Ready your blade.
And it was she who spoke again now.
“Defeat the undead.”
The Bonewood Trial had begun.
TWO
The forest was ten miles wide and another ten deep. Some said the ancient bonesmiths had been giants, their limbs as long as Wren was tall—but it was more likely that they had stretched and distorted the bonetrees, making them narrow and spindly or thick as oaks.
That was the magic of the bonesmiths, the ability to sense, move, and manipulate dead bones without touch. Within a ten-foot radius, bonesmiths could summon a bone to their hand, guide its movements in midair, or heft bones much heavier than their muscles alone could bear. Valkyrs like Wren carried bone weapons, their magic lending them extra speed and strength, as well as pinpoint accuracy.
Bonesmiths could also see spiritual tethers—the fibers that connected the ghost to its bones—that were indistinguishable to the non-bonesmith eye.
If Wren was totally honest, they were often invisible to her eye as well. It came down to training and natural talent—the former of which Wren hadn’t bothered with, knowing that it was the realm of the reapyrs and she was meant to be a valkyr, and the latter she’d simply been born without.
Reapyrs had a more delicate touch, able to detect and label every bump and groove, and were better at sensing and locating the anchor bone—the bone that connected the ghost to the body. While all bones in a dead body contained some trace of the spirit, the anchor bone was the strongest. It was usually the bone nearest the mortal wound that had killed the person, or in the case of death by illness or age, the bone nearest the ailment or first organs that started to fail.
The anchor bone was also the most coveted by bonesmith fabricators, who used a combination of tools and their magical touch to create armor, weapons, and talismans. They could shape rib cages into breastplates and carve femurs into longswords, or pulverize knuckles into bonedust. The possibility of crafting her own weapons certainly held some manner of appeal for Wren, but the idea of being locked away inside Marrow Hall’s catacombs for the rest of her life did not.
As such, it was valkyr or bust for Wren. Their job was the most dangerous, and Wren loved nothing more than a challenge.
And for valkyr novitiates, there was no greater challenge than the Bonewood.
It was filled with undead bones, haunted by ghosts and beyond a bonesmith’s magical reach. Only by fighting back their spirits and allowing the reapyr to cut the tether to their bodies could the bonesmiths use and manipulate their bones. In one swift move, bonesmiths made the world safe from ghosts and acquired the materials to do so. After all, there was nothing that ghosts hated more than dead bone. It was the bonesmith’s first and best protection against them.
It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it, and Wren was only too happy to oblige.
But the Bonewood was more than a haunted forest—it was a maze, dense and confusing. Marking the barrier to the House of Bone’s lands, the Bonewood doubled as a line of defense and was filled with the bodies of would-be attackers and trespassers.
And just because there were trails through the wood did not mean those routes were safe. Stray off the path to find a shorter road—or one less haunted—and risk never finding your way again.
Many novitiates would rather travel twice as far and take twice as long than have to encounter a ghost higher than a two on the undead scale.
But not Wren.
She smiled fiercely at Inara before striding toward the bonetrees. Her reapyr followed, while Inara and her reapyr—as well as the other pairs on either side—did the same. When Wren moved toward the entrance to the Spine, Inara close behind, the other pairs balked and shook their heads, choosing safer routes.
Wren thrived off their doubt, but the instant she stepped into the trees, her attention sharpened and her focus was honed.
The Spine was not, in fact, a real path, but rather a rough route through the forest, demarcated by old smears of red paint against the pale trees. That meant Wren and Inara would not actually be walking together, hand in hand like lost children from a fable, but following their own instincts and choosing their own way, ever heading toward the next flash of red.
The only light came from the moon above, obstructed by soaring bone branches that creaked and rattled together, drifting in an undead wind Wren could not feel—and, of course, from the ghosts.
There were surely thousands of them, some bright as the sun but with an eerie, green-white light and others as soft as a guttering candle, begging for release. Some were mere wisps of vapor without shape or form—tier ones—while others were nearly solid, their edges sharp and clearly defined. Tier twos. No matter how dense and substantial, there was no way to mistake any of them for the living. Their bodies rippled in the same, unearthly wind as the bones, and their features were stretched and distorted or flickering in and out of existence like flashes of lightning. There were animals among them too, swooping bats or stalking snow cats, and the lot of them blurred together between the trees.
With a small amount of distance now between herself and Inara, Wren turned to Sonya. It was the valkyr’s job to lead, to choose the safest path and soundest strategy, but the most successful pairs worked together in well-balanced harmony. While Wren had never been the best team player, she tried to include Sonya so the reapyr could do her job properly.
Wren needed her, after all.
“How do you want to play this?”
There were numerous different strategies they could implement for the trial. Tier-one ghosts were virtually harmless, but that was because their tether to their bones was weak. That made finding their earthly remains more difficult, even if trying to do so was safer. The higher on the undead scale, the more corporeal the ghost—and the stronger the connection to their bones—but it also made trying to reap them more dangerous.
Targeting tier ones would mean a nice, safe trial… but the reapings would be slower. Not ideal in a race that had an extra bet with a lifelong rival tacked on. Targeting more dangerous ghosts would be faster, but the likelihood of mistake and injury higher.
The likelihood of failure higher.
It wasn’t terribly common, but it did happen—a reapyr and valkyr pair got lost and failed only the previous year—and would mean another year of study at Marrow Hall before the next trial began.
Wren was generally a fan of the chaos approach: barreling through at top speed and choosing targets on the fly. She didn’t like to back down from a fight, but if a ghost was too volatile, they’d leave it and move on. If a ghost was too weak, it likely wasn’t worth the time and effort.
“Take them as they come?” she prodded as Sonya chewed on her lip, uncertainty written on her face. “Avoid ones and fives?” Wren quirked a smile. There were no fives in the Bonewood. In fact, they shouldn’t even exist. Only in the Haunted Territory to the east, behind the Border Wall, did the bones of the undead walk with their ghosts—and that was because of the Breach. Apparently, if you dug deep enough, like the ironsmiths had, you could unearth all manner of surprises… including hundreds of buried corpses flush with dark power and happy to be set loose.
Those walking undead—or revenants—had been the work of ancient ghostsmiths, a long-extinct order of necromancers shunned by the rest of society for using their magic to command and control the undead. Even Wren, who loved nothing more than a good fight with a ghost, suppressed a shiver at the thought of them. Thankfully, the ghostsmith civilization had been buried by some sort of cataclysm centuries ago, and anyone who possessed their abilities was buried with it. Unfortunately, just before Wren was born, the ironsmiths’ mining had dredged their lost world back up along with their undead creations. It was because of the Breach that bonesmiths had to come up with the undead scale in the first place.