Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(62)

“I know the feeling,” Julian said softly, staring in the direction of the bridge. “Honestly, I wasn’t really interested in fighting. But I guess you could say it was a family tradition.”

“Your father,” Wren began, choosing her words carefully, “he’s a sword, too?”

“He was,” Julian said, not looking at her. His hand was resting against his chest over the arrow wound again. She’d have thought he was in pain from the way he kept touching it, but he never winced or grimaced, and she suspected it was more of a nervous gesture than anything else. “Until he fought during the Uprising. He never came back.”



* * *



Their path toward the bridge was an indirect one.

They had to move around the landscape, climbing every now and again to make sure they were on course. They’d gone farther north than they should have, but eventually they found the remnants of an Old Road, and it was a clear shot from where they stood to the bridge.

The iron structure pierced the gray clouds above, the glow of the Breach painting everything in shades of eerie ghostlight.

It was a foreboding sight, causing tension to tighten Wren’s shoulders.

She turned to Julian to gauge his reaction, but he was staring in the exact opposite direction.

Behind them the road continued, cutting through a rocky hillside before dipping into some sort of valley. And rising from that sunken landscape was another wash of familiar, otherworldly green. The daylight coupled with the rising hills must have blocked it from their earlier view, and Wren’s magic struggled in their heavily haunted surroundings. But with the amount of ghostlight emanating from that direction, there was certainly something undead nearby. Most likely several somethings.

A part of her wanted to investigate, but her curiosity had already gotten them into trouble, and she’d promised to avoid the undead.

Julian, however, seemed to have forgotten that promise and the logic behind it. He strode toward the valley without a backward glance.

“Hey, what are you doing? We need to make that bridge before—” Wren followed him, but as soon as they crested the ridge, the words died in her throat.

What lay before them was the remnants of a battlefield. Churned-up earth, rusted wagons, and broken weapons, sun-bleached and grown over with grass and wildlife.

And there were bodies. Countless corpses strewn across the road, human and horse, decomposed and picked over by whatever scavengers dared to venture here, leaving nothing but dented bits of armor and moldering leather behind.

Nothing.

Not even bones.

Or rather, there were bones, but they were so severely damaged, they were little more than dust blowing in the wind. And their ghosts? They were less than tier ones; they existed in a haze of green ghostlight, their bodies broken beyond repair—beyond reaping—the spirits of these poor undead souls suspended in this state of not-being forever.

How had this happened?

She had seen damaged bones before—those that had been burned by people who didn’t know any better, or a body crushed in some horrific accident, the ley lines destroyed beyond recognition.

But this was a battlefield. These people died together this way, yet there was no evidence of fire, no reasonable explanation for this.

“What… is this?” Wren asked, stunned.

Julian turned to her, eyes darker than she’d ever seen them. “The end.”

“Of what?”

“The Uprising. The House of Iron. Everything.”

But that meant… How had Locke and her father, Odile, and the Dominion soldiers done this?

Julian laughed at Wren’s silence, the hollow sound echoing across the ghostly field. “Figures. What sort of story did they tell west of the Wall? Heroic battle? Good persevering over evil?”

“I…”

Julian shook his head. “Some say it was the undead.”

“No,” Wren said, shaking her head. “With deathrot… there’s no ghost, no haunting. And the bodies, they wouldn’t—couldn’t—look like this….”

“No,” Julian said softly, as if he agreed. “Others say it was the Graven heir.”

Locke. Wren averted her gaze, desperately glad she’d never given Julian her family name.

“They say he had limitless power. That he was able to control the bones of the living as well as the dead. That he was able to bend and break and shatter them. He turned it on everyone, even some of his own people, before the abuse of power killed him.”

“But that’s not possible,” Wren argued despite seeing the evidence right in front of her. Julian’s gaze was intent, and she felt the need to explain—to defend. “Bonesmiths can’t touch the bones of the living. They can’t touch revenants, either. Any bone with a spirit still attached is beyond our reach.”

“Yours, maybe. Not his.”

“But it’s not…” She trailed off, thinking. Limitless power… Could that have anything to do with the magic the ghostsmiths dug so deep for? Julian said new undead continued to rise as revenants. Did that mean whatever magic they found emanated from the Breach? Could it have touched Locke somehow? Changed him? But no one had ever told her anything like that…. Of course, her father never told her anything, full stop. It was Odile who had told Wren the most about the Uprising, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about Locke, though she did mention something dark and evil living there….