All this—the wasted magic, the painful chase, the villagers’ rage, the ruined cave entrance. All of it for a single day.
I’ll take a day, she thought.
Chapter Two
Kreya cleaned the sliver of bone. She laid it in a box that had been made for jewels, closed the lid, and locked it. She then sank into a chair with a half sigh, half moan.
As if concerned about her, the bird skeleton hopped around her feet.
Peeling off her shirt, she twisted to view her back in the cloudy mirror on the table beside her. During the night, while she’d slept fitfully and uncomfortably, a vicious flower of purple had blossomed between her shoulder blades where the rock had hit. “Jentt will have questions about that,” she muttered.
She eased her shirt back on, after checking to be sure the rock hadn’t broken skin. Or my ribs. Or lungs. Lifting her foot, she examined her ankle next. Another developing bruise, plus it had been skinned. Dots of blood had dried along the scrape. On the plus side, she felt whole, if achy. Her muscles would probably throb for days.
If Jentt saw her like this . . .
He’s seen me worse. Of course, that had been during a war, and he hadn’t exactly been sanguine whenever she’d been injured then.
She should wait until the bruises faded and her muscles felt less like quivery goo. But it had been months since she’d spoken with her husband and had him answer, months since she’d been able to look into his eyes, months since she’d seen his smile. She didn’t want to wait any longer.
“And they say the young are impatient,” Kreya said to the bird construct.
Patience, she decided, is for people unaware of their own mortality.
She permitted herself a few more minutes of rest before propelling herself out of the chair. Shuffling across the room, she pulled several books from the shelf and piled them on her makeshift bed.
After a few years of failing to sleep near Jentt’s body, she’d taken to sleeping in the library and had built a bed out of quilts and blankets that looked more like a nest than a proper piece of furniture. It was nestled in the corner of two bookshelves. In another corner was the stove where she prepared the bulk of her meals. Despite the size of the tower, this one room was where she spent most of her time. It was comforting to be surrounded by so many books, as if the past experience of all the authors could protect her from the unknown future. She loved the smell of the room, with that distinctive old paper and old binding-glue scent, mixed with dust. She’d spent years collecting these volumes. Many of them were one-of-a-kind. A few shouldn’t even have existed.
Kreya reached to the back of the shelf, unlatched the hidden door, and pulled out a black metal box. Running her fingers over the lid, she couldn’t suppress a shudder. When she’d stolen these books, she’d planned to destroy them. Their author had poured everything he knew into his journals—knowledge he’d used to inflict horrors. No one knew she hadn’t burned them, though. Certainly no one knew she’d read them. Studied them. Found a way to use them.
Knowledge itself isn’t evil. It’s how you use it. And she had a very good use for it. Opening the box, she lifted out the top book.
Given the atrocities committed by the author, the book should have been bound in human skin, for the sake of the appropriate level of melodrama. But it was ordinary cloth, as threadbare as the carpet, with scorch marks on the spine. The pages were stained and brittle, and Kreya turned them carefully. She’d pored over them so much that she had most of it memorized, but this was too important to trust to that. A mistake would be unforgivable, and she wasn’t taking any chances when it came to Jentt, especially when she had so small a bit of bone to work with.
She read the words silently, mouthing each syllable. It was more complex than anything she’d learned through the Bone Workers Guild—“A perversion of our purpose,” the master teachers there would have said.
“They’re not wrong,” Kreya told the skeleton bird, who was pecking at the carpet again, pulling stray threads as if prompted by a memory of worms. She let it continue, her focus back on the book. The techniques in it were not approved by any guild.
In fact, the guild didn’t know they existed.
As far as the guild was concerned, there were only three types of bone workers: bone readers, who used animal bones to reveal the future, understand the present, and glimpse the past; bone wizards, who created talismans out of animal bones that imbued their users with strength, speed, stealth, and other attributes; and bone makers, like Kreya, who used animal bones to animate the inanimate. Ships, weaving machines, cable cars . . . all the advances of the past few centuries had been fueled by bone makers. She could have had her pick of commissions after the war. Instead, she’d turned them all down, shut herself away in this tower, and devoted herself to studying these books.
Now she mouthed the words she’d need and then carefully closed the book, placed it back in the metal box, and returned it to its hiding place at the back of the bookshelf. While all knowledge could be dangerous in the wrong hands, Kreya considered it simple practicality to be extra careful with books written by genocidal maniacs. Especially books you’d sworn to destroy. It was just common sense.
“Want to watch?” she asked the bird construct.
It whirred its gears, confused by the question.
“Come on.”
It followed her down the stairs and into the bedroom where Jentt lay. Startled, three rag doll constructs climbed the curtains and scrambled onto the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling. They peered down with button eyes.
“Such bravery,” Kreya said. “What would you have done if I were an intruder?”
The three dolls stared down at her, chittering to one another in a language that, near as Kreya could determine, wasn’t a language at all. They were simply imitating sounds they heard, mashed in their cloth mouths.
“Never mind. Stay there, if you like.” She pulled a tray next to the bed and set the jewelry box with the bone on it, beside her favorite knife.
Only then did she let her eyes fall on her husband.
He was clothed in linen sheets from head to toe. Gently, she unpinned them and pushed them back from his arms, his torso, his legs, and his face. It had been three months since she’d last woken him, and it showed. His cheeks were sunken, his skin gray, and his chest had collapsed so every rib was visible. She’d tucked sachets of lavender beneath the mattress to mask the stench, and she’d instructed her rag doll constructs to bathe him daily to keep him free of maggots and other indignities of death, but that only did so much.
“You look terrible,” she told him. “Never wear gray.”
She reached for the knife and realized her hand was trembling. Glaring at it, she held her wrist steady until it stopped. She’d overused her muscles climbing that rock face, even with the talisman helping her.
I really should wait, she thought.
But looking at her husband’s gray-toned face, she knew she wouldn’t.
Closing her hand over the knife’s handle, she lifted it up and, in one swift movement, sliced her palm. She winced at the sting but didn’t take her eyes off her husband’s face. Squeezing her hand, she made blood well into her fist, then she laid down the knife and opened the jewelry box with her uncut hand. She smeared her blood onto the bit of bone.