Page 36 of Wizards & Weavers (Cozy Questing #1)

Card No. 37, the one about shoelaces. This shambling, rickety thing didn’t have any shoelaces, but that didn’t matter. There was plenty enough to entangle. Braiden swallowed hard, forcing himself to concentrate, and flung out a panicked snarl of a spell.

Glowing threads and ribbons exploded from his fingers, snagging the jagged bits of the skeleton’s outstretched hands, its ribs, its feet. Braiden didn’t even have to call on Card No. 37’s recommended knots.

The skeleton sabotaged itself, tripping clumsily in a mess of string. It slipped on a patch of ice, toppled off balance, then went rattling and crashing to the floor.

Augustin clapped Braiden on the shoulder. “Well done, weaver. A gust of wind might have smashed and scattered the miserable thing to pieces. Better that we have a chance to question it.”

“Please don’t kill me,” the skeleton whimpered, its skull rolling about until it could look into their faces. “I panicked, okay? You try waking up dead. It’s fine. You can keep your skin. I just — I’m just going to lie here for a bit.”

Warren pointed the tip of his staff at the skeleton’s skull. Standing that way, Braiden couldn’t help noticing how this was an echo of how they’d met the burrowfolk to begin with, Elyssandra standing over him with her spear pointed at his throat.

“Who are you?” Warren asked, his voice steely and cold.

“I wish I could tell you,” the skeleton grunted. “Like I said: I just woke up. I’ve been dead forever, and now I’m not. It’s a lot to process.”

Warren frowned, lowering his staff even closer to the skeleton’s face. “You’re lying. Tell us what you remember.”

Bone clicked against icy stone as the skeleton shrugged. “Nothing,” it finally said. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I don’t exactly have a brain.”

“You don’t have any of the parts needed for speaking, either,” Warren growled, “and yet here we are.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I was dead, and now I’m not. Well, technically speaking, I’m not dead dead, but — ”

“This is going nowhere,” Warren sighed. “I say we crush its skull and get on with it.”

“No,” the skeleton cried out. “I’m just a little guy. Don’t hurt me.”

Braiden squinted at the creature — nothing little about him. Mostly very average, really. But he could see what the skeleton was getting at. He was small in his helplessness. Braiden knew how that felt.

“He’s not a threat to us,” Braiden said.

Warren cocked an eyebrow, one of his ears bending into a questioning crook. “How could you possible know that?”

Look at him , Braiden thought, knowing it wouldn’t be polite to say out loud. Any truly dangerous undead would be thrashing in its restraints, hungering to drink or draw the blood of the living.

“Braiden has a point,” Augustin said. “I have encountered the walking dead in my travels, heard tell of fearsome liches and powerful skeleton kings that dwell in the darkest recesses of the world. Tell me, friend Warren, if you can sense anything sinister about this particular specimen. He is, as he says, just a guy.”

“Just a little guy,” the skeleton corrected.

“Yes,” Augustin said. “That. Thank you.”

“Madness,” Warren said, shaking his head as he removed his staff.

Elyssandra stepped out from behind the safety of Augustin’s cloak. The color had returned to her face, no longer as frightened of the skeleton as moments before.

“What is your name?” she asked.

The skeleton shrugged again. “Don’t know. Can’t remember.”

Braiden went down on his haunches. “Then what would you like us to call you?”

The skeleton turned his head, hollow eye sockets staring at Braiden, as if really regarding him for the first time.

“Bones,” he finally said. “You can call me Bones, I guess.”

“Bones it is, then,” Braiden said. He held out his hands. “If you promise not to hurt us — and if there are no objections from the group — I can dismiss your bonds.”

Augustin nodded, powerful enough on his own to blow the skeleton apart with a single well-aimed spell.

Elyssandra agreed, too, though she did retreat more of herself behind the wizard’s cloak.

Only Warren was annoyed, but again, in case of skeletal betrayal, he was also very well equipped to defend himself.

“I won’t hurt you,” the skeleton said. “Won’t try anything tricky. Not sure I can, really. But it’s nice of you not to totally murder me on the spot.”

With a stroke of two fingers, Braiden severed the threads still restraining the skeleton. They fell away, fading into nothing. Bones brushed the disintegrating filaments from his ribs as he stood, his skeleton cracking and popping the whole way up.

“I suppose there’s not much you can tell us about this place,” Augustin said.

Bones shook his head, taking in the icy debris, the shattered, scattered bits of other skeletons. “I wish I could. It’s all so hazy. Why am I here? Why am I alive? I mean — you know what I mean.”

Warren scoffed. “Wonderful. An undead liability with no brain and a big mouth.”

A rasping noise emanated from the skeleton’s skull. Apparently, that was the sound of Bones scoffing back. But before he could fire back a retort, Bones suddenly went still.

“It can’t be,” the skeleton said softly. His skull turned, rotating impossibly to look straight behind his back and between his shoulders.

The crack in the wall. Bones broke into a stuttering, awkward run, his skull realigning as he bobbled forward. The four followed suit, Braiden’s heart thumping in his chest. What was going on? Had he misjudged the skeleton’s harmlessness after all?

Bones stopped just short of the gaping crevice, his bony fingers clutching at the wall as he stared in. Skeletons couldn’t breathe, but Braiden could swear he heard the skeleton gasp.

“Now this,” Bones said, peering into the chilly chamber. “This, I remember.”