Broken Souls and Bones (Broken Souls and Bones #1)

Chapter 7

7

Lyra

Bone crafters shifted and altered bones, be it crafting a blade or armor, or snapping necks.

Beneath the woman’s hands, Kael’s body bent and twisted. His skin split with broken shards like jagged nails shredding his flesh.

She was ripping him open.

Time seemed to slow. Stav held people back. Thorian’s shouts for Kael were muffled when four guards forced the old man to the ground.

“Time is being wasted,” Baldur said, voice rough.

It took five heartbeats to realize he was speaking to me. Head in a fog, I dropped to my knees at Kael’s side.

“Ly.” Blood bubbled over his bottom lip. “Don’t.”

A simple word and I hated him for it. He did not want me to risk myself, but I would not lose him. Even if I didn’t know how to save him.

One palm on his bloody chest, and the need—the obsession —to mend it all was as though a fist curled around the back of my neck, holding me in place. Be it instinct or something else, I knew there was a way to fix this.

As though the magic in my veins craved the opportunity to try.

By my side came the sound of leather stretching as a body crouched. Ashwood.

Roark did nothing but hold a hateful stare. No twitch of his lip, no flash of emotion. He was as stone until he removed a parcel wrapped in linen.

Once the flaps of the cloth were peeled back, all that was left was another jagged shard of bone.

A furrow gathered between my brows when the Sentry held out the piece.

“What?” I spat out the word, panicked and laced in disdain.

Roark held up one hand, curling and shaping his words like I would understand.

“Our Sentry is telling you a tale,” Baldur said with a sneer.

“I’ve no time for tales.” I leaned closer to Roark. “Hear this—you let him die, and I will slit my throat, for I serve no king who slaughters the innocent.”

A rough sound, like the cut of a dry rasp, rose from Roark’s chest. Almost a laugh.

“Sentry Ashwood is telling you a tale of bone,” Baldur repeated. “He is telling you there are some pieces that can heal the gravest of wounds when melded into living bones.”

Roark nudged his palm and the wrapped bone closer. He used his chin to gesture at Kael, then tilted his head to one side.

“He says—”

“I understand what he is saying,” I gritted out through my teeth. In a swipe of my hand, I snatched up the bone. “But I don’t understand how. What am I to do? Place it on him? Give a bit of my own flesh? Tell me and I will do it.”

There would be no words shared between us, but Roark leaned forward like he might murmur the answer, his brow a mere finger’s width from mine. I stilled when he used one knuckle to tap the place over my heart, then with the same finger, gestured at Kael.

Roark gave no further instructions. He rose and took three backward steps.

Through a blur of tears, with Kael’s wet, thick breaths filling my head, I studied the bone. Ashwood’s demands were clear enough—he believed I could find a way to make the healing bone save Kael’s life by placing it—I assumed—against him.

When the heat of my palm touched the bone, something inside me fell away. Like gates sweeping open in my mind, a strange glow bled from Kael’s shattered ribs and breastbone. Patterns of gilded stitches crossed this way and that over his battered wounds.

It took but a moment for my mind, perhaps an instinct, to note the glow revealed a possibility of how to include the new piece of bone, a way to seal the cracks and holes left behind.

I reeled over his body. “Kael, I-I know how. I see it.”

His lashes fluttered. A weak smile crossed his lips as he whispered, “Let it be. I will greet you with the gods with a…curved horn, Ly.”

“No.” Nausea tossed through my middle for what needed to be done. “Salur can wait.”

There was no time to scorch a blade in a flame. Infection we could face if he lived. He would live.

I took the knife Roark handed me, placed it at the open wound in Kael’s chest, and began slicing it wider, deeper.

Screams of our people boiled in my brain with each cut of Kael’s flesh. His eyes rolled into his head, no doubt with the pain so fierce his body was giving up.

I swallowed back the thrum of panic when he went limp.

Once the wound was wide enough for three fingers, I took up Ashwood’s strange bone and maneuvered the edge into the bloodied flesh.

But there was more.

Intricate golden patterns honeycombed across Kael’s front and Ashwood’s healing shard. Heat prickled on the ends of my fingers, a need to reach out and follow the golden threads.

Baldur let out a groan of frustration at my back. “Hasten your damn hands, woman, or—”

Roark held up a closed fist. The man did not utter a sound, but one simple gesture sliced through the Stav unit like the lash of a whip. Spines straightened, jaws tightened. What sort of cruelty was given by those hands to demand such abrupt discipline?

Kael’s chest was soaked in blood. He was no longer lucid and his sun-toasted skin had gone pallid and sickly, but through the gore, a soft hum of light pulsed with each weak beat of his heart.

With trembling hands, I maneuvered the shard into the bloodied flesh, bile burning my throat when my fingers brushed along the pulpy edges.

Beneath my palm, the new piece shifted, sinking into Kael’s chest, as though an unseen force absorbed it into his body. Craft brightened like a silken web around his body.

No one gasped, no one uttered a sound at the sight of the gilded filaments, and it was frighteningly clear no one could see what was unraveling before my eyes. Unorganized and chaotic, the glow of fibrous magic flitted across the bone, desperate for a purpose, for a command.

I gingerly touched one thread. Heat teased the tip of my finger, and where my hand shifted, so, too, did the glimmering strand. The threads rearranged like Kael’s bloody body and the bone inside were a spool with wool yarn, my hands the needle. With each movement, the strings of gold sutured the new shard into the broken edges of his wound.

My eyes fluttered closed.

The air grew colder. Where candlelight from sconces and chandeliers in the great hall had brightened the room, now the space was doused to misty gray. Shadows stretched up the walls and doorways like creatures so black they seemed to draw whatever was left of the light toward them.

When I lowered my gaze, a scream split from my chest.

Kael had been beneath my palms, but now only a soft glow of his shape remained. Each bone, each divot of his jaw, his spine, his ribs, was outlined in a golden sheen.

I spun around. Village folk, Stav Guard, all stood like radiant starlight beams. Flesh was gone, and it was as though I were witnessing the burn of their souls.

In the eerie silence came a laugh. Low, dark, like fear on the wind.

My scalp prickled with a sense of watchful eyes. I turned again and the blood froze in my veins. Clad all in shadows from cowl to boots to the skeins of inky black flowing off his shoulders, a figure—a creature—stood over Kael’s vibrant form.

Tethered around his body was a thick, golden strand. Like the heavy ropes we used to lift the stuffed fishing nets onto the longships. The opposite end of the strand disappeared into the shadows, like a line to find his way through the darkness.

A vicious grin split from beneath his hood, followed by the slice of wicked copper eyes.

“Melder.” The voice was as cold as the fiercest frosts and sliced across my heart. A sound heard somewhere within, as though part of my soul. “At long last, you’re found.” The shadow made a sound, like it was drawing in a long breath. “Your soul is familiar. Why?”

“Who are you?”

The click, click of his tongue, his claws, something , scraped down my spine. “I am he, and we are we.”

“I-I-I want to save him.” My hand fell to the glow of Kael’s unmoving form. “Help me, please.”

“How is it you’ve come here?”

“I don’t know. I was handed a bone—”

Another laugh, deep and rough, rose from the phantom’s chest. “Come to steal the souls in the bones? Come to corrupt the fallen for your own greed?”

“I don’t want any of that. I want to save him.”

“You take a soul from its rest.” The shadow reached out a hand. Billows of smoky black rolled off his pointed finger. His attention was aimed at the new piece of bone I’d sewn into Kael’s body. “Then I will take one to fill its place. A soul for a soul.”

“Who are you?”

The spectral didn’t respond, merely pulled back its cloak of shadows, revealing a thrashing shape on the murky ground. Add flesh and it might’ve been a small man, curled and skeletal.

Screams rattled the darkness. Cries of pain from the convulsing creature filled my ears until I clapped my palms to the sides of my head, desperate to muffle the agony of the sounds.

The more Kael’s body melded with the new bone shard, the more the screeching figure broke apart, like embers in the wind. Golden ashes drifted over Kael’s body, falling into the ghostly light of his bone.

All at once, the agony ended.

The wretched figure was gone and absorbed into Kael’s heart.

In the silence, the shadow peered out from his misty cowl. The heat of its eyes like molten knives, reaching the marrow of my deepest fears, my dreariest thoughts.

“You destroy them”—a dark, wicked rasp scraped over my brain—“and they will destroy you.”

I had no time to even scream before the shadow rushed toward me and its horrid coldness slashed into my chest.