Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(7)
After, her father’s voice had seemed kind, almost gentle, as he said, “This is the price of failure in the House of Bone.”
Wren would not fail now.
“Sonya,” she snapped, using her now free hand to dig into her bandolier. The reapyr halted, her gaze fixed on the quivering spirit. “The bones.”
Turning back to the ghost, Wren sent more knuckles hurtling outward, slicing holes clean through the misty shape, but the attack seemed only to enrage the spirit further.
Wren cursed and picked up her fallen sword just in time for the next impact. The ghost’s form hissed and crackled like a flame against water as it connected with her blades.
It was time to try something different.
Before it could gather itself for another violent surge, Wren went on the offensive. Instead of fighting defensively and protectively, as valkyrs were trained, she angled her body and stepped forward, her swords outstretched. The movement drove the ghost back and away. Creating space between it and its bones.
The spirit did not like this. It was like separating a shoulder from a socket—unnatural and uncomfortable.
In response, the ghost fought harder and more erratically, but Wren could take it. She drew its rage and attention, not her reapyr, allowing Sonya to work.
The move was risky, of course. There could be other ghosts nearby, waiting to pounce, and valkyrs were taught to never let their reapyr out of arm’s reach.
But it worked. Sonya gripped the haunted bone—the clavicle, in this case—and performed the cut with a somewhat shaky hand. The scythe fractured the bone and severed the ley line, and the ghost disappeared.
Wren whooped in delight. Sonya looked like she wanted to be sick.
“Almost there,” Wren said cheerfully, already imagining Inara’s sour expression when she handed over Nightstalker. Then she thought of her father’s face, glowing with pride when Wren held two blades before Lady-Smith Svetlana and swore her fealty.
She had lost sight of Inara and Ethen, but she and Sonya were already two-thirds of the way through their task, and they’d yet to hit the midway point of their journey—or their timeline. Judging by the moon above, they had at least three hours left until dawn, and they’d been at it for about two.
To her surprise, it was Sonya who pushed hard to find their next reaping, forgoing Wren’s offer to take a short break—not that Wren minded. The sooner they had Sonya’s task done, the sooner they could focus on speed. Wren would go all night if it were up to her, and she was eager to reach the center of the forest. She had heard all manner of rumors about the deepest parts of the Bonewood. Cook said the very first bone in the entire forest was “planted” there by the Gravedigger himself, founder of the House of Bone and the first-ever bonesmith, and the hostler swore there was a dragon skeleton deep in the trees, the ghost unreaped, though Wren’s father insisted that was nothing more than peasant superstition. No one had ever seen such a creature, nor was there an official record of one. The largest bones they had were from mammoths or whales. Still, Wren imagined fighting some great beast’s spirit and carrying that skull back to her father as their third and final reaping, and swelled at the thought.
As it turned out, their third reaping was an animal, but nothing so fantastic as a dragon. The elk had impressive antlers though, jutting from the ground where Sonya had unearthed it.
The deer’s spirit was utterly peaceful in comparison to the bonesmith ghost they’d just reaped, and while Wren enjoyed fighting human spirits, she found the animal undead almost soothing. They didn’t understand life and death, like people, and seemed to exist much as they did when they were alive, without all the angst and torment. It also meant their spirits didn’t linger long in this world. Most animal ghosts would disappear on their own over time—even those that had been domesticated or kept as pets would rarely last longer than a few months after their corpse had decayed—and since they provided little threat to the living, they were rarely properly reaped by a bonesmith. Instead, they could be found scattered across the Dominions in forests and fields, like fireflies, carefully avoided by the living until they eventually winked out.
As such, the reaping was swift, and while an animal was as easy to deal with as a standard tier one, it still counted toward the trial, and Wren wasn’t about to be picky. Not with so much on the line. She helped Sonya load their third and final bone—the long, narrow-faced skull complete with antlers attached—into the reapyr’s satchel, and they pressed on.
Triumphant and flushed with adrenaline, Wren perked up when they reached a clearing. Could it be the center of the Bonewood? The entire place was hazy and lit with the barest hint of ghostlight, as if whatever undead lurked here were so incredibly ancient that they existed only as the tiniest of molecules, barely discernible to the naked eye.
They approached a gigantic rib cage, the cartilage gone and the bones open and gaping like some monstrous flower, reaching for the moon. It must have belonged to a mammoth, each individual rib longer than Wren was tall.
And standing in the middle of it was Inara. Ethen was next to her, sitting on a moss-covered stone, and they both had pieces of dark bread in hand.
At Wren and Sonya’s approach, Ethen leapt to his feet, his wary gaze flicking to his valkyr.
A knot Wren hadn’t realized was there eased at the sight of them. She was relieved to know that Inara hadn’t managed to get far ahead—and better yet, judging from the two bones poking out from Ethen’s satchel, they had yet to finish their third reaping.