A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  The belling of the hounds was louder this time, a wild howling that raised the hairs on Kora’s arms and coursed adrenaline through her muscles. The wind, which caught her hair in greedy fingers and tied it into one thousand and one lover’s knots, was full of souls.

  • • •

  Sleep is dying, and does not want to be. So sleep steals here and there, from wreck and ruin, from blood and dream. Small pieces, never missed.

  Until they are.

  • • •

  Every paradise has a serpent.

  • • •

  The octopus, again ghost-white, had taken up residence in Kora’s hair, wrapping the strands around itself like sea wrack. It seemed content to perch there as Kora danced her way through the strange party that had become her life, never-ending and sleepless.

  The woman that she danced with wore the mask of a white hound, with ears red and wet with blood. As they danced, the woman’s eyes shaded from a warm brown to a bright poison-green.

  Serpent green.

  The woman’s mask trembled, and her feet faltered in the dance.

  Kora reached up and held the woman’s head in her hands, fingers pressed against the mask. Fur prickled beneath them, and the urge to chase, to hunt, quivered against Kora’s skin.

  The phoenix rose, burning, and Kora heard, as if from some great distance, the belling of the hounds.

  The hiss of a serpent.

  The strings of the woman’s mask untied from her head and wound themselves around Kora’s hands, and still she held the mask to the woman’s face. She could smell the forest, fecund and dark, and could hear the inexorable chime of a clock. A small green snake, whip-quick, slithered over her foot. Poison-green, like the snake coiled in a dead man’s eye. Kora stepped, once, twice, and crushed its skull.

  The woman sank to the ground. There was no body where she fell. Instead, a white hound with ears of blood red, the incarnation of the mask that dangled from Kora’s hands. Not dead, but translated.

  And then the room was full of the howling of the hounds of hell, the red-eared Gabriel Ratchets, full too of the souls they carried. One more joined their number as they harried the steps of the masked dancers. In the center of the room, the horned man, the phoenix mantled on his shoulder, the hunt wild around him. He met Kora’s eyes and bowed.

  • • •

  Even eternal places change.

  • • •

  Kora wrote in ink that matched the pale luminescence of the octopus braceleting her wrist. Three lines. An address. She slipped the card into an envelope sealed with bordeaux wax, the phoenix in flame impressed upon it.

  Dreamers were everywhere that fall.

  The Speaking Bone

  The island itself was made from bones.

  There was a church, in another land, similarly constructed. The decayed flesh of the saints slipped from its underlying architecture, the white bones, sacred and incorruptible, incarnating the holy place. But the Sedlec Ossuary had been built. Hands that would become bones themselves set the pieces in place. Divinely inspired, but a mortal work.

  The island had made itself.

  It began, as these things do, with a woman, and a man. An unanswered question, and a death by water.

  It began with the shipwrecked and the lost. Their bones were whited of excess flesh by the small and skittering denizens of the sea. The shapes were purified, rendered down to their essence, and then coral-encrusted, decorated with the care a medieval artisan would have lavished on a reliquary.

  The first bone to break the surface was the iliac crest of a suicide. As the surf foamed over it, a tempest broke from the heavens.

  The island grew quickly then.

  From the time of its birth, there were always three women who dwelt upon the island.

  Thin and wraithlike, barely enough flesh to cover their own bones, very nearly ghosts. All had long, tangled hair, woven with sea wrack, and though they were never old, their hair was white, white as bone.

  If you were to ask one of these votaresses of the bones how she came to the island, she would not speak. If you were fortunate, she might smile and place a scaphoid or a hamate in your palm. Worn smooth by wind, polished by the sea, the bone would be the only answer your question required.

  There were those who asked. There were always those who asked.

  Most who did were satisfied by the small weight of someone else’s death pressed into their hand. The island held its secrets close. This was known and had always been.

  But there were those who arrived in search of secrets of their own, who came to the island to divine runes, to read entrails, to throw the bones.

  They arrived by casting themselves upon the shore, with the other flotsam and jetsam carried on the tide. They made pilgrimage from the edge of the salt-tear sea. Over bones whiter than cloud, whiter than page, whiter than death, they walked. Past bones lachrymal and parietal they quested.

  Then, of a sudden, they would begin to collect: phalanges, proximal and distal. Scapula, calcaneus, and hyoid. The pilgrims would gather bones until they could articulate a complete skeleton of disparate parts.

  The bone-priestesses would not hinder the gathering, but neither would they assist. They stood witness. They anticipated the miracle.

  The pilgrims would take care not to choose bones that had known one another in life. Even malleus, incus, and stapes must never have heard the same sound. Otherwise, it risked the oracle speaking in a singular voice, and who consults an oracle in the hope of hearing sense?

  The pilgrims could not eat while making their collections, for nothing living could grow in a field of bones, and as their flesh evaporated, they became like skeletons themselves, animate only by blood and questions.

  When all the bones had been found, the quest completed, the pilgrim would speak a question to the wind. In many cases, this was even the question she had come to the island to have answered. When the last echoes had vanished to the air, the pilgrim would lie down on top of the collected skeleton, with grace and care, so as not to disturb the bones so carefully assembled.

  There, she would wait.

  In most cases, the skeleton never spoke. The pilgrim would lie in the calcified embrace of the lover she had labored to create, and thin, until a second set of bones fell to intermingle with the first.

  Sometimes, so rarely it seemed as if this were a thing more impossible than the island itself, the bones chose to answer.

  When the bones spoke, it was with the voice of the island. The very place convulsed as the answer was given.

  The bones spoke only at dawn, when the newly born sun streaked the sky and water with its red-gold palette, mingling blood with ambrosia on the canvas. The voices of the three women who lived on the island at its beginning, now, and ever after, would rise in a song of transformation and mourning. Thus was the miracle marked and encouraged into being.

  The song would continue until the pilgrim screamed. Once: the keening of a storm-tossed gull. Answers, true answers, like miracles, come at a cost.

  The three women, the sisters of the bone, too sharp to be graces and surely too kind to be fates, would bend to lift the pilgrim off her skeletal lover.

  One bone would be removed from the pile. It would be covered over in writing: ink dark as blood, dark as night, dark as truth. The words there written would spell out the answer to the question that had been whispered on the wind.

  This bone, it should be noted, was not from the collected skeleton. It was from the pilgrim.

  The bones were exchanged, one for the other, question for answer. The body of the pilgrim reshaped around the speaking bone, much the same as her life would reshape itself around the answer inscribed upon its twin.

  The three sisters would guide the pilgrim to an ossuary at the center of the island, where she would remain for three days—yes, ever and always, three has been the proper length of time for resurrections—while she meditated upon her miracle. While her blood bathed the bone—lunate, perhaps,
or sacrum—that had translated itself beneath her skin.

  At sunset on the third day, the pilgrim would place the bone that had been hers, the one now scrimshawed over with knowledge, into the walls of the ossuary. She would be met at the door by one of the bone sisters. “Return,” the bone woman would tell her, and kiss her once on each eyelid, so the path might be seen.

  The next of the three would meet her at the place where the pilgrim had lain in communion with her bones. “Return,” she would say, and kiss the pilgrim once on the breast, so the heart might remember. The last of the three would meet the pilgrim where the sea wept upon the shore. “Return,” she would say, and kiss her once upon the mouth, so that nothing that had passed there might be spoken of.

  Then the pilgrim would cast herself upon the waves, to be borne back to the land less strange, where she had formerly lived.

  In time, in days, or months, or decades, the bones of the pilgrim would return to the island. They would be reverently collected, examined, spread beneath the wind and sky. The mirror bone to the one that had been placed into the ossuary would be removed and reunited with its twin. Question with answer, speech resolved into silence.

  The remainder of the skeleton—no longer pilgrim now, but saint—would be scattered across the island, the architecture of future miracles, to whisper answers to those brave enough to ask.

  Those Are Pearls

  Elaine broke her curse like a mirror, heedless of the shards that scattered across the floor. The guests at the party laughed, applauded, whooped with delight at her reckless abandon. She offered them an exaggerated curtsy, holding the pose as she held their eyes, reveling in their gaze, in the simple pleasure of being seen.

  The broken pieces of the curse slid into liquid, shimmering like mercury before fogging into smoke and disappearing. A minor curse, to be gotten rid of so easily. Nothing that had grown thorns and teeth. Nothing that had developed a craving for breath or blood.

  Color high in her cheeks, Elaine plucked a glass of champagne from a passing server and drank. Her laughter was as bright and sharp as the bubbles, as sparkling as the crowd that surrounded her, all of them here to celebrate her freedom.

  Her guests traded stories as they drank and danced, reminiscing about their own curses—“Ah, yes, sleeping does tend to run in families; certainly it is painful for words to turn to diamonds in your mouth, but when it was over, I had them made into this tiara”—and the breaking of them. They marked their relief at being past such things with every clink of glass upon glass.

  They would drink until their memories were replaced with a shining haze. Until their own curses were nothing more than half-remembered shadows, until they could look at their tiaras without remembering the taste of blood and saliva as the diamonds fell from their lips.

  Glass in hand, I left the too-bright room, the aggressive celebration. Happy as I was for my sister, that room wasn’t mine.

  Curses can be lingering things.

  • • •

  My own curse had been silence. It’s common enough, particularly for girls. We’re so often encouraged not to speak, and that practiced quiet makes it easy for a curse to steal our voices.

  Because silence was one of the traditional curses, there was already a plethora of known ways to break it: I could weave or sew a certain number of shirts out of some material rough enough to cut my hands and stain the fabric with my blood, all without weeping. I could endure a loveless relationship for a year and a day. I could perform some tremendously useless task: find one mis-sorted seed in a barrel of its near-identical cousins and nurse the plant to flowering, my voice to return with its blooming.

  There were traditions. Established guidelines. The curse fell, you purchased the way of breaking it, you moved on. That was what was done. Expected. Traditional.

  Safe.

  And in that safety, the seeds of the second curse. To have a voice only when it is given, only after asking nicely, following the rules. So I had decided to break my curse myself.

  It wasn’t the done thing, but it wasn’t impossible. I could afford to be eccentric, and people don’t mind a curiosity, so long as she’s quiet about it.

  • • •

  “I don’t know why you were worried that something would go wrong.” Elaine stood in front of her mirror and rubbed at her eyes, smudging the memories of the party into her faded eyeliner.

  “Curses aren’t always easy to see in their true form. They lie and twist things around, and if you don’t break them fully, you might not notice what’s left until it’s too late.”

  “You worry too much, Rose.” She brushed her lips against my cheek, then yawned so hugely I heard her jaw crack. “Good night.”

  • • •

  I worried just the right amount.

  You’ll see them sometimes, people with pieces of their curses still clinging to them. Half-transformed into birds—taloned feet, and feathers instead of hair—or with snakes slithering through their teeth along with their words. And then it gets worse, until there is nothing left but a sad-eyed bird that doesn’t quite understand wings, a knot of serpents, a pool of silence in the shape of a girl.

  Curses, if not properly broken, put roots into your blood and bones until you are nothing but a garden of misfortunes.

  • • •

  Elaine acted as if she’d never been cursed. That’s tradition too. When it’s over, there’s no need to look back.

  But in the days after the party, mirrors began to appear. Logical places at first—windows silvered over and offered reflection rather than transparency. Puddles became glass underfoot.

  “There’s something different, though,” Elaine said, looking from our images in the shop window to the passing street behind us. “Look.”

  I stopped and stood next to her. Sister dark and sister fair. She was right. The reflected colors of her clothing were wrong, faded somehow. She wore an eye-catching blaze of red, but it looked barely pink, and she was nearly transparent.

  “So strange,” she said. “I’m almost gone, but you look the same. Maybe it’s just the angle.” Elaine smiled at her reflection and kept walking.

  I looked at the mirror slantwise, my gaze unfocused, searching for the haze of a curse. Nothing. But as I turned away, the glass seemed to alter, to shimmer like liquid, like mercury. I froze, then shook my head. Only a window again.

  • • •

  Most people only ever notice the manifestation of the curse. You know that your sister has fallen into an unwakeable sleep, that your brother speaks only truth, no matter how brutal, and those things are enough.

  But each curse has a shape.

  This is what a curse looks like: a necklace of thorns, bright against a throat, sharp enough to open a vein.

  To break it, you see that the curse is water, and you drink it deep.

  Or a curse may look like a vine of ivy, lush and green, roots almost unseen but hooked like claws beneath the skin.

  You make yourself salt and ashes, inhospitable ground.

  A curse may bind you, like a gag of shadows.

  And your words are knives, cutting through.

  • • •

  All at once the mirrors, like curses, were broken. They did not return to what they had been before, windows and water and other, more usual things, just sat cracked in their stolen frames.

  “It’s creepy, seeing yourself in pieces like that,” Elaine said, gaze averted from her shattered reflection. “Someone should clean this up.”

  I reached a hand out, wanting one of the fractioned pieces of glass, then yanked it back, hissing. “It’s sharp. Like teeth.” Drops of blood welled on my finger. “Maybe that’s why no one has cleaned them up.”

  “Ugh.” Elaine shuddered. “I like them even less now.”

  The sensation of the mirror’s teeth reaching for me lingered. I didn’t like them at all.

  • • •

  When a curse is broken, nothing of it remains. It’s swept away with the faded
party decorations, poured out with the flat champagne.

  The parties where we celebrated their breaking were the only places we spoke about the curses, after. Safe, light phrases. It was tradition not to speak seriously about them, no matter what the curse was. To ask someone what it was like to be shifted out of their shape every full moon, to be winged and feathered, to be unseen.

  To tell anyone what it felt like to be strangled by your own words. To drown on unspoken poetry filling your lungs. To taste every silenced hello and goodbye like grit on your tongue.

  All gone. Except for the memory.

  Most people will not see you if you cannot speak. When I was cursed, I was ignored, shoved aside, treated as if I didn’t exist.

  Elaine made a point of carrying paper, so I could still talk to her, after a fashion. She asked me questions, as if expecting an answer. She said hello when she saw me. She said “I love you.”

  My curse breaking was the sound of locks flinging open. It was shadows falling away and ropes unraveling.

  I wrote down all the things I would have said. Every word, every shout, every hesitation. I unsilenced myself, writing each unspoken thing over and over until the pages were covered in my unheard voice.

  I lit the pages on fire, giving my words air the only way I could.

  And I spoke.

  My voice was a rusted hinge, so quiet I thought for a moment that I had done something wrong, that instead of breaking the curse, I had bound myself in it forever. My heart clenched around the thought that I could have been safe, that I should have asked nicely. There were reasons for the traditions, and I was no better than anyone who had followed them. I should have known.

  Then I realized the weeping, howling animal sounds I heard were my own.

  • • •

  “I think something went wrong,” Elaine said.

  “Wrong how?”

  “With my curse.”

  Elaine’s curse had been invisibility. Again, a common one, with well-established traditions. Quests were the usual thing in this circumstance—finding someone to fall in love with her, or to speak to her achievements rather than her physical beauty. Instead, she captured her reflection in a mirror and then shattered it.