadn’t had the heart to remove the bones that animated the dutiful, broken creature, and it could be several more years before the last of its power finally wound down. “Beautiful work,” she told it.
It made a noise like a purr.
On the ground floor, she lifted the three iron bars that locked the door. She then stepped over the broken step that Jentt liked to complain about. Calling over her shoulder, she said, “Lock!”
It took an extra minute for the bars, powered by bones, to lock back in place. She’d have to examine the mechanism when she had more time. It’s always about time, Kreya thought. How much you use, how much you waste, and how much you waste regretting the time you already wasted.
She’d eaten up precious minutes in preparation, but there was still plenty of time left before dusk. She estimated the hike would take her three and a half hours. If she left now, she should arrive exactly on time. The sun was high between the peaks, casting a golden light on the gray rocks. Picking up her walking stick from beside the door to her tower, Kreya started on the path.
Made by mountain goats, the path wound its way across the rocky face of the mountain before plunging into the pine forest that clung to the slope. Birds chirped cheerfully to one another, unconcerned with the lone hiker who was picking her way through their territory. They startled more when a cable car rattled across the open void between two of the nearest peaks. Kreya halted where she was, hidden within the pines, until the contraption was safely out of sight. Of course it wasn’t forbidden to walk at such an altitude, but it was unusual enough to be memorable, and it was safer if Kreya’s passage wasn’t memorable.
She knew Jentt would have been surprised at how cautious she’d become, but she’d learned her lesson. A cautious bone worker was one who got to see another day.
The last bits of fall were clinging to everything: the aspen leaves were as golden as candle flames, the fallen leaves crunched under her feet, and the berry bushes were heavy with the final fruit of the season. Squirrels and rock mice skittered everywhere, stocking up for winter. Up on the rock faces, wildflowers clung to the crevasses, not yet blanched by frost, and the wild goats nibbled at them, their legs splayed for balance. As she hiked, Kreya tried to enjoy all the beauty around her, but her thoughts kept drifting back to her goal: the village of Eren.