The Bone Palace

and the alien magic with which her mistress has infused her.

The latter sense leads her to her quarry, one tent among the hundreds sprouting like fungi from the field. A man sleeps within, his fire banked but heat still glowing from the coals. Gaunt-cheeked and sunken- eyed, hands gnarled and scarred. He twitches with restless dreams.

Another raven, still her. Now she glides above narrow alleys, searching the harsh stone streets below for prey. She is no owl meant for night flying, not made to fall ghost-silent from the sky. But it isn’t mice she hunts tonight, and humans are deaf and dull, blind to the skies above them. The one she follows now never looks up, though it twitches rabbit-wary at every sound. Pale, this one, and underfed, as are all those her mistress hunts. She doesn’t understand it-the streets are full of plumper quarry, slower and easy to catch. But hers is not to question, merely to stalk as she is bidden and wait for the scraps her mistress will share.

Another image-

Savedra woke dizzy and lost, hands clenched in the covers to stop her spiraling fall. Her wounded arm throbbed, and the taste of blood sickened her.

The images began to fracture. She had seen Mathiros, and a strange woman on a foggy street, and a dozen other things besides, but they were already unraveling like smoke through her fingers.

She rolled over, groping for warmth to reassure her, but found only cold sheets and rumpled covers. Evharis, she remembered, as the unfamiliar surroundings sank in. Ashlin.

She lay awake until dawn, sick and dizzy with dreams, and with the enormity of what they had done.

CHAPTER 11

Kiril heard crying before he opened the library door. Phaedra had come once more uninvited, but his annoyance at her intrusions faded at the sound of tears. No, he corrected himself as his hand closed on the handle, not tears-no wet sniffles or hiccupping sobs, but a high mournful keen. The dead couldn’t truly weep.

She lay in a heap beside the hearth, perilously close to the unscreened fire. Books and parchment scattered around her, torn and crumpled pages drifting like snow. Kiril locked the door, hands tightening at the sight of mangled books. He held back a curse as he crouched beside her, gathering her hair and skirts away from the fireplace. Even in the shadows and red light he recognized the books: her books, her work that hadn’t been destroyed at her death. Some he’d taken during the careful sack of Carnavas and others he’d stolen from the Arcanost later. Murder he could stomach, but the loss of knowledge sickened him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, gentling his voice. Phaedra rocked and moaned in his arms, face contorted in the firelight.

A cold draft and movement in the shadows made him glance over his shoulder, already tensing to deal with some new intruder. All his dark-sharpened eyes found were an open casement and a bird perched on a chair beside it. A raven, huge and glossy. It mantled, oilslick rainbows rippling across its wings, but remained on the chair-back. A quick touch found his wards intact; her pets could pass through them as easily as she did. His nape prickled at the thought.

Phaedra’s keening died and she gulped air she didn’t need. Awkwardly, he cradled her to his chest and stood, carrying her to a chair. His back and knees screamed, but she was lighter than a living woman, dry of so many of life’s fluids. He left her curled against the cushions and bent to retrieve what he could of the books. A few scraps of paper curled and fell to ash in the hearth, but most of her violence had been to rip out pages. Many of those he thought he could salvage, or at least rewrite. He shoved the survivors into his desk and lit a lamp. The raven regarded him with one black eye, its gaze canny for even a clever bird.

“What happened?” he asked again, risking a stretch past the bird to close the window.

“Someone was snooping around the castle.” She rubbed her face though she had no tears to wipe away. “Pawing through our things.”

That made him stiffen. No need to ask which castle, or who else she meant by our. “Who?”

“I don’t know. No one the birds had seen before. They fled west, so I imagine they weren’t Sarken.”

“Fled from what?”

She sat up, trying to smooth her tangled hair. “My birds drove them off. I should have burned it, should have razed the stones to the ground.”

He drew a breath. Let it out again. “Mightn’t it be wiser not to draw attention to the castle? To you?”

“It’s difficult to draw attention to my past these days.” She gave up on her hair and tugged her gown straight instead. Wine-red velvet today, a modern style. Varis’s work, no doubt. “You wrought that very well indeed. But not, apparently, well enough. We’ve had enough invasion, enough destruction and callous looting. The bones of Carnavas belong to my family now, and they may guard their treasures as they see fit.” Her wild rage cooled, settling into an angry chill.

“Be as that may, a little discretion would be wise. You won’t find revenge as a pile of salted ashes. Varis and I have no desire for that fate either.”

“No. No, Varis doesn’t deserve that. He was always so kind to me.”

“He worshiped you in university,” Kiril said, weary enough for unhappy truths to spill. And you repay him by making him a party to treason. But that was unfair-Varis had begun this. Phaedra’s magic had kept her from true death, but Varis had found her and nursed her back to sanity and kindled in her the desire for revenge.

Phaedra blinked. “He never said anything.”

Kiril nearly laughed. You never see what’s right in front of you. Isyllt had told him that years ago, her voice heavy with exasperation and resignation. And he, to prove her point, still hadn’t realized what she was speaking of. If he had-

Kiril sank into a chair across from Phaedra and rubbed his temples against a growing pressure there. His eyes felt as though they’d been scraped out with a spoon and shoved back into his sockets. “Of course he didn’t,” he said, forcing his thoughts to different history. “He has a heart, you know, under all that velvet gaud. And he’s never handed it away for the breaking.”

Which was why their own affair had been so brief. Or perhaps Varis had simply been unable to love someone already sworn to the Alexioi. Whatever the reason, he had broken with Kiril publicly and melodramatically before he left for Iskar, before Kiril had to do the leaving. It had been a kindness, just as his leaving Isyllt had been; that never seemed to make it easier for anyone.

The raven croaked and Phaedra stood, shaking out her wrinkled skirts as she crossed the room. “I know, darling,” she murmured, stroking its cheek with one knuckle. “Such a long way you’ve flown for me. And I’ll ask another journey of you still.” She slipped a knife from a skirt pocket and nicked the soft brown skin of her wrist. Blood welled, slow and dark and heavy. The bird bobbed its head to the wound, drinking till the edge of its beak glistened crimson.

The creation of familiars was an old practice, but Phaedra’s birds were closer to her than that. She had been them, and they her, until she had found a new body to claim. Kiril could scarcely imagine what that had been like-it was a wonder she had any remnants of sanity left.

Phaedra glanced up to find Kiril watching. Her eyebrows rose. “Care for a taste?”

“And become one of your pets as well? No thank you.”

“I don’t think you would,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Not easily, at least, or from such a small amount.”

“But it would start the process. The spread of your power and will and consciousness into me. I did read your articles when you were at the Arcanost, you know.”

She smiled. “Then you know how much a taste could benefit you. Haematurgy can heal as well as harm, unlike your necromancy. My power can make you strong again.” She wiped a bead of blood off her wrist with one finger, and raised the finger to his lips.

He caught her arm before she touched him, staring at the slick crimson stain seeping along the whorls of her