The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection Read online

  “It’s beautiful,” Vrana said. She laughed, felt the dress, and laughed again. “Did you make this?”

  Adelyn nodded. “Anything look familiar?”

  Vrana shook her head. She ran her fingers along the shoulders, touched the smoothed bone embellishments.

  “When you left for your second trial, Bjørn and I went to the Den.”

  Vrana looked up at her mother, one eyebrow raised high. “This is from the Cruel Mother?”

  “We couldn’t let that bitch go to waste.” Adelyn handed Vrana the dress, kissing her on the forehead as she did so. “Feel better about tonight?”

  Vrana nodded. “Very much so.”

  As was customary, Vrana was the last to arrive to the elders’ garden, and as soon as she passed between the lattices, an outpouring of congratulations closed in on her. She greeted the blur of animals and insects calling from the smoky torchlight. In that dress, under that mask, Vrana could be anything the night required, so with that confidence, she went to the head of the main table and waited until everyone was seated.

  Vrana stood up, and Caldera stood up with her. “I’m very sorry to put you through this,” she started, her voice shaking slightly, “but the elders won’t let us eat until I embarrass myself with a speech.”

  The village laughed and encouraged her with nods and claps to continue.

  “I thank you all for coming tonight, but this night is not for me. This is for you, for the ones we’ve lost, and for those who lost them.” She scanned the crowd, taking note of who lowered their heads, who looked away; for it was to them, the grieving, that she spoke. “I can’t stand up here and pretend as though I’ve done something great, something remarkable. This isn’t the first feast, nor will it be the last. But here we are, in the lingering twilight of tragedy, and look how far we’ve come, how close we’ve remained. That’s what’s great, that’s what’s remarkable.

  “This night is not for me. This night is for you, for the ones we’ve lost, and for those who lost them. This night is for the Witch, a last moment of reprieve, because tomorrow, she will be hunted mercilessly until we drag her back here in bloody fetters and take her apart, twenty-two pieces a person, until nothing remains but her skull. And we’ll take it and raise it high, because it is ours, and not even in Death will she find mercy, because not even Death will expect us to give it, for we are Its faithful servants.”

  Vrana lifted the mask from her head and set it down on the table. One by one, each villager did the same, as a demonstration of their approval for her initiation. She smiled at her graduated classmates—Korr, Gul, Galan, Verda, Aka, Cressida, and Vit—and they smiled back, silently shouting words of praise. When the final mask met the table, the elders stepped away from their seats, moved to where Vrana was standing, and went to their knees, bowing before her as though they were her subjects. She helped Anguis, Faolan, and Nuctea to their feet, and with their feeble arms, they lifted her up against the starlit sky and then released her. As though made of nothing at all, Vrana floated down to the ground, and when her feet finally met the grassy earth, the gathering erupted into applause and welcomed her as a full member of the tribe.

  “I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen you in a dress,” Aeson said, flanking her from the darkness as the village members settled into their seats.

  Vrana threw her arms around him and hugged him longer than most friends would hug. She pressed her fist into his side and said, “And I only need one to make sure you never forget.”

  Aeson took off his mask and grinned. His eyes traveled the length of the dress, lingering on the places most friends’ would not. “You look badass.”

  Vrana shook her head, wiped the tears of joy from her eyes. “You just like to say that word any chance you get.”

  “It’s my favorite Old World word, and is there not a more appropriate moment?” He sat in the empty chair beside her own, which Vrana hadn’t noticed until now. “How do you feel?”

  Vrana looked at her mother, who was busy picking the surplus of food from Bjørn’s plate. “Like I’m still floating up there.”

  Aeson’s eyes never left hers as she sat beside him. “You earned this. Did you practice that speech?”

  She shook her head. “Just the first part. I don’t know where the second half came from.”

  Aeson nodded. “You must be starving. Let’s eat, before you float away for good.”

  An hour later, when the night was noticeably darker and bellies noticeably larger, the dishes were cleared away by the ever-diligent harvesters and relegated to a second, smaller table as leftovers. Vrana finished her wine, and then her mother’s wine, as the village turned its attention toward her once more. The speech had been given, the initiate accepted; all that remained were drunken admissions and endless questions from those who had been close to Vrana throughout her life.

  “I’m going home,” Vrana said, leaning into her mother. “Tell everyone I said thank you.”

  Bjørn slammed his fist against the table, scaring away an ambitious vine that had tried to carry away his underworld rice. “I’ve been waiting for this moment a long time, girl.”

  Vrana squinted as though to burn a hole through the Bear’s head with her gaze. “You don’t have anything on me, old man.”

  Bjørn shrugged, grinned the smallest of grins, and tore into a haunch of meat with his teeth. Chewing with his mouth open, he added, “I’ve got a drawing that says ‘Vrana loves Bjørn’ that begs to differ.”

  Vrana’s jaw dropped; she fell back in her chair, arms locked cross her chest. “I was five.”

  “Little hearts, little flowers. Wasn’t there a poem?” He looked to Adelyn, who nodded, her face frozen to hold back the laughter. “Bears and Ravens don’t go together, but me and you, we’re two of a feather!”

  Vrana closed her eyes. “I’m going to kill you, Bjørn. I really am.”

  The first question posed to Vrana asked her to relate to the village the details of each of her three trials, so she did just that, while omitting anything that concerned the young boy and the Witch.

  “The Black Hour? You don’t say!” Helga of the Frog exclaimed. “That Skeleton sounds an awful lot like an old boyfriend of mine! Always wondered what happened to him. Hell of a lover. You know, now that I…”

  The second question, which, to the village’s relief, interrupted Helga’s ramblings, came from the Beetle, a watcher by the name of Lucan. Vrana seldom saw the man, and as a child, she had been grateful for his absence, as his mask, a pale carapace with two large, imposing pincers, had terrified her.

  “Where will you go next?” he asked, his face wrapped in shadows, his wife beside him gripping his arm, studying him. “You’re an explorer, like your mother. Where will you go, eh?”

  “I’m… not… sure,” Vrana said. Why does he care? “Perhaps North,” she said, “where the Corrupted live.” Glances were exchanged between several of the older adults at the table. Do they know of what’s happened in Geharra? “I’d like to see everything for myself, as it really is.”

  Lucan nodded as he rubbed the top of his wife’s hands. “I hope that you do.”

  The third and fourth questions were trite and trivial recollections about Vrana in her youth—“I remember the day you brought your bird home!” and “She was always a pleasure to have in class.”—and the fifth and sixth not really questions at all but the Wasp and the Boar presenting political dilemmas they’d hoped to force on Vrana, so that they could have one more person, other than themselves, to rely on to validate their well-known opinions.

  “We call the Corrupted human, but is it not possible they are of another origin entirely?” the Boar insisted.

  “What does it matter, you fool?” the Wasp stung. “Corruption is contagious. We’ve seen it in every species, except our own. Our purity is what gives us the right…”

  Aeson glanced at Vrana, who pretended to listen while watching and wishing she could be with the children, who were dancing around
a pond with the black sprites from her basement. “That’s not true. Corruption is not contagious,” Aeson whispered. “Did you know these idiots—” he stopped and smiled at the Cat who had overheard him, “—tried to be Archivists?”

  “I can see why they were denied the job,” Vrana said, taking another sip of wine. “But I’ll put in a good word for them if it means they’ll let you come out in the sun more often.”

  Eventually the Boar and the Wasp were silenced by groans and thrown bits of food, and Bjørn, helping himself from the leftovers on the second table, took advantage of the lull to speak on Vrana’s training over the years.

  “She was a chubby thing, wasn’t she?” Bjørn fell into his chair, tried to nudge Adelyn with his elbow but missed, instead dipping it into grumbler sauce. “Very round.” He belched and made the shape of a sphere with his hands. “Used to roll all over the yard. That’s how she dodged attacks. She’d hit the ground and roll away. It did a number, psychologically, on the other kids. Do you still do that?”

  “Practice three times a day.”

  Bjørn cocked his head: He didn’t like it when Vrana played along. “Truthfully, I’ve never met a more competent woman. With that ax of hers, she could outfight the lot of you. If anyone can bring that Witch back to us, it’s her.” He raised his cup to the Raven, the glint in his eyes telling her he knew more than she thought. “Now, about that poem!”

  Under the cover of night and the pulsating rhythm of drums, Nuctea snuck up on Vrana and touched her shoulder. The Raven excused herself and followed the Owl into the house of the elders. Flickering candles lit the way, their flames an impossibly bright black. The wood floor creaked beneath Vrana’s feet; purple sprites, not unlike those found in her basement, passed through the cracks between each panel. Nuctea kept her hand on the small of Vrana’s back, gently guiding her through the labyrinth of narrow halls that seemed far longer than the house itself.

  Before Vrana realized what had happened, they were standing in a small room lit by a single gray-flamed candle. Around the light sat Anguis, Faolan, and Deimos. “Have a seat,” Nuctea said, leading by example and sitting beside the Wolf.

  Vrana sat opposite Deimos, who, unlike her and the elders, still wore his mask. She nodded at him and then started to nod off, the wine and the warmth of the room, which smelled of fire, overpowering her.

  “Your contribution to the village has been great, Vrana,” Anguis said as an albino deathrattle wrapped itself around his arm. “Greater than you may realize. We are indebted to you.”

  “You are young, with so much potential, but there is no denying you’ve become a part of something ancient and terrible,” Faolan added as a wolf pup trotted over and laid its head on her lap.

  “There are questions for us.” Nuctea shifted and rested her chin upon her palm. “And you should have them answered.”

  Vrana looked to Deimos for guidance, but he didn’t stir, and if he was breathing, he didn’t show it.

  “What…” Vrana began, her thoughts racing, each overcoming the other, begging to be articulated. “Why did you not tell us of the North?”

  “We had done so in the past, but we found it instilled fear in the young, discouraged them, because it is difficult to imagine and accept. We wanted to see if it were best to wait. If not for Deimos, you would have been told tonight,” Faolan said, petting the purring pup. “Our people are excavators and executioners. There is much for us to find and many for us to kill. We mustn’t become overwhelmed.”

  “Are we outnumbered?” Vrana asked.

  Anguis leaned forward. “Very much so. We have always been, and yet we persist. Our knowledge is beyond theirs, and they fear us. It keeps the balance.” The albino deathrattle uncoiled from his arm and began to climb his chest. “Their leaders depend upon our actions as well. It is, no doubt, a parasitic relationship, but should the time come, we will emerge the stronger.”

  The gray flame whipped back and forth as a gust of wind blew through the room. Vrana spoke again, feeling more confident. “Why are the spellweavers kept in secret?”

  Nuctea straightened up and responded quickly. “The spellweavers are not like you or I, nor will they ever be. They are kept hidden to protect them, so that they may protect us.”

  “‘Not like you or I.’ I don’t understand.”

  “Vrana,” Anguis interjected, “I’m sorry, but not all questions can be answered.”

  Vrana tilted her head. “Then tell me why he tried to fight the Witch.”

  “That, we do not know and wish that we did,” Nuctea said. “We’ve spoken with the other two spellweavers, and they informed us they felt the Witch’s presence when she arrived.”

  “Fine,” Vrana conceded. She asked about the Witch, to which they said that they had no solution.

  “Her existence was known to us, yes,” Faolan said as the wolf pup started to snore, “but only as rumor, myth. You have seen her, Vrana, and the Void; it is you to whom we look for guidance. Mara spoke of her and her horrors and warned us long ago, but we had and have no means of reaching her, this Witch. There are many terrors in this world. We cannot attend to them all.”

  “And so we must be selfish and ask of you to learn more of her on your northward journey,” Anguis added. “It is the humans she enjoys the most, and beyond Kistvaen, they do not want for Corrupted.”

  “I…” Vrana stuttered, images of Aeson and her mother flashing through her mind. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Vrana.” Nuctea touched her again on the shoulder. “We know you better than you may think. Fight it if you like, but you know that you want this, even if it hurts.”

  Vrana sighed, nodded. “I guess there is no sense in asking how long I will be gone, so who’s coming?”

  “There are two more. You will meet them soon,” Anguis said, the light of the candle glinting off the scales of the deathrattle. “If the task cannot be done with you four, that is worrisome. Deimos and the others are unmatched. And if what Deimos tells us is true, you, too, are fearsome.”

  “Oh,” Vrana muttered, feeling heat rise to her cheeks. “What…” She considered revealing her ordeal with the Black Hour, then decided against it. “If Alluvia is really gone, how many of us are left?”

  “Three villages, not including our own, so no more than twelve hundred,” Anguis said, pained. “But we are not convinced all is lost. Our brothers and sisters in the North have been trying to repopulate, though they’ve little to show for it.”

  “Why is that? I’ve never fully understood why so few of our own are born each year.” Vrana thought back to her classmates. “You don’t want to overwhelm us, because there’s so few of us.”

  “It is our fault,” Nuctea said as an owl descended upon her from above. “Like the Corrupted, who are weak to temptation and violence, we are unfit to reproduce.” She removed a piece of parchment tied around the owl’s leg; the owl flew off into the smoky darkness. “They know Alluvia is empty and are heading east now for a spellweaver.”

  “Good,” Anguis said, not lifting his eyes from Vrana.

  “Then what did we do in the past? The Corrupted are that way because of what they have done. What did we do?” Vrana moved her hands to her stomach, suddenly feeling very estranged from her body.

  “It has always been like this.” Faolan stood up, the sleeping cub sliding off of her lap onto the floor, undisturbed. “We are not perfect; that belief alone has been the demise of many of our brethren.”

  Anguis, too, stood up, and so did Nuctea. Vrana knew that her moment with the elders was over, and she felt she had wasted it. “Wait,” she said, pushing herself off the ground. “What happened? What did the humans do to make the world this way?”

  “It is a culmination of their downfalls,” Deimos said, drawing the gaze of not only Vrana, but the elders, too. “With their gods they made of this world a wasteland, time and time again, and we can only assume the Trauma was the same. But they do not deserve to be destroyed. Where would we be with
out them? We are their images reflected through broken glass. No.” Deimos stepped forward until he was looking down on Vrana, his horrible mask like the face of Death. “They must be maintained, just as we must be maintained.”

  Vrana opened her mouth to speak, but before she could do so, the gray flame of the candle was extinguished, and the darkness of the room became the darkness of her eyelids; and when she opened her eyes, Vrana found she was still sitting at the head of the long table, surrounded by her people, the music and the garden swelling around her, with Aeson’s hand around hers.

  CHAPTER X

  Vrana had two days to say goodbye. Her mother was more than supportive of the proposed journey (“Are you really?” Vrana asked her), having already been informed by the elders prior to the feast. Aeson, however, didn’t share the same enthusiasm as Adelyn. This worried Vrana most of all, because in her absence, she knew that it would be all too easy for Aeson to seal himself in the Inner Sanctum and never emerge until word of her return reached him.

  “I’m fine, Vrana,” Aeson said as he paced about the Inner Sanctum, appearing anything but. “I will manage.”

  “I suppose you will, seeing as you let me go to that hospital and all,” Vrana said as she attempted to juggle the bauble that had been on Aeson’s desk. “What is this, anyways?”

  Aeson snatched the bauble from the air and put it back in its place. “It’s a prophecy stone, or a paperweight, and I didn’t let you go to the hospital. You know, trying to make me feel bad is an odd way of trying to make me feel good about you leaving.”