Nettle & Bone(83)

“Wake,” she whispered, while the light faded outside the door. “Wake. Please.”

The bones lay motionless in her lap. She bowed her head. Please. Please, Bonedog. I’m never going to see my sister again, or my mother. I’m not going to see the Sister Apothecary or the abbess. I need one more friend. Please.

It was too much like the first time. The second impossible task was also the third. She had always known that she had gotten off too lightly, being handed the moon in a jar.

Fenris took her free hand, careful of her sore fingertips, and held it between his palms, waiting with her.

“Please,” she said again, and a single tear ran hotly down her cheek and splashed on the white expanse of skull.

Bonedog yawned and stretched and woke.

Marra let out a sob of relief and buried her head in Fenris’s neck. He held her in the crook of his arm while Bonedog stood up and bounced and cavorted around the hut.

“We’ll have to get him enchanted again,” said Fenris, watching the dog trying to lick parts that had vanished along with the glamour.

“We’ll figure something out.”

“Mm. And what happens now? Are you going back to your convent?”

Marra thought about sitting up, but it was very warm against his side. “You said once that you couldn’t go back,” she said. “You said that homesickness wasn’t worth a clan war.”

Fenris nodded. “It’s still true.”

“If I go home now, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe nothing. But they’ll probably marry me off and I’ll be back in that world and I … I’m not good at it. I’m so very bad at it. And there’s always a chance that someone figures out what we did.” Marra took a deep breath. “I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Very likely.” He was looking at her with that grave, thoughtful look again, but there was a hint of humor in his eyes, which was encouraging or maddening or both together.

“And I already agreed to help you ransom the other humans in the goblin market.”

“You did.”

“So. Maybe you and I could … not go home together?”

The words hung in the air between them, as fine as spun glass and just as fragile. Marra waited for him to say something, to catch the words or shatter them, whichever he chose.

“I think I’d like that,” said Fenris.

Marra sagged with relief.

She had been so focused on what he might say that she hadn’t quite expected what he might do. So it came as a surprise when he wrapped both arms around her and put his lips against her hair. “I think I would like that very much,” he murmured.

“Oh good,” said Marra against his neck. And then she would have kissed him or he would have kissed her, but Bonedog decided that they were wrestling and jumped up and barked soundlessly at them both.

Black dog, white dog,

Live dog, dead dog,

Yellow dog, run!





Author’s Note


This book started in a grocery store parking lot, with the line “with the dog made of bone at your side.” I don’t know why, but that line showed up in my head and started hammering away like a tuneless earworm.

It’s always neat when something drops in your lap like that, but you generally spend the first hour trying to figure out if you thought of it or if it’s a fragment of something you read once. Authors have minds like packrats and a lot of stuff gets squirreled away, some of which belongs to other people. Nevertheless, the line was insistent and didn’t seem familiar.

By the time I reached the grocery store, it had grown to “You came to me in your cloak of nettles with the dog made of bone at your side.” At the checkout line, I had most of a very short story called “Godmother.” It had a lot of imagery in common with the book you just read, though the plot, such as it was, was very different. I put it on the internet and then in an anthology and then went on about my life.

Still, the images nagged at me. Why did she build her own dog out of bones? Why were her hands stained with a prince’s blood? What does building your own dog feel like? Who was the godmother narrating the story? Judging by some of my reader mail, it nagged at them too. People wanted to know about the woman with the bone dog.

At the same time and unrelated, in my other life as a children’s book author, an editor asked me if I could do a fairy tale retelling of “The Princess and the Pea,” and I couldn’t do it. I have always found that story … well … squicky. Why does a prince want a bride with skin that sensitive? If a pea under a dozen mattresses is enough to leave bruises, what would a human touch do? Why would you want that? What does it say about the prince? None of my thoughts were the sort of thing you want in an upbeat romp aimed at seven-year-olds. We compromised on “Little Red Riding Hood” and I took my squick elsewhere.

Somewhere between the bone dog and the prince obsessed with tender skin, I wound up with the opening chapters. It included someone called a “dust-wife” about which I knew nothing, and the blistered land and Kania and Damia being married off. And then, as often happens, the story sat fallow for a half dozen years, occasionally getting dusted off and poked and prodded, and then one day I sent about ten thousand words off to my editor with my usual note: “Hey, I got this thing, you want it?” (I have heard some authors write cover letters and synopses and so forth. Someday I will have to try that.)