Standing, Kreya looked up at the moon, three-quarters full and heavy over the mountains, and the stars, splattered across the sky. She reached into her pocket and drew out the dead girl’s finger. It was only a sliver. Even less bone than she’d hoped.
At best, it would give them a day.
Ash flaked away and was caught by the wind and carried off the side of the mountain. Far below, the deadly valley that ranthroughout Vos between the mountains was invisible, shrouded in shadowy mist. It would swallow the ash, eventually. Her hand closed around the tiny bit of charred flesh and bone.
All this—the wasted magic, the painful chase, the villagers’ rage, the ruined cave entrance. All of it for a single day.
I’ll take a day,she thought.
Chapter Two
Kreya cleaned the sliver of bone. She laid it in a box that had been made for jewels, closed the lid, and locked it. She then sank into a chair with a half sigh, half moan.
As if concerned about her, the bird skeleton hopped around her feet.
Peeling off her shirt, she twisted to view her back in the cloudy mirror on the table beside her. During the night, while she’d slept fitfully and uncomfortably, a vicious flower of purple had blossomed between her shoulder blades where the rock had hit. “Jentt will have questions about that,” she muttered.
She eased her shirt back on, after checking to be sure the rock hadn’t broken skin.Or my ribs. Or lungs.Lifting her foot, she examined her ankle next. Another developing bruise, plus it had been skinned. Dots of blood had dried along the scrape. On the plus side, she felt whole, if achy. Her muscles would probably throb for days.
If Jentt saw her like this...
He’s seen me worse.Of course, that had been during a war, and he hadn’t exactly been sanguine whenever she’d been injured then.
She should wait until the bruises faded and her musclesfelt less like quivery goo. But it had been months since she’d spoken with her husband and had him answer, months since she’d been able to look into his eyes, months since she’d seen his smile. She didn’t want to wait any longer.
“And they say the young are impatient,” Kreya said to the bird construct.
Patience, she decided, is for people unaware of their own mortality.
She permitted herself a few more minutes of rest before propelling herself out of the chair. Shuffling across the room, she pulled several books from the shelf and piled them on her makeshift bed.
After a few years of failing to sleep near Jentt’s body, she’d taken to sleeping in the library and had built a bed out of quilts and blankets that looked more like a nest than a proper piece of furniture. It was nestled in the corner of two bookshelves. In another corner was the stove where she prepared the bulk of her meals. Despite the size of the tower, this one room was where she spent most of her time. It was comforting to be surrounded by so many books, as if the past experience of all the authors could protect her from the unknown future. She loved the smell of the room, with that distinctive old paper and old binding-glue scent, mixed with dust. She’d spent years collecting these volumes. Many of them were one-of-a-kind. A few shouldn’t even have existed.
Kreya reached to the back of the shelf, unlatched the hidden door, and pulled out a black metal box. Running her fingers over the lid, she couldn’t suppress a shudder. When she’d stolen these books, she’d planned to destroy them. Their author had poured everything he knew into his journals—knowledge he’d used to inflict horrors. No one knew she hadn’t burned them, though.Certainly no one knew she’d read them. Studied them. Found a way to use them.
Knowledge itself isn’t evil. It’s how you use it.And she had a very good use for it. Opening the box, she lifted out the top book.
Given the atrocities committed by the author, the book should have been bound in human skin, for the sake of the appropriate level of melodrama. But it was ordinary cloth, as threadbare as the carpet, with scorch marks on the spine. The pages were stained and brittle, and Kreya turned them carefully. She’d pored over them so much that she had most of it memorized, but this was too important to trust to that. A mistake would be unforgivable, and she wasn’t taking any chances when it came to Jentt, especially when she had so small a bit of bone to work with.
She read the words silently, mouthing each syllable. It was more complex than anything she’d learned through the Bone Workers Guild—“A perversion of our purpose,” the master teachers there would have said.
“They’re not wrong,” Kreya told the skeleton bird, who was pecking at the carpet again, pulling stray threads as if prompted by a memory of worms. She let it continue, her focus back on the book. The techniques in it were not approved by any guild.
In fact, the guild didn’t know they existed.
As far as the guild was concerned, there were only three types of bone workers: bone readers, who used animal bones to reveal the future, understand the present, and glimpse the past; bone wizards, who created talismans out of animal bones that imbued their users with strength, speed, stealth, and other attributes; and bone makers, like Kreya, who used animal bonesto animate the inanimate. Ships, weaving machines, cable cars . . . all the advances of the past few centuries had been fueled by bone makers. She could have had her pick of commissions after the war. Instead, she’d turned them all down, shut herself away in this tower, and devoted herself to studying these books.
Now she mouthed the words she’d need and then carefully closed the book, placed it back in the metal box, and returned it to its hiding place at the back of the bookshelf. While all knowledge could be dangerous in the wrong hands, Kreya considered it simple practicality to be extra careful with books written by genocidal maniacs. Especially books you’d sworn to destroy. It was just common sense.
“Want to watch?” she asked the bird construct.
It whirred its gears, confused by the question.
“Come on.”
It followed her down the stairs and into the bedroom where Jentt lay. Startled, three rag doll constructs climbed the curtains and scrambled onto the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling. They peered down with button eyes.
“Such bravery,” Kreya said. “What would you have done if I were an intruder?”
