Bone Crier's Moon (Bone Grace #1)
Kathryn Purdie
Dedication
To Sylvie, Karine, and Agnés
for four life-changing summers
Eight Years Ago
FINGERS OF MIST CURLED AROUND Bastien’s father as he walked away from his only child. The boy lifted up on his knees in their stalled handcart. “Where are you going, Papa?”
His father didn’t answer. The light of the full moon shone on Lucien’s chestnut hair, and the mist swallowed him from sight.
Alone, Bastien sank back down and tried to be quiet. Stories of cutthroat robbers on forest roads ran rampant through his ten-year-old mind. Don’t be afraid, he told himself. Papa would have warned me if there was any danger. But his father was gone now, and Bastien began to doubt.
Outside the city walls, the idle cart offered little shelter. Bastien’s skin crawled at phantom whispers. His breath caught when the branches around him formed claws.
I should follow Papa right now, he thought, but the nighttime chill seeped into his bones and filled them with lead. He shivered, pressed up against the limestone sculptures in the cart. Tyrus, god of the Underworld, stared back at him, his mouth chiseled in a wry line. Bastien’s father had carved the figurine months ago, but it never sold. People preferred the sun god and the earth goddess, worshipping life and disregarding death.
Bastien turned his head, hearing a song without words. Lilting. Primal. Sad. Like the soft cry of a child or the plaintive call of a bird or a harrowing ballad of lost love. The song swelled inside him, achingly beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the woman standing on the bridge, for Bastien, like his father, soon followed the music there.
The mist settled, and a thick fog rolled in from the Nivous Sea. The breeze played with the ends of the woman’s dark amber hair. Her white dress swished, exposing her slim ankles and bare feet. She wasn’t singing. The music poured from a bone-white flute at her mouth. Bastien should have recognized her for what she was then.
She set the flute on the parapet when Lucien met her in the middle of the bridge. The hazy moonlight cast them in an unearthly glow.
Bastien faltered, unable to take another step. What if this was a dream? Perhaps he’d fallen asleep in his father’s cart.
Then his father and the woman started dancing.
Her movements were slow, breathtaking, graceful. She glided through the fog like a swan on water. Lucien never looked away from her midnight-dark eyes.
Bastien didn’t either, but when the dance ended, he blinked twice. What if he wasn’t dreaming?
The bone-white flute caught his eye again. Dread dropped hot coals in his stomach. Was the flute really made of bone?
Legends of Bone Criers rushed back to him and clashed warning bells through his mind. The women in white were said to stalk these parts of Galle. Bastien’s father wasn’t a superstitious man—he never avoided bridges during a full moon—but he should have, for here he was, enchanted like all doomed men in the tales. Every story was alike. Each had a bridge and dancing . . . and what happened afterward. Now was when— Bastien sprang forward. “Papa! Papa!”
His father, who adored him, who carried him on his shoulders and sang him lullabies, never turned to heed his son.
The Bone Crier withdrew a bone knife. She leapt straight into the air—higher than a roe deer—and with the force of her descent, she plunged the blade deep into his father’s heart.
Bastien’s scream raged as guttural as a grown man’s. It carved his chest hollow with pain he would harbor for years.
He ran onto the bridge, collapsed beside his father, and met the woman’s falsely sorry eyes. She glanced behind her at another woman at the bridge’s end, who beckoned with a hasty hand.
The first woman lifted the bloody bone knife to her palm, like she meant to cut herself to complete the ritual. But with one last look at Bastien, she cast the knife into the forest and fled, leaving the boy with a dead father and a lesson seared forever in his memory: Believe every story you hear.
1
Sabine
IT’S A GOOD DAY FOR shark hunting. At least that’s what Ailesse keeps telling me. I pant, climbing behind her as she springs from one rock outcropping to the next. Her auburn hair gleams poppy red in the morning sunlight. The strands whip wildly in the sea breeze as she effortlessly scales the cliff.
“Do you know what a true friend would do?” I grab a handhold on the limestone and catch my breath.
Ailesse pivots and looks down at me. She doesn’t mind the precarious ledge she’s standing on.
“A true friend would toss me that crescent pendant.” I nod at the grace bone that dangles among the small shells and beads on her necklace. The bone came from an alpine ibex we hunted in the far north last year. He was Ailesse’s first kill, but I was the one who fashioned a piece of his sternum into the pendant she wears. I’m the better bone carver, a fact Ailesse encourages me to gloat about. I should, because it’s the only thing I’m better at.
She laughs, my favorite sound in the world. Throaty, full of abandon, and never condescending. It makes me laugh, too, even though mine is self-deprecating. “Oh, Sabine.” She climbs back down to me. “You should see yourself! You’re a mess.”
I smack her arm, but I know she’s right. My face is hot, and I’m dripping sweat. “It’s very selfish of you to make this look easy.”