Page 69

A LONG NIGHT

WREN

T he air is heavy and thick the next time I open my eyes, tiny shards of shattered-glass pain filling my lungs with every breath, so it takes me longer than it should to realize there is someone in the small room with me.

Before panic can overtake me completely, a deep, exhausted voice almost stumbles across the floor from the far curve of the wall.

“It is only me, BoneKeeper.” Silas is careful, subdued, trying to be reassuring, but I have had enough of waking to strange men near me, and I cannot calm the frantic skipping of my heart.

The room is almost pitch-black — the only light a thin strip of flickering candle flame from beneath the door frame separating us from the front room of the tiny cottage — so he isn’t defined, rather just a shadow in darker shadows.

I’m completely disoriented; it is a peculiar trick of time, waking up in the house in which I was born, where my mother raised me, where my father decided to give his life for me.

In the ink of night, I am pulled back to being a child, the stale smells old but familiar.

This place is a memory box filled with long-forgotten treasures of scents and sounds that prompt a choking array of memories.

Even Silas shifting in the chair reminds me of my mother sewing at night, rocking in a rhythmic creak, the steady sound somehow lulling me to sleep.

It is too much, combined with the avalanche of the last two days, and my heart cracks in painful longing for the safety of my mother’s arms, the feeling, however brief, of someone else taking the burden from my hands.

The present and past shimmer over each other, a mirage of what was, what could have been, and what is, and I can’t prevent the crushing sadness of realization that, whatever version of life I am in, it is not one of my making.

Silas waits a beat, two, then speaks, his voice velvet-soft in the pressing darkness of the room, a blanket of deep sound covering me and pushing back against the weight of the memories around me.

“I remember the first time I saw you,” he offers unexpectedly.

Something in his tone catches my breath, though he isn’t vulnerable and there is no hesitancy.

Instead it is like he has practiced this, knows the words by heart and has been waiting to say them.

He is matter-of-fact, but unguardedly so.

“Not the first time I met you, though I remember that as well. You were a baby, white as bone, snow hair, bloodstained eyelids. Even then you had pale eyes. They had color, just not entirely. Did you know that? Ringed in sapphire, but the entire middle was diamond blue, light and clear.” He drifts away into some private moment, long enough that my eyes start to grow heavy, and my breathing slows before he begins again.

“But the first time I saw you, well. That is a different matter altogether, isn’t it.

Because you can look and look at something and never really see it.

And maybe I would never have, had things gone differently.

I was too young to be named Father, no matter what your bone friends may say.

The weight of a people is too much to bear for a single man, let alone a child.

And though gifts in our village are not things that can be given back, I would have done almost anything those first few years to have passed it to another's hands.”

My throat is too raw to respond; I’m not certain what to say in any case. I don’t know this version of him, don’t really know any version of him other than what I’ve seen on the stage and in the Council House.

“I — I don’t know how much you remember, Wren.

” For the first time, he falters slightly, before his voice strengthens again.

“I have to assume…everything. It’s not something I can forget, and I wasn’t locked in the room with you.

I’ve never known — did you think I was part of it?

Part of your…training…as Raek called it.

” His question is fervent, begs for a response.

“I haven’t thought of it,” I whisper, and though I can’t see his face, I can hear the sorrow in his answering sigh.

“Ah. You haven’t,” he says, a strange twist of disappointment curls through the sound.

“I wasn’t. If that makes any sort of difference.

I didn’t agree with it, but you were, what, five when you started coming to the Council House?

I was twelve or thirteen at the time. Most of my days were spent with tutors, learning the rhythms of our people, the patterns of the Council.

The price of our past, and the cost for our future.

” He stops, then exhales sharply, a mirthless huff of sound.

“ We chose the wrong man , she said. The soul that spoke through you. We chose the wrong man, and you have failed us at every turn .” The words are bitter, acidic.

“They didn’t choose a man at all, though, did they.

They chose a boy. A wholly unprepared boy.

And threw me to the wolves to be raised, then expected me to know the correct path forward, though all the ways are lined with blood and bone. ”

There is a shifting in the darkness and suddenly he is next to me, still hard to distinguish in the dim room, but close enough I can see the curve of his shoulders, the bend of his head, the curve of his cheek.

“Do you need anything?” he asks. “Can I get you water? Something else?” I shake my head carefully, painfully, and he sighs, then continues on his original path, as though he never detoured.

“You were newly twenty. It was the spring where the Month of the Maiden was unusually forgiving.” He pauses as though waiting to see if I remember.

What he doesn’t know is that I remember every soul that has been lost over the years, every soul I have guided as well.

The spring of my twentieth year bloomed so vividly and enticingly that I thought I would be trembling under the weight of those I would have to guide to bone.

But we only lost two to the poisoned harvest. More made it through the winter than in the previous few years, and I think it lent courage and strength to the villagers.

“It was early enough in the morning that the light was still thin, the air almost painful from breathing in the cold. I don’t remember why I was out, where I was going.

Just that I rounded a curve in the road, and there you were, kneeling on the ground in front of a child who was giving you a loaf of bread.

It was the first time I saw your face look like…

like you were in your body. You thanked the girl, and smiled at her, then stood up, dusted yourself off, and walked away. ”

“ That was the first time you saw me?” I ask, surprise clear even in my barely voiced question, and he laughs briefly, a deep, delicious rumble of thunder that rolls through my chest.

“It was. Because —” He pauses as though he is trying to make a decision, then, reaching out hesitantly, he takes my hand in his, leaving it open so I can pull away if I want to.

But his hand is warm surrounding mine, and my fingers curl into his without thought.

“Because I thought in that moment that you knew what it was like to wear a masque. That perhaps you knew what it was like to be someone who was created by their circumstance, who had their life forced upon them rather than…I thought, selfishly, maybe here is someone who could understand me.” He stares down at our intertwined fingers.

“I regret not thinking instead, maybe here is someone I could understand.”

Neither of us speaks for a long time. The only noise is the settling of the house, the wind outside, the occasional deeper breath.

“Wren,” he finally says, “when the sun rises, we will have to forget tonight, and return to our duties. We both know there is no escaping the commands from the Bones. Nothing can come of this.” There is no uncertainty; he is resolute and immovable.

“Tomorrow we will be back to normal, back to the masques we wear to make it through a day.” Here his fingers betray him, his thumb tracing patterns on the back of my hand, and his voice drops from a murmur to a whisper.

“But for tonight, for this moment, maybe you’ll let me pretend that it is just you, and just me.

That the first time I saw you, I approached you as a boy in this village would.

That we have spent the last several years meeting under the full moon of the Dancing Month, that we have shared mead from the same cup.

And that we are both unbound from expectations, from duty.

Just for the space of a few hours. You can sleep and dream, I can sit and dream, and if dreams are the only place we meet, for tonight it will be enough.

We can be an unwritten book together, just in this moment, the ink being sketched on the very first page.

No chapters before, only empty pages after.

Everything still to be decided, scribed only by your hands and mine, none other to guide the pen. ”

It is a fantasy woven in rich fabric, and I tighten my fingers around his, closing my eyes to picture what he is painting in his words.

Taking the movement as assent, he slowly reaches up his other hand to brush my tangled hair from my face, to gently trace the line of my jaw, carefully avoiding any cuts or bruising.

“I will pretend that I haven’t been breaking under years of other people's expectations. That between us, we have made our own plans, that we have not been not forced into those ideas for what we should do and who we should be.” He swallows hard, and though his voice doesn’t tremble, it is tight, so controlled it is almost shattering.

“This village has left little room for me to know myself, even now, though it is becoming easier. For so long, every step has been a prescribed path forward — despite what I am, most things are chosen for me, and those expectations are a heavy burden. I think you know how that feels as no one else in the world would. That, in a different time and place, your soul might recognize mine as a mirror.” Silence fills the space between us, swelling and pushing out, and time freezes in the seconds between our heartbeats.

When he speaks, his heart is in his words, raw and ragged and true.

“I have been called so many things in my life, and none ever seemed to fit. Father, Brother, even Silas. But here, in the dark with you, I have no name.”

Picking up my hand very gently, he brings it to his lips and kisses it softly, before laying it carefully down by my side and pulling the blankets up around me.

“Rest now, Wren. I’ll stand watch and none will cross the threshold.

We are somewhere out of time, somewhere unexpected and unknown, a path no feet have trodden.

You’re safe here, in this moment. Tomorrow will come with all it may bring, but for now, I have you.

And I will keep the darkness from your door. ”

When I wake again, the room is empty, and I am alone.