Page 6

“Peace! Peace!” Raek’s voice is a gong, and the word he calls to calm the crowd drips with the promise of violence.

I want to step back, but it will be seen.

“Peace!” he calls again, but in our village, peace means blood, and war, and Rending, and this time, the warning is heard, and the crowd falls more silent than its previous silence.

Before it was the silence of night. Now it is the silence of the grave.

Seemingly satisfied with their compliance, he tries to gentle his voice, but it’s still steel on stone, setting teeth on edge with its sound.

Though Raek is usually a favorite amongst the villagers, for a moment he slips, lets his private face show through his public masque, and he fumbles to regain control. “Friends…”

Councilman Nickolas, stepping forward to stand next to Raek, is an eagle’s scream, too loud in the soundless square.

“The Storms are coming!” There is no response from the people, and his mouth curves like the edge of a scythe.

“The Storms are coming,” he repeats, “and we are not prepared.” He shakes his head, a sad, disappointed father over the failure of his sons. “The silos are only half-full.”

At this proclamation, a ripple runs like a spark through the people.

Half-full! That will not carry the elders through the winter!

If the silos are beneath three-quarters, the elders get nothing.

Nothing at all. I see a woman shudder visibly in the crowd — she is months away from the sunset marking her twilight years.

The years we are promised should we make it through the Offerings, and she still has two grandchildren to care for, though her hair is ashen and her face lined.

Her eyes are wide with fear, but her cheeks are dry.

In our village you are born crying and you die crying, but you do not waste the water in between.

And we all know the truth, despite the promises.

The sanctity of the twilight years is a dream in the Nowhere.

If her sunset birthday falls in the Storms, and we are too low on food, she will be marked, grandchildren or not.

I is for Infant, we all owe our due I chant automatically in my head.

But never from my hands. No matter who the bones call for.

The mountain thunders again, and I can feel its longing vibrate in my chest.

In the tired clumps of slumping bodies, there is a growing realization — they should not be this hungry in the early frost. Now is the time of abundance in the village…

what little abundance they have. And while they are never full, this should be when they are, at least, not empty.

But the hollow cheeks and dull eyes of the people speak of too many skipped meals and scarce water.

It is written on their faces — the coming Storms will not be kind.

The village is too deep in desperation already to make it through the dark hours.

Everyone knows the trees grew scant fruit this year, though the Council anointed them with the blood of the Rendered, and the fields of pearl millet never turned autumn gold.

But…half-full? In my lifetime, a full twenty-three years, we have never dropped below three-quarters, and even then, the number given as Offering to help us through the Storms was…

something I do not like to think of. At half-full…

I clench my hands beneath my long sleeves and breathe shallowly. The Offering would be unheard of.

Another of the Council motions to me with practiced hands.

“We know, friends. But take comfort!” he calls, not as commanding as Raek, or chaotic as Nickolas — just one villager speaking to another.

Somehow, the normalcy of his words does something Raek and Nickolas could not, calming some of the panic.

“Take comfort,” he says again with a gentle smile, hand still extended in my direction, and the people turn to face me as one .

The BoneKeeper, a pale snow bunting kept in a cage, brought out by the Council to sing for her supper.

Every Gathering is the same — twelve men like carved statues in a row, and me, a pale shadow just behind them, though today two are missing from its ranks, and the Village Father as well.

They must be off with the hunters. The Council never asks that I stand with them — I am but a tool to be wielded.

Not an equal — not anymore — and they do all they can to make sure I remember my place.

I don’t know how they have convinced themselves that their warped version of our history is true, or why they think I would believe them when their words taste of iron and deception.

Even if they could force their words to burrow like worms in my brain, the Bones have whispered the true map of our people to me, and the Bones cannot lie.

The Council was not always the crown and the scepter of our land, though they have done all they can to erase any whispers of the past. Long before the Earth rose and the Sky fell, we worshiped a trinity of women — the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.

And in that time, when the earth was soft and the wind was gentle, and the TriGoddess gave her blessings to us, the bones have a memory of a woman like me, though they won’t name her, no matter how many times I ask.

But she was a Flower, a Jewel, a Treasure Box.

Not a whip, or a rod, or a knife. It was in the before , brief in the golden, fading memories of the oldest bones.

Before our people were torn limb from limb and left in pits to feed a flesh-starved earth, before we filled the skies with smoke carrying the scent of burnt skin and boiled blood, before water drained from our world and left us cracked and wanting.

Before the Council.

Before the BoneKeeper.

“We are asking the BoneKeeper to search for an answer!” Raek steps in front of the other Councilman, unhappy losing the attention of the people, and his words yank me from my dream fog in a whiplash.

I do not start, am too well trained, but my heart beats faster at his words.

“Perhaps there is someone who will have lived through this, who will be able to help guide us.” He clicks his fingers at me, commanding his leashed pet, and I step forward, pressing my hands together as is our way, and bowing slightly, the white curtain of my hair hiding my face.

I am a ghost. I am a soul tethered to Earth, transparent and weightless.

“We have time!” he promises, the words a steel prod.

“We still have two months until the Storms descend. We have given our hunters permission to go outside the Northern Arch and beyond the growing lands of the Southern Arch to bring back enough provisions to last us through the worst. And if we go hungry, well, we have suffered and survived similar.”

It is almost laughable that a man the size of Raek can speak of going hungry.

He is not heavy — heavy does not exist in our world, even for our leaders — but he is not gaunt and hollowed out like the rest of us.

Even at almost fifty years, Councilman Raek is tall and broad, hard cut muscles taught on his forearms. There is no part of him that has dulled to the dust that coats every other villager.

It is amazing what sleep and food can do for a man; his gleam and vitality is a lure to the downcast eyes of the people.

I have heard the women of the village whisper about him over their kneading and washing.

“Raek looks like a man who knows ,” they say, smiling and winking at each other, falling into a giggling quiet if he passes by and nods at them.

I thank the long silent goddess every night that I have never been one swayed by shiny things.

No, Raek will not go hungry, even with half-full silos.

He and the rest of leaders of the village will have their share, even when the rest have none.

All who have a place in the Council House — the Father, the twelve Brothers of the Council, an equal number of Protectors, six Renders, six Reapers, and the sole Justice — when we have one —will never go hungry.

Nor will their kept women, I think ungenerously, and immediately regret it.

I don’t envy the wild-eyed women who I sometimes see scuttling away from the Council House in the early hours, hands laden with burlap sacks earned at a stomach churning price.

Not all the Council. Some are decent men.

It is best to be honest, even in my own head.

Still, aren’t all guilty if none speaks?

Nickolas stands shoulder to shoulder with Raek, the siblings bearing a startling resemblance to each other, looking almost like twins despite the five year difference between them.

Raek has either aged well, or Nickolas poorly.

Reluctant sadness sits heavy and awkward on his face, almost a mockery of the villagers' own terror.

Nickolas has never been as good at hiding his true self as Raek.

“We must ask you to sacrifice for this,” his voice heavy with faux regret.

“If the BoneKeeper is to find an answer, we must ask you not to request visitations for the foreseeable future.”

And now there is a rumble in the crowd, like breaking rock from the mountain overhead.

There are few things that could light any sort of fire beneath these desperate people, but visitations are a right , a gift from the Gods that not even the Council can take away.

I smile to myself beneath my veil of hair, then school my face and look up at Nickolas, eyes wide and unseeing. Blind and blank, and white as bone.

“I cannot condone that action,” I say, voice flat and toneless. Show no human heart, no human emotion. You are merely a conduit between the living flesh and living bone. “The Bones will not allow it. Especially this close to the Storms.”