“I beg your pardon?” said the Book Man.
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
He leaned back in his chair, finally taking a sip of his tea. He made a face. “Quite cold. Never mind.” He set it down on the little table beside him. “I am glad you told me all of this,” he said. “I will be better able to help you.”
“I don’t understand any of it,” I said. “I don’t know what the Temple wanted with Mother’s spellbook, or why they have been after me.”
“Are you quite sure it was the Temple?”
“He mentioned that he was a Temple guard, and that the others were too—the ones that attacked us in the Tower. I wishI could have asked him more.” I swallowed hard. “Now that I’ve told you about her … Did you know my mother? I saw your letters to her, the receipts …”
“I know the letters you speak of,” he said, “but I’m afraid I do not know anything about the specific nature of your mother’s work. Many people order books and materials from me, for all sorts of obscure purposes and research. Your mother was not a … forthcoming correspondent and said nothing in her letters other than what she needed from me. It appeared to me that she made an attempt to disguise her handwriting, and she did not sign her letters. I did not even know her name.”
He left a pause there, as if inviting me to share it, but I did not. I had already trusted him with so much, but I still felt a need to protect Mother, just in case.
“I just want to find her,” I said in despair. “I still don’t know who took her, or why—nor how they found me here. Why couldn’t they just have taken the book and left us in peace?”
He steepled his fingers. “Everything you have told me, my dear, tells me that this must be much larger than you or I suspect. There has been something big stirring in the kingdom lately—I have felt it. I even wondered if the Plague was coming back. Listening to you now, and your story of the manner in which you, er,overpoweredthat young man, I have a suspicion that bone magic might be awakening in Virelith once more.”
“Bone magic?Wait, are you saying … are you saying it’sin mesomehow?” I hugged myself tightly, as if to keep it from bursting out willy-nilly.
“Perhaps. I don’t know how else to explain what happened when you, er, defended yourself against the young man. But it might not be that the magic is inherently tied to you—there has been some talk of it stirring across Virelith. Perhaps this is just one of its many manifestations—channeling itself through your suppressed abilities somehow, as you are unable to use them in the regular way.”
“Stirring?” I shivered. “But … we can’t let that happen. The Temple would never let that happen.”
“Believe it or not, there are some who have been actively trying to resurrect it for a long time.”
“How do you know this?” I whispered.
He took off his spectacles and gave them an unnecessary polish on his silk cravat. “Because I used to be one of them, my dear.”
“One of them?”
He exhaled a long, shaky breath. “I am not proud of it,” he said. “I was quite a different man, then. Discontented. Ambitious.”
“But bone magic …” I looked down at the book I was repairing. “The Plague. Almost half the kingdom died. Why would anyone …?”
I thought of the tapestry—the stitched images of diseased dead, risen and walking, touching the living with their dripping fingers, as melted and deformed as Temple candles long burned. Their lipless mouths, grinning in skinless faces. My stomach curdled. Was that magic somehow moving through me now? Was that my future—becoming one of those near-monstrous creatures, or creating them? I wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“Yes, that is the widely accepted story,” he said. “But not everyone believes it, you see.”
“But how else …?”
“There is a theory,” he said carefully, holding his hands before him as if carrying something very fragile, “that bone magic was not the culprit. Not exactly.”
“Then what was? What else could possibly …?” I shook my head. The Plague had shaped everything we were. Even I, living in isolation in the Tower, had known how it had sliced the kingdom’s population in half—redefined our world.
“Some think—not all, mind—that the Plague was a resultof the warping of magic from its true purpose. That bone magic was blamed because of the …macabrenature of its practice. It was an easy scapegoat. The Temple executed all the bone mages it could find, and the rest went underground. Eventually the secret of bone magic was lost. Or so it is believed.
“In fact,” he added, “the original final panel of the great tapestry of Quell reflected this theory, but one of the Pontiffs ordered it to be unpicked and restitched to reflect the Temple’s victory, as he saw it.”
So that explained the odd patterning and needle points I had seen.
“But even if that is true, why would someone want to bring bone magic back?” I asked.
“Some believe that all forms of magic, including both affinities and the incarnists’ powers, need to be free—to be practiced freely and joyfully, that is, without restraint or control. Without books and words. Without bodily sacrifice.”
“That’s not possible.”
