The Bones of the Earth

by Rachel Dunne

  Scal struck the steel down at his flint. Missed, and bruised some of his fingers. Tried again and hit, sparks leaping into the air, dying fast. Modatho gasped, and Scal heard him scrabbling on the ground. Another try and the cloth caught an ember, glowing, precious. Scal dropped the steel, a loud sound in the quiet space, and his fingers searched quickly for the tinder. He brought the two together, spark and tinder, folded them carefully together, and gave them his breath. A slow, angry flare of red with each blown breath, the ember stubborn. It caught, finally, in a rush, flame swallowing quickly the food it had been offered. Modatho lurched into the sudden light, eyes wide, a candle thrust forward. Their shaking hands met, flame to wick, and when Scal dropped the tinder to the floor to save his fingers, the candle held.

  “Thank you,” Modatho whispered, staring at the flame like a man starved. In the faint light, Scal searched the floor for another candle, lit it from Modatho’s. Found a corner to put his back to, tried to make the thump of his heart calmer. Listened. It was quiet in the cellar, the world shut out. Or silenced already.

  They did not sleep. Did not speak. Sat through the silence as the candles and their fear ate up the air in the room. Scal wished to be doing anything, wished for a blade in his hand, and hated himself for it. When he thought of facing a Northman, that wish quailed. He hated himself for that as well. He had hated his fourth life, hated the man he had been. At least, though, he had known himself. Known how to think, how to act, how to feel. He knew nothing about the man he now was.

  There were footsteps above like thunder, and they set Scal’s blood pounding. He did not know if it was with thrill or with fear. Voices, speaking words he could not hear though he understood the sound of them. A laugh, like a bear’s. Clattering, and more thunder, and then more silence.

  Time passed slow as dripping wax. Slow as learning to breathe normally once more.

  “We should . . .” Modatho’s voice was a croak, sneaking into the silence like a rabbit fearing the wolf. “We should . . . go see.”

  Scal met his eyes across their candles. He was right. “Unchain me,” Scal said quietly. He was half sure he would find his death out there. He would like to die a free man at least. Modatho did not answer right away. Finally he reached within his cassock, pulled out the heavy key. It landed loud at Scal’s side. Soon the manacles took its place, the chain coiling in a whisper. Some little bit of the fear fell away with the iron.

  Scal left first. The ladder complained under his weight, but it held. He pushed the door up by slow measures. Enough to listen through. Enough to peek through. Enough to see through. Enough to climb through.

  It was no louder without than it had been within the cellar. Quieter, even, without shallow breaths echoing. The chapel was a ruin, the door hanging from one hinge, silently shuddering. Powerless against the cold blowing wind. Tables turned, herbs and bowls scattered, the floor torn open where Modatho had thought Scal did not see he hid away precious coins. In the center of the room, the everflame bowl lay upside down, its stand broken. Its flame extinguished. In the corner where Scal’s sword had leaned, and his knives—nothing. That did not hurt so much as the dead everflame. He walked carefully through the ransacked chapel. As though ungentle feet would do more damage than had already been done. Out through the hanging, swinging door.

  Outside . . . outside he was a boy again. The streets ran red. The bodies lay scattered. Limbs torn. Wardens and convicts alike, no discretion. Occasionally, the white fletching of an arrow bright against darkening blood. Carrion birds already gathering for the feast. No different than when he was a boy, save that he did not feel anger now. Only fear.

  Modatho prayed and wept, and Scal left him to it. He needed to be gone from this place. He walked carefully through the streets. Stepping over bodies, around blood. Still his breeches soaked red halfway to the knee. He reached the gate, opened wide, and all the North spread out before him. White and open. Clean.

  He ran. Legs churning, feet catching on ice and roots, falling. Rising again, and running. He did not think he would ever stop. He hoped the snows would take him. Perhaps they would not give him another life and he could finally, finally, stop.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rora hadn’t expected it to feel like coming home. She’d never hated Mercetta, but she’d never loved the city either—it was just the only place she’d lived, until she’d had to run from it. But the familiar streets, the buildings all crowded together, the reek of fish from the East Market, the hard-eyed sneers that passed for greetings—it put a strange feeling in her chest. She could tell Aro felt it, too. He was smiling, which was something she hadn’t seen in too long. He’d never said anything when she’d dragged him out of the city, but she knew if it’d been up to him, they wouldn’t’ve ever left. He might’ve told Joros about the Canals just for a reason to come back.

  She almost ducked down an alley at the first brown-coated city guard they saw, until she remembered she looked respectable enough that she fit right in with the East Quarter crowd, and anyway, ducking into alleys wasn’t so easy on horseback. Aro got twitchy about it, too, but he was more used than she was to moving around topside like a real person. Part of what he’d done for the Dogshead was pretending not to be Scum, and he’d got good enough at it. He was leading them to a tavern, a place he’d been to plenty on Dogshead’s business.

  Rora’d been careful not to talk to Aro about it, but she hoped he had the same plan she did. They’d leave Joros and his witch and the merra in the tavern, saying they were going off to find muscle, and then they could disappear. Rora’d even stay in Mercetta, if that’s what Aro wanted; they could take up with a different pack for protection, or maybe they could try to be respectable people with all the coin they had from Joros. Rora didn’t know the first thing about being respectable, but she’d try her hand at that sooner than going back to Whitedog Pack. In the Canals, you could get killed for a lot less than abandoning your pack. Rora wasn’t about to test her luck, and since Joros was set on them getting their “old friends” to be his new muscle, the only choice they had was to leave him.

  The tavern was a big place, just before the market square really started. There was a hanging sign out front with letters on it she couldn’t read, but it had a picture of a spitted boar. She could bet merchants filled the place up after market, buying each other drinks with the money they’d fleeced off honest folk. Halfway between midday and sundown, the place looked pretty empty.

  A few stableboys took their horses, all being very careful not to look at the merra’s burned face. Joros, looking pretty happy that his own burned-but-healing face wasn’t getting any notice next to the merra’s, threw the stableboys a few copper sests each, and they caught the coins well enough even with their hands full of reins. It almost made Rora smile. Kids anywhere weren’t much different’n pups, who were just kids with some skills and some Scum to back ’em up.

  “Right,” she said, turning to Joros. “We’ll go see who we can dig up, and meet you back here. Second bell after sundown?”

  Joros nodded, and there was something in his face she didn’t like. “If you’re sure that’s enough time. We wouldn’t want to rush you. I’m sure Aro and I can find plenty of conversation to fill the time.”

  Rora went cold all over. “Aro’ll be with me. I need him for—”

  “Do you know what ‘collateral’ means, Rora?”

  She didn’t, but she could guess well enough. In her head, she kicked herself for not thinking that Joros’d guess their plan. Aro looked as sick as she felt, but he had the easy end of this new deal. He didn’t have to go face the pack that’d view ’em as traitors.

  “Right,” she said again, harder. “Then I’ll be back at sunup.”

  Joros smiled, a tight thing that pulled weird at the burned side of his face, and it made her want to hit something. Instead she leaned down and tugged off her boots; they were well-made, and she wanted to wear them again without the canal-rot getting to ’em. She shoved the boots in
to Joros’s arms, making his smug look turn to a surprised one, and covered that up with the heavy white bear cloak. He came out of the fur sputtering, just in time for Rora to throw her tunic at him, too. It was nice and clean enough that it’d be like asking to get robbed. Her loose shirt kept her daggers covered, and her coinpurse, and that was the important thing. She didn’t say a thing more to any of them, not even Aro, just turned and stalked off. The packed dirt under her toes made it feel like she’d never even left.

  It was strange walking through the crowds of Mercetta in daylight. As a knife, she’d mostly gone topside at night, if she’d had to go topside at all. Walking through all those people with her back straight and her eyes up ahead felt like one of the most unnatural things she’d done in her life, and that counted burning a god’s hand. She even felt fingers reaching for her purse once—a clumsy try, but it just added to feeling like a real person here. That was a dangerous sort of feeling.

  Rora took herself down to South Quarter, where the nice houses of East fell apart to shacks and crumbling old buildings and refuse filling the streets. The people there were refuse, too, hard faces and thin limbs and sharp edges. Rora at least fit in better, with no shoes and the simple shirt and her own face hard as rocks. She ducked into a tavern, one that didn’t make an effort at writing out its name, just a slab of wood with a rough painting of a black knife on it. She sat near the middle of the room and drank slow from a chipped mug, and listened to the news of the low city flow around her. It wasn’t too heartening.

  Sounded like the Blackhands’d gotten the war they’d been looking for, and it’d even started to boil up from the Canals into the city proper. Folk didn’t go out after dark, not unless they wanted their bodies to send a message when the sun came up. The businesses that scraped by in South were getting looted or burned if they sold to the wrong customers, and a lot of ’em had stopped selling at all, scared they couldn’t tell the wrong people from the right people. No one topside knew what things looked like down in the Canals—they never did—but most guesses were pretty grim. Knowing the Canals and the Scum as she did, Rora thought even the darkest guess she heard was probably putting a heavy shine on the truth.

  When she’d heard all she cared to, sat still for as long as she could stand it, Rora went back out to the streets. She chose her place carefully, twisting through foul-smelling alleys until she found an old sewer grate, half-covered by trash. She hadn’t seen anyone watching, but she made the hand signs for “pack” and “safe” and “help,” just in case. The grate was heavy, but it slid away from its grooves, showing a pit dark as a cloudy night.

  Shit choices, but there was some shit you could stand, and some you couldn’t. Rora sat at the edge of the hole and found the footholds, slid down into darkness, and pulled the grate back over above her head. The sound of it settling back echoed down the hole, setting her teeth on edge.

  She’d taken this path down to the Canals more times than she could count, and dozens of others like it through her life as a pup and a knife, but it felt different this time. She felt like she was trespassing—like she didn’t belong here anymore.

  No one was waiting for her at the bottom, which made her think maybe the hand signs’d worked; just in case, she made them again, for if there was anyone hiding in the shadows weighing how easy a target she looked. The paths were familiar, faded white smudges that maybe looked like dogs dotting the walls. She kept making the signs as she walked, “pack” and “safe” and “help.” No one came to stop her, and that was wrong. Even when she’d been a knife, one of the eyes would’ve come forward by now, just to make sure she really was herself. Now, she was as good as a stranger, and still no one stopped her.

  She stepped around the corner into Whitedog Den, the place where the pack lived and cooked and slept, and it was empty. Not a body, not a breath. A big open space, and not a sign that anyone’d ever lived there except the dogs chalked onto the walls.

  Rora’s footsteps were louder than the water whispering through the canal to her left as she walked through the Den, bare feet loud on the muddy ground. Her fingers found her dagger, her first one, the one with the smashed blue stone on its hilt. She held it down at her side, even though it didn’t do anything to stop the quick thumping of her heart.

  A while back, when she’d still been a knife and Aro’d still been as close to the Dogshead as a son, Rora’d sat whispering with her brother, sharing fears. “I don’t know why the Blackhands have decided we’re their worst enemies,” Aro’d said, eyes honest and voice scared, “but if it comes to a war . . . Rora, I’m not sure we’d win.”

  At the far end of the Den, a spike was driven into the ground, set before the way that led deep into the pack’s territory. There’d always been a dog’s head stuck on top of that spike, just to remind anyone who got close enough where they were and that Whitedogs were as bloody bastards as the rest of the Scum. The head was down to a skull now, just a few strips of old flesh that rats hadn’t gotten to yet. It hadn’t been changed in a long while.

  Rora stepped around it, palm slippery with sweat around the hilt of her dagger. She didn’t bother making the hand signs anymore. It was all she could do to keep walking, to keep her feet from breaking into a run. She didn’t even know which way she’d run, whether she’d race forward looking for whatever was left of her pack or if she’d run back, run away so she didn’t have to know what’d happened. She just kept on going, step by step, and the dagger shook at her side.

  Her feet knew the way; she’d walked it hundreds and hundreds of times. The second left, with the canal water splashing up against her ankles, and the next right, footsteps echoing on the brick that made up this stretch of floor, and then a long walk down a hall with high walls, feeling like they were crushing her in so she couldn’t breathe. The chamber at the hall’s end was a circle, three other paths leading off it, and the left one would take her to the Dogshead’s chamber. She stood in the center of the circle room, her heartbeat and her breath both too loud, and she almost missed it. She would’ve if she’d been any less edgy, but her ears were straining for any sort of sound. She heard the soft footsteps and spun to face the right tunnel, saw a man with a rusty knife rushing toward her. Rora brought up her dagger, scrambled for the other one, shouted, “I’m Whitedog! I’m pack!” Then there was a dagger at her throat, from the person she hadn’t heard behind her, and a hand slapping the screams back into her mouth. Pain shot through her, a shallow fiery line of it across her neck, and panic chased after the pain.

  “So the bird’s come back to its nest, hey?” a voice hissed in her ear. “Where’d you migrate to, Sparrow?”

  Rora went still, not trying to fight against the arms around her anymore. She opened her fingers and let both daggers drop to the ground with loud clatters, held up her hands so her attackers could see they were empty. The man who’d rushed at her from the right hall sneered, leaned down to scoop up her daggers. She knew his face, but couldn’t think up his name. He was Whitedog; at least she knew that much. Or he’d at least been Whitedog last time she’d seen him.

  There were others, footsteps moving over stone, low voices, flickers at the edges of her eyes, but the knife to her throat didn’t give Rora much room for looking around. The pressure of the blade disappeared suddenly from her throat, and the arms let her go—but her own arms were grabbed real quick, two sets of hands holding hard enough it felt like they meant to crush her bones through her skin. The one who’d been holding her stepped around the two bruisers now doing that job, stepped into Rora’s sight.

  “Tare,” Rora gasped, half relief and half terror.

  “In the flesh,” Tare said with a mocking smirk Rora knew so well, but there was none of the usual warmth in her voice. “Despite all efforts.”

  “You have to let me explain—”

  “Oh, you’ll explain plenty,” Tare interrupted. She held her dagger out to the side, let its edge flash. Rora’s blood was on the other edge, where it’d pressed against her n
eck. “You’ll tell me everything.”

  Rora’s heart was beating like a bird at the bars of its cage, and a choking sob jumped out of her mouth. “Tare, it’s not—”

  “Shut up,” Tare said, and one of the fists holding Rora let go of her arm for a second to thump his knuckles into the side of her head. It left Rora’s eyes fuzzy and her thoughts spinning like seedpods in a wind. The fists started marching forward, and Rora couldn’t get her feet working in time. They held her up by her arms, her bare feet dragging along the ground, leaving behind the skin off the tops. A few times she tried to get her feet under herself to walk, but it seemed like the fists were making sure she couldn’t.

  She knew the way they were taking her, down the left hall from the circle chamber, over a careful bridge, a quick right, pausing before a door. The only door in the Canals.

  The waterfall room was loud, water roaring down in a sheet to disappear past the floor. There wasn’t anyone in the room, but Rora’d bet anything the Dogshead was watching from beyond the waterfall. The fists threw Rora down into a chair, tied her arms. They were smart about it, not just tying her wrists behind her, but lashing her forearms to the rungs, too, and tying her ankles to the chair legs for good measure. Rora kept her eyes on Tare, who was leaning against the big desk, studying Rora’s daggers. When the fists had her tied up, they left Rora and Tare alone.

  “Tell me,” Tare said, balancing the point of Rora’s broken-stone dagger on one finger, “why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  Rora was too panicky to think proper, and the thump to the head hadn’t helped, so she blurted the first thing to pop into her head. “It’s a longer story than you want to hear.”