I opened my eyes, and I was back in the catacombs. Patrick was still slumped against the wall, clearly too injured to move easily, Baldbeak on his shoulder. It was just Mother and me.
She looked quite as she used to, in some ways—her tall, straight form, slightly rounded at the shoulders from long nights of study. Her hair was long and loose where before it had always been scraped back, but her large, capable hands were the same, as was her manner of glaring at the world as if it had personally offended her.
“You tried to …” I say.
“Oh, don’t make afuss, Netta,” she said, sounding sohumanfor a second, so like herself.
“You were going tofeedme to it,” I said blankly. “That’s whyyou were learning all those terrible things about making books out of human skin, out of blood …”
She made a face. “Crude,” she said. “But informative. There were things I needed to learn. And the experience was to be more metaphysical than that. I was hardly going toskinyou.”
I took a step forward.
“Netta,” said Patrick warningly, but I ignored him.
“You think that’s better?” I asked. In that moment, I was truly not afraid of her—I was furious.
“You used me, from the day I was born! You always planned to … todissolveme into your book! And you sold it to the Temple! You would have soldme.”
“It had to be the Temple mages, and it had to be the catacombs,” she said. “I stipulated that I would travel with the book as a condition of the sale. All I had to do was wait for them to cast the spell, and then step in to control the bone magic myself. I knew it would obey because of what I had given it—what I had sacrificed.”
So Mother had planned to betray the Pontiff after all, once she had used his resources for her ends.
“All those years,” she said, and her voice sounded almost the same—low and perfectly modulated, with a rasp of irritation behind each word. “All that time laboring up there to get every word, every syllable correct, every page precisely measured and cut, every step of the enchantment prepared withabsolute precision.” Her voice rose on the last words.
Her skull seemed to glow through her skin; her eyes seemed lit from behind, looking like stained glass. “And you botched it.”
I felt an involuntary shiver of shame, as I always did when I displeased Mother by being too sloppy, too soft, or not clever enough. Then I shook it off.
“I am so sorry,” I said, “that I disappointed you. How selfish of me to resist being sacrificed.”
“It was incredibly vexing,” she said. I wondered if Motherhad always been unable to spot sarcasm when it came to her work, or whether something in the transformation process had bled the ability out of her. “Twenty years of planning almost completely wasted. I should have known you would find a way to ruin it. You were always sountidyabout things, Netta.”
As if I had spilled her pot of ink again.
“I am your daughter,” I said.
“In a sense,” she agreed.
“What do you mean,in a sense? Did you not give birth to me?”
“I did, and a most unpleasant experience it was.”
“Then I am your child, Mother! And you were going to offer me as some kind of … of sacrifice to your spellbook!”
She clicked her tongue in disapproval. It made an odd sound, as if her mouth hadn’t quite aligned all its inner parts correctly when it reconstructed itself. “But Netta, that’s what you werefor. You were born from bone magic—created from and for it. I found a spell in my father’s library—well, I thought it was the ramblings of a madman, at first, but it worked. I invited bone magic in, and it came.”
She sounded almost dreamy now. “It was so lonely. It had been rejected—been alone—for so long. Others had tried to resurrect it, but I was the first to offer it a place to grow anew. A child.”
I felt frozen. I could not move. All I could do was watch her mouth move as she told me this terrible story with suchpride, such satisfaction in herself. As she told me that I was barely her child, was barely a person. I was an animal tended and fattened for slaughter.
“It was so grateful,” she said. “It granted me so much knowledge. Oh, I had to work hard, of course, but I felt its willingness. You were rather a disappointment, to be frank. I expected a child of magic to be, well, adept at magic. You were adept at nothing.”
“I am not adept at nothing anymore,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Any power you have now comes from being born of bone magic and of me. It has lain dormant in you for a while and now is stirring, yes … But you will never really be able to wield it as a mage, Netta. It is eager to be free, that is all. I am the one who built the vessel to house it.Youwere always intended to be its vessel.”
“I cooked and cleaned for you, foryears.” My voice cracked. “I held the light for you while you worked. I made your quills, your ink … I made everything you needed to create the thing you wanted to use to destroy me.”
