The Bone Palace

by Downum, Amanda

  They startled a few mice and feral cats as they explored the ground floor, and one sleepy owl, but found no other signs of life or unlife. Signs of the previous inhabitants were all around them, though. Beans spilled out of rotted bags in the pantries, and jars of preserves encased in dust lined the shelves. Dishes still littered the kitchen counters, and drawers held crumbling receipts and recipes and lists of stores. The altar in the narrow chapel was spotted with wax, the candles toppled and chewed by rodents. A few tarnished silver sconces still clung to the walls, while others had fallen to reveal cleaner stone beneath. The icons of whatever saints or gods the Sarkens prayed to were darkened and unrecognizable. Moth-eaten clothes and linens filled chests in the servants’ quarters, and hints of lives littered the rooms: a shelf of moldering books; a carven box filled with needles and buttons and an ivory thimble; a pair of shoes heavy with once-bright embroidery, much too fine to be worn for daily chores. Paintings hung in flaking frames, long-faded portraits or hunting scenes.

  The second story was much the same—no corpses, no waiting monsters, but memories thick as cobwebs everywhere. No one spoke as they searched the rooms, and Iancu’s face grew sadder and more strained with each vanished life they found.

  On the next floor a painting watched them as they climbed the stairs. A woman sat in the foreground, white-skinned and sable-haired, with dark eyes and beautiful cheekbones still visible beneath the web of cracks that marred the oils. A man stood behind her chair, one hand on her shoulder. He was tall and lean and well-dressed, but his face was too chipped and shadowed to make out.

  Ferenz III Darvulesti, the tiny plaque read, Margrave of Carnavas, and the Margravine Phaedra.

  “Who are you?” Savedra murmured, raising a hand to the painting and pulling back before she touched the canvas. The frame was grey with dust, but her hands were worse. Her nose had long since closed off in self-defense.

  “Who indeed?” Iancu asked softly, standing beside her. Savedra studied his face for any hint of recognition, but his frown only deepened.

  “Here,” Cahal called. He kindled a lantern and held it aloft. Their own footprints showed stark against the pale drifting dust, but other, fainter prints were visible beneath it. Like tracks in trampled snow clear beneath a fresh fall. Short, narrow feet—a woman or a small man.

  “How old are these?” Savedra asked.

  Cahal shrugged, sending orange light swaying across the walls. “Hard to say.”

  The tracks led down the corridor to a bedroom that must have belonged to the Margrave, and crisscrossed the floor there. Bed hangings pulled free of the great oaken frame, and the lantern cast their shadows like great tattered wings across the walls.

  Savedra and Ashlin tugged back the curtains and pried the shutters open. The windows facing the cliffside were wider than those overlooking the path; anyone who could scale the cliff and the walls deserved to take the castle. The panes were glass—warped, leaded diamonds. A great extravagance, no doubt, whenever Carnavas had first been built.

  Savedra studied the room and the footprints. They led to all the places one might expect in a bedroom: the bed; the wardrobe; the dresser, whose mirror was shattered and turned toward the wall. The dust blanketing the sagging mattress was disturbed as well, as if someone had curled against the pillow. She touched the dimpled cloth, almost expecting some ghost of warmth there. Her fingertips left shadows behind, and she rubbed the silk-soft grime onto her coat. She brushed against the velvet hangings as she turned, and a panel tore free of the bed frame with a snarl. The cloth fell with a muffled whump and a billow of grey. She sneezed until her eyes and nose ran. Her hands were grey as well, and every inch of exposed skin itched.

  Behind the carven doors of the wardrobe she found dresses, rotten as the bed curtains, fur and jeweled trim pulling free of fragile cloth. Dark, striking colors, garnet and crimson and deep forest green, the sort the woman in the portrait would have worn well. A tall woman, with a narrow waist and a bosom that Savedra could only envy. Mostly heavy, tight-laced gowns suitable for mountain weather, with a few looser high-waisted designs hung to one side.

  “Vedra.”

  Ashlin’s voice, unusually soft, distracted her from inspecting the dressing table. The princess stood in the doorway of one of the adjoining rooms. A bathroom, Savedra had assumed, or perhaps a connecting bedroom if the margrave and margravine hadn’t shared a bed.

  Instead she peered around Ashlin’s shoulder into a nursery. The shutters stood open and daylight poured like weak tea over a table and rocking chair, a clothing chest, and a cradle. The faint draft of the door opening sent motes spiraling through the slanting light.

  “They had a child,” Savedra said, soft as a whisper.

  “No.” Again that queer hush in Ashlin’s voice. Her hand twitched toward the blanketless cradle, toward the table and the half-knitted cap there, stitches still on the needles. “They were expecting one.” Fingers clenched, and her fist fell hard against her thigh.

  Savedra’s mouth opened, closed again on the princess’s name. “Sorcha—” Not very convincing, but it drew a humorless laugh from Ashlin.

  “It’s nothing.”

  Savedra caught the other woman’s arm as she strode toward the bedroom; her fingers smeared grey on Ashlin’s sleeve. “It isn’t—”

  “It is.” She twitched her arm free. “Leave it be. It doesn’t matter.”

  Bootheels clacked on stone as she vanished into the hall, leaving Savedra to turn away before Iancu noticed her prickling eyes, or her filthy hands clenching helplessly in her coat pockets. But concern and anger wouldn’t let the matter lie. She blinked her eyes dry and followed, leaving Iancu and Cahal exchanging glances in her wake. Ashlin’s trail was easy to follow; booted footprints led up the stairs, past the fourth story and up again, to an open trapdoor.

  The wind caught at Savedra’s clothes and hair as she stepped onto the tower, belled her coat-skirts and tugged at her loose trousers. Her eyes watered in earnest with the force of it, rinsing away lingering grains of dust. Ashlin stood by the crenellations, silhouetted against the pewter-bright sky. Her arms were crossed tight, cupping her elbows with opposite hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Savedra said after a moment of staring at the princess’s back. She crossed the weathered floor to stand beside Ashlin, the span of a wide stone block between them, and peered over the edge. She regretted it before she truly realized the height, the length of the sheer plunge below. The Ardos¸ unwound like a grey ribbon, something delicate and ornamental, not the murderous icy rush she knew to be the truth. Not, she imagined, that the cold and current would matter by the time you reached them.

  She put her back to the terrible view and sucked a calming breath through her nose. Clean air was a blessing after the stifling must below, even if it numbed her fingers and toes. She gathered her scattered thoughts and raised her voice against the wind. “It’s not my place—”

  That drew Ashlin around like the jerk of a chain. Snowflakes landed on her face and hair, melting to leave cleaner spots in the grime. Her eyes glittered, the green of her irises all the fiercer against bloodshot whites. “Not your place?” She barked a laugh. “To tell me when I’m being a fool, and a termagant besides? If you won’t do that for me I don’t know who will.” Her arms snapped open. “You’re my friend, Vedra. You can say whatever you want to me.

  “And don’t think,” she said, softer now, “that I don’t know your place, or that I’ve taken it from you.”

  Savedra swallowed half a dozen responses, along with a lump in her throat. “If I can tell you not to be a fool, then I’ll do that now.” She closed the distance between them, till the hem of her coat whipped Ashlin’s legs. “I have always known how it had to be with me and Nikos. The only thing I didn’t expect was to care for the woman he married.”

  Ashlin’s smile was wry and lopsided. “I’m glad you do, since we’re alone on a tower.” Her smile twisted and fell away, and she waved the bad joke aside. “I wish
you could have had it, though. The throne, the prince. Children.” Her hand clenched on her belt buckle till her knuckles blanched. “My father could have married off my brother instead of me, if this is the best I can do at bearing heirs.”

  Savedra caught the princess’s hand and eased it away before she could bruise her fingers on metal. “I’m sorry you’re unhappy, but there’s no sense in recriminations.”

  Their fingers twined, cold and grimy, and Ashlin squeezed tight. “It’s not that I’m unhappy.” Her breath hitched, unraveling on the wind. “It’s that—”

  Whatever she might have said was lost as black wings passed close enough to ruffle their hair and a raven alit on the merlon opposite them. Talons scraped rock as it regarded them with one dark, mirror-bright eye.

  “Lady of Ravens,” Ashlin breathed. For all Savedra knew, it was. The bird on the tower was certainly large enough; she hadn’t realized ravens grew so big. Another bird wheeled overhead, its shadow staining the stones.

  “Maybe we should go down,” Savedra said, straining to keep her voice calm. “The last thing I want is bird shit in my hair.”

  “Good idea.” She steered Savedra down the steps first, her hand on her sword until she tugged the trapdoor shut behind them. The hollow thunk chased them down the staircase.

  They found Iancu and Cahal in the library, past the bedroom at the end of the hall. They stood in the center of the room, surveying the disarray around them.

  Books spilled off shelves and tables, lay open on the floor. A lamp had fallen, shards scattered across the once fine carpet. The hearth still overflowed with ashes and a few scraps of withered paper. It was the first true disarray Savedra had seen, the first sign that the inhabitants hadn’t simply vanished amid their daily tasks.

  “There’s more than one set of footprints,” Cahal said, not glancing up from the span of floor he was studying. “It took me a moment to catch it through the dust. They’re nearly the same size.”

  A woman or a small man. A woman and a small man.

  You don’t know, she told herself. You can’t be sure it was Varis. But it was too late for that—wrong or not, she was sure. What had he done here, and why?

  Savedra knelt by the hearth and picked delicately through the ashes, trying to find a clue as to what had been burned. The scraps were too old, though, too faded and filthy to be legible. Most crumbled when her fingers brushed them.

  “What’s missing here?” she asked Iancu, but he wasn’t standing beside her anymore. She turned to find him examining the opposite wall, running his hands over a stretch of wall between two decorative panels.

  “Here,” he murmured. His fingers paused, pressed, and something clicked. One of the panels swung outward with a creak and a silver flurry of shredded cobwebs.

  Savedra closed her mouth before any more dust flew in. “Oh.”

  “Clever,” Ashlin said. She shot a sideways glance at Savedra. “Do we have those?”

  “The palace has spyholes, but no passages that I know of.” She took a step forward, even as the depth of the blackness in the opening prickled her nape. The opening was set high on the wall; an awkward step without a stool. The air that breathed from the black mouth was cool and stale, but a pleasant relief from the stirred dust and ash of the library. “Maybe Nikos will add some.” That careless we would have given the princess away to anyone paying attention, but it warmed her all the same.

  Iancu lit the lamp again. The glow lined the angles of stone stairs and brushed a low curving ceiling. “Shall we?” he asked.

  Savedra caught herself touching the pocket that held the striga coin; she swept her hand in a gesture of invitation instead. “Lead on.”

  Tight spaces had never bothered her, unlike heights, but the chill closeness of the stairway was still oppressive. Her shoulders brushed the sides and she was glad she wasn’t any taller; Iancu stooped like a hunchback.

  The panel at the top of the stairs took a moment of fumbling with, but finally opened to a thin wash of daylight. She hadn’t realized she’d been hoping till her hopes died—the room was a skeleton, bookshelves and tables picked clean. The old woman had mentioned a workroom, and she supposed this might have been that. But no sign of any sorcery remained now, nor any clues.

  This room had the largest window in the castle, a paired casement that swung inward with a screech when Savedra tugged at the latch. Ice stung her face, falling harder now. A rusting balcony lined the outside ledge—nothing that would save anyone from a fall, but wide enough to become yet another home for birds. That was all that Carnavas was home to, it seemed—birds and rats and cats, and if Varis had come here maybe that was all he’d found as well.

  A crimson glitter caught her eye amid the filth and feathers that clung to the railing. She stooped, grimacing as she flicked aside debris to retrieve something that gleamed red and gold.

  She stumbled back at a raucous croak. The giant raven from the tower—or another just as big—wheeled past, so close she smelled the musk of his feathers. She retreated quickly, shoving the window shut behind her.

  “Are all the birds in Sarkany that big?”

  She asked it lightly, but Iancu frowned. “No,” he said. “And I don’t like the look of these.”

  A sharp crack made them all jump. A black shape vanished from the other side of the window as Savedra looked up. The raven. Another shadow wheeled past, and another. Talons struck the glass again.

  “Perhaps we’ve outstayed our welcome.” Iancu said, urging them back into the passage. As the panel swung shut behind them, they heard the sharp whine of splintering glass.

  “Definitely time to go,” Ashlin said, taking Savedra’s arm for the long step back into the library.

  Too late. The library windows burst inward with a howl of wind. Savedra threw up her arm to ward off splinters; it saved her life as a giant raven struck her.

  Talons closed on her forearm and she screamed. She’d felt the force of a falcon landing on a glove—this was worse. She stumbled and fell to one knee, her other hand rising against the blinding storm of air and feathers. Someone else cried out. Steel sang. She scrambled back, groped for a weapon and found a book. Leather and parchment blocked the striking beak that meant to take her eyes. She couldn’t reach her knife.

  Bone and feathers crunched. Blood sprayed hot across her face and hands and the buffeting weight was gone. The bitter gamey taste of it filled her mouth as she sucked in a breath.

  Ashlin stood over her, sword drawn and bloody, equally splattered with red. Her eyes were black and wild. “Out, out!” Savedra read the shape of the words on her lips—she couldn’t hear over the roar of wind and her own heart.

  As she scrambled up she glimpsed the fallen bird, cleaved nearly in half by Ashlin’s blade, and another across the room that Cahal must have slain. Curtains billowed in the draft, and ash thickened the air. Beyond the splintered glass teeth in the window frame, more winged shadows circled. Her boots skidded in moisture as she ran; she didn’t know whose blood it was.

  She felt the door slam shut behind them. After the brightness of sky the dim hall blinded her. When her vision adjusted she saw Cahal and Iancu leaning against the door. Both men were tousled and grime-streaked but seemed unharmed.

  “Are you all right?”

  Savedra hadn’t realized she’d fallen to her knees until Ashlin crouched beside her. She looked down, and regretted it as pain followed her glance. Her right sleeve was shredded and quickly soaking with blood. Her left hand was merely scratched, but stung like a fiercer wound.

  “Shit.” Ashlin glanced down the length of the hall and swore again. “Everything here is filthy.”

  “Here.” Iancu stripped off his coat, baring clean linen beneath. With a slit of his dagger and three sharp tugs, he ripped free one sleeve and passed it to the princess.

  “There are bandages in the packs with the horses,” she said, crouching next to Savedra. “This will do till we reach them.” She tore the ruined sleeve away. Savedr
a closed her eyes against the sight of blood welling from deep claw wounds, and when she opened them again the princess was knotting the makeshift dressing. A drop of red splashed white cloth.

  Not all the blood on Ashlin’s face came from the birds. A talon had gouged a furrow down her temple and onto the curve of her cheekbone. Rivulets of crimson tracked her cheek, feathering across her skin and dripping off her chin.

  “What about you?”

  “It’s nothing.” She snorted a laugh at Savedra’s expression. “This time I mean it. Just a scrape. I’ll clean it when we get out of here.”

  “What now?” Cahal asked. Iancu resumed his place against the door so the lieutenant could wipe and sheathe his sword. Nothing struck the wood, but Savedra heard shuffling behind it.

  “We get the hell out of here,” Ashlin said. “I’m not spending the night in this place.”

  “There are more of them outside!”

  “We have to chance it. Unless you want to stay.”

  “No,” Savedra said instantly. “All right.”

  More ravens wheeled over the courtyard, rasping voices echoing. A few dove as Savedra and the others raced for the gate, but no blows landed.

  “They’re driving us off,” Cahal said as they paused in the shelter of the gate arch.

  “They certainly are. And they can keep the place.”

  Raucous shrieks followed them halfway down the mountain, finally dying away. Pain and fatigue gave way to fugue, and Savedra could remember nothing until Ashlin hoisted her into the saddle. She caught the pommel right-handed out of instinct and cried out as injured muscles flexed. Sweat soaked her, stinging in a dozen scrapes and scratches and chilling quickly now that she was still.

  When they passed the salt circle they dared stop. Ashlin stripped away Savedra’s blood-soaked bandages and rinsed the wound, first with water and then with whiskey. Savedra sobbed at the latter. Ashlin’s hands shook by the time she wound the fresh bandages, and Cahal had to tie them off. He cleaned Ashlin’s wound too, eliciting an angry hiss. His ministrations left one side of her face clean, the other a half-mask of filth.