The Bone Queen Read online

  “You’re that cobbler,” he said, echoing his wife.

  “I am,” said Cadvan. “But I know some other things too.”

  “He was sort of shining,” said the woman, her voice high. “Shining, he was. It’s witchcraft, that’s what that is.”

  Cadvan turned to her, forcing himself to smile. “It’s not witchcraft, but a Gift I have,” he said. “He should breathe easy now.”

  “Shut your face, woman,” said Ald. “He’s a proper healer, he is. You should be thanking this gentleman here. I ain’t felt this easy since I can remember.”

  A few people had gathered around to watch, and a buzz rose among those near by, drawing further attention. Cadvan studied the crowd, wondering if they would turn against him.

  “Is there anyone else who needs healing?” he asked.

  There was a visible hesitation; then a woman came forward.

  “My Breta is cut bad,” she said. “And she’s burned by the fire.”

  Cadvan breathed out, realizing that in the moments before the woman stepped towards him, his whole body had clenched with anxiety. There was no reason why these people should accept him. Revealing his power here was risking suspicion and mistrust, perhaps even violence; but it ran against the grain not to help when there was such need. He nodded, and followed the woman, and began work.

  Cadvan of Lirigon, Bard of Annar. Cadvan the cobbler, taking what business the miners could afford in an ugly mining settlement which had barely heard of the Light. I cannot marry these two things, thought Cadvan. And I cannot kill the Bard in me either. Unless, of course, I kill myself. And I have neither the courage nor the vanity to do such a thing. I have the despair, of course. I have plenty of that… Unconsciously, his lip curled with contempt.

  He lay on his pallet in the small, patched house he now called his home and stared at the ceiling. It was very late the night after the explosion, so late that the first intimations of dawn glimmered on the horizon. He had driven himself to an exhaustion past sleep; all evening and into the night he had worked with the injured, and had comforted their families as best he could. The count was twenty-one missing and two dead. Fifteen of the missing and both the dead were hewers, all of them the main breadwinners in their families, because hewers were skilled craftsmen and bargained for the highest rates. The other six were haulers, five of them children under ten.

  Sixteen had escaped the mine, and of those, eleven were injured. Healing broken limbs and superficial burns was straightforward; the sickness caused by gas and smoke was less simple but still treatable. But there were two among the survivors who had suffered a great deal worse, who had somehow used a last animal strength to climb the long ladder out of the shaft and spill onto the ground, despite serious burns that blackened their skin. Without salves or medicines, or even a modicum of hygiene, Cadvan had felt helpless: he knew that their injuries were beyond the help of healing, and that the most he could do, all he could do, was to alleviate their agony. And even that was not enough: magery could only do so much. When he first assessed the severity of their wounds, he had expected these two men to die quickly. But they had lingered on for hours, dying in the small hours of the night, before Cadvan had stumbled back to his hut, barely able to stand from weariness.

  They were tough people, the Jouains: tough, proud and unruly. He had already learned to respect their stoicism; today had taught him how deep that went. The explosion was a numbing catastrophe: it meant not only deaths in almost every house in the village, but the possible destruction of their livelihoods.

  The smoke had cleared from the shaft after nightfall, and the chief colliers had sent down caged finches on a rope to check the air. The birds had fallen off their perches at only one fathom. The colliers checked every hour after that, with the same result. Older miners shook their heads. Jouan had always been a safe mine, with no history of firedamp, but perhaps that had changed now. Perhaps the adits that ventilated the mine had collapsed in the blast. Perhaps the hewers had struck a large pocket of gas – firedamp or even blackdamp – that had made the entire pit noxious. Perhaps, they said, the mine would have to be abandoned altogether. Only time would tell.

  Beyond listing the missing, nobody talked about the miners who were still below. There was nothing to say. They all knew that it was possible, just possible, that some had survived the blast and the poisonous airs that followed. Mining lore was full of these stories, of a desperate scramble to a lucky pocket of air, of heroic rescue against the odds, of the miracle that cheated their daily enemy, death. Every man, woman and child knew every morning that they might not return at nightfall. You could be knocked off a ladder, or just fall, as sometimes children did after a day of hauling, their hands too tired to clasp the rungs that led up to the daylight world; or a collapse of rock could stave in your head, as had happened only last month to one of the hewers; or any one of a hundred other mischances.

  If anyone had survived underground today, they would be the unluckiest of all: until the damps cleared, there was no way in or out of the mine. They would die in the darkness, swiftly of the thickening air or slowly of thirst, beyond hope of rescue. Their last hours would be beyond imagining. After Nils had died, Cadvan had used his Bard sense to try to discover if there were any survivors. He set his ear to the ground and sent his Bard-born hearing as deep as it would go. He heard the groan and sweat of the earth, the slow grinding of the rock, the implacable trickle of water seeping into the mine now that the windlass was broken and could no longer pump the tunnels dry. He heard no human sound, no breath or heartbeat or cry.

  He didn’t tell the villagers. At first he thought he must, to save them the torture of illusory hope; but then he uneasily wondered whether he had any right to rob them of even that. The knowledge gave him some small comfort. He was as sure as he could be that no one had survived the accident, only to face the worst death of all, in the dark, alone.

  If anyone deserved such a death, he thought, it was Cadvan of Lirigon. And yet he lived and breathed, facing nothing worse than his own nightmares. If any further argument was needed that the world was unjust, he would be the clinching evidence. Cadvan lived on, useless to anyone, while good people whose lives were needed, who were loved and missed, died without reason.

  When sleep wouldn’t come, Cadvan found himself obsessively retracing the choices that had led the rising star of the School of Lirigon, the man who had been hailed as the most gifted Bard of his generation, to his present disgrace and exile. In the bitter clarity of hindsight, there were no excuses: his own condemnation was absolute, more unforgiving even than his harshest judges in Lirigon. He had taken every step willingly and recklessly, heedless of those who had warned him… But here his mind flinched. He forced himself to finish the thought: he had been heedless even of she who loved him most, she who had paid the price for his folly as surely as if he had murdered her with his own hands. For such a crime, there was no redemption.

  Sometimes, in his weaker moments, he wondered if this pit in which he found himself had been his destiny, a fate that he could not escape. It was a thought he always pushed away, as the cowardly plea of a man who would not face his own actions. All the same, the Dark had been there from the very beginning.

  II

  CADVAN had been raised with his four siblings by his father, Nartan, in a small Lirhan village, not far from Lirigon. He didn’t attend the Lirigon School until much later than most children with the Gift. He was an attractive child, clever and quick with his hands; and he knew he was different from his brothers and sisters. He came into the Speech, the inborn tongue of magery that signalled he was a Bard, when he was about five, shortly before he lost his mother, Mertild. His father never quite recovered from the death of his wife, and was frightened of his son’s precocity. He was often harsh with the boy, and when Cadvan’s Gift became evident, he ordered him to tell no one. Even had he wished to, it was impossible for Cadvan to conceal it completely, and soon the whole village knew that he had the Speech.
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  When Cadvan was nine years old, the Lirigon Bards, as was the custom, came to Nartan’s house to discuss his attendance at the School of Lirigon. Being a Bard was considered an honour in Lirhan; it was not a place where those with the Speech were shunned. Nartan was surly with the Bards, and would not hear of Cadvan attending the School. Perhaps he was reluctant to lose another member of the family, or perhaps he needed the hands of his eldest son to help with the younger children and his cobbling. The Bards told him that to leave a boy with the Gift untrained was asking for trouble, but Nartan turned a deaf ear. They said they would come the following spring and ask again, but Nartan turned his face away and would not speak another word, so they sighed and left.

  Cadvan had not been allowed in the room during the visit, but he knew they were talking about him, and he eavesdropped easily enough using his listening. What he heard excited him, and he decided that he wanted to be a Bard more than anything else. His father cuffed him and told him to get on with his work.

  After that, Cadvan conceived a great resentment against his father. He began to run wild, leading other children on his escapades. It was nothing very harmful: raiding orchards, throwing stones and other such mischief as occurs to small boys. Because he had the Gift, he could go hidden and speak to animals, which gave him the edge in their pranks. He was stretching his powers, but his use of them was wilful. His behaviour worried his aunt, his mother’s sister Alina, who had a little of the Gift herself and was a perceptive woman; and she spoke again to Nartan, telling him he ought to send the boy to the School.

  Nartan was a stubborn man, and he said he would not agree to his first-born going away. Alina told him he was a fool and was breeding problems for himself, but he wouldn’t listen. The truth was that Nartan burned with a greedy love for his son, a love that he could not admit even to himself, and he could not face letting him go. It was often said that Cadvan was very like his mother.

  One day, when Cadvan was about ten, a stranger came to the village on a black horse. He was tall and severe-looking, and he was dressed in rich clothes. He went straight to the cobbler’s house, demanding that a strap on his horse’s bridle be fixed at once. Nartan was not at home, so Cadvan took the job. Cadvan saw that the stranger’s horse was ill-treated; its mouth was bleeding. This angered him, and he spoke to the man without respect.

  “If you were more gentle with your hands,” he said, “the strap would not be broken.”

  The stranger told the boy to hold his tongue, and then examined him more closely. What he saw interested him, and he asked his name. Concentrating on mending the bridle, Cadvan answered sullenly, not liking to be questioned. Finally, the stranger asked him if he had the Speech. Cadvan looked up swiftly, and took a long time to answer. At last he nodded.

  “Why are you not at the School?” asked the stranger.

  “My father will not let me.”

  The stranger heard the resentment in the boy’s voice, and smiled to himself. He picked up a pebble from the ground and tossed it in his hand.

  “How might I make this pebble fly, boy?” he said.

  Cadvan shrugged. “Throw it,” he said.

  “Aye. Or give it wings.” As Cadvan watched, the pebble turned into a butterfly and flew away.

  Cadvan knew that illusions were the least of charms. “It’s a trick,” he said scornfully. “I haven’t time for silly games.”

  The stranger laughed. “My name is Likod,” he said. “I will be back.” Then he mounted his horse and rode away. Cadvan stood in the road and watched him until he was out of sight.

  The meeting disturbed him. He didn’t like the stranger, and he liked even less the way he treated his horse; yet there was a fascination about him too that made him deeply attractive. For the next few weeks he waited for Likod to return, but he did not; and after a while Cadvan decided that he hadn’t meant what he said. The conversation had made him curious, and he began to experiment more widely with the simpler enchantments – glimmerspells and other mageries of illusion.

  Time passed, and Cadvan grew into a handsome boy. Every spring the Bards of Lirigon would ride to speak with his father, and every year his father spurned their offer. And every year the boy grew wilder.

  It was around this time that the Bards of Lirigon began to be concerned about some disturbing, if small, incidents; and one of these happened to Cadvan. There were stories that shapeshifting wers had been seen in the wild lands near the Osidh Elanor, and rumours even of Hulls, the Black Bards who had traded their Names for eternal life, who had not been seen in Annar since the Great Silence. Also at this time, the raids of the Jussack clans pushed the Pilanel people out of their traditional summer grazing lands in the Arkiadera, and the chief of the Pilanel came south over the Osidh Elanor and asked the Lirhan Bards and Thane for permission to graze their herds in the northern Rilnik Plains.

  Cadvan knew little of these things, although of course he heard gossip. Sometimes he would sit with his father at the inn and listen restlessly while the greybeards spoke darkly of bad portents. At such times, he would yearn to be at the School of Lirigon, because then, as he thought, he would learn great mageries, and would fight these evil things and be the hero he was meant to be. But he knew better than to mention his wish to his father. Sometimes he thought of running away to Lirigon, but despite his fierce desire, he could not abandon his father. And so he learned the trade of cobbling, and frittered away his spare hours thinking up new pranks to amuse himself and his companions. And all the time, a deep bitterness was nursing itself inside him.

  One day, five years later, the stranger did return. Cadvan was working outside the house and he saw him riding through the village, looking neither right nor left. He stood up and watched the rider. The man glanced sideways at Cadvan as he passed the house, and pulled up his horse.

  “Still here then, boy?” he said, with a touch of scorn.

  Cadvan flushed and looked away.

  The stranger dismounted and stared at Cadvan. “You’ll be a man soon,” he said. “And yet you still let your father tie you to his house? The world is big, my boy. You don’t belong here.”

  He said no more than what Cadvan already thought, but the boy’s face darkened at the man’s mockery of his father. “I am with my own people,” he said angrily. “Who are you, to speak thus to me?”

  “You know my name,” said the man. “Unless you are more stupid than I thought.”

  Cadvan wanted to deny it, but he did know his name. “Likod,” he said, unwillingly.

  Likod looked pleased. “So you have some wit. Or some memory,” he said. “You have the Gift: from here I can see it is in you in no small measure. Why haven’t the Bards of Lirigon taken you to where you should be? They betray their duty. Your training is no business of your father’s.”

  Cadvan had no answer, because he had sometimes wondered the same thing. But Bards will not teach children with the Gift if their parents do not permit it.

  “Come with me,” said Likod. “I have something to show you. Your father is away from home, he will not know.”

  Cadvan wondered how Likod knew his father was out. Then he said, “I have to finish mending this boot. You can come back later, if you want.”

  Likod made to move away, but Cadvan would not go anywhere until he had finished his task. He bent his head down and concentrated on his work, ignoring the stranger. When he finished, Likod was still waiting for him.

  Cadvan met his eyes and shrugged, as if he didn’t care. He slowly put away his tools, and stood up to follow the stranger.

  Likod led him out of the village and a short distance into a beech wood. It was high summer, and the light shone bravely on the leaves, but where Likod walked it seemed that a shadow followed him and the birdsong sank into silence. Cadvan felt fear settle inside him, and he began to feel sorry that he had come. But despite his doubts, he kept on following.

  At last Likod stopped in a small clearing. He turned and smiled at Cadvan.

  “Now,
” he said. “I will show you something you have never seen before.”

  He gestured and spoke some words that Cadvan didn’t understand, and between them there began to gather a darkness, as if Likod were making a hole in the air. Cadvan now was very afraid and wanted to cry out, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he could make no sound, and his feet were rooted to the ground. He was no longer aware of the woods or the sunshine around him: he could only watch the shadow gathering before his eyes.

  The blackness thickened and roiled, and he heard a noise like rushing wind or water. And then, to his astonishment, Cadvan saw a picture form before his eyes: and the picture moved and was alive. It was of a glittering city, with graceful walls and towers, which stood by a great mere so still that stars were reflected on its surface. The city was built of white stone that shone as if it were carved of moonlight. It seemed to Cadvan that he entered the city and walked around inside it like a ghost, and that he peered through casements and saw men and women in fine robes speaking together, or making beautiful things; but none of them saw him.

  The vision passed, and Cadvan came to, as if out of a swoon. Likod let down his arms, and the darkness disappeared. Cadvan stared at him with amazement.

  “What is that place?” he asked.

  “It is a place that is no longer,” said Likod. “By my art, you glimpsed the ancient citadel of Afinil, which has been gone for many lives of men. Is that not wonderful?”

  “Aye,” said Cadvan, caught in enchantment. He hungered to see more. “What else can you show me?”

  As Cadvan had suspected, Likod’s aims were not benevolent. He was pleased that he had enraptured the boy, because he did not want him to be fearful. He had seen that Cadvan had a rare and untrained talent, and he wished to bind him, so the boy would be his slave.

  Now that Cadvan was no longer wary of him, Likod lifted his arms again and put forth his power. But this time the spell was different, and Cadvan didn’t like it; he felt that chains of smoke were winding around his thoughts, and he felt the stranger’s voice inside his head, as if Likod’s thoughts were his own. He thought that he would die from the black pressure in his mind.