“You won’t get away with this,” Wren said, fear tightening her belly as Inara prepared to leave. “My father—”
“Is not the hero you think he is,” Inara said softly. “See you on the other side. Don’t forget to bring my blade.”
Then she walked away, the two reapyrs following close behind, leaving Wren alone in the dark, with a view of nothing but stars and bones and the moon’s unwavering progress through the sky.
FOUR
“Fuck!” Wren shouted, the word reverberating off the cavern walls and echoing out into the night. She clenched her hands into fists to stop them from shaking.
It didn’t work.
She kicked and punched and spat, raging at everything and everyone, but at herself most of all. How could she have let this happen? She had been halfway there, her victory within reach, and she’d allowed Inara fucking Fell, perpetual second-best and shameless bootlicker, to snatch it away from her.
Wren halted, her chest heaving. She stared up at the sky, and the moon stared back at her.
There was still time.
She had until dawn, and Inara and Ethen needed to do one last reaping, which gave Wren a chance to catch up. All she had to do was get out of this Digger-damned grave Inara had somehow managed to drop her into.
She examined her surroundings more closely. The opening above was at least twice her height, and the earth was surprisingly muddy and wet underneath the snow that had fallen down with her. It was early winter, and though the cold never really left the Northern Dominions, the ground was soft enough to allow Inara to dig this hole and set her trap.
But how? As Inara had pointed out, Wren was the rulebreaker in the House of Bone, and even she had never managed to get into the Bonewood on her own. Had Inara gotten outside help? And from whom? Her mother, perhaps? Ingrid Fell hated Wren’s father and had been vying for power and influence alongside him for most of their lives.
Pushing those thoughts aside, Wren considered all she’d brought with her. She carried her swords and her dagger, knucklebones, and pouches of bonedust, but she had, unsurprisingly, not brought any climbing or grappling tools. In her defense, of all the things she’d thought to prepare for, her conniving cousin burying her alive wasn’t one of them.
But Wren was resourceful. She pressed her hands into the muddy sides of the pit, feeling a distant tingle from bones embedded within, and while the outer layer was indeed soft and slick, the deeper she pushed, the more solid the ground became. The digging was what had made the earth so unstable, but just past the surface, firm, semi-frozen soil remained. It was, however, impossible to get a proper hold with her bare hands.
She grinned. It was a good thing she had her blades.
The first sword sank nearly to the hilt into the muck, just above Wren’s right shoulder. She did a cursory tug, then let it take her full body weight.
It held.
She fixed the second sword higher and to the left. The angle was more difficult, but she pushed and hammered on the grip, using her magic to help the blade along until it, too, was stable enough to bear her weight.
Wren was a good climber, light on her feet and agile—she had proven that on the library bookshelves. But the hard part was yet to come. She would have to remove and reinsert one blade while dangling from the other, repeating the action several times if she wanted to make it to the top. She could shove her booted feet into the holes the swords left behind, but it would still be a tall order.
As she stepped back to admire her handiwork and wipe her slimy hands for the climb, she stumbled over something. Not solid and firm, like bare bone, nor slick like melted snow or mud. Instead, it was soft and… squishy.
She looked down.
It was a body.
Not a skeleton, ancient and eroded. No, this was fresh… or at least, fresher than it should be. Too fresh to make sense. They’d stopped disposing of bodies in the Bonewood decades ago. It had originated as a way to defend their borders and ward off attack, but that was in the time before the Dominions, when dozens of rulers vied for power and control over these lands. Now, in times of peace, such protections were no longer necessary.
The corpse Wren was looking at now, though partially preserved thanks to the cold, could not have been there much longer than a few years… five, tops.
The flesh was mottled, the features gaunt but not fully decomposed. Even the clothing was well preserved, the thick layers of wool and leather and mud-spattered boots telling her this person had undertaken a long journey before they’d arrived here. Had they been a wayward traveler? A messenger? There was nothing else to indicate who they were or how they’d wound up here.
Well, that wasn’t true. There was one piece of evidence that pointed to how this person had wound up dead in the Bonewood.
The back of their head was caved in.
It was certainly the death blow, but the more Wren looked, the more unease she felt.
This person had not wandered into the wood and gotten lost—the crushed skull was proof of that. They had been killed and disposed of in the one place in the Bonelands where a dead body might go unnoticed.
No death rites. No reaping. And hidden in the Bonewood.
Lost, never to be found again.
Until now.
The manner of death fueled a ghost’s spiritual existence. A peaceful death meant a peaceful ghost. An old, tired death meant an old, tired ghost.
A death on a battlefield amid violence and hatred left behind a violent, hateful ghost.
But there was nothing more violent or hateful than cold-blooded murder.
It was clear to Wren that this death had not been peaceful or tired, and a blow to the back of the head meant a surprise attack—a cowardly attack. The Bonewood was no battlefield… at least, not for those outside the House of Bone, which this person surely was. They carried no bones, wore no armor; they had no weapons of any kind that she could see.
For a moment Wren just stood there, frozen, wary of disturbing the body further than she already had.
Ghosts didn’t instantly detach from their bodies with death. That separation took time. How much time usually depended on the state of the body, which acted as a sort of container and camouflage for the soul.
Not only did it trap a ghost, but it obscured a bonesmith’s ability to detect bones. It was one of the reasons why bonesmiths couldn’t sense or manipulate the bones inside a body, because their flesh acted as a shield.
But a body didn’t need to be fully decomposed for the ghost to rise. If the anchor bone was exposed—likely the skull in this case, given the obvious death wound—then the spirit could detach. Just because it hadn’t yet didn’t mean it wouldn’t, either, which made the prospect of turning her back on it in order to climb even more precarious.
But there was nothing for it. She had already lost too much time.
As she turned to go, her gaze landed on a flash of pale white against the muddy ground.
She shifted a piece of stiff, partially frozen fabric to reveal a ring.
It hummed powerfully in Wren’s senses, telling her it was made of bone, except… bonesmiths didn’t make jewelry.
She carefully lifted it from the ground, seeing designs carved into the band’s smooth surface—another thing bonesmiths never did. She thought it was a pattern at first, but the odd shapes and lines were actually glyphs of some sort, spanning the entire band. The images nagged at Wren, and she had the feeling she’d seen something similar before.