“If Sabine is dead”—my gaze cuts to Bastien—“you will die slowly. I won’t bury you with your bones; I’ll wear them. I’ll take them from your body before you draw your last breath.” No Leurress has ever touched the bones of her amouré, but I don’t care. The rite will begin with me.
Bastien’s jaw muscle tightens. “And if Jules is dead, I’ll decapitate you.”
“I won’t give you the chance.” I hold his knife the way he does, like a shield, the hilt never far from my face and constantly moving. I’m quickly learning his defenses, his attacks. I lunge for him, and we begin a new dance, this one more deadly, more passionate, more inflamed.
I deflect his strikes. He deflects mine, forearm against forearm. I never extend my elbows. I counterattack swiftly. Bastien makes for an excellent teacher. His mistake. The predators in me are cunning students.
He treads the narrow parapet with ease. His powerful desire for revenge is a grace of its own.
Once I learn the rhythm of his movements, I take greater risks. I use more force when I slash for him. I shove him back when our arms connect. He might be brave, but he’s weak. I could snap his bones. Maybe I will.
Perspiration wets his brow. He grunts with each blow, each block, each counterattack. I’m tempted to push him to his limits and discover his breaking point. But I can’t. If Sabine is injured, there’s still a chance I can help her. Please, Elara, let her only be injured.
“Thank you for the dance, mon amouré,” I say.
“You call this dancing?” Bastien strikes for my face, then my leg, deftly switching his knife hands.
“Forgive me, were you fighting?” I dodge both attacks, ibex nimble. “I’d love to see you try, but I’m afraid we’re out of time.”
“Why? You can’t be tired already. Unless you lost all your endurance with one little bird bone.”
My nostrils flare. He has no idea what he’s up against. “I still have the combined stamina of a tiger shark and a great alpine ibex.”
“Strength you stole.”
“Strength I earned.”
“Not enough to beat me.”
My veins torch with blistering rage. Now you die, Bastien. “Watch me.”
With every measure of my ibex grace, I leap ten feet into the air and raise my blade with both hands. All the ferocity and muscle from my tiger shark gathers in my body. I focus on Bastien on the parapet below. He looks small. Easy to conquer.
He steps back into a defensive stance, his eyes wide and ready.
I plunge.
He swings his fist a moment before I strike. I can’t move fast enough. The tension inside me falls slack. He hits my arm and knocks my knife from my hand. It flings into the thinning mist and clatters onto the stones of the riverbed.
Shocked, I barely catch my fall on the ledge. My muscles cramp in protest. My surroundings dim. The energy shifts around me. My sixth sense is gone.
The shark tooth. Bastien’s accomplice has it.
“Sabine!” I cry again. My eyes burn. She’s the limp figure on the ground. She has to be.
I abandon all thoughts of my rite of passage. I won’t kill Bastien here and now. I’ll hunt him down later, even if it takes me a year. Then I’ll have his blood. “I’m coming, Sabine!” Be alive, be alive.
I move to jump from the parapet and onto the bridge, but Bastien grabs my arm. I gasp at his painful grip. I can’t break free. He isn’t such a weakling, after all.
“Let go of me,” I shout. I still have my ibex grace, which gives me strength in my legs. I kick him hard in the shin. He grimaces in pain, but doesn’t release me. “I need to help my friend. She’s innocent.”
“So you admit you’re not?” Bastien yanks me closer when I try to kick him again. He sets his knife at my throat. I swallow against its sharp edge. He can end my life at any moment.
This is all wrong. An amouré isn’t supposed to kill a Leurress. It’s never happened, not in all our long history.
I can’t believe it will happen to me.
Bastien’s breath is hot in my face. “None of you are innocent.”
9
Bastien
AILESSE DOESN’T CLOSE HER EYES as she anticipates death. She stares at me directly. Her body shakes as I hold her at knifepoint on the parapet, but she doesn’t blink. She’s afraid of this moment, but not what’s beyond it. Death. The afterlife. Everything I can’t imagine when I think of my father.
Don’t hesitate, Bastien.
“This is for Lucien Colbert.” My forearms flex. My heartbeat pounds through every space of my head. Ailesse’s umber eyes glisten.
“Bastien, stop her!” Jules’s shout echoes from the clearing mist of the riverbed. “It’s done!” Ailesse sucks in a sharp breath and staggers in my arms.
What does Jules mean? “I am!”
“Not her, the other one!”
Behind me, I hear the crunch of toppling rocks. I glance over my shoulder. A dark-haired girl in a green dress—the witness—climbs up the riverbank near the foot of the bridge. Blood streaks down her injured head.
“Sabine!” Ailesse’s voice clangs in my ears. She’s struggling to free herself—and almost succeeds while I’m distracted.
Sabine sees my knife at Ailesse’s neck. Her face twists with horror. “Let her go!” She bolts toward me.
I tense. She could have the strength of a bear, for all I know.
She races onto the bridge, but then her head sways to the side. She grips a post for support. Another rush of blood streams from her hairline.
“Sabine, stop!” Ailesse cries. “You can’t fight like this.”
“Neither can you.” Sabine’s stubborn voice wobbles.
“You’re not supposed to intervene.”
“I don’t care.”
“Please go!”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
“You can’t save me! Go warn my mother. Tell her the flute fell in the riverbed and . . .”
I stop listening. My attention snags on the moonlight reflecting off my blade. Ailesse’s neck tendons strain beneath its sharp edge. What am I waiting for—her to scream or act more afraid? This moment is supposed to be my ultimate victory. It will be. I can slit one Bone Crier’s throat, and then deal with the other.
I grind my teeth in determination, but my stomach churns.
Do it, Bastien!
“Bastien, the witness! She’s getting away!” Jules’s voice rings closer. She’s climbing up the riverbank, pursuing Sabine.
I jerk around in Sabine’s direction. She’s already off the bridge. She and Jules will cross paths at any moment. “You can grab her before I can!”
“Hurry!” Ailesse calls to her friend.
Thump, drag, thump. Jules clears the top of the riverbank. She’s limping.
Sabine tries to get past her, but Jules whips out her knife. Sabine shrieks as it slices across the side of her waist.
“No!” Ailesse wrestles against me. “Run, Sabine!”
Sabine barely dodges another swipe from Jules. Both girls are slow from their wounds.
Jules misses again. Sabine takes her opening and kicks Jules’s hurt leg. Jules cries out and clutches her knee.
Ailesse’s muscles tense. “Now’s your chance! Go, Sabine!”
Sabine shoots Ailesse a fierce look. “I’ll come back for you!” She whirls away, hurrying as fast as she can down the road to the forest. One of her hands presses to her bleeding head. The other holds the gash at her waist.
Jules struggles to stand upright again. “Bastien, we have to do something! She’ll go back and get the rest of her people. She told me they can track us with their magic.”
I shift, suddenly dizzy. “Marcel would have said if that were possible.”
“Marcel doesn’t know everything!” She stumbles after Sabine.
Marcel. He’s off the road and in the trees somewhere, on the lookout for Ailesse’s soulmate. But now I need him here. He can prove Jules wrong. I shout his name, but he does
n’t call back.
Ailesse’s upper lip curls. “None of you fathom how deeply this night will cost you.”
I draw my knife back a fraction from her throat, then check myself. What does she know? I’ve thought through my revenge countless times—through every possible scenario. If one of the Bone Criers happened to escape, we planned to kill the other and— “Leave her bones! The ones belonging to her.” I rattle Ailesse, and she almost falls off the parapet. Jules must have stolen her last bone, and Ailesse’s balance with it. “That’s how their magic works. If we don’t have them anymore, her people can’t find us.”
Sabine, who is ten feet from the border of the forest, freezes. Her pained eyes flash to Ailesse. Jules turns and considers me. I nod to show I’m serious. I’ll kill Ailesse, then hunt down her friend. But if Sabine manages to outrun me, we don’t have to worry.
Ailesse’s glare holds steady. “They’ll still find you.”
I snort. “Your people won’t stand a chance. I’ve lived on the streets of Dovré since I was a child. The best hideouts in the city and the places beneath it—they’re my territory.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she spits. “My famille doesn’t need my grace bones to track you. You and I are soul-bound. That’s enough.” She draws herself taller. Blood trickles down her neck from my blade. “You’re right that our magic lies in bones. I used them to summon you here. You came when you heard my song, and the gods let you because they chose you for me. Now your soul is mine in life and in death.” The mist rises behind her, clinging to her body. “If you kill me, you’ll die with me.”
My palms sweat. I tighten my grip on the knife. “Nice try, but you’re a terrible liar.”
I start to drive in my blade, but Jules shouts, “Bastien, wait! What if she’s right?”
“About what—that I can’t live without her?” I scoff. “You really believe that?”
“Think about it. What if that’s why my father died, because he was soul-bound to Ashena? She died soon after she left him—the witness told me so tonight. Her death might have set off his.”
I breathe harder, faster. Could I really be soul-bound to a Bone Crier? Waves of hot and cold crash through me. If Ailesse is telling the truth, she wouldn’t have been so scared of dying a moment ago. Then again, was she really so afraid? I caught that spark of confidence behind her terror.
Marcel doesn’t know everything.
Maybe I haven’t thought through every outcome tonight.
Now I’m the one who’s shaking. I need Ailesse’s death. The words sear inside me, and I press even closer to her. Her foot slips off the edge of the parapet. I catch her back. My blade wavers at her throat.
“Bastien, stop!” Jules cries.
“Shut up!”
I’ve planned for this moment for eight long years. It can’t end with letting her go.
“Are you about finished?” Marcel calls. Hazily through the mist, I see him lumber toward the bridge. At the same time, Sabine reaches the forest border behind him. Marcel doesn’t see her. He’s found his own path here through the trees. “I haven’t seen any soulmate,” he confesses, taking no pains to be quiet. “The man must live on an island. Either that or he’s as slow as molasses—or crystallized honey. That’s thicker.” He shuffles to a stop and takes in the three of us. Ailesse. Jules. Me. “Oh. Not finished, then.”
“The witness, Marcel!” Jules points wildly, unable to get to Sabine fast enough on her wounded leg. “Hurry! She’ll bring more of them. They’ll kill Bastien!”
Marcel wheels around and stares dumbly at Sabine, a few yards away from him. She’s bent over from another dizzy spell.
“Did you hear your friend?” Ailesse hisses in my ear. “He hasn’t seen another soulmate.” I turn to her, drawn to the gaping black of her pupils. “You are mine,” she says.
Faster than seems possible, Marcel drops his pack and pulls an arrow from his quiver.
Ailesse gasps. “No. Sabine, run!”
Sabine painstakingly lifts her head. She looks feral with a stripe of blood smeared down her face and over one eye.
Marcel strings his bow. His shoulders bunch up like he’s about to be sick.
“Run!” Ailesse shouts again.
Marcel startles and lets his arrow fly. It whizzes past Sabine, just shy of her head. She snatches something from a tree branch and rushes away. The forest swallows her from sight.
“Merde!” Jules buckles to the ground.
Ailesse’s spine relaxes under my fingers. Her gloating eyes flick back to me, and my jaw muscle clenches. Her friend is free, and now Ailesse thinks I won’t dare to slit her throat because we’re soul-bound. Or so she says. I’ll find out soon enough. Then I’ll make her suffer. She’ll beg me to end her life.
“You will die, Bone Crier.” My scathing tone cools to a deadly simmer. “Because you are mine.”
10
Sabine
I RACE INTO THE RUINS of Château Creux and past King Godart’s carved crest of the crow and the rose. Fire and ice chase through my veins with each thunderclap of my heart.
Ailesse is gone. Her amouré killed her. I’m too late.
I swipe my tears with shaking hands. My fingers come away sticky with blood. It’s everywhere—on my neck, in my hair, all over my dress and sleeves. It’s in places I can’t see. Ailesse’s throat. The stones of Castelpont. Her amouré’s knife.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Calm down, Sabine. You don’t know Ailesse is dead.
The boy kept hesitating. She could still be alive. I’m not too late.
I bolt through the tide-carved tunnels beneath the ancient castle, then down the last tunnel toward the courtyard. The night is half spent, but Odiva should be awake and awaiting our return.
How will I explain what happened? This is all my fault.
I’m about to burst inside when a rush of dizziness seizes me. I grit my teeth and brace my hand against the tunnel wall. My salamander grace has helped me recover from the hooded girl’s attack, but I’ve lost too much blood. On the way here, I nearly passed out and had to rest with my head between my knees. It cost me precious time. I can’t let that happen again.
“I have given you everything possible these past two years.” Odiva’s voice is a murmur, but it resonates throughout the large cavern.
My chest tightens. For a moment I think she’s speaking to me—my mother died two years ago—but when the black spots clear from my vision, I see my matrone standing under a pool of moonlight in the center of the courtyard. Her back is turned to me and her arms are outstretched. She’s praying—fervently—or else she’d notice me. Her stingray’s sixth sense and bat’s echolocation would have picked up on my arrival.
“Now the time is nearing an end,” she continues. “Grant me a sign, Tyrus. Let me know you honor my sacrifices.”
Tyrus? I focus on Odiva’s cupped hands. They’re turned downward to the Underworld, not upward to the Night Heavens. I wrinkle my brows. The Leurress worship Tyrus—we offer him souls of the wicked on ferrying night—but our prayers travel to Elara, who hears the pleas of the righteous. Or so I was taught.
I push away from the wall. It doesn’t matter. Ailesse is in danger. I’d pray to any god to save her. “Matrone!”
Odiva stiffens. I emerge into the silvery glow of Elara’s Light, and she turns to face me. At the same time, her hands close around something dangling from a gold chain over her three-tiered grace bone necklace. She quickly tucks it into her dress, and I catch a glint of sparkling red.
“Sabine.” Her ebony eyes narrow as they flick over the gashes on my arm, my head, and waist. She hastens to me. “What happened?” A slight tremor skims across her lower lip. “Is Ailesse hurt, as well?”
I suddenly can’t meet her gaze. My throat runs dry, and tears flood my vision. “We were unprepared,” I choke out, not knowing where to begin.
Odiva steps closer, and the noctule bat skull fastened to her asp vertebrae crown looms over me. “Unprepared? For what?�
�
“Her amouré. He was ready for us. So were his accomplices—two of them. They knew what we were. And they wanted us dead.”
Lines of fury and confusion form between the matrone’s dark brows. “I don’t understand. Ailesse is the most promising Leurress our famille has seen in a century.” I agree, though it’s a compliment she’s never paid my friend. “How could mere commoners—?” Her voice breaks like she can’t find her breath.
“A girl stole Ailesse’s grace bones under the bridge.” I withdraw my hand from behind my back and present Ailesse’s depleted shoulder necklace. My final task as her witness would have been to tie her grace bones back onto it. Shame burns from deep inside me and scalds my cheeks. Until tonight, I believed my best friend was invincible, but I should have buried her bones deeper, guarded them better. Then Ailesse could have defended herself. “The girl claimed her father was killed by Ashena, so Ailesse’s amouré must have been helping her seek vengeance.”
Odiva grows statuesque. The funneling breeze wisps through her raven hair and sapphire dress, but her body is motionless. Finally, her lips crack apart. “Is she alive?” she whispers. “Did they kill my daughter?”
A broken sob rips out of my chest. “I don’t know.”
She grips my chin. “Where is the bone flute?” Ice crawls up my spine as her black eyes bore into me. I’ve never seen Odiva so vicious and desperate.
“It’s” . . . lost in the riverbed. “They took it.”
Her teeth grind together. “Are you sure?” she asks slowly, pointedly.
“Yes.” My stomach quivers. I’ve never lied to the matrone. I’m not sure why I am now, except for an ominous feeling that warns me Odiva shouldn’t have it yet. Especially when she seems more concerned about the flute than her daughter. “We should start tracking Ailesse now. If she’s alive, she needs our help.”
She whirls away from me. “Have you any idea of what you’ve done, Sabine?”
“I—?” I shrink back. Odiva’s never scolded me before. She saves that for Ailesse.
“How could you let this happen? Did you lose your grace bones, too?”
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