I clap my hands over my mouth and shrink backward. My eyes pool with tears. “Where—?” I choke on my words. “Where are their other bones?”
Marcel removes his pack. “There’s a gallery of femurs in the west catacombs.” He rolls out his shoulders. “But most of the bones—ribs and clavicles and the like—are lying in heaps behind monuments such as these.” He shrugs lackadaisically. “I suppose our ancestors couldn’t spare the time to arrange all of them.”
“Are all their skeletons separated like this?”
“Mm-hmm.”
My tears spill over. This is sinful, abhorrent, revolting. The Leurress bury men whole. The gods forbid us to remove human bones from their bodies. If we did, their souls would suffer a state of endless unrest in the afterlife. They wouldn’t be reunited with their bodies. They wouldn’t be able to touch or act upon things. They wouldn’t be able to embrace their departed loved ones.
“Why are you offended?” Bastien’s brows furrow. He grabs a crate tucked against the wall and passes it over to Jules. “Your kind wears all sorts of separated bones.”
“That’s different. Animals are ordained for us by the gods.” I wipe away another rush of tears. “Their souls were granted inferior glory.”
Jules snorts. “She’s unbelievable.”
“But humans were crafted in the image of the gods,” I go on, ignoring the disgusted look she gives me as she crouches and removes several clay lamps from the crate. “We’re destined for a higher place in the eternal realms.”
She rolls her eyes. “Naturally.”
Why am I explaining sacred things to hateful people? My gaze drifts back to the wall of skulls, and I tremble, numb with shock, sick with horror. I drop to my knees and lift cupped hands to the Night Heavens, somewhere above all this rock and death.
“What is she doing?” Jules asks. I hear the whoosh of flame as she lights all the lamps with hers.
“She appears to be . . . praying,” Marcel says.
Grant these souls peace, Elara. Tell them I mourn for them.
After a brief spell of silence, Bastien mutters, “Watch her, Jules. Come on, Marcel. Help me carry in these lamps.”
As their footsteps retreat, Jules scoots beside me. “So let me guess—you Bone Criers receive the most glory.” Her snide laugh grates on my ears.
“My soul chose this path, just as you chose yours. Do not mock what you don’t understand. To be a Leurress requires great sacrifice.”
“Yes, but not for your people. You consider the men you kill to be your sacrifices—my father, Bastien’s father. But we’re the ones who have suffered, not you.”
I meet her hard gaze, and guilt nicks my stomach. “Is that why the three of you banded together? Because you all lost your fathers?”
Jules roughly swipes a hand under her nose. “We were only children.”
My guilt cuts deeper, but Jules doesn’t understand. None of them do. “Your fathers are in Elara’s Paradise, a place of great joy and beauty.” I recite what I’ve been taught. “They’re happy, and they accept their deaths.”
Jules spits in my face. I recoil with wide eyes. “Do you know what does comfort me?” She pushes to her feet and walks to the dim edge of our circle of lamplight. She withdraws something tucked under the neckline of her bodice. I squint and barely make out that it’s long, slim, and pale. “Knowing you Bone Criers won’t be able to lure another man without your flute.”
Adrenaline flashes through my veins. She has it. Found it. Took it from the riverbed. She stole it. “That belongs to my mother!”
“Does it?” She unceremoniously holds the flute over her knee.
And breaks it in two.
My heart stops. I gape at the severed pieces in her hands. “What have you done?”
“Don’t worry, Princess. Your mother can surely stoop to carve herself another one.”
My mind reels. No, she can’t. Not without the bone of a rare golden jackal. A beast that isn’t even native to Galle. No living Leurress knows where to travel to hunt one.
Jules tilts her head. “Unless it’s irreplaceable.” She grins and fury builds inside me. “Do all you Bone Criers share the same flute?” I school my features, though blood roars through my ears. My silence betrays my answer. She tosses the pieces of the broken flute into the darkness. “Excellent.”
My rage peaks. I lunge for her. “You monster!” She jumps out of my path and steadies her weight on her good leg. Not good for long.
I kick her knee with my heel. She shrieks and swings her fist at my face. I duck, then ram my head into her stomach. She falls back on the ground. I tumble on top of her. “I’ll kill you!” The dense air muffles my shout. She grabs my wrists to keep me from striking her. I thrash to break her hold. “The gods will bind you in chains for this!”
“Jules?” Bastien’s muted but alarmed voice grows louder. He charges into our ring of lamplight.
She tosses him a smug grin, even as we wrestle harder. “I just confirmed what Marcel suspected,” she says, panting. “Ailesse’s bone flute is the only one that exists. We don’t have to worry about another one.”
Bastien yanks me off of his friend. “Good.”
“I hate all of you!” I rail against him and manage to clip his jaw. My mother is going to murder me when she finds out about the flute. “You’re pathetic, soulless excuses for human beings!”
“Feeling’s mutual, Bone Crier.” He wrenches my arms behind my back and pulls me with him along the wall of skulls. Jules rises, limping to follow.
A few kicking and stumbling paces later, we reach a square opening that leads into a chamber. Light from the extra lamps that Jules lit pours out from within.
Bastien hauls me forward past a panel of skulls resting beside the entrance—a false door to keep the secret room hidden. He pushes me inside, and I duck my head under the low clearance. I catch a glimpse of the door’s back. It isn’t made of stone, but only thatched straw and thin clay. It can’t weigh more than I do; it will provide for an easy escape. And I vow to escape soon.
In fifteen days, the tides will recede to their lowest and reveal the land bridge in the sea. On that new moon—like every new moon—the Leurress need to summon the dead from their graves and ferry their souls past the Gates of the Beyond. If they don’t, the souls will grow restless and leave their burial places on their own. The dead must be ferried, my mother told me as I prepared for my rite of passage, or they’ll wander the land of the living and wreak devastation.
But the Leurress can’t summon the dead without the bone flute and the song Odiva must play on it. I see only one solution: I have to make a new bone flute from the bone of a golden jackal. Somehow I’ll find one. I need to make this right. It’s the only way to prove myself to my mother.
Bastien and Jules follow me into the chamber. He lugs me to the back and shoves me down onto a limestone slab. He binds my hands with rope from Marcel’s pack, then all three of my captors roll a heavy stone over the end of the rope that’s tied around my ankles. “Get comfortable,” Bastien says, knowing full well that’s impossible. “And pray your mother comes quickly.”