Kreya wasn’t certain that was true, but she appreciated the confidence. She found Jentt sitting beside Marso, who looked more alert than she’d seen him these last few days. She hoped she wasn’t pushing him too hard too fast. She knew she had a tendency to do that, and it didn’t always work out well. But she didn’t stop.
Dropping the towel with the bones into Marso’s lap, she stepped back.
Jentt looked up at her. “Are you sure?”
No,she thought.
“Yes,” she said.
If he read what she thought he’d read...It will change the world.But that wasn’t precisely correct, because if he read what she thought he’d read, he’d be seeing that the world was already very, very different from what everyone believed. Reading aboutdanger wouldn’t create the danger; it would just make it so they couldn’t ignore it.
“You can do it, Marso,” she said.
He hesitated, then picked up one of the bones and spun it between his fingertips.
When he was six years old, Marso read his first bone. A chicken bone. He’d been playing in the backyard with three of his friends. He couldn’t remember now what their names had been, but he remembered one always had a smudge of dirt on his nose, as if he applied it every morning as an identifying mark. They’d been pretending to be bone workers. One friend had been the bone maker and had created a teetering structure of sticks he claimed was a water pump, despite the fact that it had zero of the features of an actual water pump. Another friend had played the bone wizard, claiming that he’d carved the chicken’s skull into a talisman that would grant him super strength—it hadn’t. And Marso was supposed to be the bone reader.
He’d seen a real bone reader in the market, offering readings for young men and women anxious about their future, or older men and women anxious about their past. His parents had forbidden him from lingering around the bone reader’s tent, saying it did no good to know what ordinary people weren’t meant to know, but he kept being drawn back, and his parents were distracted anyway, selling their dyed wool at their stall. He’d told them he wanted to watch the puppet show, and they’d given him a coin to spend on pies.
That day, he’d given up the pie—an unusual choice for a child his age in a market that tempting—and instead broughtit clutched in his fist to the bone reader. “Will you read my future?” he asked, offering the now-sweaty coin.
The bone reader had taken the coin, tossed the bones, and said, “Prynato.”
“What does that mean?” he’d asked breathlessly.
“Reveal,” the bone reader answered. “Come to the bones with an open heart and ask them to reveal secrets, and—if you are open enough—they will.” To the bones: “Show the boy’s future.”
A mist rose from the bones, swirling above them. He’d expected to see faces inside the mist or, well, he didn’t know what. All he saw within the mist... was more mist.
“What do the bones reveal for me?” little Marso had asked. He liked the word “reveal.” It felt magical in his mouth. “Prynato.” He angled himself to see the bones beneath the mist, fascinated by the carvings on them, memorizing all the ones he could see.
The bone reader peered into the mist and then down at the bones. Scowled at them. Scowled at Marso. Flipped the coin back at him. “Read them yourself if you want to know so badly.”
At home, he’d drawn on the chicken bone and tossed it out onto the yard, saying, “Prynato!” with as much pomp and gravitas as a six-year-old could manage. He then stared at the bone. And stared and stared.
And saw nothing. No mist. No answers.
His friends laughed and kept playing.
But later, after dinner, he came out to look again. This time, he hadn’t come with any grand expectation. He’d come because he was curious. And in a wisp of cloud that swirled above the bone, he saw an image within the mist and simultaneouslywithin his mind: a golden wheel. And with the image came the sense ofsoon.Andjourney. Andsickness.
Two hours later, a cart with golden wheels pulled up to their door and handed his father a letter saying that Marso’s grandfather was ill and the whole family had to come quickly. Marso was already packed and ready.
After that, he never doubted that he would become a bone reader. He won his apprenticeship with the guild easily, once he was old enough, and he advanced quickly to journeyman. He wasn’t surprised either when Kreya chose him for her quest—he had foreseen that in the bones.
His was a rare gift. While most bone readers saw a sliver of the future or the past of whoever posed a question—and an imperfect sliver at that—Marso could cast his mind farther and wider. He didn’t require the subject of his question to be present. The bones showed him hints of possible futures of whomever he wished, as well as the certain present. They answered questions, sometimes directly, often obliquely. But they always revealed truth, if not precise fact. He became adept at interpreting the images in the mist.
The truth spoke to him, he said.
It was he who identified the danger when other bone readers began to be murdered one by one. It was he who pinpointed the cause of the killings: constructs made by the bone maker Master Eklor. And it was he who predicted the location of the final battle.
He never doubted himself, and that was one of the things that made him the most powerful bone reader in generations—his unshakable belief that the bones would unfold the meaning of their images and patterns to him. Until they didn’t. Until Jentt died and he hadn’t seen it. Until that moment, he’d neverimagined it was possible for him to fail his friends. But he had, and after the war, when they were all lauded as heroes, he knew he was secretly a fraud.
He quit trusting his readings.
Especially when every bone he cast gave the same terrible reading, no matter what question he asked, no matter how hard he tried to clear his mind and focus on something else, anything else.
And sometimes the bones would even speak to him when he hadn’t thrown them, the mist forming only within his mind, which was why the only relief he’d found in recent years was in Ocrae, where the hideous noise of the city drowned out the relentless warnings in his head.
