Bone Crier's Moon (Bone Grace #1)(30)

Adrenaline flashes through my veins. She has it. Found it. Took it from the riverbed. She stole it. “That belongs to my mother!”

“Does it?” She unceremoniously holds the flute over her knee.

And breaks it in two.

My heart stops. I gape at the severed pieces in her hands. “What have you done?”

“Don’t worry, Princess. Your mother can surely stoop to carve herself another one.”

My mind reels. No, she can’t. Not without the bone of a rare golden jackal. A beast that isn’t even native to Galle. No living Leurress knows where to travel to hunt one.

Jules tilts her head. “Unless it’s irreplaceable.” She grins and fury builds inside me. “Do all you Bone Criers share the same flute?” I school my features, though blood roars through my ears. My silence betrays my answer. She tosses the pieces of the broken flute into the darkness. “Excellent.”

My rage peaks. I lunge for her. “You monster!” She jumps out of my path and steadies her weight on her good leg. Not good for long.

I kick her knee with my heel. She shrieks and swings her fist at my face. I duck, then ram my head into her stomach. She falls back on the ground. I tumble on top of her. “I’ll kill you!” The dense air muffles my shout. She grabs my wrists to keep me from striking her. I thrash to break her hold. “The gods will bind you in chains for this!”

“Jules?” Bastien’s muted but alarmed voice grows louder. He charges into our ring of lamplight.

She tosses him a smug grin, even as we wrestle harder. “I just confirmed what Marcel suspected,” she says, panting. “Ailesse’s bone flute is the only one that exists. We don’t have to worry about another one.”

Bastien yanks me off of his friend. “Good.”

“I hate all of you!” I rail against him and manage to clip his jaw. My mother is going to murder me when she finds out about the flute. “You’re pathetic, soulless excuses for human beings!”

“Feeling’s mutual, Bone Crier.” He wrenches my arms behind my back and pulls me with him along the wall of skulls. Jules rises, limping to follow.

A few kicking and stumbling paces later, we reach a square opening that leads into a chamber. Light from the extra lamps that Jules lit pours out from within.

Bastien hauls me forward past a panel of skulls resting beside the entrance—a false door to keep the secret room hidden. He pushes me inside, and I duck my head under the low clearance. I catch a glimpse of the door’s back. It isn’t made of stone, but only thatched straw and thin clay. It can’t weigh more than I do; it will provide for an easy escape. And I vow to escape soon.

In fifteen days, the tides will recede to their lowest and reveal the land bridge in the sea. On that new moon—like every new moon—the Leurress need to summon the dead from their graves and ferry their souls past the Gates of the Beyond. If they don’t, the souls will grow restless and leave their burial places on their own. The dead must be ferried, my mother told me as I prepared for my rite of passage, or they’ll wander the land of the living and wreak devastation.

But the Leurress can’t summon the dead without the bone flute and the song Odiva must play on it. I see only one solution: I have to make a new bone flute from the bone of a golden jackal. Somehow I’ll find one. I need to make this right. It’s the only way to prove myself to my mother.

Bastien and Jules follow me into the chamber. He lugs me to the back and shoves me down onto a limestone slab. He binds my hands with rope from Marcel’s pack, then all three of my captors roll a heavy stone over the end of the rope that’s tied around my ankles. “Get comfortable,” Bastien says, knowing full well that’s impossible. “And pray your mother comes quickly.”





12


Bastien


I CAN’T BE THE BONE Crier’s soulmate.

A bead of sweat drips down my spine. My hand slides to my sheath. I graze the hilt of my father’s knife.

I could kill Ailesse now.

She sits on the stone slab in the corner of our secret catacombs chamber. I’m standing a few feet away, leaning against a limestone wall. I haven’t been able to sleep, unlike Marcel who’s sprawled out and snoring, smack in the middle of the oblong room. This space has always felt large—fifteen paces wide and twenty long—but with Ailesse among us, I’m cramped. She holds her knees to her chest with her tied hands looped around them, and rests her cheek on top. Curled up like that, she looks so small. So easy to murder.

Her head turns. Her umber eyes collide with mine. In the warm glow of the oil lamps surrounding us, she holds my gaze with the same ferocity she did at Castelpont.

A wave of heat rushes through my body. I clench the muscles along my jawline to make it stop. I slowly pull my hand away from my knife, but now the blade feels lodged between my ribs.

What if we are soulmates?

Her death would be my death. My father would have no justice.

“Here.” Jules limps over to me and presses a wooden cup into my hand. “The water has settled.”

I unhitch my back from the wall and take a long swallow. I don’t mind the mineral kick of the limestone water, especially when it’s not choked with the silt we dredged up in the tunnels. “How’s the leg?” I ask, putting the cup aside.