The Bone Roses

by Kathryn Lee Martin

  I stop at the second door on the left and twist the tarnished doorknob.

  Gray light creeps through the lone, partially frosted window standing guard over a small hammock strung between the pale-green walls. The sage-and-bronze-colored blanket Sadie knitted for me from an old banner and some fabric left over from a chest in one of the textile warehouses out in the snowfield lies on the floorboards. I sidestep it. My shaky hands seize the tattered lavender curtains and slam them shut. Dust drifts over the hammock.

  Matthew’s room is the last thing I want to peer outside and see right now. I clutch the curtains, trying to calm my breathing and trick myself into thinking it will be okay. Dried blood flakes onto the thin fabric, reminding me that it’ll be anything but “okay.”

  I rip myself away from the curtains and fumble with the polished animal-bone buttons on my buckskin jacket until it’s stripped from my shoulders.

  Blood. So much blood. The awful, metallic stench floods my nostrils, taking over the room. My fingers tremble and ghost over the bloodstain marring the once tawny buckskin and its soft fringes.

  It’s noticeable even with the dark water stains over the jacket’s top half and back. Not even my stitch work on the sleeves where I snagged a razor-wire fence in Hydra last year can distract from it. There are bloodstains under the arms from that day but that’s different.

  This bloodstain isn’t mine. And I didn’t earn it on a sour raid.

  Still damp . . . I cradle the jacket against my chest. Even my gray, goat-hair sweater reeks of blood. I grimace but don’t bother removing it.

  Fleeing my room, I push the door facing the stairs open. Ice-cold water spills from the tin pail into the small system of refurbished copper pipes we rigged up to at least make it appear that we have running water here. We’re lucky to even have this.

  The frigid water trickles from the spigot into a porcelain sink.

  Grabbing a cloth from the metal wall rack, I flip the jacket over the sink and rub the course fabric against the bloodstain. Pink water circles the drain but the stain remains. I grind my fingers deeper into the cloth. Back and forth. Scrubbing deeper and deeper into the buckskin until I’m certain it will tear. It doesn’t. Just grows darker with the water ruining the jacket and the thin fringes drifting back and forth under the surface. Tears wet my cheeks. The jacket lands on the tiled floor.

  Both hands shake, the washcloth falling into the sink.

  Cold water flows over the pale flesh. Clear, not pink like it was. I wish I could believe that. The blood on these hands will never wash away. My knees sink to the ground, the buckskin hide of my pants soaking up the cold puddle oozing from the jacket.

  Something clinks in my pocket. Water drips onto the tiles and I fish around until sharp edges and warmed pewter prick my fingertips. Stone-gray petals brush against each other, clinking and clicking a sad, pathetic sound around a single pewter stag charm.

  “Why?” my voice cracks. “Why him?”

  The roses tangle and part as water trickles over them, offering nothing.

  I press my eyelids shut, desperate to remember the gentle, patient young man who led Nigel around in a circle while I struggled to not fall off during the early years in Rondo. His impish smile. The long hours spent working with the animals, tending the hothouses, carrying harvests to the storehouse. Being able to bare my soul to him and dream about the future and not have him judge me for it.

  All I see is blood. Endless rivers staining the snow where he falls. Phantom gunshots replay in my ears. I rest my chin on the sink’s frigid rim and suspend the roses over the water. The stag charm’s tiny hooves dance on its surface as the water droplets fall around it.

  “I don’t know what to do.” What can I do?

  You know what to do. You know exactly what to do, the rustler in me says. Images of Henny and his rifle flash through my mind.

  The bone roses click against the sink. My hands clutch the rim and I stand, face-to-face with the young woman in the mirror.

  Her fierce blue eyes challenge from between the wild, uneven bangs, dampened by tears, falling around her small, pale oval face. Despite the harsh redness under them, she’s a feral and dangerous mountain child.

  Dried blood streaks across her left cheek to rival the thin, bladed scar on the right. Her long mahogany hair tangles, in desperate need of brushing, as it hangs down past her shoulders to cloak her thin frame, stopping a few inches above the thin rawhide belt around her waist.

  The bladed pink scar angling under her right eye makes her seem older than she really is. Like a wind-burnt and weathered ghost caught somewhere between being a child and an adult, but unable to make up its mind on which she should be.

  The girl in the mirror doesn’t care though. She’s a rustler. Rondo’s rustler.

  One of the last people standing between the Kingdom and the precious existence this settlement clings to. Every settlement and soldier knows that a rustler fights to the death to protect their territory, especially when it’s damned like we are.

  I don’t have a choice. What’s left of my family needs me to be strong. My hands gather the trickling water and splash some against my face in an attempt to wash the blood away. Henny wants a fight? He’s going to get one.

  He’s going to remember the day he crossed paths with this rustler.

  Chapter Ten

  He’s completely hidden in the darkness, watching, quietly embroiled in the almost hopeless tug of war that goes on every time we have to go anywhere at night.

  My fingers press harder against the doorframe. A frozen wind stirs the dead willow’s branches. I shy back into the kitchen’s protection.

  “Rags, you wanted to go.” His words barely rival the wind in case the K. C. a little way out in the snowfield have good hearing.

  “I know, but—”

  His boots crush the snow until he’s directly in front of me. He places a heavy, gloved hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be fine. The sky’s not going to fall on you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He sighs. “I know that if you don’t do this, you’ll likely be going back to the slave line in the morning if they don’t kill you.”

  I step into the snow.

  A wind gust cuts across the snowfield.

  I shiver, jacket still damp from my earlier efforts to clean it.

  The slave master is not going to crack a barbed whip across my back, nor is he going to sic that big white demon dog on me.

  “That’s what I thought.” Tracker eases the door shut. “Matthew would be proud of you.”

  Proud? Yeah right. There’s nothing to be proud of tonight—if Hunter and the others knew the rustler they despise so much fears the darkness, they’d drag me up to Rondo’s mines and bury me alive so fast I wouldn’t have time to scream.

  I lost count of how many nights Matthew and I walked across this yard, one step at a time, his arm around my shoulders in support until I was able to do so on my own, to his house and back. He’s not here anymore; there’s only Tracker, and this isn’t just any casual evening stroll.

  “Stay close,” he says.

  I can see their flashlights halfway down the hill. The tiny white lights hover and bob in an unsteady line. Their beams cut through the glittering snow, playing on the cottage’s roof and siding. A wind gust tears through the willow’s branches. Behind us the old farmhouse groans.

  I shy closer to Tracker.

  In the hungry darkness white light oozes around the cottage porch. I hurry across the yard.

  The lights shift.

  Tracker drags me against a ruined outbuilding.

  Molten white light creeps up the hill and spills down over the split-plank wall above us.

  “See anything?” A soldier’s body hides behind his flashlight and the glittering snow being kicked up by the wind.

  “Nah, just one of those old tin roofs,” replies another. “Damn wind’s just about torn it down finally.”

  “Well I wish it would hurry the h
ell up. I’m freezing my ass off out here and tired of seeing it every time I hear a noise.”

  “Yeah, well, until it does fall down, we’re stuck with it. Let’s go before Sir Holier-Than-Thou Oreson decides to surprise us with a visit.”

  “Shh, he might hear you.”

  “And risk freezing his perfect blond ass off out here? Doubtful.”

  “You never know man. I hear he’s in cahoots with Fieldson and keeps a list of people who went MIA after whispering behind his back.”

  “No shit. Fieldson’s got his paws in just about everything that goes on in the Kingdom.”

  “Which is why I don’t want to piss him off, man. You know what he can do to us.”

  “Yeah, I know—which is why I suggest you turn your sorry ass around and go check that fence again before he finds out we’re wasting time on a roof.” The lights lift from the wall and return to the snowfield.

  Tracker taps my shoulder.

  I slip away from the boards and into the dark street, eyes frantically seeking the village lantern. It’s never been this dark in Rondo.

  Soldier footsteps crunch along Witherwood Lane.

  Moving through the darkness, I listen as the wind tinkers with the bronze bell in the church steeple.

  It wasn’t always holy. The basement has rooms with discolored floors that reek of bleach. Cast-iron rings are fixed to the stone walls like someone tethered animals to them at one point. The doors are thick iron with old brass numbers on them and the room under Father Jericho’s office contains a huge furnace with a sickening burnt-hair stench.

  There are also left-over knives and other cutting instruments like the ones Sadie keeps for the really bad injuries. Something bad used to go on under the church when the Kingdom owned it.

  We navigate through a wrought-iron gate and through the maze of crumbling tombstones. It’s not a big cemetery—more like a small, flat field with a loose stone fence around it, but in the dark it feels endless. You can almost sense the ghosts prowling for souls tonight.

  An old oak’s branches chatter behind the church, guiding us to the back door where Father Jericho waits.

  “Didn’t think you two were going to make it.” He eases the door open and ushers us into the church’s limited warmth. “Frank said Witherwood Lane is crawling with K. C. tonight.”

  I rub my hands together, cursing the fact that I left my gloves back on the farmhouse’s kitchen counter. The door finally closes with a soft click behind us, sealing the wind on the other side, but doing little to keep away the cold.

  Jericho leads us through the dusty, candlelit hallway until we reach a narrow metal door, just feet from where we gather every Sunday.

  “Everyone’s waiting in the basement.”

  The metal bar shrieks. Harsh lantern light surges across the burgundy carpeted floor.

  My eyes sting. A little warning would have been nice. But still, even the smallest light is welcome right now.

  “Sorry about that,” he says and motions to the steps.

  Woven metallic grates make a hollow clonking sound under my soft deer-hide boots as I navigate the stairs. The thin pipe handrail wobbles back and forth to match the twisted, colorful loose wires running along the ceiling.

  Four people sit on black folding chairs in a small, lantern-illuminated semicircle talking quietly amongst themselves. A more than familiar, mousy man with cockeyed glasses and a bandage on his jaw snarls something to a big, burly man in red flannel and overalls.

  My fingers grate against the metal banister. Oh hell no. What the hell is he doing here?

  Chapter Eleven

  Tracker prods me forward, blocking the staircase from behind so I don’t try to run out before Rondo’s chief witch-hunt extraordinaire sees I’m here.

  Farmer Addison waves us over to the empty seats beside him. Compared to Tracker, he’s a relic. His gnarled hands have counted millions of seeds. Pre-Yellowstone and at least thirty years of eternal-winter hothouse soil hide deep under his fingernails and a permanently hunched back.

  A snowy beard conquers his face. Dark-gray eyes highlight the wrinkles on his pale flesh. He rarely speaks but when he does, people listen to his wisdom and heed it. He’s also one of the few to find joy despite the lousy circumstances in this settlement and always greets us with a smile.

  I sit beside him.

  “Well look who it is—back to cause even more trouble with your spells, witch?” Hunter Lawrence adjusts his glasses, making a great show of the bruises I landed on him this morning like he’s the victim.

  A grin almost breaks across my face as I study the blue and purple hues blotting his flesh but I quickly set my lips back in a tense line—I won’t give Hunter the satisfaction of a smile, even if it’s one drawn from his own suffering. Instead, my frigid eyes challenge his.

  “What’s the matter?” He studies an empty chair, lip curling into a wry smirk. “Your little servant boy not here tonight? Bet you enjoyed sacrificing him for this latest spell, didn’t you? That poor ignorant boy. You probably ripped out his heart as an offering for the demon spawn you two have probably made together—”

  “You son of a bitch.” Tracker and Addison grab my arms, the black chair clattering against the floor. “How dare you.”

  “Rags!” Sadie begins to stand but the burly man in flannel takes her hand.

  “Let her go.” Hunter’s wry smirk shows fangs. “I want to see what she’ll conjure.”

  “You wanna see spells?” The grips on my arms tighten, Tracker dragging me back to the chair. “Oh, I’ll give you spells.”

  This time I’ll make sure I do worse than the fountain.

  “You heard her say it.” He points a fat finger at me. “She confessed.”

  “Hunter.” Jericho slams a hand against a stack of cardboard boxes. “This is your first and only warning.”

  “Warn all you want.” He continues to point. “It won’t change the little witch’s ability to summon her master.”

  “I’ll show you summoning.”

  Tracker’s fingers embed into my arm as he grabs the chair and unfolds it again with his foot, slamming its legs against the cement.

  “I’m so scared. What are you going to do, witch?”

  “I’m going to put my foot in your—”

  “All right, that’s enough.” The burly, black-haired man beside Sadie stands up. Frank William’s stark onyx eyes focus on us, no doubt having been filled in about the incident earlier in the day by now. His shoulders, strong from wielding a pickaxe alongside his crew, tower over the mousy man. He looks a little like a big dumb ox with his shaggy black beard and coal-dusted flannel shirt, but he has a gentle heart.

  My face flushes but I don’t look away.

  “I wouldn’t go near that demon-spawn if I was you. Think about it, Frank,” Hunter scowls. “You really want your baby to fall victim to this witch’s abilities?”

  “Unlike you, we—” he motions to Sadie and back to himself, “don’t believe in this mumbo jumbo magic stuff. Our baby won’t either.”

  “You should. Look around you. You think it’s ‘coincidence’ Hyperion’s best hound shows up? He came for her.”

  Frank crosses his hairy arms. “And it has absolutely nothing to do with Rondo’s past involvement with Hyperion or that we refuse to bow to him?”

  “He was looking right at her. What other proof do you need?”

  “From what I heard, Lawrence,” he offers me a reassuring nod and eyes Hunter, “it’s not her mark he wants to see in the morning.”

  Hunter shrinks a little. “Because of her, your baby will carry a mark like hers.”

  The burly man cracks his knuckles. “How ’bout we see if whatever mark you have is any better.”

  The mousy man cowers, opens his mouth about to say something, but thinks better of it.

  “I figured as much.” He makes a sweeping motion over our group. “Floor’s all yours, Jericho.”

  “Thank you.” He leans on the makeshift cardboar
d pulpit. “As you’re all aware—not one word, Lawrence—the Kingdom Corps got through our defenses.”

  I slouch in the chair, arms crossed. What defenses?

  Everyone in Rondo takes shifts guarding the settlement. I do it. Tracker does it. Matthew did it. We all do our time sitting up in frozen trees and huddled down in snow drifts year-round to prevent the hungry wildlife, rival rustlers, and the Kingdom from taking what little we do have and making life worse. The K. C. should not have gotten even close without the alarm being raised well in advance. Something doesn’t feel right about this.

  I wonder . . . My eyes drift to Hunter in a fleeting glance. Some of his crew should have been coming up on guard duty soon.

  “So, what do we do?” Frank shifts closer to Sadie.

  Jericho drums his fingers over the cardboard.

  “First—” A glare at Hunter. “We stop being childish. Then we find a way to get rid of Hyperion’s little watchdog and reclaim our home.”

  “Easy enough,” Frank says. “We’ll just route them like we’ve routed threats before.”

  Yeah, and evading Henny to keep him away from Rondo in the first place should have worked too, but it didn’t. I look at him. “That won’t work.”

  “Oh, you poor, ignorant thing.” Hunter’s whiny tone grates. “You have no experience in these things, so why don’t you just be a good little witch-child and let the grown-ups talk.”

  “Why don’t you shut the hell up.”

  Sadie sends a disapproving frown my way.

  “Lawrence, Rags.” Jericho rubs his forehead. “If I have to, I will throw you both out.”

  “Sorry.” I tip my chin up at him. “But playing the same old tricks isn’t going to scare them off. This is bigger than wildlife and rivals. Turning the same tricks won’t work with so many of them.”

  That’s what makes us rustlers so dangerous to Hyperion’s forces. Whereas Hydra’s rustlers usually get caught because they play the same tricks and underestimate the military crackdown on the deadly and illegal practice, we scrape by because we figure out the razor-wire puzzles and bend the rules to our advantage. Now that the K. C. is in town, they’ll be studying our moves and comparing them to what they already know from Hydra.