Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(117)
Author: Alexandra Bracken

 

A sickening fury crept through me, bringing the taste of bile to my mouth again. There was no Goddess or any other god. There was no fate. There had only ever been the cruel uncertainties of life.

 

The isle’s mist roamed between the trees, spreading its long, searching fingers toward the tower. The last of the Nine’s magic had dwindled, and the fires inside the moat were no longer burning. I stared down into it, eyes skimming over the bones, the charred wood, the swords and shields that had fallen in and become distorted with heat.

 

What was I supposed to do? There was hardly anything left of my brother to bury. The way to the barge, to the human world, was clear now and there was nothing to stop me or anyone else from leaving, but what was left for me there? A small life riddled with painful memories of being left behind and made to feel useless. A job I’d inherited, a guild that had never wanted me, no friends to lean on, no place to go but back to a home that was meant to be shared, full of things my brother would never need again.

 

At the end of everything, what was left?

 

Quiet weeping filled the gloaming, and a faint light rose below. With stiff muscles, I pulled myself away from the wall and looked down into the courtyard.

 

Olwen was laying the bodies out alongside one another, tenderly arranging even the most grotesque of them. She tried to clean their faces, their arms and legs, but when she came to Betrys, she began to shake. She pressed her face into her bloodied apron to muffle her cries.

 

This.

 

The word sang through me, as clearly as if someone had whispered it in my ear.

 

This. This was what was left.

 

Them.

 

I made my way along the wall, stopping to hook my arms beneath the body of a man slumped over his broken bow. I brought him down the stairs, struggling beneath his weight, and laid him out beside the others. Olwen looked up, but I had already started back toward the stairs, where more of the dead waited.

 

We worked in silence, and I found that the movement, the focus, stilled my thoughts. At some point, Neve joined us, washing and preparing the dead as Olwen and I brought them to her. Neve, who had once been so intrigued by death, had lost the last trace of light from her eyes as the grim reality overtook her.

 

Then Caitriona came, carrying Mari’s frail body out of the tower. She laid Mari beside her sisters, her face rigid with barely suppressed emotion.

 

She brought Flea out last, but as she came near us, she stopped. Her grip on the girl tightened, her face strained beneath her bandages.

 

“Cait,” Olwen said softly, lifting her arms.

 

“No,” the other girl said roughly, cradling Flea.

 

“She’s already gone, dear heart,” Olwen said. “There is nothing to be done now.”

 

“No.” Caitriona closed her eyes, pleading.

 

Neve rose and went to Caitriona, placing a gentle hand on her back and guiding her forward. I wiped the sweat and grime from my face with the sleeve of my jacket, barely able to look as the little girl was placed with the others.

 

Flea looked almost peaceful, and somehow that made it worse, because I knew her final moments had been anything but.

 

I crouched beside her, touching her hand, studying her like I had the others. I didn’t want to forget any part of her. Her small-boned frame. The thin blue veins on her eyelids. The white-blond strands tucked up into her knit cap.

 

I took her left hand and cleaned it with a new rag. Olwen took her right, placing a small bundle of herbs and dried flowers in it, as she had with all the others. Caitriona hung back, tears streaming down her face. Neve stayed close to her side, giving me a helpless look as she hooked her hand around Caitriona’s elbow.

 

Gently, gently, I placed Flea’s hand over her stomach, but as I pulled back, my fingers skimmed over something tucked into the waistband of her breeches. Frowning, I lifted the blood-stiff fabric.

 

“What is that?” Neve asked, leaning over my shoulder.

 

The others crowded around me as I held the flat, palm-sized rock toward the nearest wisp of glowing mist.

 

No. It wasn’t rock at all, but bone. And the etchings . . .

 

Olwen rose, disappearing into her workshop, only to reappear a few moments later with a basket holding the vessel of High Priestess Viviane. She turned the sculpture upside down and I brought the shard of bone to the hole there, adjusting its angle until it fit perfectly in place.

 

“Where did she find that?” Caitriona breathed out.

 

“Or who did she steal it from?” I said, my words scratchy.

 

“We were checking her each night for missing belongings,” Olwen said, resting her hands over Flea’s smaller ones. “She must have come across it while we were gone.”

 

“Can the vessel be repaired?” I asked. “If someone broke it intentionally, I want to know what memories they were trying to hide.”

 

Olwen shook her head. “There is no one alive who can repair it and rejoin it magically.”

 

A thought slithered through my mind, hushed and coiling with anticipation. “Not in this world. But what if there was someone in the mortal one?”

 

The Bonecutter had been crafting keys for skeleton knobs for ages and could procure anything, even basilisk venom. If they couldn’t repair the vessel, maybe they would know someone who could.

 

I tucked the bone shard into the basket and covered it with the cloth. It would be coming with us on our journey.

 

Caitriona stroked Flea’s cold cheek.

 

“What should we do?” Neve asked after a moment. “Bury them?”

 

Caitriona shook her head. “We cannot. We have to burn them, as we did the others.”

 

“But the curse—” Olwen began.

 

“We do not know if the curse is still upon the land,” Caitriona said. “Better their souls release forever to death than risk them turning into the very creatures that killed them.”

 

“Tamsin and I can do it,” Neve told them.

 

“No,” Caitriona said. “Honoring the dead is one of the most sacred duties of a priestess of Avalon. It must be our final act as such.”

 

“You’re still a priestess of Avalon,” I told her.

 

“I am the priestess of nothing,” Caitriona said, rising. “That is all I shall ever be.”

 

 

 

We placed the bodies on the field within the courtyard, where crops might have grown, if there’d been time. Caitriona sang for the fire, the words gritty as they emerged from her throat. Yet when Olwen took her hand and began to hum a low tune, Caitriona pulled away.