Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  One stranger seeks to claim her heart…another is destined to destroy her.

  Looking Glass Gods, Book 1

  Ra. Just two letters. Barely a breath. When she stumbles into the frozen Haethfalt highlands, her name is all she has—the last remnant of a past she’s managed to keep hidden, even from herself. Her magic, however, isn’t so easy to conceal—magic that’s the province of the Meer, an illicit race to which she can’t possibly belong.

  The eccentric carpenter who takes her in provides a welcome distraction from the puzzle of herself. Though Jak refuses to identify as either male or female, the unmistakable spark of desire between them leaves Ra determined to find out what lies beneath the enigmatic exterior.

  But more dangerous secrets are brewing underneath the wintry moors. Jak’s closest friend, Ahr, is haunted by his own unspeakable past. Bounty hunters seeking fugitive Meer refuse to leave him in peace.

  Harboring feelings for both Ra and Ahr, Jak nonetheless struggles to keep them apart. Because like the sun and the moon coming together, their inevitable reunion has the potential to destroy Jak’s whole world.

  Warning: Shape-shifting? That’s so last millennium. Reincarnation? Yawn. Get ready for a gender-bending fantasy that will fire your imagination and haunt your dreams.

  Idol of Bone

  Jane Kindred

  Dedication

  For Dee, Steph, and Cat, who’ve waited long enough.

  One: Awakening

  It was a deliberate act of mental vandalism. Like a round moonnut shell with the meat hollowed out and its sweet milk drained, her head was empty. Nothing remained but a lingering dream of warmth and the heady perfume of petals drifting under an endless indigo night. But there was one thing she was certain of: the world had not been this white or this cold when she died.

  For the moment, this was her most pressing concern. The sea of whiteness that predominated in every direction, from the heavy clouds above her head to the damp ground beneath her huddled form, was as cold as ice. The chill settled in her bones, a dense precipitation scattering over her skin and catching in the silk of her hair like tiny blossoms floating on the surface of a dark river. A tremor ran through her as this sparked some memory, but it was clear from the ensuing pain in her head as she grasped at the fleeting thought that whatever memories remained were not meant to be disturbed.

  She knew without a doubt this unseemly act of cowardice had been her own. But she must have left herself something.

  “I am Ra,” she breathed. The words seemed to hang in the air before her with conviction. This had been her name and was her name again.

  Violent shivering seized her before she could dwell on this. The environment wasn’t suitable, this whiteness, this… “Snow.” The stuff began to fall faster as the word left her mouth, as if her voice made the world more tangible, and with the memory of this word came another recollection: to speak was to create.

  “Cloak,” she gasped, and a warm garment of sable flowed around her. Ra rose and gratefully drew it close. “Boots,” she added quickly. Soft leather enveloped her feet and climbed upward, topped with a pelt of fox.

  It was easier to think now. She turned about to get the lay of the land. Behind her, a tall mountain loomed, jagged and menacing. Ra pulled the cloak tighter and looked to the other direction. It appeared at first to be nothing but gentle rolling hills, but in the lowering twilight, she began to see flickers of illumination dotting the landscape—signs of habitation. She made for the promise of warmth and company.

  The first snowfall had caught him off guard. Ahr nursed the thumb he’d slammed beneath his hammer while installing the winter casement—“storm glass,” Jak called it. His friend had warned him not to wait until the weather turned to do it. It was a bitch to manage with the chill and the damp, and it meant he wasn’t spending these critical hours of first snow protecting his remaining crops, not to mention the pipes that carried water from the reservoir. He felt a fool for not taking heed. But he was used to feeling a fool here.

  Three years in the settlement of Haethfalt had made him no more welcome, and little wiser. Most thought him mad for building his homemound nearly half above ground. Jak had advised strongly against it. There was no practical need for a “view”. “A view of what?” He could hear the words in Jak’s dry tone. “Three stunted trees and an endless sea of hills?” There were more than three trees, he’d argued, knowing Jak was baiting him, as always. But view or no view, the absurd Deltan window was the one thing he loved.

  It wasn’t that it reminded him of home, he insisted to himself. Ahr simply needed the light. He hadn’t reconciled himself to a life beneath the ground. He understood the necessity; the winds from Munt Zelfaal—Mt. Winter, he amended—could be brutal in the spring and summer, and winter was as long as it was cold.

  The mounds were beautiful in their own way: stone spirals rising in clusters from the earth, covered in the green of moss in the months without snow, revealing just the suggestion of their size and purpose. But light, as everything in the highlands, was different here from that of the Delta. The sky seemed subdued, its color an uncertain blue, and the sun paler and more distant, even when the weather was warm—and it was never as warm as Rhyman.

  The fiery hues of late-autumn trees were the most intense the highlands had to offer—for a few brief moments, making his humble window a temple glass of orange and red, etched in light and shadow with the esoteric ciphers of distant gods. But the snow had ended that. And gods, in any event, did not bear thinking on. They were buried in the rivers and the sand, decayed blossoms crushed under the weight of their own majesty. They belonged to the suffocating fragrance of the past.

  Ahr sighed and squared his shoulders. He was being self-indulgently morose, and he had work to do. Dusk was beginning to make ghosts of trees in the copse as he lingered at the window. The thought must have prompted his eyes to play tricks on him, for it seemed from the corner of his vision as he turned away that there were ghosts moving among the trees. Or one ghost, at any rate. Jak would have said he was seeing the Hidden Folk—elemental nature spirits to which the locals paid homage when they built and planted, though it seemed they did it in irony, not being big believers in mysticism and magic.

  He narrowed his eyes and peered into the gloom. No one else lived this close to the mountain, yet someone was walking away from his end of the valley, dark and determined against the snow.

  Silver lace blanketed the moor under the rising moon as the clouds parted in wisps for a moment to let it through. High-country autumn had gone in an instant, the stone spirals of the Haethfalt mounds buried beneath the shroud of winter within a matter of hours. Jak breathed in the crisp winter air. There was nothing like a stroll in the soft silence of a light highland snowfall for clearing one’s head. The mound had been stifling. Maybe continuing to live with one’s ex wasn’t such a great idea. Getting caught in bed with another member of the moundhold by one’s ex certainly hadn’t been.

  It didn’t help that Jak had broken things off with Geffn on the pretext of becoming celibate. And it hadn’t been pretext, exactly; it only seemed that way in retrospect. Celibacy had been Jak’s intention, and was still—the indiscretion with Mell notwithstanding. The one-night stand with her, in fact, had clarified things in Jak’s head. Sex complicated everything and poisoned relationships. Maybe it wasn’t that way for everyone else, but like a drunkard offered a single drink, Jak simply couldn’t do sex in moderation. One “drink” led to another, and another, until all perspective and sense of self was lost, swallowed up into primal urges that seemed to eclipse any kind of meaningful interaction with another human being. Every encounter led to a mindless binge.

/>   So Jak was done with it. Never mind that there was no one else in the moundhold with whom another indiscretion would have happened anyway, and that with winter coming, they’d see very little of any of the others in the collective. It might be uncomfortable being cooped up in the same mound with Geffn—and his parents—not to mention Mell and her lover, Kieran, but it would be like going off drink by staying away from pubs and taverns until the urge for it abated. At least, that was what Jak hoped.

  The temperature dropped swiftly as the last dim glow of the sun beyond Mount Winter faded. Jak pulled up the collar of the wool coat that had seen better days. In the pale colors of twilight, Haethfalt had a startling beauty. Like everything west of the Delta, city folk called it “the wasteland” to discourage emigration, but between the prevalent peat and the gray stone tors, the black highland soil was surprisingly fertile.

  At the edge of the copse of rowan, the pale blue glow of foxfire illuminated the underbrush. Or maybe it was fool’s fire. It seemed to waver as Jak drew nearer, and then disappeared entirely. Jak gave a wry tip of the hat to whatever Hidden Folk or ancestor might be lurking about. Just in case.

  The scraggly rowan thinned as the glen dipped before Mount Winter, and Jak’s footsteps slowed. Feet tracing the familiar path, Jak had walked toward Ahr’s place without thinking. This was another disaster waiting to happen. There was a visceral, unspoken attraction between them that neither had acted on. Ahr was the proverbial mysterious “bad boy”, which was like putting an “X” on his chest for Jak to make a beeline to. And his sultry Deltan looks—with intense eyes of an almost midnight blue against his warm olive skin and deep brown hair worn long in the Eastern style—didn’t help any. But he was also Jak’s dearest friend, and the thought of losing that had so far been sobering enough to keep Jak from making the usual stupid mistakes.

  Ahead on the trail, a dark rock huddled as if the snow avoided it. Jak paused, perplexed, and then started as the shape seemed to unfold in a swift, elegant motion, a woman’s form distinguishing from the gray. Under the cloud-cauled glow of moonlight, eyes like black sapphires looked out of a pale face framed by a waterfall of ebony that could have been Jak’s own woodworking on the shoulders of a polished vanity.

  “What in sooth?” A brief chill gripped Jak between the shoulder blades at the thought that the Hidden Folk might be real after all. But that was foolish. This was no elemental or ancestral haunt; it was a flesh-and-blood woman. Jak took a step toward her. “What are you doing out here?”

  The woman blinked like a cat, clutching a heavy fur cloak close to her chest, shoulders lightly dusted with white as if she’d only just stepped out into the snow. Odd. She was no highlander, and the nearest town was Mole Downs, a half-day’s walk to the north. She must have been sheltering somewhere, but the stunted trees in the copse couldn’t have provided much.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  She seemed to consider this. “I think so.”

  Jak’s brow wrinkled at the peculiar answer. “Whose moundhold are they with?”

  “Moundhold?”

  “Household. Dwelling.” Jak tried to keep an irrational surge of irritation in check and spoke slowly. Perhaps the woman was feebleminded. “What’s the name of the person you’re looking for?”

  She glanced around vaguely. “I’m not certain.”

  Jak frowned. There was definitely something wrong with her. “I think maybe we should get you back home. Are you from the Downs?”

  The woman shook her head, beginning to tremble with cold. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Jak eyed her with concern. She had no gloves or scarf, and between the cloak and a pair of boots topped with some indeterminately fluffy pelt, bare skin was visible. Perhaps she’d been assaulted and wandered here in a daze. “Well, you can’t stay out here. You’ll catch your death. I live with a small clan just over the hill. Not too far.” Jak proffered an arm. “Jak na Fyn.” When she volunteered nothing in reply, Jak prompted, “And you are?”

  She looked startled at the question and rubbed her temples with a grimace of pain. “I am Ra.” Despite the grimace, the declaration was sudden and decisive after her hesitation about everything else. Like Ahr’s name, it had the ring of the Delta. Ra took the offered arm, huddling a bit too close for comfort.

  Jak sighed. Bringing home another stray. The moundhold was going to love this.

  The soft sound of charcoal on parchment was like rain rushing over the Anamnesis in the heavy fall of spring. Black lines snaked over the canvas from the disintegrating element of wood, whorls and whooshes of shadow on light illuminating images formed in the glittering depths of a dark glass. Only the child could see the images. And the child drew.

  On the parchment, a beautiful woman took shape, curled in the snow, her only covering a drape of long, shining hair rendered in perfect color by the bit of charcoal beneath the child’s thumb. It was a favorite image. The child had drawn it before.

  There were other pictures of the same figure, pictures the child didn’t like but felt compelled to draw anyway. They were scribbled, agonizing drawings rendering pain and grief, things broken apart. Chaos. Misery. The child much preferred this image—the woman waking, the world around her untouched.

  “I am Ra,” she said. “Snow,” she said. “Cloak,” she said.

  The child’s fingers swept over the parchment in waves and arches of shadow denoting the slopes of snow-covered ground; heavy, rubbed marks denoting the silken hair that flowed down the woman’s back almost to her knees; rough strokes denoting the nap of fur in a winter cloak. Fur became spirals of stone. Hair became a river coiling through the frost-covered highlands and the desert toward the Delta: the River Anamnesis, wide and deep, and full of undiscovered memory.

  Two: Redolence

  “I don’t know where she came from,” Jak insisted in a low voice. The stranger was curled in a chair by the fire in the gathering room, drinking a hot cup of kerum while the rest of the moundhold huddled in the kitchen trying not to be obvious about the fact that they were huddled in the kitchen. Their guest had offered up no other information about herself or her situation, content to drink the pungent liquid with an air of curious interest.

  “She looks Deltan,” said Keiren, opening the kitchen door a crack to glance out.

  “So what?” Jak pulled the door shut, eyes narrowed with irritation. This was obviously about Ahr. “Why must we have such mistrust for anyone from the Delta? Aren’t we all, originally?”

  Peta, the mound matriarch, shrugged absently. “My nan came here from the Delta. Rem’s great-grandparents were northfolk.”

  “We’ve no objection to Deltans,” Oldman Rem said gruffly, packing his pipe at the table. Jak couldn’t refrain from laughing out loud, and Rem frowned. “It’s not your friend’s race we object to, Jak, it’s his standoffishness. The mounds are a cooperative collective, not every man for himself. A man’s got to give something to get something, and he gives precious little.”

  Jak sighed. “Can we just leave Ahr out of this for the moment? Besides, she speaks perfect Mole. She has to be from around here somewhere.”

  “Then someone will be looking for her,” said Peta. “She must have suffered some trauma, hit her head perhaps.”

  Keiran snorted. “Or perhaps she’s just daft.”

  Peta ignored him. “She must stay the night, at any rate. It’s too cold to let her wander about on her own. We’ll try to help her find her people in the morning.”

  Keiren’s scowl deepened. “How do we know she’s not going to kill us all in our sleep?”

  “Oh, for soothsake, Key.” Mell, normally quiet, tossed a dishrag at her partner from her spot by the sink. Jak tried and failed to suppress a grin, earning a black look from Geffn, who’d said nothing since Ra’s arrival—not that silence from him was unusual these days when he and Jak were in the same room. But if l
ooks could kill, the moundhold would have had one less name in it from the vitriol in that glance.

  For once, unexpectedly, he had something to say. “What’s this really about, Jak? Went out and scrounged up new blood because you ran out of people in Haethfalt to fuck?” The room went silent, and Jak sucked in a sharp breath.

  Peta put a hand on her son’s shoulder, but Geffn rebuffed the gesture and swept from the room, letting the kitchen door swing closed behind him with a bang.

  Keiren tossed the damp dishrag back into the sink. “Congratulations, Jak.”

  “What in sooth did I do?”

  Keiren opened his mouth, apparently all too eager to enumerate Jak’s sins, but Mell grabbed her partner by the arm and steered him toward the door. “We’re going to bed.”

  “See you all back here in the morning, then,” Keiren threw over his shoulder, not bothering to lower his voice when he added, “if our throats aren’t slit.”

  Jak was left standing awkwardly before the couple that had become like second parents, though they were getting on in years; Geffn had been a late-in-life surprise after they’d lost their first son, Pim. Rem avoided Jak’s eyes, studiously lighting his pipe.

  “Why don’t you find our guest something warm to wear before we sit down to dinner?” Peta suggested, smiling fondly. At least she hadn’t judged Jak for the disaster of the failed relationship with Geffn. “I had the distinct impression there wasn’t much beneath that cloak of hers.”

  Jak looked toward the door. “I got that impression, too. Honestly, I hope Keiren’s right and she’s just daft. I’d hate to think what else would send a woman out onto the moor in this weather dressed like that.”

  Ra followed Jak down the hallway with an amiable shrug at the suggestion that she might like to change clothes, relinquishing her empty kerum cup to Peta with a somewhat reluctant glance after it, as though she’d rather have more.