The Bones of the Earth

by Rachel Dunne

  The first one to speak was the old man, the one Joros’d wanted her to kill more’n any other. He held the torch, and even if she hadn’t already known he was the head black-robe, everything about him said “packhead.” “Tell me your name, child.”

  “I’m not a child,” Rora croaked at him, even knowing it was something a kid would say.

  “As you say. Your name?”

  “Tare,” she said, because it was the first name she thought of that wasn’t her own.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you not to lie?”

  “Never had a mother.”

  Another old black-robe stepped forward, the pits of her eyes new-made and crusted with pus. “Where is your brother?”

  “Never had one of those either.” The light, small as it was, was making her feel a little braver, or at least a little less scared. “You should just let me go or kill me, ’cause I don’t see this ending any other way.”

  The head black-robe rumbled out a laugh. “Then you’ve a poor imagination, child.”

  He turned away from her, him with the torch held above his head, and the rest of ’em turned, too. The shadows crept back in, starting at the edges of her cell but creeping fast, near ready to swallow her up. “Wait!” She didn’t mean to call out, wouldn’t’ve if she’d thought about it, but the word exploded out of her as the light took her little bit of bravery away with it. One of ’em stopped, a woman, the holes in her face staring at Rora as the torch kept going, pulling the shadows behind it. Rora held her breath, staring back at the eyeless woman until the light was gone, and there was no telling if she was alone or if the black-robe had turned and gone up the tunnel, too . . . In the cold and the quiet and the dark, she could pretend the chattering of her teeth was just from the cold.

  If there’d been any light, she could’ve waited it out, knowing her eyes’d adjust eventually, knowing she’d be able to see if there was a darker shape in all the dark, if the woman was still there. But there wasn’t any light, and her eyes wouldn’t ever be able to see through that kind of dark. So she waited long as she could, but her voice burst out of her again: “What d’you want?” She managed to keep her voice low so it wouldn’t crack, made it a little like a snarl so it sounded less scared. Then she held her breath, to see if there was anyone there to answer.

  A light swelled like a stick just catching fire, slow and growing, not enough to make her eyes burn like the torch, but still plenty enough to surprise her. The light kept growing, brightening the cell piece by piece—showing the hand the fire was sitting in and boiling black smoke, sending light crawling up the black-robed woman’s face and making dark pits out of her empty eyes. She was right at the bars, her face boxed in by the metal, her arm on Rora’s side of the cell as she held the glowing, strange fire. Rora shrank back from her, shrank back from the black smoke sneaking across the floor toward her feet. “I want you,” the woman said, and a small smile touched her lips. “I am the shadows, and I know your name. Rora.”

  Instinct put Rora’s hand to her belt, grabbing for any of the daggers that weren’t there. Her heart was flying around in her chest, and there was a rushing in her ears that sounded like To the ends of the earth . . .

  “Oh, don’t worry.” The woman was whispering, but her voice still cut through Rora. “Your secrets are safe with me. A shadow can hide so very much.”

  “Who are you?” Rora demanded, and it did come out shaking this time.

  “I am Neira. My name, freely given. We are not the enemy, Rora—or, at least, not all of us are. You, of all people, should know that a shadow is a thief’s finest friend.”

  “I’m not a thief.” It was the only one of those she could think to answer, and the lie came easy—any good thief learned early on you had to be able to say that with a straight face.

  “No?” Neira’s other hand stuck through the bars, and in her weird hand-light, Rora could see she was holding a dagger, Rora’s dagger, the one with the big broken gem in its hilt. There was fresh blood along the edge of the blade, shining like a line of jewels.

  It’d been so long ago that Rora’d stopped thinking of it as stolen; the dagger’d been hers near as far back as her memory went, or at least as far back as she wanted to remember things. But she supposed she had stolen it, taken it after she’d pushed it into a man’s heart. Her first kill, her first dagger, her first taste of what power and fear and blood could do. She thought about leaping forward, grabbing for the dagger, wrapping her fingers around the blade if she had to . . . but she didn’t really want to move, or maybe couldn’t. Sometimes those were the same thing.

  “What was his name.” It wasn’t a question; it was just like a hand in the middle of your back, pushing you through a crowd.

  Near whispering, too, she said back, “Nadaro.”

  “Just so. Remember the shadows, Rora.”

  A big shiver rolled through Rora, the cold shaking her and ripping her eyes away from the empty holes in Neira’s face. She’d forgot about the black smoke boiling out of Neira’s hand, creeping across the floor of the cell and snaking around Rora’s ankles . . . she’d forgot about it, and in the time she hadn’t been looking at it, it’d started snaking up her body—over her hands and up her arms, around and around her chest, circling around her throat, crawling over her face, between her lips, sneaking careful down her throat—

  Rora lashed out, even though there wasn’t much you could do to fight against smoke, scrambled up to her feet spitting like smoke was something you could spit out. Neira was just watching her, her hands steady holding the weird flame, holding Rora’s stolen dagger. Rora was careful not to look at her empty eyes, stared at the woman’s chin instead. “What are you?” she asked.

  Neira smiled, all sad innocence. “I am the shadows. I am the unsleeping dark, and I know your name.” Her head tilted to the side, the pits of her eyes staring at Rora, and Rora had to keep herself from staring back, from getting lost again. “I think we will meet again, Rora, sister of Aro. I hope you will remember how far a shadow can stretch.” Neira closed her fingers, and the light died a sudden death.

  Rora held her breath again, didn’t start breathing until she heard footsteps moving away, gone. She slid slowly back down to the floor, feeling only the cold, no smoke twisting over her skin. She pressed one hand against her throat, wondering if she’d feel the smoke there, or if it’d already worked its way to her stomach or lungs, or if she’d just imagined it all . . .

  It seemed like more time had passed than it actually had, probably because her heart had done more thumping in the last few minutes than it had in the hour before. But she remembered one of the black-robes setting a basket inside the bars, and even if her stomach was full of smoke, it didn’t seem like smoke did a lot to stop the hungry twisting in her belly. Trapped in a cell, there were more important things to think about than one of the crazies in this mad place.

  She crawled along the floor, her hands and knees gone so numb she didn’t feel the cold, or the press of stone. Her head bumped into the cell bars first, and then she groped around until her bloodless hands bumped against the water jug. It tipped over with a sound like glass breaking in another room, but it was just ice snapping as the water flooded over the floor. She lost most of it, and what she did drink sat in her belly like a lump and really did make her shiver, so hard it made her muscles hurt. The basket held some bread and some cheese hard enough she could barely bite into it, but it wasn’t frozen, and that was enough to make her insides feel a little warmer.

  Next thing she did was piss into the empty water jug, which was no easy thing in the dark, but it was better than dirtying a corner when she didn’t know how long she’d be stuck in the cell. That was what she set out to fix after that, though—getting out.

  They’d put a cloth napkin in the food basket, which was nice of them, but stupid. She wrapped it around one of her hands, the right one that’d never been as good since she’d broken the arm as a kid. When it came down to it, she’d rather save her
left hand, the good hand. She stuck her wrapped-up hand through the cell bars, groped around with it. All the movement’d started to warm her hands up some, made her skin prickle with the blood rushing back, but her hand froze right back up again the longer she held it against the bars. Felt as useful as a dead fish at the end of her arm. Finally she thumped it against something wider than an iron bar, and she knew she was probably lying to herself, but she thought her numb fingers felt the shape of a keyhole.

  After that she spent a long while breathing on her hands and sticking them under her arms—anything to get ’em warm again, so she could actually make her fingers move. It hurt like a bloody hell when they warmed up, and Tare’d been right when she’d said Rora was a baby about pain, but there was nothing else in the cold and dark and lonely to do besides wait until she could make a fist and straighten her fingers back out, each little movement like a hundred needles.

  She started ripping up the basket, which was made of wove-together rope but came apart easy enough. She got a few good pieces of it, a mix of long and short and thin and fat, trusting her fingers on the sizes. She dipped each of ’em into the piss-jug, letting ’em soak for a bit before she laid them out on the ground. Then it was more warming her hands up while she waited until the piss had frozen the rope into straight, hard pieces. She wrapped her hand with the napkin, the left hand this time, leaving enough of her fingers out that they could move easy enough. Then she took her makeshift lock picks to the cell door.

  It didn’t work great, and not only because Rora’d never been great with picks. Even though her hand felt half-froze, there was enough warmth in her fingers to start to melt the frozen piss in the rope-pieces, making them go all soggy and useless as she was jamming ’em into the keyhole. A good pick was a lot more than something hard to poke a lock with, and she didn’t really expect it’d work, but it felt better than doing nothing.

  She tried it a few more times, soaking and freezing and picking and unfreezing, but it didn’t do much good. When she saw light start to touch the floor of the tunnel, sending the shadows slinking back, she quickly hid her rope-pieces against one of the corners—they might be useless so far, but she wasn’t the kind of person to give anything up.

  She waited near the bars until the torch appeared, with the black-robes under it. Neira wasn’t there this time, which Rora counted a blessing. But there were two extra people this time, and they shook her, a little, once the light-tears cleared from her eyes enough to let her really see them. She’d never seen twins before, save looking at herself and Aro in dirty canal water.

  “She looks like you,” the girl sneered to her brother, and even though Rora’s short hair made her look more like a boy, she didn’t really think she looked like either of ’em. These twins looked pretty young, a handful or so years younger’n Rora, probably, and they had the soft faces of kids who ate pretty well and got cleaned often and always slept long enough. Those kinds of things put less of an edge on a face, and Rora knew hers had plenty of edges.

  “She looks like herself,” the boy said softly. Seemed like he was careful to keep his voice a whisper in such a quiet place. His face looked young enough, but there was more age in his eyes than in near anyone else she’d ever seen. It was like the head black-robe, old as he was, had cut out his own eyes and stuck ’em on the boy’s face.

  “You see,” the old man said, the torch above his head making dark pits in his face, “that there are more choices than leaving or death.”

  “If it’s a choice,” Rora said, “I’ll take leaving, thanks.”

  “You can choose to bend,” the head black-robe said, “or to break.”

  The boy was staring at Rora, and his gaze made her skin crawl for no reason she could name. Still quiet, he said, “She won’t bend, not ever.”

  “Then she’ll break. Such is the way of things. You’ll want to watch her, Etarro. You’ll see that fighting only puts you in a worse position at the end.”

  Rora snorted. “Etarro, yeah? Watch who you trust instead.” She thought of the witch, how he’d practically told her not to trust him and she’d just ignored that good advice. “You can’t trust anyone but yourself.”

  The boy blinked at her. “Not even your twin?”

  She thought of sweet, simple Aro, and blinked back at the boy. “No one but yourself.”

  “Where is your brother?” the black-robe interrupted.

  Like she would just tell him that kind of thing. “Why don’t you tell me where that lying traitor is?” Rora demanded. Let him think she’d trade Aro’s life for Anddyr’s. She wouldn’t mind if the black-robes brought the witch down to parade in front of her—she could probably reach through the bars and get her hands around his neck. At the least, swearing at the witch would make her feel better.

  The head black-robe raised his eyebrows, which looked all sorts of creepy with no eyes under them. “You’ve fought? Have you parted ways?” His hands reached out and, even without eyes, he rested them perfectly on the little twins’ shoulders. “It doesn’t do for twins to be separated.”

  She was careful not to let anything show on her face when she realized the black-robe thought she’d been talking about her brother when she’d said “lying bastard.” One of the things Rora could do best was keep a straight face. Back in the knifeden, what felt like a whole life ago now, no one’d ever liked to play cards with her because—she guessed—it was hard to play against someone you couldn’t read. “Better that he’s not here,” she said.

  The boy, Etarro, tilted his head at her, and she got that crawling feeling again. His eyes, whole and blue, were almost worse than the empty eye sockets of the black-robes. “He’s hiding,” the boy said. “Hidden is better. He doesn’t blame you for not trusting him. You should listen to him, though, when he finds you.”

  Rora was watching him close enough that, even in the little light, she saw the old black-robe’s hand tighten on the boy’s shoulder, saw him wince. “You shouldn’t waste your words on her, Etarro. She’s not worthy of them. Not yet.”

  The boy’s words’d put a shudder in Rora, because she was pretty sure she remembered the last person who’d spoken about hiding, and it hadn’t been Aro. Still, she didn’t let the boy or the black-robe see that those words had had any effect on her. She threw on bravado like armor. “So you keep pet twins, hey?” she asked the head black-robe, and she spat onto the floor. It froze right away. “How well have you trained ’em? They know any tricks?”

  The girl bared her teeth at Rora, was stupid enough to step close to the bars. “Let me in there and I’ll show her a trick.”

  “You mustn’t let yourself anger so easily. The weak will always try to twist the minds of the strong.”

  Rora laughed at that. “You know he’s just using you, don’t you?” The girl snarled, so Rora turned to the boy. “You’re a tool to him, that’s all. How long, you think, before he decides he doesn’t need you anymore?” The boy just blinked at her with his too-old eyes. “Bet that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? A replacement for when the two of you aren’t so useful anymore.”

  That was when the rest of the black-robes herded the twins away, leaving only the head black-robe. “Tell me where your brother is,” he said.

  “Not likely.”

  One of the black-robes had left a basket near the old man’s feet, a basket like the one Rora’d tore up, only bigger. He reached down into it and pulled up a heavy quilt, so thick and warm-looking it made Rora feel the cold all over again. “Tell me where your brother is.”

  “You think I’d trade him for a blanket?” she scoffed.

  The head black-robe shrugged. “I think, in time, you’ll realize being somewhere warm with him is better than freezing to death alone.” He shook the blanket at her. “I spoke to you of options. You’ve seen now that you’re not my only option—you would merely be a convenience. I do not need you. Tell me where your brother is, and I vow you’ll both be kept in comfort and health.”

  Rora’d had her sh
are of promises made and broken, and she wasn’t stupid enough to let in another promise that just begged for breaking. So she stayed quiet, glaring out at the black-robe, and let the silence stretch and stretch. It’d bend, or it’d break.

  The quilt slipped from the black-robe’s hand, making a heavy puddle on the floor. “Freeze, then.” He turned, leaving the blanket well out of arm’s reach, and he took his torch and left her again, to the cold and dark and quiet.

  She still tried to get the quilt, even knowing it was out of reach, pressing the folded napkin between her face and the metal bars as she swept her fingers out along the floor. She tried until the cold bars put a bone-deep ache into her shoulder, and after she gave up she just sat for a while and tried not to think too much about freezing.

  She was in the middle of jabbing her rope-pieces into the lock again when she heard a sound. It was soft, but in the ghost-quiet dungeon, any noise was loud. She went still, listening hard as the sound kept on going, a scraping like dragging a body over the ground, and her heartbeat was near loud enough to drown it out.

  Rora scooted slowly back to the far wall of her cell, and all the while the scraping kept going, kept getting louder and closer. Whatever it was, maybe it could be scared off . . . She let out the loudest yell she could, wordless and made half of fear, but it was sudden and loud and she near scared the piss out of herself with it. There was a yelp, a scrabble, a thump, and then only the sound of breathing—not running away, not leaving. Something that got scared, but was too stupid to run from fear.

  “Who’s there?” Rora demanded, ’cause animals usually had more sense than people.