There was a knock at the door, and Mieka poked her head around. “Can I come in?”
I nodded. She crossed the room and sat on the bed beside me, legs curled up. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, still hugging myself.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
I told her, as best I could. When I had finished, she stared at me.
“So where did it go?” she said. “The bone magic, I mean. Is it gone again? Or sleeping, or …”
“It’s in me. I think,” I said.
“Inyou?” She stared at me as if expecting my skeleton to slip free from my skin and start dancing a jig.
“I offered it … a sort of partnership.”
“Is that … something you can do? With magic?”
“Apparently so.”
“So is it … I mean, can it talk? Bargain?”
“No, not exactly. Perhaps a little, in the way Baldbeak can with his mind-pictures. But it desperately wants to live. I offered it another way. A less destructive way.” My Hair curled about me as I crossed my arms over my chest, still feeling the bright surge of it inside. “I don’t know if I can control it at all, or even live with it. I’m hoping … that I will find out how. Mother made me from it,withit, after all. It has always been part of me. Now it’s just … more.”
“Made you from it?”
“Yes. I never had a father, it turns out. She made me with a spell. She carried me in her womb, birthed me the usual way—as far as I know—but I was never really aperson. Not like other people.”
“Netta,” Mieka said gently. “Youarea person.”
“My whole life,” I said slowly, “I thought I was a disappointment to her. That she loved medespite, notbecause of. That she wanted a different sort of daughter. But she didn’t want a daughter at all. I was … raw material. Like her paper and ink. She was just waiting to use me.”
Mieka took my hand. “But you are more than that.”
“Am I? I am only half a human, after all.”
Mieka shrugged. “And what makes a human? I never knew my mother. Perhaps she was a magical entity, too. Or a murderer. Or a sentient vase of flowers. It doesn’t matter. I am who I am. And so are you.”
I nodded, looking down. “I hope so. And I hope I can … stay me. I don’t know if I can. I am going to try.”
She was still holding my hand. “You can stay with me and Zlata and the rest of us. Until you decide what you want to do.”
“Thank you.”
“No criminal activity required. Unless you want some. Would you like some criminal activity?”
I smiled a little. “I appreciate that. But I think I’m going to go back to the Tower.”
“To theTower? Where you lived with your mother? But why?”
I shrugged. “I want to see it again, now that I know … everything. And all of Mother’s work is there—all her research on bone magic. Two decades’ worth of it. If I am to understand exactly what I’ve got myself into, I need to start studying.”
“But …” She paused, as if not sure how to proceed delicately.
“I can’t read, I know. I have some ideas about how to get around that.”
“All right. I suppose I understand. But we’re always there, if you need us.”
