by Rachel Dunne
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
They stopped when the sun fell out of the sky. Vatri’s loose fingers tugging on Scal’s, halting his churning legs. Her fingers were tight around his, painful, as they watched the sun swallowed piece by piece. Watched, helpless, as the world went dark around them.
He glanced at her face, and her jaw was hard. Her eyes fierce and bright. There was no fear in her face as the sunlight left it. Grief, yes, but only faint traces of it. Mostly, there was determination.
The sun left, piece by piece, but Scal and Vatri were left standing in a pool of light.
She held his fingers tightly, but the fingers of his other hand were wrapped just as tight around his sword, pointed downward. He did not want to look down. Did not want to have to face, finally, the thing he could not understand. He made himself look, to see his fingers clinging tight to the leather-bound hilt. To see the long blade, slightly curved, with fire licking along the blade. Its light a steady crackle, not devouring, not consuming. It simply was, and the longer he stared, the more a song seemed to glow at its heart. A song of justice and of revenge, a song of retribution, and of fear, too . . . a song of blood . . .
Scal’s fingers came open slow, stiff. The sword fell, and the fire faded from its blade sudden as waking from a nightmare. His hand felt heavy and cold where he had held it. He flexed his fingers, open and closed and open, and his skin was not burned. Was callused and rough as old leather, no different than it had ever looked.
Vatri’s fingers loosed from his other hand. He turned and found her facing him, head tilted back to meet his eyes, shoulders tight. There, in the sudden daylight dark, with only the faint-ember stars to shine upon her face, she said, “Ask.” Her jaw was tight, and her eyes were fierce, but beyond the fierceness he thought he saw the whisper-light touches of fear.
He closed his fingers, felt the dull distant bite of his nails into his palm. She had drawn sigils on his palms with fire-ash, and she had pointed him into the roaring fire. He turned to face her, his fists held between their still bodies. “You did this?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have that sort of power. You know that.”
“You made this happen,” he tried instead.
“You asked me.” There was a sharp note in her voice. A low-lurking anger. Defensiveness. “You asked me to shape you. You said you trusted me.”
“I did. I do.” Scal opened both palms to her, perfectly matched, though the one had held a sword of fire for long hours. “But I do not understand.”
She bent down, hands sure in the darkness. When she stood, she held the sword between them, hilt loose in her fingers, held toward him. In her hand, it was a simple sword, hard steel and bright with starlight glow, but there was no fire to it. She looked away, to the dark empty place where the sun had hung only moments ago. “Take it,” she said softly, without meeting his eyes.
It made him uneasy, but Scal did. His fingers brushed hers, touched leather, and the fire sprang between them, shining along the blade like rippling water. On the other side of the blade, the fire echoed bright in her eyes. Her face was a sudden mask, and an awful thing to see. Inhuman, with fires in her eyes.
Her fingers slipped from under his, and it left his hand cold, though the fire burned bright above it.
“Now with the left hand,” she said. Scal passed the sword into his other hand, and the fire quenched—replaced, just as sudden, with a sheen of ice and spines like crystals, short but sharp as knives themselves.
Scal dropped the sword, and the ice was gone before it touched the ground. He stared again at his palms. They looked no different. Skin over flesh over bones. He closed his fingers over them. “I do not understand,” he said again.
“You saw the swordsmen the Fallen have. ‘Blades for the darkness,’ they’re called. Not quite enough of them to be a true army, but they have a good fighting force, and now that the Long Night has come, they’ll be passing their own judgments alongside the Twins’. I think the Parents deserve at least one sword.”
Scal clenched his fists tighter, stared at his bared wrists. His jaw was tight when he looked up at Vatri. He could see, almost, why Joros had grown so frustrated with her. “Speak plainly.”
She made a sharp sigh, and spread her own hands. “How can I? This is . . .” She ran a hand through her hair, brought it down to thump against her leg. Stared into the dark sky once more. Her eyes now were less fiery, more troubled. More human. “I told you before that I was godmarked. Called at birth to serve the Parents, and I always have. Everything I do is to serve them. My life is a clear path, my choices drawn like a map. I know to my bones who I am.” She looked up to his eyes, and hers were at once sad and fierce. “But you. It’s like you were put together by a blind man at a loom. You’re a dozen different colors of thread, and none of them match, and there are big empty spaces of nothing with no clue how to blend the mismatching pieces together. You asked me to shape you.” Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, bright and distant as stars. “I’m not a weaver, or a shaper. All I know is doing what I’m told. This—” she gestured at Scal in a way that covered the sum of who he was “—is what I was told to do.”
He had been many things in his many lives. Each of them had had a name, a purpose. A reason. They had all fit poorly as a small glove, but at least he had known what to name himself. “What am I, then?”
“You are fire. You are ice. You are a blade for the light. A sword to fight back the Long Night.”
Scal opened his fingers, closed them again. He could not think of the right words. He could only ask, “Why?”
Vatri made an impatient noise. “Why what?”
“Why . . .” He showed her his palms, waved one at the sword lying in the grass. “Why . . . me? Why was I chosen for this?”
She shook her head at him. “No one is ever chosen. You merely are, and all the things that make you you have shaped you into a tool that fits within the hand of a god. You asked me to shape you, but . . . that’s not something I can do. Not something anyone can do. You shape you. You are nothing more than what you’ve made yourself, and nothing less.”
There was a place in Scal that had been empty for most of his lives. An aching hollow, filled by slow drops, and they leaked away as easily as a pierced waterskin. The empty echo rang through him, full of a priest’s smile and a snowbear’s smile, an everflame and an ice-shelf, lonely steps and lonely sleeps, and blood, always blood.
He had wanted to be more than he had been. Wanted to be better.
“Scal.”
She drew his eyes back up. Her face was still tight, tense, closed and dark as the sky. The tears touched her eyes, but the fire did, too, the distant fire that glowed within her. Her lips trembled, and then they flattened. “You’re not alone,” she said. “I’m not leaving you this time.” She did not reach out to him, did not reach across the yawning distance of the space between them. Her eyes were sad and they were fierce, and she stood straight and still as a mountain peak.
He wanted to reach across that space, to touch her and make the distance between them vanish. But there was fire in his hands, and there was ice, and the familiar peaks and valleys of her face had become a mask.
Shape me, he had asked her. She had only done what she could. Nothing more, and nothing less. It had not been how he would have wanted . . . but then, it never was.
He bent down, and in the darkness his fingers found the leather-wrapped hilt. Raised the sword, fire-flickering, to his side. Though it touched the grass, brushed against countless stalks as he raised it, the grass did not burn. The blade sang to him again, its song of glory and retribution and blood, and he let the song hold him. It lit the world around them, made a new small sun upon the earth, and he stared at Vatri in its dancing light. She stared back, and the fire was in her eyes. There was more in her, beyond the singing flames. Words that would fill the space between them, words like a rock slide that would make a bridge, a path. So many things she could have said. Held back, o
r trapped. Words unspoken, lost among the plains and the fire.
Scal walked forward, and Vatri walked at his side, but the space stretched between their swinging arms. The sword led them, its fire-glow piercing through the Long Night, and its blood-song sang sad and steady through his veins.
About the Author
Living in the cold reaches of the upper Midwest with her beast of a dog, RACHEL DUNNE has developed a great fondness for indoor activities. In the Shadow of the Gods, her first novel, was a semifinalist for the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award before being picked up for publishing. For as long as snow continues falling in Wisconsin, she promises to keep writing.
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Also by Rachel Dunne
In the Shadow of the Gods
Credits
Cover design and photo illustration by Tony Mauro
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BONES OF THE EARTH. Copyright © 2017 by Rachel Dunne. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition June 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-242817-2
ISBN 978-0-06-242816-5
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