Soon enough my lips parted, allowing short puffs of breath to flow, all to keep from breathing in the hint of copper and sweat on the king’s skin.
More stitches, more threads, more gold and heat stitched Kael’s finger bone beneath the surface of the king’s neck, shifting it like a bulge of creeping maggots to the hinge of Damir’s jaw.
Melding was curious, subtly powerful, and I could not look away.
It felt as though a dormant edge of my heart awakened with a new thrum and pulse. Kael told me when he used his bone craft to manipulate a fishing hook or blade or to heal a cracked shin of a child, his body heated and his blood swelled in his veins with a new sort of strength.
Before the horrors of Jarl Jakobson’s great hall, I’d never felt the burn of being anything but ordinary. Too bony, too freckled, too dull. In this moment, my craft drew out a side of me I did not know.
Someone braver, bolder, even stronger.
Absorbed in the motion of threading the sliver into Damir’s neck, I never took note how the walls darkened, like a shade pulled over the lancet windows, blotting out the sun. Flames in the inglenook died, filling the hall with the gust of a winter wind.
The eerie glow from bodies of the consorts, the prince, and the queen lined the tattered and chipped table.
My hands stilled and I pulled back. The king’s features burned like a noon sun, his flesh more like a flame than anything. I could not make out his fine tunic or the beads in his beard. All around, much the same as in Skalfirth, bones burned through bodies of those in the palace hall as though their very souls were aflame.
Black dripped off the walls, from the corners and edges of the tables, like moldy refuse.
A mirrored reflection of the world I knew, but rotted and dreary.
Smoke and salt expanded in my lungs with every breath.
I shuddered in the chill, too unnerved to look over my shoulder at the shuffle of steps across damp stones. I clenched my eyesfor one breath, two, then shook out my hands and tried to continue stitching the golden thread into Damir.
The small shard gleamed like a polished gold coin, half inside Damir’s aura, but a different shade. In truth, I could make out endless shades of gold on the king. All different shapes and sizes.
“Come to take more souls, Melder?”
Ten paces away, the harsh glow of the phantom’s eyes held mine. His cloak billowed like mists of the night around broad shoulders. This time he was not towering over me; he’d perched atop a blackened stone that dripped in rotted moss and vines.
The golden rope keeping the creature tethered around his waist seemed weaker, more frayed, almost ready to split.
Tricks of the mind, that’s all this was.
“I’m not here to disturb anything.” I turned back to the king’s bones. The threads had faded and what was left was a molten glow around the edges of the sliver, melted down into Damir.
The phantom drifted to my side, the brilliant rope shifted with him, going slack when he stopped at my shoulder.
“What is it that has brought you here?” He tilted his cowled head.
“The command of the king.”
The phantom merely hummed, gaze sliding across my throat, almost as though he were hungry to cut it out. My eyes clenched when he leaned close enough the cool mist of his darkness brushed along my cheeks.
“Why are you seen here?” He spoke like he was asking the question to himself more than to me.
“This is simply in my mind.”
A heavy, strained sort of laugh grumbled from the spectral. “You don’t really believe that. Learn this now, Melder—not everything is as it seems. Those who seem trustworthy might beenemies. Those who seem enemies, well, they might be the fiercest allies.”
“What are you?”
Another hum. The phantom billowed, almost iridescent, like he was fading. “Take a soul, Melder, and I will take one in its place.”
The memory of the screaming figure when I melded Kael’s body would not leave me. A soul for a soul.
The world spun and the same suffocating fog began to fill my head, until I was flung back.
