Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(85)

She thought of the coldness in her grandmother’s voice when she’d proclaimed Wren a failure, the disappointment in her father’s eyes when she’d been forced to hand over Ghostbane.

She thought of Leo, the look of fear he’d worn as the kidnappers descended on him.

They were her family. He was her friend.

But this was bigger, even, than that.

“Do you think Leo will be safe? If the exchange happens, your people… They won’t hurt him, will they?”

“No,” Julian said with certainty. “Whatever Captain Royce is cooking up, the prince will be safe because he’s valuable. Plain and simple.”

Wren wasn’t as convinced, but she knew she didn’t have a choice.

“I say we pursue the iron revenant. We can’t pretend we didn’t see it, can’t turn our backs and continue with the mission as if nothing has changed. It has. Whoever that boy is working for, both sides of the Wall stand to suffer for it.”

“Agreed,” Julian said, and they shared a strange smile, as if both of them were expecting an argument.

“You do realize that you might miss out on your chance, too,” Wren said. “To confront the captain and learn the truth.”

Julian’s smile turned sharp. “Oh, I’ll have my chance.”

A chill slipped down Wren’s spine, and she was glad that they were currently on the same side.



* * *



They consolidated their supplies first. Wren’s pack was sodden, and with the cold night wind whipping across the landscape, it would remain that way for the foreseeable future. She ditched the extra blankets she’d stuffed inside, along with the firewood they’d have no time to dry. The remaining food stores went into Julian’s pack, the extra bonedust attached to her belt, and the empty bag was left behind.

They stopped twice to take turns resting. Wren let Julian sleep for as long as she could, but when it was her turn, she only lay there, her mind racing.

Rather than try to sleep, she stared at the ring, fingertips running over the ridges in the smooth bone, over the glyphs and the birds. A bird of prey for him. A songbird… a wren… for her.

“I wonder if it’s an amplifier,” Julian said, making her jump. It was sometime in the middle of the night, and she’d been so absorbed she’d forgotten he was there.

Wren looked down at the ring. “Amplifier?”

“They store extra power. It takes magical familiarity—like ironsmith armor bonding—and increases it exponentially.”

“But this is bone… That would make him a bonesmith, when his abilities…” She trailed off. When his abilities were clearly ghostsmith abilities, she was about to say, but she was a bonesmith and had wielded the same powers as him. Or some of them, anyway. The ring had glowed brightly when he’d drawn up the well’s power, just like the horned skull mask had, suggesting they did indeed hold magic. And though she hadn’t seen it, she would bet the mask had one of those dark spikes through it, the same as the ring. So maybe it wasn’t about the bone at all but the spike. The same kind of spike that had bound that revenant to its corpse.

Did that mean these rings, that skull mask… Were they haunted? Was that the material a ghostsmith needed to be close to… the spirit?

“It’s just a theory,” Julian said quietly. “But amplifiers are common among metalsmiths. You saw how much gold that prince wore.”

“I thought he was just vain,” Wren mused, though at the mention of Leo, she felt a pang of guilt for abandoning him.

Julian grinned. “That too, maybe, but I’d bet one or two of them were amplifiers. They’re usually jewelry—family heirlooms, if they can get them, so they hold decades of shared contact between the material and the user’s bloodline. In fact”—he cleared his throat—“sometimes they even mix them with blood—or other living matter—to increase the bond, or implant amplifiers inside their bodies. Permanently combining magic and blood.”

Living matter? Magic and blood?

She stared at the ring again, made of someone’s bone—though she didn’t know whose. She ran her finger over the songbird, then put it back inside her pocket. “I heard silversmiths actually eat silver,” she said, needing to divert the conversation. “Is that the same sort of thing?”

Julian laughed, the sound low and rich. He seemed less wary of her now that she’d stopped commanding the undead, which was a relief.

Wren started to smile in return, but then she remembered the kiss. The rejection. This was a bad idea. They were slipping back into the easy rhythm that had landed them in that spring together, which made it difficult not to think about… not to want…

The warm glow in her stomach turned cold, and she looked away. They were here together because they made a good team. Not for anything else.

“They do that because silver has healing properties, so they use it as a treatment,” Julian replied, oblivious to her thoughts. “They’ve definitely tried to do implants, from what I’ve heard, with varied success. It’s generally considered too risky, whatever the benefits. The procedure is painful, the implanted object often rejected by the body, and the amount of additional power it actually provides is debatable. It comes down to the quality of the material and its compatibility with the host. It’s long since fallen out of practice.”