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A THREAT AND A CAUTION

WREN

“ L et me out! Please…please! Let me out!”

Little Keeper.

“It hurts! It hurts !”

“She is just tired. Ignore her.”

There is a murmur of dissent.

“Bone shouldn’t hurt the child.” The words are anxious, uneasy.

“It will help her in the long run. Help her listen to only bone.” He is confident, and it carries the room. A long, thoughtful pause. “We could get her there more quickly if she didn’t have a mother to return home to.”

A flurry of sound, of protest, of reluctant agreement.

“She’s only just started Guiding, Raek. Earlier than any other.”

“The people have gone almost six years with no souls being safe home after losing a fully capable BoneKeeper, and now we’re blessed by a Keeper who can hold a soul barely out of the cradle? To keep her from them — they’ll rebel. We’ve lost too many.”

“They had a Keeper for nigh on thirty years, Raek. If we harm her in some way…we are knowingly sending souls to Silence.”

“The village will understand.” He is pensive, deliberate.

“We will say something is happening — some unknown illness attacks her. Blights her vision. Perhaps she started too early. She’s only a child.

A girl .” The disdain in his voice bubbles up like poison, and he swallows it down, replacing it with practiced concern.

“Her eyes are fading. Imagine what would happen if she wandered the wrong way and got hurt, or worse? There would be no one left to Guide us home. And who knows for how long?”

“What is your proposition?”

“It HURTS!”

Little Keeper. Please.

Bodies shift uncomfortably, but no one moves.

“We are in unknown times, friends. The Father is barely out of his milk teeth. Thirteen. What were the bones thinking? We have no guidance; we don’t even know if he’ll make it through the coming Storms!

Do we risk losing the Keeper too? It would devastate the people.

With no Keeper, no Father…” Nothing more needs to be said.

“So what, then?”

“We will be careful. Nothing now — her mother barely consented to have her come to training as it is.” His voice is sickeningly sweet, poison that is easy to swallow.

“There are considerations…We must watch for her welfare, not let her speak for the bone if she is too tired. And, of course, in her place, the Council will name the Offerings. Until she is well.” And then, more quietly, “When it is time, we will build her a protective cage, and keep her, a little mountain finch brought out to sing.” A considering pause, and then, voice low, “For us, and us alone.”

The room is silent, the implications in his statement astonishing.

“Let me OUT! It hurts! Please!” I want to scream that I am not blind, that they are mistaken, even with my eyes slowly bleaching to white I can see, but the bones whisper anxiously “hush, hush”, so I keep silent. It hurts though. “It HURTS!”

Keeper. Attend. Keeper!

“You can not be suggesting…” A single dissenting voice.

“There is a vacuum of power. If we do not fill it, others will seek to. Let us just maintain the course, until we know if her sight will improve or drain away entirely, or until the bones speak. This is an unprecedented time. Does it not call for unprecedented measures?”

BoneKeeper!

“It is not tradition…” Indecision, but considering .

“We will make new traditions. Inch by inch. So slowly they will not recognize the land has changed until it is too late. Leave her there until she can hear bone and nothing else. Until she has forgotten anything other than gratitude for the hands that feed her.”

“Please!”

Keeper! Wren!!!

I wake in a rush, a sudden, sickening lurch from heavy sleep to startled awareness, the dream slipping away in the grey veil between.

My room is still dark and quiet, a gift before the dust and death of the day.

Sitting up slowly, I rub my arms in a soothing motion, up and down, up and down.

What woke me? Cold shivers run like a cat’s tongue along my skin, and I look around my small, barren home, confused.

What woke me? From the bones down my back, a whisper of sound, a silky, smokey voice easily identifiable.

Little Keeper. You were dreaming.

Ah. Ah.

You were difficult to reach. A long hesitation in the noiseless room, and then, haltingly… You were lost deep in your childhood.

There is nothing to say back. We both know how long it has been since I’ve dreamed of the past. I no longer carry it with me; years of training have taught me to leave that space open for bone memory.

An empty jar that the people who have passed fill with their recollections of life, and which I then pour out to the villagers.

To have it reappear now? Frowning, I stare down at my still—shaking hands as though they belong to a stranger. Is this even my body?

Keeper? A mother’s voice, from the braids in my hair. Concerned and sweet.

I am well. Thank you for waking me.

I did not. Something else pulled you from your nightmare. The Council Bell.

The Council is calling this early in the day?

In the month ? Sighing, I lift a hand to rub my face, trying to shake off the lingering shadows left by the dream.

The dawn light catches on shiny, pale patterns worn smooth on my paler skin, and something in me twists in rebellion.

I don’t want to wear the Silent bones today.

Don’t want to fit them in their places, where they have been so long that my body has made permanent accommodation for them.

The imprints of their grooves and bumps are landmarks on my skin even when they aren’t bound to me, my living flesh having given way to the hard, empty vertebrae, my arms holding their indentation even when I am bare of them, which is only ever for the length of a night’s sleep.

Eleven years of tightly bound bone have worn their pattern in glistening, permanent lines.

Turning over, I bury my head in my pillow in frustration.

The weight of the bones grows and grows, and it pushes me into the hard earth.

One day it will be too much, and I’ll be buried, brought to death by the dead.

The Council bell sounds again in the distance, echoing in the quiet early morning off the mountains, and around me in the village, I can sense life beginning anew, the temporary death of night fading in the rising sun.

I have never wanted so badly to be somewhere else, anywhere else, but I am tied to this village and its people as surely as if we shared veins.

There is no way to leave without cutting my own throat, and bleeding out.

I was born to death, and death will be my escape.

Between, I have one foot in each world, and belong in neither.

It is this way for every Keeper, I remind myself tiredly.

You are not unique. Every Keeper is trapped in everywhere and nowhere.

Every time and no time. It is your blessing.

Or curse. But I would not even dare to think those words, even in the darkest corners of my mind.

A Blessing. I repeat firmly. To know your path, your purpose.

There is a saying amongst the people here — there is no way but forward.

But BoneKeepers are exempt from that. Because there is no future for us.

There is no past. No then, no now, and no what will be.

All times exist in the present together.

It is…exhausting. But it is known . Consistent. Expected.

And so, even now, with the weight of the night still heavy on my shoulders, I begin the morning as I always do.

The ritual of each day’s birth is the same, even with the Council waiting.

I wash my face and wipe my skin in brackish, oil scented water — a luxury most would envy.

villagers, in general, do not have even brackish water in their houses, have to trudge to the briny ponds to bathe when they are able.

But I have a small stone cistern in my simple home, little more than a wine barrel size, and I fill it each week with new water, lacing it with an herbed oil to lend an earthy, clean smell.

After washing, I pull on a thick brown, cowl neck wool tunic, sleeves ending at my elbows, and woolen pants, only slightly darker and slightly thinner.

There are talented seamstresses here — not everyone wears such simple clothes, such simple designs, but I am not meant to draw attention to myself outside of the bones.

Unless it is for a Rending or a Reaping, I wear plain, unadorned outfits that have little variation.

In the summer months I have sleeveless dresses, in the cold a heavy cloak, but otherwise, I blend into the pale dirt of the town.

Sighing, I pull on my short leather boots, then stare at my bracers and necklaces in tired distaste.

It is not disgust of the bones — I would never denigrate our dead in such a fashion — but just of the necessary masquerade.

Reaching down, I trace the lines of my vertebracelets.

I thought them so pretty. Once. A long, long time ago, when my eyes went almost white, and the Council became convinced I turned blind so I could hear the bones more clearly.

Against my will, I glance towards the closed door of my bedroom, and panic flares to life, blood moths in my stomach, swarming wings beating frantically. I have not shaken off as much of my dream as I thought.

Let me out.

Please…please Gods, let me out.

Fumbling for control, I try to breathe, to center myself and push the memory away, but as the Council Bell chimes a third time, the sound is mirrored eerily in my mind, and I am sucked into blackness, the world before me being replaced with a long-buried past.

After the harsh gong of the Council Bell, the silence is painful.

I wonder if it’s morning.