“You can’t keep doing this,” Jentt said, “especially without working talismans.”
“I’ll get more talismans.”
“How? You haven’t taken a commission in . . . Years? It must be years. Have you even been asked? Does anyone know you’re here, or do they all assume you’ve joined me in the great silence?”
Kreya didn’t answer that. Instead, she leaned her head against his shoulder. The sun was staining the sky a burnt amber, and the rocks were glowing rose. “I’ll find a way.”
“You’ll get yourself killed.”
“Not if I’m careful.”
“You need someone to watch your back. When I’m dead, do you speak to anyone? Anyone at all? Because I feel a hermit vibe from this tower that wasn’t there a decade ago.”
“I haven’t hosted a dinner party in a while, if that’s what you’re asking. Last time I invited all the woodland creatures, but the squirrels trashed the library. I won’t even describe what the raccoons did.” She kept her voice light but couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It was going to happen any time now. She’d seen the weakness in him as they’d climbed the last set of stairs. His arm was limp around her.
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Half the guests left in a huff because I served venison.”
“You need to let me go.” He kissed her silver hair, and she felt his breath warm on her scalp. “Leave this place. Be around living people again.”
“You’re living.”
“You know this can’t last forever.”
She knew far better than he did. But she wasn’t going to say that out loud. “All I need are enough bones, and it can last. Not forever. But enough.” She wondered if it would ever be enough, or if everyone, when they died, felt their life was too short, too fast, too unfair. Turning her head, she studied his profile. He was watching the sun spill onto the mountain ridge.
“So we’re hoping for a natural disaster? Earthquake? Avalanche?” His voice was light, and she knew he was joking. Her Jentt would never want any harm to befall anyone.
“Body recovery would be difficult. How about a plague?”
He nixed that. “Chance of contagion. How about a war?”
“Already did that.” Kreya touched his cheek. “I didn’t like what it cost me.”
“But if we’re noncombatants this time . . .” His voice failed him as the joke ceased being funny to either of them. He swallowed. She felt his breath shudder against her.
Gently, she said, “It’s time to go downstairs.”
“I’d hoped—” He stopped. Tried again. “To see. The sun. Set.”
“When you wake again, we’ll watch sunset after sunset until you’re sick of them.” She helped him to his feet. We waited too long, she thought. They stumbled toward the stairs. He fell against the doorway.
“Open windows. Please. I want. To see it. Tonight. In case, last time.”
Haltingly, they stumble-walked down the stairs. She guided him into the bedroom. His jaw opened and closed as if he wanted to say more, but speech had left him. With her assistance, he lay down on the bed, on top of the linen sheets. She kissed his forehead, his nose, his lips.
She then crossed to the window and opened it.
A drop of sun remained. Blood red on the ridgeline. Above, the sky was a fierce orange, and the rocks gleamed like bronze. “See? We didn’t miss it.” Kreya turned back to Jentt as she spoke those words.
He lay lifeless on the bed.
Chapter Three
Kreya stood by the window, her back to the bed, while the rag dolls wrapped her husband in the linen sheets. The night breeze smelled sweet. Closing her eyes, she breathed it in and tried not to choke on the loneliness that burned in her throat. Her hands curled into fists.
Behind her, the dolls murmured to one another, and Kreya wanted to scream with every cell in her body. But she didn’t. She merely stood, eyes shut, facing the window, as her constructs finished covering his body.
Every time he died again it was harder to take. This can’t go on, she thought. Not emotionally. And not practically, since she was out of talismans. She couldn’t steal more bones without them.
Jentt had joked, but he was right: they needed a natural disaster. Nothing else would provide both the quantity of bones she needed and enough chaos to steal them. But it was too terrible to hope for the deaths of many to save the life of one, and as badly as she missed Jentt, she couldn’t wish that fate on anyone.
I don’t want anyone to have to feel like this.
There had been so much loss already. She’d seen it firsthand twenty-five years ago. In the Bone War. Hundreds had died at the hands of Eklor’s grotesque army before Kreya and Jentt’s team began their final attack. We’ve already had a war in my lifetime. I’d never wish for another.
So much death.
So many bones, she thought.
“Don’t think about that,” Kreya warned herself.
It wasn’t a new idea, but it was a bad one. When she’d first started down this path to save Jentt, she’d promised herself to never consider it. She’d bring him back with bits of stolen bone from nearby villages instead—which was exactly what she’d been doing ever since she’d cracked the secret.
But that was before she’d used up all her talismans. And before she’d nearly been caught.
Before those bones were no longer available to her.
She opened her eyes. The stars speckled the sky, and the mountains were full of shadows. In the war, hundreds had died, and their bodies had rotted on the plains beyond the mountains. Due to the severity of Eklor’s infraction, it was ruled illegal to venture onto the plains, even to burn the dead. The guild master supported this, both in words and in action—by funding the construction of a vast wall and assisting in supplying it with armed guards, in perpetuity. Eklor had been one of their own, before “the unfortunate incident” (as the guild phrased it), or before he became a homicidal maniac (as Kreya would have put it), and Kreya suspected the guild had donated a lot of gold in the aftermath to deflect blame and assuage guilt. Also, to keep ordinary people from realizing the depths to which he’d sunk—and the full extent of the horrors that an immoral bone maker with enough skill could commit.
They figured it out anyway, Kreya thought.
Regardless, the law remained: it was punishable by death to cross into the so-called “forbidden zone.”
“A bit of an on-the-nose name,” she said out loud.
The rag dolls crooned as if they’d understood her.
“Do you think Guild Master Lorn drops his voice an octave when he mentions it? ‘My friends, we need to guard’”—Kreya lowered her voice—“‘the forbidden zone!’ ‘Be afeared of’”—low voice again—“‘the forbidden zone!’ He absolutely says ‘afeared.’ And all his sycophants nod along and then send more soldiers to guard the dead. Asshole. Those people deserved for their ashes to rest in their own Cliffs of the Dead. Their families should have gotten proper goodbyes.” It was the guild master’s cowardice that had prevented them from having the peace they deserved.