After an hour of fruitless pacing, his feet took him to Stran’s door. He didn’t know what his old friend could do, but he knew he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. It was too tempting to try to drown them. Safer to be with another. He knocked.
Stran’s wife, Amurra, opened the door. “Marso? Is everything okay?”
Yes. No.It hadn’t been okay in a very long time, and it wasn’t okay now, but he was trying.Look at me, trying.“Is Stran here?”
“He went out again to search for any traces of Eklor’s army.” She widened the door. “Do you want to come in?” He saw she’d been having tea. A half-eaten sandwich lay on a plate.
“I don’t want to bother you.”
She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “No bother. I’d like the company.”
He came in and stood awkwardly in and her Stran’s room. It was a converted music room, with instruments on the walls and several chairs for an audience—the chairs had been stacked in one corner to make room for Stran and Amurra to sleep and live while they were in Cerre.
Sitting at a tiny table, Amurra poured tea into a second cup. “You look like you need to talk. Come. Sit. I feel like I haven’t gotten a chance to get to know you yet.”
“I feel the same way about myself right now.”
She nodded sympathetically. As she did, he eyed the chair and the tea and knew, with more certainty than he’d known anything in weeks, that he didnotwant to talk. “I want to read the bones again. But... I don’t want to, too.”
She nodded again, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. “I have to confess that I’ve never been clear on what it means to ‘read the bones.’ You toss them down and mist appears? Poof? And images within it? How does that work?”
“It... uh, has to do with your connection to the bones. You, well, activate them. Like how you activate a talisman. But you do it with a question, not a command.”
Amurra clasped her hands together. “Can you teach me?”
“I . . .” He’d never taught anyone. “It requires innate power, to summon the mist. Unlike bone wizardry or bone making, which are more skills. And art. They’re art too.”
“Pretend I have it, the innate magic. Walk me through what I’d do to read bones.” Leaving her tea, she moved to sit cross-legged on the floor beside a marble and gold hearth. “You don’t have to read them yourself. Just demonstrate for me what you would do if you were to read them.”
Marso hesitated.
“Don’t read. Just teach.”
He... he could do that.
Marso dropped to the floor across from her. The carpet was plush and soft. He wasn’t sure why Amurra would want to learn if she didn’t have power, but it was nice to have something to think about that wasn’t dire and serious. He drew a handful of chicken bones from one of his pockets. “First, you need to introduce yourself to the bones.”
He held them out, but she folded her hands. “Show me?”
Feeling a bit silly, he lifted the bones to his lips so they’d feel his breath. “I am Marso of Vos. I am... broken inside. And...” He tried to think of what else to tell the bones, to imagine he’d never held them before. “I like chocolate. And the sound of wind in the pine trees. I once danced naked in a waterfall.”
“Only once?” Amurra teased.
It was commonly thought to be lucky to dance naked in a waterfall. “Did you do it more?”
“I have three children,” she said. “I danced for luck before every birth. What else do you need to tell the bones?”
“The more they know, the better they’ll respond to you. But these bones already know me.” He tried to hold them out to her again.
Gently, she curled her hands around his and pushed the bones back toward him. “Tell them something new about you. Something from today. Or this week.”
He hesitated, but she was smiling brightly and innocently at him. So he told the bones what Zera’s palace looked like, what the city of Cerre smelled like. He told them how he’d felt in the crowd outside the grand master’s palace and how he’d felt seeing Eklor again. He told them about what Kreya had said, only an hour ago, and how he didn’t need to be a bone reader anymore but that was scary because he didn’t know any other way to be. He forgot that Amurra was there and just talked.
When he quieted, she said, “Now what?”
Startled, he flinched.
“If you were a new bone reader, what would be the next thing you’d do?”
