“Or were you thinking more of an anonymous note?” Zeracontinued. “Because those are always well received.” She shook her head. “No, we should just forget about what we saw.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m the only one being serious. They’re doing no harm.” Zera held up one hand while clinging to the crawler with the other. “Hear me out: They’re beyond the wall and obviously haven’t even come close enough for the guards to notice them. They’re not going near any populated area. All they’re doing is roaming an area inhabited purely by the dead. Let them roam. Eventually, in a year or a decade or whenever, their power will fade, and that will be it. No one will even know they outlived their maker.”
The idea of leaving those monstrosities free... “They’re designed to kill. They should be destroyed. An innocent person could—”
“Literally no one innocent will ever be in the forbidden zone. Honestly, those atrocities are a better deterrent than the guards on the wall. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Grand Master Lorn knew about them and left them alone to take care of trespassers.”
Kreya opened her mouth and shut it. Knowing Lorn, it wasn’t impossible. He could have decided it was an effective deterrent. “So we tell no one?”
“Well, you can tell Jentt when we get there.” Patting the pack of human bones, Zera beamed at her with a sparkling smile, and then she waved airily behind them. “You know, assuming we outrun whatever herd of river lizards wants us for breakfast.”
Shooting her a look, Kreya allowed herself to smile. She gestured at the newly installed lizard bone, now carved with steadiness symbols. “How about we just outclimb them?”
“Ooh, you finished! Will it work?”
Valid question. This wasn’t the traditional use of the animal, but Kreya had a few tricks up her sleeve for adapting bones. She hadn’t just been pining over Jentt for the past twenty-five years. “Do you trust me?”
“I know you want me to say ‘with my life,’ but in the interest of complete honesty, I’m going to have to go with ‘sometimes.’”
Leaning over, Kreya activated it.
The crawler pivoted sharply and made its way toward the cliff that hemmed in the valley. They tilted backward as it began to climb.
“Yikes, that’s unsettling,” Zera said. It jerked as it slipped, then caught itself. “Or terrifying. Your choice.” She braced herself, clinging to the log bench.
“Hold on,” Kreya said.
“Really? That’s the extent of your advice?”
“Hold on tightly.” But she passed Zera a rope before tying herself to the crawler, a makeshift seat belt. Muttering to herself, Zera looped the rope around a bar and knotted it around her waist. The crawler continued to climb steadily upward.
As they left the valley behind, Kreya heard the river lizards below them howl their dismay. She didn’t look back. “It works.”
“I love you.”
“You know my heart belongs to a dead man.” But Kreya couldn’t stop smiling. Soon, she’d be with Jentt again, and they’d have another chance at the future they were supposed to have. And it was thanks to Zera and her talismans and a friendship regained.
“That is both sweet and deeply disturbing,” Zera said.
Kreya felt as giddy as a ten-year-old who knew she was about to be given the present she’d desperatelywanted—in her case, at age ten, that dream gift had been a collection of marmot bones. Unusual, yes, but it was what any budding bone worker would have wanted. And the gift had meant even more than that: when her aunts gave her that skeleton, she knew they were saying they approved of her dream.
Becoming a bone worker was one of the only choices available for a smart kid from a mining village. Her mother had been adamant that Kreya wouldn’t waste her life within the heart of the mountains, and when her mother was killed in a cave-in, Kreya swore she wouldn’t disappoint her. So she’d asked for a marmot skeleton, and her aunts had delivered. Aunt Lirra had trapped the marmot, prepared the bones, and gifted them to Kreya on her birthday, wrapped in leaves Aunt Neen had painted with pictures of woodland creatures. Later, they’d pooled every bit of gold they had to buy her an apprenticeship in the Bone Workers Guild. But it was that first moment—that gift—that she was most grateful for.
This felt like that day.
It even involves a skeleton,she thought.
She was grinning as she and Zera rode the crawler out of the pine forest into the clearing of her tower. And then she felt as if her face, her blood, her every thought had frozen inside her as she looked at her ruined home.
Charred and blackened, the broken door lay strewn in pieces on the moss. The window shutters had been burned away, and the windows were shrouded in shadows. The roof was gone, also burned.
“Fuck,” Zera whispered.
“Jentt!” Kreya flung herself off the crawler and half-ran, half-stumbled toward the tower. All she saw was the window of the bedroom, dark above her.
“Kreya, come back! Whoever did this could still be here!”
