As she did so, she caught sight of a spectator between the trees.
“One already,” she said, smiling smugly at Inara. “Try to keep up.”
THREE
The deeper they moved into the Bonewood, the more tightly packed the trees became, their swaying branches knocking together and snagging the fabric of Sonya’s robe. She brushed the bone aside with a casual wave of her hand, while Wren preferred to keep her swords raised to discourage their grasping reach.
The ghosts, too, were more plentiful, though the majority were tier ones, hanging in the air like fog or swirling in an unseen current like woodsmoke. They spotted what looked like a tier two, but it was too far off the path—trying to lure them into the darkness like a will-o’-the-wisp—and a tier one that glowed so brightly Sonya had to look away until Wren dispatched it.
Their next reaping came nearly an hour later.
They spotted the bones before they saw the ghost, so when the glowing form suddenly appeared out of nowhere, angry and violent, both Sonya and Wren—much to her embarrassment—leapt back in alarm.
Wren recovered first, swords raised, but the ghost wasn’t interested in her. It had surely been a bonesmith in life, its vaguely human shape draped in a wispy fabric that could have easily been a reapyr’s robes, and it focused on Sonya with single-minded intent that suggested it knew exactly what they were about. Reaping might provide peace, but the undead wanted to live, just like everything else.
When it crashed against Wren’s swords with a physical impact strong enough to make her boots slide in the slush beneath her feet, Wren realized it wasn’t just a self-aware tier three. It was able to affect the world around it. Only a tier four—also called a geist—and higher could do that.
Sonya quailed, neglecting her task as the ghost drew nearer.
“Hey,” Wren barked, glancing away from the ghost for a split second—but that was all it needed. The next time it slammed into her bone blades, heedless of the damage such contact did to its form, Wren dropped one of her swords thanks to her distraction.
Sonya cried out and took a hasty step backward, ready to bolt in fear, forgetting another fundamental rule of the death trade: Never run.
The simple, terrible truth was that tier-three and higher ghosts were fast. They were able to disappear and reappear in the blink of an eye, or streak across an open field in half the time it took a horse galloping full tilt.
Running was far too dangerous and risked the person running directly into the ghost, which would mean instant death or such severe deathrot that they’d be a shell of a person, immobile and in constant pain until they eventually succumbed. Wren had seen the victim of such an attack once—her father had, on Lady-Smith Svetlana’s orders, dragged her out of bed and hauled her to the infirmary to witness it firsthand. Wren had hardly ever spoken to her grandmother before then—she hardly ever spoke to her now, either—and had approached with wary fear.
“I’m not sure—” her father had said, trying, perhaps, to protect Wren, but Svetlana quickly shut him down. Then he just stood there, silent and unflinching, while the woman’s clawlike hands gripped Wren’s narrow six-year-old shoulders and forced her to hover next to the bed until the dying man’s last, choking breath.
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.