The fire crackled. This land was very damp, and she was grateful for the heat, and yet— “Aren’t you worried that they’ll see the fire?”
The woman shook her head. “They hate it,” she said. “It’s the punishment. The more they eat, the more they fear it—they do not cook the flesh, you see…” She rubbed her face, obviously distressed.
“Safer,” said the man. “But … can’t burn … all the time.”
They leaned against one another. She bent her head down against his shoulder and he reached his arm across his body to hold her close.
A few days ago, Marra would have wondered why they did not leave this terrible land. She no longer did. They might not be sane, as the outside world understood it, but they were not fools. If they felt that they were safer here than they were outside it, it was not her place to tell them otherwise.
If I had to explain to everyone I met what had happened to me, have them judge me for what I’d had to do—no, I might think a land with a few roving cannibals was a small price to pay, myself. At least here, everyone understands what’s happened, and they are as kind to each other as they can be.
As a girl, she would not have understood that, but Marra was not the girl that she had been. She was thirty years old, and all that was left of that girl now were the bones.
For a moment she had envied them, two people punished through no fault of their own, because they had each other.
Now, as she sat in the pit of bones, the skeleton cradled against her chest twitched.
“Shhhh…” whispered Marra into the skull’s openings. “Shhhhh…”
Bone dog, stone dog … black dog, white dog …
She heard the footsteps as he approached. Had he seen her?
If he had, then he, too, dismissed it as a trick of the light. The footfalls skirted the edge of the pit, and the sound of breathing faded away.
“Probably harmless,” she murmured to the skull. Even if he were not, she would be a difficult target.
The other, gentler folk in here were uniquely vulnerable. If you had learned not to trust your own senses, you might wait too long to run from an enemy.
Marra was no longer as sure of her own perceptions as she had once been, but the edges of her mind were only slightly frayed, not blasted open by furious spirits.
When the footsteps had been gone for many minutes and the crows had settled, she sat up again. Fog lined the edges of the wood, hanging in low swirls over the meadow. The crows cawed together like a disjointed heartbeat. Nothing else moved.
She bent back over the bone dog again, fingers moving on the wires, hoping to finish her task before darkness fell.
* * *
The bone dog came alive at dusk. It was not quite completed, but it was close. She was bent over the left front paw when the skull’s jaws yawned open and it stretched as if waking from a long slumber.
“Hush,” she told it. “I’m nearly done—”
It sat up. Its mouth opened and the ghost of a wet tongue touched her face like fog.
She scratched the skull where the base of the ears would be. Her nails made a soft scraping sound on the pale surface.
The bone dog wagged its tail, its pelvis, and most of its spine with delight.
“Sit still,” she told it, picking up the front paw. “Sit, and let me finish.”
It sat politely. The hollow eye sockets gazed up at her. Her heart contracted painfully.
The love of a bone dog, she thought, bending her head down over the paw again. All that I am worth these days.
Then again, few humans were truly worth the love of a living dog. Some gifts you could never deserve.
She had to wrap each tiny foot bone in a single twist of wire and bind it to the others, then wrap the entire paw several times, to keep it stable. It should not have held together, and yet it did.
The cloak had gone together the same way. Nettle cords and tattered cloth should have fallen apart, and yet it was far more solid than it looked.
The dog’s claws were ridiculously large without flesh to cloak them. She wrapped each one as if it were an amulet and joined them to the basket of thin wires.
“Bone dog, stone dog,” she whispered. She could see the children in her head, three little girls, chanting to each other. Bone dog, stone dog … black dog, white dog … live dog, dead dog … yellow dog, run!
At run, the little girl in the middle of the rope had jumped out and begun to run back and forth through the swinging rope, the only sound her feet and the slap of the rope in the dust. When she finally tripped up, the two girls on the ends had dropped the rope and they had all begun giggling together.
The bone dog rested his muzzle on her forearm. He had neither ears nor eyebrows, and yet she could practically feel the look he was giving her, tragic and hopeful as dogs often were.
“There,” she said, finally. Her knife was dulled from cutting wire and it took her several tries to hack the last bit apart. She tucked the sharp end underneath the joint where it would not catch on anything. “There you are. I hope that’s enough.”
The bone dog put its paw down and tested it. It stood for a moment, then turned and sprinted into the fog.
Marra’s fist clenched against her stomach. No! It ran—I should have tied it. I should have thought it might run—
The clatter of its paws faded into the whiteness.
I suppose it had another master somewhere, before it died. Perhaps it’s gone to find them.
Her hands ached. Her heart ached. Poor foolish dog. Its first death had not been enough to teach it that not all masters were worthy.
Marra had learned that too late herself.
She looked into the pit of bones. Her fingers throbbed—not in the horrible stinging way they had when she pieced together the nettle cloak, but deeper, in time to her heartbeat. There was redness working its way up her hands. One long line was already snaking through her wrist.
She could not bear the thought of sitting down and sculpting another dog.
She dropped her head into her aching hands. Three tasks the dust-wife had given her. Sew a cloak of owlcloth and nettles, build a dog of cursed bones, and catch moonlight in a jar of clay. She’d failed on the second one, before she’d even had a chance to start the third.
Three tasks, and then the dust-wife would give her the tools to kill a prince.
“Typical,” she said into her hands. “Typical. Of course I’d manage the impossible thing, then not think that sometimes dogs run off.” For all she knew, the bone dog had caught the wisp of a scent and now it would end up a hundred miles away, chasing bone rabbits or bone foxes or bone deer.
She laughed into her swollen hands, misery twisting around, as it so often did, into weary humor. Well. Isn’t that just the way?
This is what I get for expecting bones to be loyal, just because I brought them back and wired them up. What does a dog know about resurrection?
“I should have brought it a bone,” she said, dropping her hands, and the crows in the trees took up the sound of her laughter.
Well.
If the dust-wife had failed her—or if she had failed the dust-wife—then she would make her own way. She’d had a godmother at her christening who had given her a single gift and smoothed her path not at all. Perhaps there was a debt owing there.
She turned and began to make her way, step by dragging step, out of the blistered land.
Chapter 2
Marra had grown up sullen, the sort of child who is always standing in exactly the wrong place so that adults tell her to get out of the way. She was not slow, exactly, but she seemed younger than her age, and very little interested her for long.
She had two sisters, and she was the youngest. She loved her oldest sister, Damia, very much. Damia was six years older, which seemed a lifetime. She was tall and poised and very pale, a child of Marra’s father’s first wife.
The middle sister, Kania, was only two years older than Marra. They shared a mother but no goodwill.