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Story: The BoneKeeper’s Daughter (The Blade and Bone Trilogy #1)
THE ORANGE AND THE MOTHER
WREN
R annoch’s face softens the moment we walk away from Tahrik. Tahrik, Tahrik , his name is a song, his name is a promise, his name is a dream. Tah-REEK, Tah-REEK, the sound of the sunrise, the promise of dawn.
I keep my face placid, my eyes unseeing, but Rannoch’s sharp lips turn up at the corners.
The sweetness is unexpected, though he has been more gentle with me recently than I have seen him be with any other before.
“Your meeting is done unexpectedly early,” I offer as an opening, trying to find my footing, and he frowns.
“It was a waste of time. It usually is.” He’s gruff, clearly frustrated. “Nothing but chickens squawking. They love hearing their own voices.”
I make an indeterminate noise — I can’t tell if he’s looking for a response, but I have none to give him in any case.
My whole life I have tread only on safe paths, where I know the ground is sure and steady.
These new moments with Rannoch are like trying to climb shale cliffs, slippery and uncertain.
Lorcan? I ask suddenly, and he flares into awareness .
Here, Keeper.
I’m… I want to say I’m scared, that I’m suddenly petrified by the changes that have been happening, but I don’t know how.
He sighs in the way only bone washed in my blood can, and whispers against my skin I am here, Little Keeper. I will warn you of harm. For now, be wary, but from what I know of him, you are safe.
I nod, then notice Rannoch has been waiting patiently for me in my silence, head tilted, watching through careful eyes.
I wonder what he sees when he looks at me.
“You are wearing your sigils, Keeper.”
“It seemed the day for it.”
“You don’t seem to enjoy them.”
My heart stutters in response. “Why would you say such a thing, Councilman?” I ask, voice cooling. Have I been so incautious?
“I apologize. I meant more that it has been a long day, and that perhaps you are tired of blood and bone lining your face. I think I’m casting how I would feel onto you, which is not fair.
” His lips twist again into a wry smile.
“After the hunt, if we’ve been in the mud and the dirt, I can’t wait to wash my face off when I get home.
I thought maybe it would be the same for you, that feeling of returning to yourself.
I didn’t mean to compare. Of course the dirt of the hunt is a far cry from the sigils of the Keeper. ”
It’s such a strange, normal thing to say, that I don’t know how to respond. His earlier words echo in my head. I want to be something better than I am. At least, I’d like to try.
We walk in silence for a few minutes, and then, “I wouldn’t mind washing my face…” The words burst from me unexpectedly, without my permission, but he just nods in reply, face unchanging, and alters our course down a small side street.
Oh, Little Keeper.
Lorcan’s voice is amused in his long-suffering way though, so I can’t have misstepped too much.
“There’s a small cistern this way. I have a cloth you can use.”
At the curving end of the path is one of the common cisterns, small stone bowls more than anything, filled with brackish water from the ponds scattered through the outlands of our walls.
It’s tepid and stale, but serviceable, and I dip the offered cloth into the water before wiping my face, feeling the transition from BoneKeeper to woman with each stroke.
Rannoch just stands patiently, waiting for me to pass the small square of fabric back to him once I finish.
“Let me help, Keeper.” It’s not a question, but I am getting more used to the gruffness in his voice, and don’t take offense.
Taking the cloth, he reaches out slowly and tilts my head, finger barely touching my skin, and studies my face.
“Just here, and here…” he murmurs, gently wiping the side of my cheek and forehead, before pausing.
“Done. You…look more like yourself, now.”
My chin still rests on his finger, his eyes on my face, and the moment grows too long for comfort, but he does not move.
“I have a…thing…for you…” he begins, almost hesitantly, casting a furtive glance around us.
My breath catches. Rannoch is not hesitant.
He is not furtive. He is cool, and confident, and arrogant.
Above all else, arrogant. Rannoch knows who he is and his place and importance in this village, and walks like a man who believes the soil of the earth was made for him.
In some ways, it was. He may have been born from a trade, his pale, pale eyes betraying his heritage, but in all other ways he is a lodestone for the future of the village.
Young enough to be a Councilor for decades to come, having been chosen, like Lorcan, early by the bones, and he wears that knowledge in every step he takes.
But now, discomfort sits on his shoulders like a weight, and I fight not to narrow my eyes, to keep them wide and empty, like the fields around our walls.
“A thing?” I ask, unable to keep curiosity from crawling through like a cat, wrapping around my tone in an unexpected purr, and his eyes light with satisfaction.
“Yes, Keeper. A gift, as it were.” he answers, voice lightening and teasing, and this side of him, this unexpected window into someone other than the Councilman, is dangerous. “But you’ll have to wait until we go to the Oldest Mother first. Take me there.”
I startle slightly, pulling away from him, then calm, on the surface uncaring, but inside tremble.
There are two poisonous words in his honeyed tone.
Gifts in our village are not a known thing, not in many ways.
It is a gift to serve the Council, a gift to be chosen as an Offering.
It is a gift to be protected. So a gift is not a word said with a soft smile, with dancing eyes, with nervous anticipation.
And I had offered to take him to his Old Mother, not the Oldest Mother.
Never the Oldest Mother. I do not know how he knows, but I can hear the purpose in his voice.
She is in one of my secret spaces, but now he has commanded, and I cannot ignore a request to meet with bones.
It is in my blood, so if the words are spoken, I cannot betray my calling.
I lead him to the Oldest Mother, worry like acid in my stomach.
She is some distance away, quiet and forgotten in the furthest back corner of the village, three bleached bones nestled by the cracking, ancient entrance to one of the old cisterns, and our walk to her is silent and proper, through the now quiet village, streets mostly empty of people.
The few who remain do not look at us — it would do no one good if questions were seen in their eyes.
One of the smaller children ventures a tiny wave, then remembers I cannot see her, and scuttles away.
For the rest of the walk we are like ghosts in a dead forest, the path becoming quieter and quieter until there is no sound but the sandy scratch of our feet on dry dirt.
The Oldest Mother is in a quiet, lost corner — one of my favorite places in the entire city, and I am suddenly wary.
No one can see us here — most don’t even know this little crevice exists.
When you look down the path towards the cistern, it seems as though it is built straight into the stone of the mountain behind it.
And it is, mostly. But there is one, tiny nook that curves around the back of the pillars , large enough for three or four people at most. You would never see it unless you walk all the way to the end and almost press your body against the edge of the city wall, which you would not do, for risk of shredding your skin on the thorny overhang that anchors the wall to the mountain behind it.
It is a place you slip into; you do not stumble across it.
She is covered by the heavy vines that travel the length of the stone wall, sharp, biting spikes on twisted black branches, crawling down to the dirt like dying veins.
I will give Rannoch his due — it is always hard to locate the Oldest Mother, even for me.
The wall is long and uniform, though old, and if you do not know just where she is, you will cut your hand to vermilion ribbons before you can find her.
I walk to a point where the thorns know me, where I have sliced them off so I can slip my hand through and brush against the cool, smooth bones bricked into small slots between larger stones.
“Here,” I say, warmth blooming under my fingertips. It is always a pleasure to connect skin with bone. And no one visits the Oldest Mother, not really, so her happiness becomes my own at the promise of her many-times great Grandson.
“Show me.” He commands, and it is not a question, but is not cruel, so I take his hand to guide him through the safe space.
The moment I touch him, though, his breath falters, his fingers close reflexively around mine, an odd echo of my moment with Tahrik, and he stops me from reaching further forward.
We are both facing the wall, shoulder to shoulder, tucked in a corner away from the eyes of the village, the huge, breaking pillars of the cistern blocking us from any view, and his hand is unexpectedly warm and soft in my own.
“Councilman?” I ask, voice clearly hesitant, and he turns to look down at me, to study the image of my thin, pale fingers in his own, more tanned ones.
“Keeper…” he begins, still staring down, not meeting my eyes. His voice is a whisper; he sounds like the bones. “I have a gift for you, but you cannot tell anyone.”
I frown. “I don’t know how to reply, Councilman.”
A thought flashes across his face like lightning, before he can stop it, and his fingers flex in my own. “Just Rannoch here.” A pause, and then, “ Please. ”
This is new. This is…this is dangerous, and static crackles along my skin, like the air in the days before the Storms. I have never called him by his name. It is not a word for my mouth.
Table of Contents
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