The Bone Queen

by Alison Croggon

  None of them had mentioned Kansabur since they left Lirigon, and Selmana looked at Nelac in surprise. It was as if he had broken a silent agreement.

  “How do I show you that?”

  “You aren’t afraid.”

  She drew in her breath, surprised and a little discomforted that, even as she had been studying the others, she too had been observed. But Nelac was right: she wasn’t afraid.

  She had spent many of the numbing, cold hours of travel thinking over what had happened in Lirigon. From this distance, it seemed unreal. The hauntings that had stalked her in Lirigon, the vertiginous sense of a world that was no longer solid beneath her feet, had retreated. Maybe it was just that she was so tired; she wasn’t used to this kind of endurance riding and, even with the charms that Bards used when they travelled swiftly, every part of her hurt with unfamiliar strains.

  The feeling of horrible visibility that had plagued her since she saw the dying boar had retreated. She only realized how oppressive it had been when it lifted: for weeks, some deep part of her had felt that a malignant eye was always searching for her. In the moment when she had glimpsed Kansabur in Larla’s kitchen, it had been intolerable. When they left Lirigon the edge of that horror blurred, and now was barely perceptible. But still she sensed that she was being hunted, that far away, in the distant shadows of the night, something was haunting her tracks… Selmana shuddered and unconsciously drew closer to Nelac.

  “It’s a bit grandiose, to say that I’m wise,” she said. “Is a mouse wise for smelling a cat?”

  Nelac smiled. “Yes, it is,” he said. “For one thing, the wise mouse doesn’t get eaten.”

  XXVII

  IN only eight days, they reached the rutted track that branched off north to Jouan. Cadvan hesitated, and asked his mare, Brera, to halt. A wave of nostalgia swept over him, taking him by surprise. It was less than a month since he had left, and yet the friends he had made there, Taran and Hal and others, even his goat, Stubborn, had woven themselves into his life more deeply than he had realized, and he felt a tug of longing. Already his time there seemed so long ago… The others looked at him curiously, and pulled up their mounts beside him.

  Only Dernhil knew why he had stopped. “Shall we ride on to Jouan?” he asked.

  “It’s barely noon,” said Cadvan. “We’d find welcome and shelter there, I don’t doubt, but we’d lose a day.”

  Selmana looked up hopefully at the mention of shelter. She was tired of travel rations and of sleeping on hard ground. She was tired of the rain and of cheering up her dispirited horse and of her numb hands and sore thighs and damp clothes. Even one night indoors would be a blessing.

  Cadvan was having a silent debate with himself. For all his desire to see his Jouain friends, he felt a strange reluctance at the thought. Hal would at first think that he had returned as he had promised, his task done, ready to teach her. He could see how her face would fall, how she would pretend it didn’t matter. He couldn’t bear the prospect: Hal was too used to disappointment. He should return properly, or not at all.

  “No, now is not the time,” he said at last, and spoke again to Brera, urging her on. Selmana slumped back in her saddle.

  “Why not?” said Nelac unexpectedly. “There’s an inn, I assume?”

  “Aye, for traders,” said Cadvan.

  “The notion of a hearth and a table and a bed attracts me wonderfully. And we would travel the faster for the rest.”

  “But we can’t afford to lose even a day.”

  “We’re almost halfway to Pellinor, by my calculations; we’ve made good progress. We can afford a few hours.”

  Cadvan glanced at him expressionlessly for a few moments and then shrugged, and turned Brera up the track. Selmana brightened up instantly. A bed! A roof! It seemed the summit of luxury. Nelac winked at her and urged his mount along the track behind Cadvan.

  The sun still stood high in the sky when they reached Jouan. The mountains seemed very close today, lowering over the tiny hamlet, their peaks vanishing into mist. A knot of small children watched them as they rode to the tavern: they saw at a glance that these were not their usual visitors. At first they didn’t recognize Cadvan, but then a small boy, a cousin of Hal’s, set up a cry. “It’s Cadvan!” he said. “Hey, Cadvan!”

  Cadvan waved and the boy ran off. He wasn’t surprised when Hal came running up, her face alight with joy, as they dismounted outside the tavern. She halted when she saw the other Bards.

  “Hello, Hal,” said Cadvan.

  “Hello, Cadvan,” she said. “You’re back, then?”

  “Only for the night,” he said.

  Just as he had imagined, Hal’s face fell. She swallowed hard. “In that case it – it was good of you to think of coming all the way here.” She glanced again at the other Bards. “I’ll go, I see you’re busy. But Taran will be so pleased to see you.”

  She made to leave, but Cadvan stepped forward and embraced her. She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly, and then stood back, uncertain and shy.

  “It’s good to see you, Hal,” Cadvan said. “Why don’t you come to the tavern when we’ve taken care of the horses, and I’ll introduce you to my friends?”

  “They look very grand,” she said. “I don’t think…”

  “They’re no grander than me,” said Cadvan. “They’re only Bards. And besides, I want to know how you all are.”

  A shadow passed over Hal’s face. “Taran will be that glad to see you,” she said again. “But he’s down the mine now. I’ll tell him you’re here when he gets home.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  But Hal just shook her head and left. Cadvan watched her run off. She was still half a child, the grown woman she would become nascent in her gangly legs and awkwardness. But she was old beyond her years, her life already tempered by hard losses. She deserved so much more…

  The tavern keeper interrupted his reflections, coming out to welcome his visitors, and Cadvan turned to the business of hiring rooms and stables. When Jonalan recognized Cadvan his face lit up in welcome. “I must have known we’d have a visit,” he said. “I killed the pig for winter just two days since. I’ll roast a ham tonight and there’ll be a feast. Only one night! I could have wished it longer. You’ve been sorely missed.”

  “You are well loved here,” said Dernhil later. They had washed and changed their clothes, and now he and Cadvan sat by the tavern’s big hearth, each with an ale at his elbow. For the moment, they were alone; Jonalan was off arranging for their filthy travelling gear to be cleaned and Selmana and Nelac were still both upstairs.

  Cadvan glanced at Dernhil and shrugged. “As you know, I worked as a healer as well as a cobbler,” he said. “Bad at it though I was, I was still better than no healer at all…” He felt a strange reluctance, almost a shyness, in speaking about his time in Jouan, even to Dernhil.

  Dernhil smiled. “I think it is more than that,” he said. “You can’t help the Bard in you. That girl you were teaching, I saw her face. What’s her name? Hal, isn’t it?”

  “I was no Bard here,” said Cadvan harshly. “I made boots.”

  Dernhil was silent for a time, studying him. “I think you are too ready to diminish your own good, Cadvan,” he said. “That’s as foolish as not acknowledging your faults. Worse, maybe.”

  Anger flickered across Cadvan’s face, and then he caught Dernhil’s sceptical eye and laughed. “I’ll admit it, then,” he said. “I’m not wholly evil.”

  “Merely arrogant, stubborn and irritating, but these are forgivable faults. Maybe.”

  “You go too far, Bard.”

  “Or not far enough.” Dernhil sipped his ale, still steadily regarding Cadvan. “One day I will present you with a careful and thorough dissection of your character, and you will be forced to see yourself in proper proportion. Neither really bad nor really good…”

  “Indeed, I am the very model of blandness,” said Cadvan.

  “You are many things,” sa
id Dernhil. “But bland isn’t one of them.”

  “And you think that this portrayal will be a stern lesson to me?”

  “I have no doubt of it. It’s time you learned what you are.”

  “And you think that then I will learn to forgive myself?”

  Dernhil paused, suddenly serious. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Should you?”

  “I don’t know.” Cadvan looked away. “Even if I could, I’m not sure I have the right. Others must do so first.”

  “That may take some time.”

  “Time.” Cadvan drained his ale. “I’m not sure we have much of that.”

  Upstairs, Selmana sat on the rough bed in her tiny room, her gaze fixed on the latticed shadows the thin sunlight threw over the floorboards. The unexpected respite made her aware of her body’s fatigue, as if every string that animated her limbs had been cut: even the thought of standing up and walking down the narrow stairs seemed too much. The room was warm, and she had washed and put on clothes that weren’t stiff with sweat and grime, and the ease in her skin was delicious. After the enforced intimacy of the past few days, it was pleasant to be alone.

  She let her thoughts drift. She had gathered, although she hadn’t asked and no one had told her, that this was where Cadvan had hidden himself when he had left Lirigon. That awkward, skinny girl… What was the story there? Her face had transfigured when she saw him, a blaze of surprise and hope. She had looked as if she were welcoming a loved brother, long lost… With a stab of sorrow, Selmana had a vivid vision of Ceredin at her table in her chamber, a slight crease between her brows as she studied a scroll, puzzling out its meaning, before she turned with a smile to greet her.

  “Selmana.” Her name fell into her hearing as if it were spoken into her ear, but there was no one in the room. It was Ceredin’s voice. Selmana jumped, startled out of her abstraction. Please, she thought, not now, please let everything be ordinary, please let me have imagined that…

  She blinked. The room still looked the same, but something had happened to the light: everything seemed drained of colour, every object seemed unreal, a ghost of itself. And then, with no sense of transition, Ceredin was standing before her, a slender form of shadow. Selmana could see the opposite wall through her body. She clutched the edge of the bed. The fur coverlet slid beneath her fingers, soft and warm and real.

  “She is tracking you,” said Ceredin. Selmana didn’t need to ask who “she” was. “She can smell your spirit, your blood. She craves you, as she craved me.”

  All Selmana’s sense of safety fell away. “She is tracking me?” Then the implications of what Ceredin had said struck her, and she stared at her in horror. “What do you mean, she craved you?”

  The shade sighed, as if an unseen wind blew through her. “She sought me, even as the Dark sought Cadvan. She desired to take me for her own use. But she couldn’t devour me. Cadvan saved me that, at least…”

  Selmana stared stupidly, trying to order her mind. Ceredin wished to warn her of some peril, and she must ask the right questions. But what were the right questions?

  “What should I do?”

  “Be wary, cousin. This World is not as that other place, and she sniffs around in the other place, now here, now there, trying to find the mark. The tissue between the Circles is broken, here a rip, there a wound. Here the borders are rent, here the doors will fly open. See, I can speak to you, even here… Be wary. She hungers for us, for we who have the Sight: we are the blood she needs to knit her sorcery into flesh, so she may tear open the wounded Circles and pour each into the other, and summon the armies of the dead…”

  Bewildered, Selmana swallowed. A dark chord of alarm was vibrating in the deepest levels of her being. “The armies of the dead?”

  “Already she is a torment the dead cannot resist. We can only flee and hide, and she hunts us down, one by one, and bends us to become agents of her will.”

  A sob gathered in Selmana’s throat. “Not you, Ceredin, surely not you?”

  “Not me. Not yet. But she is so close now. So close… And the dead are so many. Should she break the Gates…”

  Ceredin’s form was fading even as Selmana watched. “No, stay!”

  “I cannot. Ever I become less. Even in death I am a shadow. And yet I cannot depart…”

  And then she was gone. Selmana stared wildly about the room, her heart hammering, a sick dread rising through her body. She had thought herself safe and hidden, but it was an illusion. Who could protect her? How could she protect herself?

  Her fingers trembling, she unlatched the door and tumbled downstairs. Cadvan and Dernhil were deep in conversation at a table by the hearth, but they turned as she entered, the smiles fading from their faces.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Dernhil.

  “Ceredin…”

  Dernhil drew her down to sit beside them. “A deep breath, Selmana. Yes. That’s right. Now, what’s happened?”

  Selmana glanced at Cadvan, who was watching her, his face tight. “Ceredin just spoke to me,” she said. “It was a warning. She says Kansabur is close, that she is tracking me, she says Kansabur will rouse the … the armies of the dead, and that she can break the Gates.”

  “She can break the Gates?” repeated Dernhil, paling. “Surely that’s not possible?”

  Selmana hesitated, attempting to recall Ceredin’s exact words. “She said: She hungers for us, for we who have the Sight. She meant me and Ceredin, so Ceredin must have had the Sight as well. We are the blood she needs to knit her sorcery into flesh, so she may tear open the wounded Circles and pour each into the other, and summon the armies of the dead…”

  Cadvan stared at her. “Ceredin had the Sight, like you?”

  “That’s what she said.” Selmana brushed her hair back from her face; her tears had made it stick over her mouth. She hadn’t realized that she had been crying. “She said Kansabur wanted to devour her, but she couldn’t.” She breathed in again, trying to fight down her panic. “Nelac said he knew she had lost our scent, because I wasn’t frightened. But she hasn’t. That’s what Ceredin said. She’s been trying to track us, in the other place. She must mean the Shadowplains…”

  There was a long silence. Then Cadvan spoke, his voice bitter. “I thought I knew the worst,” he said. “I had thought Ceredin’s death was the most terrible thing I could have done to her. But it seems I was wrong.”

  Selmana impulsively took Cadvan’s hand. “No, she said you saved her,” she said. “She said: Cadvan saved me that, at least.”

  “At least.” Cadvan’s expression frightened Selmana. “Well, that’s something, that she’s only partly devoured by the dead thing that I summoned into life…”

  “Stop it, Cadvan,” said Dernhil sharply. “I too was there, and I remember how you leapt before Ceredin. You can hate yourself as much as you like later, but now is not the time.”

  Cadvan met his gaze, and then looked away. “I failed. And now she is dead.”

  “What matters is that we understand what Ceredin was trying to tell us.”

  “Nothing good.”

  For a moment, Selmana feared Dernhil would punch Cadvan. His lips tightened as he bit back a retort. “No,” he said slowly. “Nothing good. But now that we are warned, we might protect ourselves. Better to look at what we must face now, than to gnaw the past with useless regret.”

  Cadvan stared into the fire, as the colour slowly returned to his face. “Aye,” he said at last. “You are right, of course. And now it seems we must save the dead as well as the living.”

  XXVIII

  KANSABUR the Mighty, Tyrant of Lir. Avatar of Despite and Terror, Supreme Grace, Adamant of the Law, Regnant Jewel of the Northern Realm and Tributaries, Defender of the Truth, Absolute Ruler of the Dominions of the North. She had many titles in her centuries-long reign over the ancient realm of Lir, but the people she ruled called her the Bone Queen. They saw the fields where bodies lay unburied, rotting into acres of bones tumbled together under tangles of wee
ds. They remembered the pyramids of skulls that were piled as grim warnings to rebels outside her prisons and torture halls. Those Bards who survived an audience with the Queen of Desolation reported a Hull clad in sumptuous robes, eyes of red fire burning in a white skull, skeletal hands adorned obscenely with the dark flames of rubies. To those without the eyes of Bards, her sorcery clothed her with a beauty beyond the reach of mortals, a shimmering illusion of desire and dismay.

  Yet even at the height of her power, Kansabur was but a slave. The Nameless One was said to call her his cat, and if he beckoned, she leapt to do his bidding. She feared nothing in her dominion: all her terror was reserved for the Black Hand of the South, the Lightless Silence of the Real, the Eternal Despite, the Nameless One himself. If she was cruel, he was crueller; her malice and cunning were shadows of his atrocity and guile. No matter how numerous her spies, how ruthless her armies, how rich her treasuries, how fearsome her prisons and barracks, they were toys compared to the deep-delved dungeons and factories of torment in Dagra. He alone had the power to humiliate her pride and daunt her malevolence. The Nameless One perceived her secret hatred and cultivated it, for it made her more cruel. She was one of his most useful tools. But as with all his minions, who worshipped and feared and hated him as the shadow and dread of their own ambitions, he knew that she would attempt to supplant him if she dared. He was careful to ensure that she would never, quite, dare.

  Nelac lay on his bed in Jonalan’s tavern, staring at the ceiling. As he did every day now, he was running through the Lore of the Silence, thinking through everything he knew about the Bone Queen. Til Niron, a Bard who had escaped to the Isle of Thorold in the Great Silence, wrote one of the most famous accounts, which Nelac recalled as if he were reading it; she was one of the few who survived being brought before the Bone Queen at the height of her power. Was Kansabur returned as slave or absolute tyrant? Nelac found himself swinging one way and then the other: sometimes he was certain that she was but the forerunner, blazing the way for her master.