It was a guess, but it felt right.
Marso stared at her, and his eyes looked so much like they belonged to a lost child. “Every time I tried, I saw the same thing. It haunts me, even after the mist fades. My power is broken.”
Jentt said, “Your power can’t break.”
“Iam broken,” Marso said. “I shattered like glass. Like pottery. Smashed. Crashed. Shards of me, scattered on the ground. That’s what he said, when I tried to tell. My mind lies. So I tried to silence it.” He was pleading with Kreya to understand.
Bones help me, I do understand,she thought. She’d felt shattered too. For so long. She hoped with Jentt back, she’d begin to heal.
Looming above her, Stran asked in his gentle voice, “Who said you were broken?”
“Guild Master Lorn. I thought it was a warning. He said it was false. He said I was broken. Said that by creating a false reading, I’d broken my mind. Or by breaking my mind, I’d allowed lies to cloud the mist. Can’t tell which. Doesn’t matter which. He was right. All I saw every time I read—no matter what question I asked, no matter what I tried... Useless. Broken. Damaged.” His eyes flickered to Jentt and Stran as if he needed them to understand too.
Reaching over Kreya, Stran laid a hand on Marso’s shoulder. “You aren’t, my friend.”
Kreya saw despair leaching into Marso’s eyes—he knew hewas in pain, and Stran’s denial of that hurt. She tilted his head so he was looking at her again. “Of course you are. You’re damaged. We all are.”
Stran objected. “Not all.”
Kreya didn’t buy it. Everyone had wounds. But even though she meant the words for Stran, too, she spoke directly to Marso. “Some of us are better at hiding it than others, but we are all broken. You can’t live without breaking a few times. But that doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing. It just means you’ve lived in the world.” She’d had her moments of despair, when Jentt first died, when she read Eklor’s journals and realized what the spell entailed, when she tried it for the first time and failed. She’d shattered and glued herself back together more times than she could count. “What matters is you keep living in it, despite your broken bits—or even because of them.”
Marso was listening.
“You saw what you didn’t want to see. What no one wanted you to see. But I’m here with you—we’re all here with you—and we’ll look at the unseeable together. You won’t be alone. But we need to do this.”
He began to shake. “You want me to read the bones again. You think if I try this time, I won’t see him. He won’t be in my mind. This time I’ll be healed and the mist will be clear, because my friends are with me.”
Stran said, “Exactly!”
“I don’t think that at all,” Kreya said, ignoring Stran. “But Idothink that whatever—whoever—you see, we’ll believe you.”
Now Stran’s meaty hand was on Kreya’s shoulder. “A minute, Kreya?”
She let him draw her out of the living room into the kitchen.Moonlight spilled through the curtained window, creating lacy shadows on the floor. It still smelled like the herbed grouse they’d eaten for dinner, and the embers burned low in the hearth. A curl of smoke led up to the chimney. She felt a pang of guilt for interrupting Stran’s peaceful home life, but where else could they have gone?
She knew Stran had questions, and she saw him marshaling his thoughts, preparing to ask. Saving him the trouble, she said, “Yes, it’s necessary, and yes, it needs to happen now. Do you have any bones he can use?”
Whatever argument he’d been about to make died unspoken—as he’d pointed out, she commanded, he obeyed. Instead he fished the grouse bones out of the bin. Kreya was mildly surprised they were there—she’d expected Zera to have pilfered them after dinner to create more talismans by now, but perhaps they weren’t high-enough-quality bones for her. The effectiveness of talismans depended on the type of bone, as well as the skill of the carver. But they’d do fine for Marso.
She washed them in the sink, carefully cleaning off any vestiges of the carcass, and polished them with a bit of sandpaper from one of her pockets. As she was working, Amurra appeared in the kitchen. “The kids are back to sleep, and your friend seems calmer now,” she reported.
“He’s had a difficult time,” Stran said.
Amurra clucked in sympathy. “He didn’t need to. He could have reached out for help. He’s a Hero of Vos. You can’t tell me that people wouldn’t move mountains to help him.”
It was, Kreya thought, kind of amazing how innocent Stran’s wife was. He’d managed to find someone who seemed untouched by pain or loss. Unfamiliar with broken things thatcouldn’t be mended.She’s lucky,she thought. Amurra would have been a child during the Bone War, young enough that it all had to feel more like a story than reality.
Without turning around, Kreya said, “We found him mostly naked in a fountain. He’s apparently been living like that for some time. People have short attention spans.”
“Not me,” Stran said stoutly. “If he’d come to me...”
“To us,” Amurra said. “We’d have taken care of him.”
“I know you would have,” Kreya said. “But he doesn’t need taking care of. He needs to face what’s haunting him and know the truth.” Cradling the bones in a dish towel, she carried them back into the living room.
Behind her, she heard Amurra ask, “She’s going to have him read? But he needs to rest!”
“Trust Kreya. She knows what she’s doing.”
