Eight Years Ago
FINGERS OF MIST CURLED AROUND Bastien’s father as he walked away from his only child. The boy lifted up on his knees in their stalled handcart. “Where are you going, Papa?”
His father didn’t answer. The light of the full moon shone on Lucien’s chestnut hair, and the mist swallowed him from sight.
Alone, Bastien sank back down and tried to be quiet. Stories of cutthroat robbers on forest roads ran rampant through his ten-year-old mind. Don’t be afraid, he told himself. Papa would have warned me if there was any danger. But his father was gone now, and Bastien began to doubt.
Outside the city walls, the idle cart offered little shelter. Bastien’s skin crawled at phantom whispers. His breath caught when the branches around him formed claws.
I should follow Papa right now, he thought, but the nighttime chill seeped into his bones and filled them with lead. He shivered, pressed up against the limestone sculptures in the cart. Tyrus, god of the Underworld, stared back at him, his mouth chiseled in a wry line. Bastien’s father had carved the figurine months ago, but it never sold. People preferred the sun god and the earth goddess, worshipping life and disregarding death.
Bastien turned his head, hearing a song without words. Lilting. Primal. Sad. Like the soft cry of a child or the plaintive call of a bird or a harrowing ballad of lost love. The song swelled inside him, achingly beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the woman standing on the bridge, for Bastien, like his father, soon followed the music there.
The mist settled, and a thick fog rolled in from the Nivous Sea. The breeze played with the ends of the woman’s dark amber hair. Her white dress swished, exposing her slim ankles and bare feet. She wasn’t singing. The music poured from a bone-white flute at her mouth. Bastien should have recognized her for what she was then.
She set the flute on the parapet when Lucien met her in the middle of the bridge. The hazy moonlight cast them in an unearthly glow.
Bastien faltered, unable to take another step. What if this was a dream? Perhaps he’d fallen asleep in his father’s cart.
Then his father and the woman started dancing.
Her movements were slow, breathtaking, graceful. She glided through the fog like a swan on water. Lucien never looked away from her midnight-dark eyes.
Bastien didn’t either, but when the dance ended, he blinked twice. What if he wasn’t dreaming?
The bone-white flute caught his eye again. Dread dropped hot coals in his stomach. Was the flute really made of bone?
Legends of Bone Criers rushed back to him and clashed warning bells through his mind. The women in white were said to stalk these parts of Galle. Bastien’s father wasn’t a superstitious man—he never avoided bridges during a full moon—but he should have, for here he was, enchanted like all doomed men in the tales. Every story was alike. Each had a bridge and dancing . . . and what happened afterward. Now was when—
Bastien sprang forward. “Papa! Papa!”
His father, who adored him, who carried him on his shoulders and sang him lullabies, never turned to heed his son.
The Bone Crier withdrew a bone knife. She leapt straight into the air—higher than a roe deer—and with the force of her descent, she plunged the blade deep into his father’s heart.
Bastien’s scream raged as guttural as a grown man’s. It carved his chest hollow with pain he would harbor for years.
He ran onto the bridge, collapsed beside his father, and met the woman’s falsely sorry eyes. She glanced behind her at another woman at the bridge’s end, who beckoned with a hasty hand.
The first woman lifted the bloody bone knife to her palm, like she meant to cut herself to complete the ritual. But with one last look at Bastien, she cast the knife into the forest and fled, leaving the boy with a dead father and a lesson seared forever in his memory:
Believe every story you hear.
1
Sabine
IT’S A GOOD DAY FOR shark hunting. At least that’s what Ailesse keeps telling me. I pant, climbing behind her as she springs from one rock outcropping to the next. Her auburn hair gleams poppy red in the morning sunlight. The strands whip wildly in the sea breeze as she effortlessly scales the cliff.
“Do you know what a true friend would do?” I grab a handhold on the limestone and catch my breath.
Ailesse pivots and looks down at me. She doesn’t mind the precarious ledge she’s standing on.
“A true friend would toss me that crescent pendant.” I nod at the grace bone that dangles among the small shells and beads on her necklace. The bone came from an alpine ibex we hunted in the far north last year. He was Ailesse’s first kill, but I was the one who fashioned a piece of his sternum into the pendant she wears. I’m the better bone carver, a fact Ailesse encourages me to gloat about. I should, because it’s the only thing I’m better at.
She laughs, my favorite sound in the world. Throaty, full of abandon, and never condescending. It makes me laugh, too, even though mine is self-deprecating. “Oh, Sabine.” She climbs back down to me. “You should see yourself! You’re a mess.”
I smack her arm, but I know she’s right. My face is hot, and I’m dripping sweat. “It’s very selfish of you to make this look easy.”
Ailesse’s lower lip juts in a humorous pout. “I’m sorry.” She places a supportive hand on my back, and I relax onto my heels. The thirty-foot distance to the ground doesn’t seem so vast anymore. “All I can think about is what it will feel like to have a shark’s sixth sense. With its grace bone, I’ll be able to—”
“—discern when someone is nearby, which will make you the best Ferrier the Leurress have seen in a century,” I drone. She’s talked of little else all morning.
She grins and her shoulders shake with merriment. “Come, I’ll help you up. We’re almost there.” She doesn’t give me her crescent pendant. It wouldn’t do any good. The grace can only belong to the huntress who imbued it with the animal’s power. Otherwise, Ailesse would have given me all her bones. She knows I loathe killing.
The journey to the top is easier with her at my side. She guides my feet and takes my hand when I need a little lift. She prattles on about every fact she’s gleaned about sharks: their enhanced sense of smell, their superior vision in low light, their soft skeletons made of cartilage—Ailesse plans to select a hard tooth for her grace bone, since it won’t decay over her lifetime. The defining mineral in real bone is also abundant in teeth, so the shark’s graces will imbue it in the same way.
We finally reach the summit, and my legs tremble while my muscles unwind. Ailesse doesn’t pause to rest. She races to the opposite side, plants her feet at the extreme edge of the drop-off to the sea, and squeals in delight. The breeze ripples across her short, snug dress. Its single strap complements her shoulder necklace, which wraps in strands from her neck to below her right arm. The dress is the perfect length for swimming. Before we set off this morning, Ailesse removed the longer white skirt she usually wears on top.
She spreads her arms wide and stretches her fingers. “What did I tell you?” she calls back to me. “A perfect day! There’s scarcely a wave down there.”
I join her, though not as close to the edge, and peer downward. Forty-five feet below, the lagoon is encircled by limestone cliffs such as this one. The wind can only skip across the skin of the water. “And a shark?”