Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  “I appreciate it, Jak. It’s such labor.” Ra sat on the bare frame. “It’s getting so much colder at night. I’ll need to make myself one of those thick blankets. A quilt,” she added, as if to herself. Almost as an afterthought, the exquisite threads of a delicate, embroidered blanket flowed into her hands in a reverse unraveling. She wrinkled her brow as she smoothed the fabric against her lap. “How long would it take you to make this?”

  Jak grabbed the blanket from her, eyes on the door. “Don’t, Ra. I thought we talked about this.”

  Ra gave Jak a childlike frown. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Get rid of it.”

  Her expression shifted into something unreadable, and the dark eyes narrowed. “Do you want to see destruction, Jak? Do you want to understand it?” She stared at the quilt, her face smoldering with an emotion that seemed to have little to do with Jak’s disapproval of this incidental conjuring. “Destroy.”

  The quiet word hurtled forth like a snake striking without warning from a nest in the grass, and the fibers of the blanket burst into a thousand bits of thread and fabric. Dozens of minute splinters pierced Jak’s skin, tiny needles made of wool, and Jak fell against the wall, blinking back sharp tears, hands shaking in a spasm of astonishment.

  But Ra seemed more shaken than Jak, her face paler than normal, and her wide eyes dripping once more with those alarming tears.

  “Sooth, Ra,” Jak whispered, taking out a handkerchief and stepping toward her to wipe at the dark streaks.

  Ra stopped Jak’s hands and held them palm-up. “I injured you.”

  “Just a sting. It’s nothing.” Jak looked about. “Much like the quilt.”

  Ra bowed her head, hair falling over her face. “It’s difficult,” she said. “Suppressing one’s nature.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She stroked Jak’s calloused palms absently. “I’ve begun to dream. Weaving the tapestry of my former life thread by thread. So slowly, like the making of a quilt by hand. What I’m learning is not so much the certainty of what was, but convictions. I don’t believe the fluid nature of matter is the sole province of some unfortunate mystics who received their just deserts—nor that my conjuring makes me one of them.”

  Jak moved Ra’s hair aside to see her face, and the dark eyes came into focus. “Their just deserts, Ra? That seems harsh.”

  Ra shook her head. “I rise each morning with convictions,” she repeated, her voice taut with something like hatred. “The Meer were cold and cruel and deserving of death.”

  There were still light marks on Ra’s cheeks where she had scored them with the simple act of weeping. Convictions, thought Jak, could be dangerous things.

  Jak was careful around her afterward and tried to keep some distance between them, but even without effort, Ra drew Jak irresistibly into her orbit like some dark, exotic sun. Whatever she was—magical being or madwoman—one thing was crucial: Jak had to keep her away from Ahr.

  It didn’t prove difficult. Jak avoided Mound Ahr, and Ahr, in turn, made no attempt to patch things up. By the time the Heart of Winter was upon them, it had been nearly two months since they’d argued. Shortly after the solstice, Haethfalt weather generally took a turn for the worse, and they might not see each other again until spring. The prospect was unsettling. Not talking to Ahr was unsettling.

  Chosen to host the annual feast marking this shortest day of the year, Mound RemPeta bustled with activity as they prepared for their guests, but a trip to see Ahr the next morning was in order. Whatever secrets they kept from each other, Jak needed to know that they were still friends—and if they weren’t, that at least he was okay.

  A steady fall of snow had turned to windy drifts by early afternoon, and Jak worried it would keep the guests away, but the clans came, and Mound RemPeta was soon pleasantly filled with people shuffling off the cold in the spiral stairwell and piling their wraps in Jak’s arms. Geffn and Keiren plied the guests with warmed kettles and drew them in toward the scent of chestnuts on the fire, while Rem finished up the roast. But the party began in earnest when Peta and Mell came from the kitchen with their magnificent trays of breads and pastry, sap sugar drizzled on the tops and blending in the air with the smell of the savory dishes. Ra followed somewhat shyly, bearing a tray of delicate little cakes she’d baked herself after spending days ensconced in the kitchen with Peta learning her secret techniques.

  Jak tensed with misgiving when Ra was at last introduced as the mound’s newest member, but the neighboring clans welcomed her and the party toasted her health. In a small ceremony in which the members of the mound passed a blessing cup and each took a sip, Ra’s name was written into the moundhold.

  Rem was the last to drink, and he held up the empty cup with their neighbors as witness. “Mound RemPetaJakGeffnMellKeirenRa welcomes you. Blessed Heart of Winter!”

  The Haethfalt clans cheered and drank to the mound, and the feast began.

  Ra smiled at Jak as she helped Peta and Mell dish up the plates for their guests. She’d never seemed so happy or at ease. Perhaps everything would work out after all. Nothing alarming had happened in weeks—no conjuring, no tears of blood. She was one of them now and had thrown herself into mound life with enthusiasm.

  When she filled Jak’s plate, she leaned across the table and planted a kiss on Jak’s cheek. “Blessed Heart of Winter,” she whispered.

  “Blessed Heart.” Jak resisted the urge to touch the warm cheek Ra had blessed and ignored Geffn’s glower from across the room, determined not to let him spoil the day.

  Plate heaped with food, Jak removed to the cool steps to wait for the best part of the celebration. Once everyone had been served, the lamps were extinguished, and then the flicker of individual candles began to burst from the darkness as each person added a light in turn. The glow was low and beautiful from the dark entrance.

  In the midst of this ritual, a faint rap came at the door above, and Jak jumped up to answer it, setting the plate and the candle in its canning jar aside.

  Ahr waited in the breezeway, looking over his shoulder at the darkening sky. Heavy clouds had shrouded the settlement since morning, and the snow was now coming down thick, driving against his back as he’d crossed the moor from the valley. He shouldn’t have come. The invitation had been extended before his falling-out with Jak. He had no idea what kind of reception he was going to get.

  The door swung open, and he turned to see Jak staring with a frozen smile, obviously not expecting him. Shit. He inclined his head in a vague nod of greeting, not knowing what else to do. “Jak.”

  “Ahr…” For once, Jak was at a loss for words.

  He hunched his shoulders into his collar as snow trickled down the back of his neck. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have come.” Ahr turned to leave, but Jak stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Ahr, wait. Please. Of course you’re welcome. I just—I’m surprised to see you.”

  It wasn’t the most enthusiastic of invitations, and Jak looked profoundly uncomfortable, but the smell of the feast rising up from below made his stomach grumble, and he’d be damned if he was going to walk all the way back in this biting wind without something warm in his belly.

  Jak took his coat, leading him down the steps toward the low din of voices amid the glimmer of candles, and Ahr suffered an unexpected flash of memory: lights from a thousand candelabra reflecting in the dark obsidian of a temple floor. He clenched his fists, the sharp pressure of his nails against his palms driving the unbidden vision away.

  Someone handed him a plate and drew him toward the table, and he tried to keep himself together, ignoring the looks he was getting from Haethfalters who were none too fond of him.

  “Ahr, dear, I don’t believe you’ve met our new moundmate.” Ahr glanced up at Peta’s welcoming voice. A dark-haired woman serving the roast raised her head. “This is Ra.”

  The name ass
aulted him, and Ahr fought the urge to recoil. He gripped the edges of his plate with whitened hands and stared with the rush of the flooding Anamnesis in his ears. He’d misheard. That couldn’t be what Peta had said.

  She peered at him through the wavering light, lithe and long-limbed, with a face framed in tresses of black that shone as though anointed with oil. Candlelight danced in its depths like the glinting of gemstone beads and gold pieces—the wealth of a soth swinging at the ends of a god’s locks.

  His insides seemed to have turned to liquid. Ahr was afraid for the first time he could remember.

  The pale cheeks drained of color as she met his eyes, and she dropped the serving fork with a clatter onto the floor. Ahr set down his plate with monumental control and turned toward Peta beside him. “Excuse me. The water closet?” The older woman motioned toward a darkened hallway, and Ahr stepped away, making his way to the room at the end of the hall as though he weren’t completely undone. Once inside, he closed the door and sank against it, no longer able to stand.

  It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be Ra. Ahr had seen the Meer bludgeoned unrecognizable long after the life had left him, wasting on the steps of his temple without a proper cremation. Ra couldn’t have returned without the purifying ritual of fire; it was impossible. Ahr buried his head in his arms and attempted to weep, but the air choked from his chest in a dreadful way. He was a man, and unused to crying.

  When he at last drew himself together and opened the door, Jak was waiting in the shadows like a hooded executioner. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Jak—”

  “I want to know what your intentions are.”

  Sweat dotted his forehead and his stomach churned, the circular corridor seeming to spin beneath his feet. “My what?” Jak stood blinking at him in the flickering candlelight, eyes drawn to Ahr’s hands as he turned the ring on his finger in agitation, an unconscious habit he couldn’t seem to break. The red center caught the light as it appeared and reappeared in its nervous revolutions. He lowered his hands, trying to keep them from shaking. “I think I should go.”

  The gray eyes were shadowed with a look of mistrust. “Are you a Meerhunter? I want the truth.” The words barely penetrated. Ahr couldn’t speak, as though trapped in a waking nightmare, unable to draw breath enough to cry out. “It was yesterday,” he’d told Cree. Hell, it was today. It was always.

  Jak gave him a sharp nod and turned away to use the water closet. “Maybe you should go.”

  Ahr’s refusal to answer had spoken volumes. Returning to the gathering room in the wake of his wordless departure, Jak looked around for Ra but didn’t see her. Geffn, who’d been hovering at her side like her faithful squire, was standing alone near the staircase. Jak glanced at him. “Have you seen Ra?”

  Geffn answered in clipped tones. “She needed some fresh air. She said she’d only be a minute.”

  Jak looked up at the door. “Was that before or after Ahr left?”

  “Ahr left?”

  “Shit.” Jak hurried up the stairs. Ra’s cloak and boots were gone. Outside, the breezeway was empty, and the moor was deserted.

  Seven: Disintegration

  The memory of his eyes drove Ra onward. When she’d looked up into that dreadful, uncompromising blue, the core of her being had shifted like tectonic plates sliding along a fault line in a prelude to a tremendous temblor. The memories she’d so carefully cocooned within herself had splintered and were cracking apart.

  Wind tore at Ra’s cloak and her soft boots sank in the drifting snow as she made her way across the moor, chilling her to the bone. She relied on instinct to deliver her to the door of the small mound set apart from the others, recalling that she’d passed this way before. As she raised her hand to knock with her chilled fingers, he opened the door and held it aside without surprise for her to enter.

  She pried off the thick gloves conjured on the way across the plain, already stiff with icicles, and was unable to speak for a moment, her lungs constricted with cold. Ahr gave her a stone from the fire wrapped in a scarf, and she held it between her fingers, gasping at the contrast. At last, she looked at him, probing the hooded indigo eyes, and noting with a start the beauty of his lashes, still tipped with frost.

  “You know why I’ve come,” she said on a cold-ragged breath.

  “Retribution?” Color rose in his cheeks that was neither from cold nor from shame. When she didn’t answer, he continued, as though he couldn’t bear her silence. “You are Ra of Rhyman, are you not? You’ve come again, despite…” He paused, turning pale. “Despite the manner of your death?”

  Rhyman. In this word, she heard the clamor of the Deltan streets in summer, incongruous in this dreary, winter-buried hill. She smelled the scent of holy oil, felt the motion of a serf-borne litter beneath her.

  He had taken her maidenhead in a crowd of thousands.

  Ra reeled before the dizzying image of a bustling city, superimposed upon the backdrop of this quaint hillside house, uncertain which was vision and which was real.

  She stood in the street, watching him, and he had seen—from inside his curtained box, carried on the broad shoulders of his men, the Meer had seen her, and she was undone. Heat, and sweat and dust from the street roiled together as he drew her inside the heavy layers of silk, muting the atonal notes of cymbals and supplication. Thick incense completed the barrier that kept commoner from Meer, but she’d violated that barrier; she was within. The litter began to move. Darkness, except for the glowing embers of the incense and the glinting of his hair where sunlight caught it through pinholes in the curtaining drapes. She was silent as he undressed her, silent as he entered her.

  She lost her maidenhead in the streets of Rhyman.

  The vision drifted apart like soap bubbles on the surface of a drum of wash water, and where that other place had been, Ahr’s blue eyes challenged her, waiting for an answer. He knew her, as she didn’t know herself.

  The pain in her head intensified as she snatched at the fragments of images she couldn’t quite call memory. She was only an observer to their seductive dance, floating disembodied above them. His eyes and his scent distracted her—a hint of bitter citrus and musk that brought another memory to mind: lips touching skin, claiming every part in a slow, relentless ritual of possession. A sudden conviction seized her that he was the Meer in her visions. It was right. Still, she couldn’t place herself as the girl in the veil. But that was irrelevant. He was Meer, and he had known her.

  Even if her gut hadn’t told her, she’d heard enough about the Meer from Geffn and Keiren to know he was dangerous. Should she kneel? Did she risk her life with this challenge to his authority? Or should he fear her exposure of him as a fugitive, a form of man forbidden? The potency of his presence confused her. Ra bowed her head in a muddled compromise, but spoke with the defiance of her convictions.

  “Your kind,” she said with a bitter twist of her lips, “think they can get away with anything. Seducing, deceiving, destroying. You were not worthy to have laid a hand on me.”

  When she looked up, it was to a bloodless rage in the otherwise refined features as he stared at her for an instant that felt like an eternity. And then the elastic band of time snapped back, and he struck her across the face. Ra tumbled and fell in an indelicate heap, the wrapped stone bouncing away from her in slow motion, every strike against the stone floor like a hollow gourd or a clay pot breaking on a marble step. Tectonic plates ground together and she heard a terrible sound, as if her cells were screaming as they came apart. He’d done something terrible. She’d done something worse.

  Ra looked up at him, fear and anger warring within her as the slipping plates tore jagged pieces from one another. She opened her mouth to rebuke him, but instead, burst into tears.

  Ahr was unable to do anything but stare in shock. He’d never struck a woman before, and the force of his own hand surprised him as much as her
fragility. He’d expected the resistance of the firm, muscular jaw of a Meer, and possibly a return volley that might have knocked Ahr on his ass instead of Ra. Despite the years of hatred he harbored, and rightly so, this new Ra was a fantastic creature, erratic and fine, like a piece of painted porcelain broken to a serrated edge. How was it possible the Meer could return in such a slight incarnation, so easily overcome? Surely, the soul couldn’t recreate itself of different matter.

  He clung to his fury as if it were his lifeline, afraid to let go, lest he discover what lay beneath it. “What do you want from me?”

  Ra flinched as though stung by the sound of his voice. “Myself.” Her eyes beseeched him. “Tell me who I am.”

  So it was true. She’d lost the memory of her past life. Clearly, she knew something of their association, but not the essence. Most importantly, she had no idea what Ahr had done to her.

  Before he could speak, the door to his mound opened with a fierce howl of wind, and Jak stumbled in. “I knocked,” Jak gasped, fighting against the wind to push the door shut again. “I guess you couldn’t hear…”

  Beside the hearth, Ra still sprawled at Ahr’s feet, face streaked with obscene tears, the reddening welt on her cheek unmistakable. Jak’s eyes narrowed on Ahr from within the shadows of the icy hood, flashing with warning like those of a wild boar hidden in a thicket.

  There wasn’t even time to react before Jak came at him and tackled him at the waist. The momentum crashed both of them into the handmade table and one of the chairs that were nearly the whole of Ahr’s possessions. His poor craftsmanship gave under their weight, and they went down in a pile of splintered wood. Ahr gave an exclamation of surprise and outrage and kicked out with his boot as Jak scrambled toward him, meeting Jak squarely in the gut. Jak doubled over, looking green.

  “Dammit, Jak!” He rubbed his bruised head where he’d struck it against a cabinet. “Are you all right? I’m sorry, but what in sooth?”

  “Sooth?” Jak gasped in a tight voice. “What would you know about sooth?” Ra moved toward Jak in concern, but Jak shrugged off her attempts to help. “You’re a damned fraud.”