We didn’t talk about the nightmare, or anything that came after it, and that was fine with me. Everything that needed to be said was clear in Kit’s eyes every time he smiled at me.
After we ate, Kit settled our tab and sent me to the room to fetch our belongings. I brought our packs down while he pulled the cart around outside. After loading the bags alongside the bales of hay he’d purchased from the innkeeper, I climbed in after them, but Kit called to me from the driver’s seat.
“There’s room up here for two, you know.” He patted the wide wooden bench beside him and flashed a grin. “Unless you’re going to sleep another day away.”
With my sketchbook and pencil in hand, I climbed over the backboard and sidled up to him. We’d barely made it out of town before Kit draped his arm across my shoulders and pulled me close. I sighed, content, and laid my head against him. We spent the next several hours talking about my life on the farm without a single mention of Merrick. But I had plenty of stories about Father, Mother, and Sayla, a few of which had Kit and I laughing until another coughing fit forced me into quiet.
I enjoyed riding beside Kit but kept dozing off and waking with his hand on my forehead, checking my temperature, or pulling me upright. So, when we stopped for lunch, I moved to the bed of the cart and curled up in the hay between the small wooden crates.
It was dusk when I woke again, and my chest felt so constricted that every breath creaked in and out. Kit crouched overhead, brushing hair off my face and watching me with unmasked concern.
Sitting up brought a wave of dizziness that almost knocked me back flat. I took hold of the side of the cart and steadied myself, then blinked blearily at the scene around us. Barren trees comprised dense woods on three sides, their branches stretching across a painted sky. Peering past the horse stopped out in front, tall yellow grass nearly obscured rows of scattered headstones. The markers were weather worn, cracked, and crumbling.
I’d seen the graveyard in Eastcliff as a child when we buried my grandmother. She was one of the last I knew of to be interred before the threat of the Bone Men brought an end to old traditions. Thinking about it now, I wasn’t sure what happened to her. Did my father go back to rescue her bones and burn them? Or had her final resting place been disturbed by ne’er do wellslike us?
When I finally looked at Kit, I found his eyes ringed with shadows and his face pale.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“That’s something I should be asking you.”
“I’m pretty sure you have, and that I’ve answered,” I replied. “It sounds familiar.”
He brushed his hand across my cheek, and I tipped my head to rest in his palm.
“Tell me again,” he said.
I smiled. “I’m all right. You worry too much.”
When Kit pulled away, I craned my neck around to search the overgrown graveyard again. I’d been avoiding this reality, sleeping and daydreaming my way to this point, unwilling to acknowledge what this next task would require.
Grave robbing changed my life. I still wasn’t sure my family wasn’t cursed. Sayla and I schemed, and I sought out Kit, then joined the Bone Men for the sake of preventing such crimes. I never wanted to take part in them.
“How do we know which ones still have people inside?” I wondered aloud.
Kit drew to his full height, taking me by the hand and elbow and heaving me up too. “It’s a bit of guesswork,” he said. “But as far as I know, I’m the only person who knows about this place, and I marked my trail.”
I followed him to the end of the wagon, where he hopped off onto the ground and then offered me a hand down.
Once my feet hit the packed dirt beside Kit, I looked over at him. “You’ve taken bodies before?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t make it past the first Oath.”
I talked so much about myself and my life that I imagined Kit knew practically everything about me. But when itcame to himself, Kit offered little, and it never felt right to ask. I’d learned more from his father’s records than I had from Kit himself. The subject of his past always brought sobriety and guilt, neither of which I wanted for him.
Kit stepped around me to reach into the cart. Along with the hay and crates of supplies, we had a pair of shovels, and he dragged one of them out.
“My father demanded it.” His mouth pinched in a frown. “He thought it would bring me closer to Eeus and better prepare me for my initiation. I was too soft as far as he was concerned, so he figured digging up bodies would make me tougher. I helped him when I was young, too.”
“He sounds like Merrick,” I muttered.
I’d done it again, broached the forbidden topic. I sighed and scrubbed a hand through my hair. “I’m really not good at not talking about him, am I?”
Kit shook his head.
The silence grew as I considered what to say next. I was wrong to think Kit was anything like my brother, and it must have hurt him to hear it. I might as well have said he was like his father, whom he understandably despised.
“I’m sorry he tried to change you,” I said at last.
Kit sank the shovel’s curved tip in the ground and leaned against it, looking down at the dirt as he answered, “Hedidchange me.”
