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A CHANGING TIDE

WREN

L ast night lingers with me into this morning, the strange emotions clothing I did not choose to wear, and they sit uneasily on me.

I have not fallen asleep to Lorcan’s stories since he first decorated my back, when I was still so new to loneliness that his teeth along my spine were the only thing that kept me from madness.

There are words and worlds that he built for me in my youth that are still more real to me than almost anything else in this village.

But as I grew, first my windows opened, and then my door, and one day, when the promise of spring was thick in the air, and the first poisoned bloom was a blanket of pale color on the ground, a small bundle of flowers appeared on the handle of my shutters, surprisingly bright on the dark wood.

It was tied carefully with a woolen string, and two apple buns, still warm from a baker's oven, were wrapped in a small cloth. I’d never received a gift like it before.

Nor since, really. I remember reaching out cautiously to take them, as though they would bite, my hands, so confident with the dead, surprisingly unsure of these living things.

It was only the thought that flowers, once cut, are a breath from the grave, that gave me the courage to take them, and the bread.

Bread was safe, made of living things now dead, a perfect food for me.

As soon as I had them in hand, in the near distance, under an overhang, I heard a song begin, just the gentle notes on a lute, the plucked strings echoing off dawn-silent streets.

It pulled me out my door, across the dusty road, around corners, always just ahead of me, elusive and haunting.

I shouldn’t have gone; it was unheard of foolishness to follow a shadow’s song.

But I was 13 and scared, broken from my time alone with the bones.

I did not know how to speak anymore, except for with the words of the Dead, and I kept one hand on the exposed walls at all times whenever I left the safety of my home.

It had taken everything within me to stand up to the force of the Council, and it left me with nothing but puppet strength, used completely to hold my own in a company of carrion eaters.

Lorcan and the Hunter, the Baker, her son, and the Jeweler would provide me guidance and support, but things had been shattered within me that bones could not fix.

When I did readings for people, I had no understanding of how to interact with them but for the bone memory.

I wasn’t quite a child, not quite an adult, and was out of step with everyone else in the village.

People were not unkind; we were just separate, with a mountain and a valley between us.

The loneliness was crippling for a young girl, and I had taken to spending more and more time with no one but the dead for company.

It seemed almost enough most days, their memories becoming brighter and brighter until they eclipsed the colors of the living world.

Until that morning, and the words of a song calling to me, played for only me.

When I drifted through the ivy overhanging the Children’s Garden, there, resting against the curved wall, was a smiling young man — fifteen or sixteen at the time.

I knew him by sight, though not by name.

Even then, it was difficult to miss Tahrik.

Every line of him was a story of our people in a way I never could be.

His sharp jaw and heavy brow, his dark eyes and darker hair.

If I was a painting, I would be a vague outline on a blank canvas.

Tahrik would be all the shades of the land around us, the colors of fresh baked bread, and the stone mountain, of the pathways leading to the farmers’ fields, the dusky roses of the first bloom, born of poisoned rain.

He was everything I wasn’t — music, and breath, and joy, and peace — and had a place within the walls, friends who called for him, family that looked for him, people who loved him.

He was all possibility in an impossible place, and for some unknown reason, he saw me .

He waited for me to move, watching through laughing eyes, and, when I had finally picked a small, hidden section of wall to lean into, casually walked over, settling on the dusty ground near me, as though it were a thing people did every day.

I drew back into myself, and he saw it, giving me space, closing his eyes, never stopping the tune.

Just softly, and then, opening his eyes, he tilted his head, which tilted my world in the same motion, and he began singing.

I felt, in that moment, like I was born a new person, someone different than the bone girl. He was singing directly to me, as though it were a tune just for the two of us, and his voice was the sound of color from a time before this black and white world.

“Quietly, quietly, walk in the shadow

Quietly, quietly, through the dark door

Quietly, quietly, young starlit maiden

And there will be peace for you

Water and shore.

Quietly, quietly, shimmer like stardust

Quietly, quietly, hope on the wind

Quietly, quietly, tell me your secrets

And I’ll keep them safe for you

Shall we begin….”

He let the music fade, turning to me with a shining smile, eyes fixed on my own, and he whispered, “Well, BoneKeeper? Shall we begin?”

And we had. Carefully. Slowly. Stolen moments, sometimes days, usually weeks apart.

Barely anything, just sips of time, never enough water for a parched throat.

But I knew I had someone outside my cage who looked for me.

Who watched for me. And that feeling, of having someone want to know where you are, that your footsteps mean something to their day — it is a powerful balm to a broken heart .

We have to be careful in our friendship — the Council are a jealous sort, and, though every Keeper before me has been permitted a wife and children, every Keeper before me has also been a man.

Something shifted in them when I was born, when I came from my mother with white hair and milk skin, and things that were allowed in the time before my first cry have been carefully put on high shelves, out of my reach.

When you are older, they would say, offering false comfort.

When you have time. When you are not sick so often.

When you are stronger. When rains fall from the heavens without searing skin to bone.

When the TriGoddess returns in human form to right the world.

The last two, of course, are never said. Just implied. When man can grow feathers and fly. When the Sun God is swallowed by the sea. My freedom is a Dream in the Nowhere.

But sometimes, on mornings like this, when the Council is huddled up in their den, and they do not place demands on my time, calling me from my regular duties to serve them at their pleasure, I have a breath of clear air. And in that breath, I always look for Tahrik.

I don’t have long — when not with the Council, I should be reading for the people of the village, but they have been unusually quiet lately with their requests.

The whole of the Hunt, longer than a month, the Council kept me in their chambers daily, and it feels a storm’s age since I spoke to anyone for bone.

Still, I can’t help but lean my head against the wall and send a longing look down the main street; Tahrik is the son of a miller, and should be here soon to trade grain and flour.

By the sun, if he is not late, then I may have missed him already.

I could ask the bones under my fingers, but Tahrik is a small piece of normalcy to me, a place where he is a boy, and I am a girl, and there are no bones whispering between us.

It is a nice feeling, this waiting, this nervous anticipation.

It is…human. So I wait, and watch the movements of a waking village, drink in the sounds of the people around me.

A woman catches my eye; she is laughing with a pink cheeked child, and the sound is like fresh water.

The mother pauses by a shop, then, with caution to the youngster, enters.

Her daughter remains outside, drawing patterns in the dust, until she is distracted by the noise of a small clutch of chickens on the far side of the street.

In a strange twist, our village, where all must pay their due, values children to such a degree that none would dare harm a young one.

Outside of the Reaping or Rendering, children are protected by the entire village.

As such, most children are permitted quite a bit of freedom, and the little girl wanders from the door to chase one scrawny chicken down the dirt road.

She is not paying attention to anything, though, and my eyes narrow in concern as she veers off course, heading towards a small paddock where the Hunters’ ponies are kept during the outside months.

The bony bird flaps through their hooves, startling the shaggy creatures, but the child only has eyes for the chicken until it is almost too late.

Keeper! Keeper! The bones at the gate of the paddock are screaming a warning.

I am moving before I can think, running through the street and knocking people out of the way, who stare after me in amazement.

The girl’s crying now, backed up against the edge of the paddock, paralyzed with fear as the ponies rear in front of her.

She is inches from an ironed hoof when I am able to grab her and pull her to safety.

Wrapping my arms around her, I rock back and forth, crooning a song I remember from my own childhood, a song about the sun and moon falling in love, and sharing the sky.

She is still tear stained and hiccuping softly, nuzzled in with a curved cheek and soft skin against my chest, when her mother rushes up, frantic.