The Bone Palace

The bed shifted under her weight. His throat closed as she settled against him. Her conflagrant perfume had faded to spice and embers; beneath that she smelled faintly of meat, and of nothing.

“I’m lonely, Kiril,” she whispered. Not a seductive whisper, but a lost and childlike one. “So lonely.”

Maybe it was the darkness sparing him her face, or that his defenses were still scattered from sleep. Maybe it was the need in her voice, in her fingers closing in his nightshirt. Maybe it was his own grief and guilt. His arm tightened around her.

“I know.”

“I loved Ferenz. For all my foolish sins, I loved him. He died because of me, and all the vengeance in the world won’t bring him back.”

There was no answer for that save the obvious. He stroked her hair instead. So alien, the press of dead flesh. Of any flesh. There had been no one else in the three years since he broke with Isyllt. She had been all bone-thin angles and clinging sea-wrack hair, sharp-nailed and biting. Phaedra was fuller, softer, stomach and breasts ripened by age and childbirth. He couldn’t control a shudder, so strong he thought his flesh would crawl from his bones.

Phaedra made a choked little sound. “Is it so awful to touch me?”

“Yes. But not because… of what you are.” He wanted her close and vulnerable if he was to stop her; he pretended that was why he let the words leave his tongue. “You are the worst thing I’ve ever done. Out of a lifetime of murder and lies and schemes. You are the unforgivable deed.”

“Do you want my forgiveness? Are you asking for it?”

“I could never do that.”

“No. You never would.” She buried her head in the crook of his neck; no breath stirred his skin until she spoke. “Hold me. Please. I have bad dreams.”

He didn’t believe in forgiveness, or atonement. But he held the demon in his arms and stroked her hair until she grew heavy and still. And, eventually, after the moonlight had crawled away and died, he slept too.

He stands on a tower of grey stone, overlooking a dizzying drop. The hands on the crenellated stone are not his, but white and slender and ringed with gold and rubies, laced with fine scars. Black hair whips around his face; the stomach beneath heavy skirts has barely begun to round.

The dream is not his own. He knows that, even as it ensnares him. He might escape it, but perhaps he believes in penance, if not atonement.

Far below, beneath the castle walls and the sheer plunge of cliff, the Ardos? River runs cold and wild. The wind tastes of snow, and slices to the bone as it rushes down the winter-dark slopes of the Varagas Mountains. Riders approach from the south, faint with distance on the winding road. They will be here soon.

He turns, trapped in her flesh as he is trapped in her memories, to face the man standing behind them. Ferenz Darvulesti. Tall and lean and hawk-nosed, with deep-set green eyes shadowed by heavy brows. A warrior, swathed in leather and fur and mail with a sword at his hip, but his hands are gentle as they close on Kiril- and-Phaedra’s arms. He speaks, but no sound accompanies the shaping of his lips. There is no sound at all, not even the wind. Only the empty and aching silence of what is past and gone.

The man kisses them twice. Once hungrily, pulling them close till cold steel links bite their flesh. And again, soft as a snowflake on the brow. A kiss of benediction, or forgiveness. Then he turns and strides down the frost-rimed steps, knuckles white around his sword hilt.

Phaedra-and-Kiril raise a hand, and a cloud of ravens bursts from a lower rooftop, fighting the wind on soundless black wings to reach them. They have their own defenses to marshal, even as Ferenz readies his soldiers below. The riders draw ever nearer; this will end soon, one way or another.

*

Kiril woke to dawnlight and an ache like cold iron in his chest. He could still feel the wind’s bite, the press of rough lips on his mouth. The weight and softness of foreign limbs.

He needed no oneiromancy to parse the meaning of it. A true dream, a memory, bleeding out of Phaedra and into his mind. Whether she did it on purpose as punishment, or whether the pain of recollection was simply too strong to contain, he couldn’t say.

He might have asked her, but the bed was empty beside him, save for the ghost of cinnamon in the wrinkled sheets and a strand of black hair wrapping his fingers like a fetter.

CHAPTER 5

Isyllt woke alone, tired and aching, to an insistent pounding on her door. A cursory inspection revealed a dark bruise scabbing on her inner thigh-a delicate nip instead of a full bite. Only a taste taken, since she was already weak. A few stray drops of blood spotted her sheets.

“Sand and saints,” Khelsea said when Isyllt opened the door. “You look terrible. More terrible. You did something stupid, didn’t you?”

“Probably.” The smell of spiced meat wafted from one of several bags the inspector carried, and saliva flooded Isyllt’s mouth. Her courses always left her craving meat and greens and this was many times worse.

“What did I tell you about that?”

“Believe me, you don’t want to know about some of the stupid things I do.”

Khelsea unpacked her bags, producing lanterns, rope, a map of the sewers, a small arsenal of weapons including an extra pistol loaded with spell-silver, and lunch. Isyllt fell on the food, but shook her head at the proffered gun.

“I’m hopeless with them,” she said around a mouthful of spiced mutton and spinach. “And magic has better aim.” She stopped short of licking the last of the grease and yoghurt from the wrapping, but it was a near thing. Khelsea’s eyebrows rose in eloquent disbelief, but she slipped the spare pistol into her own pocket rather than press the matter.

Isyllt washed and traded her dressing gown for leathers and boots-older, well-worn ones this time, since she wasn’t about to lose another good jacket to the sewers. The high collar chafed her wounded shoulder, but she stopped herself before she numbed the bite. Some things ought not to be forgotten. Last night’s souvenir, however, she was willing to ignore.

Khelsea puttered in the apartment’s tiny corner kitchen when she emerged, and the air smelled of jasmine tea. Watching the other woman, Isyllt almost wished she didn’t live alone. She and Kiril hadn’t cohabitated since the first few days after he found her; they’d spent so much time together it hardly mattered. She hadn’t had anyone else to make her tea-or to make tea for-since she was fifteen and living with three other girls in a leaking tenement attic. They were too poor most decads to afford tea, anyway.

A pity, she thought wryly as Khelsea handed her a mug, that she didn’t appreciate women that way. And even if she had, the inspector’s taste ran to plump and pretty and not remotely self-destructive. Her latest lover was a seamstress.

“Do the other vigils know you’re misadventuring with me?” Isyllt asked, letting the warmth of the cup soak her hands. The sun had reemerged an hour past noon, leaking like watered honey through the curtains and pooling along the dusty baseboards.

“This is my day off.” Khelsea grinned, a quick flash of white. “Gemma is always telling me I need more hobbies.” She leaned back in a chair and stretched her legs in front of her. “My autopsist knows-the one who saw the ring. In case we don’t come back.” She shrugged aside the possibility of death, and her wealth of braids-twisted into one forearm-thick plait and wrapped with brown yarn-rustled against her jacket. “Do you have a plan?”

Her surname, Shar, meant “sand” in Assari, and foreign inflections still colored her vowels. Not for the first time, Isyllt wondered how a woman from the deserts of Assar ended up working for Erisin’s Vigils. One day, she resolved, she’d ply the inspector with enough wine to get an answer out of her.

“Go back to where I was attacked and track them from there, I suppose. One of them is called Myca, but I