“If you speak the truth, it will flare a brighter blue,” she said. “Tell me lies and it will shine the deepest black. Choose your words carefully, Bard.”
“I had a dream. I saw a bright-blue moon in the sky. I followed it across the clouds until it shone over a gray, empty beach littered with the bones of sea monsters of old. On it stood a young girl with her hands stained with blood but who promised me a tale beyond anything I could ever imagine. ‘If there is one thing people desire more than a good story,’ she said, ‘it is when they speak their own.’ When I woke, I saw that same moon, as blue and as real as you and I, looking down. I trusted my instincts and followed the road the way it had been mapped out for me in my dream. It is here I find that same beach and that same girl. I have heard all the tales they speak of you. It would be my honor to hear yours. Give me leave to sing your story, and I will do it justice.”
The waves lapped at the shore. Vultures circled overhead. The sapphire in my hand shone the purest blue.
She broke the silence with more laughter, the stillness shattering at the sound. “You are confident and curious. Some would say that is not always a healthy combination.” She took back the bezoar and turned away. “I leave in seven days. I will give you until then.”
I followed her, my heartsglass heavy with questions. Of everything I had heard, I had not expected her to be so young. Seventeen did not explain why she stood on that strange, graying beach, alone, with monsters’ corpses for company.
1
Let me be clear: I never intended to raise my brother from his grave, though he may claim otherwise. If there’s anything I’ve learned from him in the years since, it’s that the dead hide truths as well as the living. I have not been a bone witch for very long, whatever the stories you’ve heard, but this was the first lesson I learned.
I understand now why people fear bone witches. Theirs is not the magic found in storybooks, slaying onyx-eyed dragons and rescuing grateful maidens from ivory towers. Theirs is not the magic made from smoke and mirrors, where the trap lies in the twitch of the hand and a trick of the eyes. Nor is theirs the magic that seeds runeberry fields, whose crops people harvest for potions and spells. This is death magic, complicated and exclusive and implacable, and from the start, I wielded it with ease.
There was never anything unnatural or mysterious about me. I was born in Knightscross, one of the smallest villages that dotted the kingdom of Odalia, surrounded by a lovely forest on three sides and rolling plains on the other. My only claim to strangeness was that I read fiercely, learned thirstily. I read of the history of the Eight Kingdoms, about the Five Great Heroes and the False Prince. It was here that I learned of the magic-wielding asha and their never-ending war against the Faceless, the people of the lie, practitioners of the Dark, sworn to the False Prince. Sometimes I would pretend to be the asha, Taki of the Silk, whom the fabled King Marrus took to wife. Or Nadine of the Whispers, who ended the war between the kingdoms of Istera and Daanoris with her dancing.
“You think in the same way men drink, Tea,” my father once said, “far too much—under the delusion it is too little.” But he brought me books from distant fairs and encouraged my clutter of parchment and paper. Some days, I would read to him when his work at the forge was done for the day. It was a sight to see: him, a tall, muscular man with a heavy beard, reclining in his favorite chair and listening as I read children’s fables and folktales in my high, piping voice.
It was true that I was born at the height of an eclipse, when the sky closed its only moon eye to wink back at the world, like my arrival was a private joke between old friends. Or perhaps the moon read my fate in the stars and hid, unwilling to bear witness to my birth. It is the kind of cataclysm people associate with bone witches. But surely normal children have been born under this cover of night, when the light refused to shine, and went on to live perfectly normal lives?
Necromancy did not run in my family’s blood, though witchery did. But my older sisters were witches of good standing within the community and did not go about summoning dead siblings from graveyards as a rule. Rose was a Forest witch; she was plump, pickled brown from the hot sun, darker than even the farmers who worked the fields from dawn to dusk. She owned an herb garden and sold poultices and home remedies for gout, lovesickness, and all other common ailments. Lilac was a Water witch; she was tall and stagnant, like a deep pool. She was fond of donning veils, telling merry fortunes, and occasionally finding lost trinkets, often by accident.
She had cast auguries for me and found nothing amiss. “Tea shows an inclination to be a witch like us, if she wishes to,” Lilac told my mother. “I see her wearing a beautiful amber gown, with bright gems in her hair and a handsome prince on her arm. Our little Tea is destined for something greater than Knightscross, I think.”
Even those who knew nothing of the witching trade considered Forest and Water magic to be reasonable, respectable professions. And Rose and Lilac made for reasonable, respectable witches.
Had I known the color of my heartsglass sooner, I might have been better prepared.
On the third day of the third month of their thirteenth summer, children gathered at the village square for the spring equinox and because it was tradition. Boys and girls wore delicate heartsglass on chains around their necks. Some were simple cases their parents bought cheap at the Odalian market; those who could afford it purchased them from famed glassblowers in Kneave.
A witch—some years it was Rose, and others it was Lilac—traced Heartsrune spells in the air until each empty glass sputtered and flared and filled with red and pink hues. As was the tradition in Odalia, my father and mother wore each other’s heartsglass—his was burned and ruddy, like the endless fires of his forge, and hers was coral tinged and warm, like the hearth. Most of my brothers and sisters wavered between their colors, though purple-tinted hearts singled Rose and Lilac out for witching. I was only twelve years old then, thought too young to appreciate my heart’s value. Having a heart was a responsibility; young children were heartless creatures anyway—or so said Mrs. Drury, who lived three cottages away and was the acknowledged village busybody. But I never believed that grown-ups took great care of their hearts either, because my older sister Daisy, seventeen and the loveliest of us Pahlavis, was constantly losing hers. She gave it to Demian Terr and then later to Sam Fallow and then again to Heath Clodbarron, and Rose or Lilac had to draw new Heartsrune spells each time her romances ended. It was all right, Daisy insisted, because the hearts she’d given away faded over time, and she could always ask for one anew.