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

Chapter 18

18

Lyra

Kael was tucked between Emi and another Stav Guard. He flashed his wicked grin my way like there was nothing amiss, but his wrists were bound in thick rope.

“Bring him to me,” King Damir said, stepping away from me to square against Kael.

I cast a look to Ashwood. His face was unreadable save for the twitch of a muscle on the hinge of his jaw. He hadn’t expected this either.

When Kael reached the king, he lowered to one knee, chin dipped in submission. His golden curls slid off his neck, baring the flesh, and I hated the sight of it, like my friend— my brother —was offering up his neck to Damir’s blade.

“Ser Darkwin, you completed training with the Stav Guard crafters, and you showed gratitude by concealing the very melder three kingdoms have sought for seasons.” King Damir clicked his tongue in derision. “I’d be wise to flay you on the walls for treason, but it seems your fellow Stav and even the Sentry think I ought to give you an opportunity to explain yourself.”

Roark spoke for Kael? I blew out a soft breath to keep from glancing at the Sentry. Doubtless he would not care for the scrutiny, and his odd show of gentility might again return to violence.

Kael lifted his head, but remained on his knees.

“I do not deny it. Lyra is my family.” Kael glanced over his shoulder, giving me a weak smile. “My actions came from a misplaced fear that the only person I loved was in grave danger and should be kept from all the kingdom’s sights.”

King Damir had the decency to give Kael his time to speak uninterrupted. My heart beat against my ribs like a mallet. I didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe.

“And what do you think now?” Damir asked.

Kael hesitated. “I will always be loyal to my family, my king. I will not do you the dishonor of lying. But I am loyal to Jorvandal in equal measure.”

Once more, King Damir clasped his wrists behind his back and took to pacing. The brush of his steps rattled in my head the longer he took to respond.

All at once, he stopped. “You are a na?ve man, Ser Darkwin, but I am a merciful king who takes the word of my most trusted into account. I will not be so forgiving a second time. Still, if you wish to live, I’ll give you the chance, but you will be bound to the Stav Guard. Your life will be to serve Jorvandal and its people. Any future aspirations belong to these walls, any family home you wish to build will be in these peaks. Do you understand?”

Kael nodded. “I do.”

The king’s bright eyes lifted to me. “We have need of a melder, Súlka Bien. Stav Darkwin will be bound to the royal line of Stonegate until he meets Salur.”

Every limb, every muscle tightened like a rope growing taut. If I refused to fasten Kael’s life to this fortress, he would die. But it was taking away his choice, his own will.

“Ly,” Kael whispered. “This is what I want.”

Liar . Kael wanted to serve the Stav to see the kingdoms, to traipse over the knolls and valleys of Jorvandal, then he’d always dreamed how he’d settle down with the most beautiful wife and take up the life of a fisherman like Thorian.

Until his death, Kael would be locked into the life of a warrior, of bloodshed, and battle if it arose. There were tales of Stav who lived such lives. They were never the same—built strangely, like battle fashioned their bodies in new ways.

They seemed empty.

Still, how could I refuse when it meant the world would be without Kael Darkwin and his good heart, his rakish way with women, his gentle soul?

“If it is what you want,” I responded, a thickness to my voice.

“Stav Nightlark,” Damir said, flicking his fingers to signal Emi. “Retrieve the bone.”

Emi approached Kael. She gave him a soft smile. “Again, I must manipulate your bones. I assure you it won’t be like the last time.”

Kael snorted. “I think you take pleasure in my pain.”

Emi shook her head and turned Kael’s palm upright, so it faced the ceiling. With a small paring knife, she cut a slit in the top of one of his fingertips. After she dabbed away some of the blood, Emi took the tip of his finger between her own, like she was pinching the nailbed.

Kael grimaced and blew out a few ragged breaths through his nose, but no screams, no horrid agony was written on his face. More discomfort and irritation.

When Emi slid her fingers off his, a shaving of something pale and blood-soaked followed. Kael clutched his hand to his chest until the second Stav Guard handed over a linen cloth to stop the blood.

Pinched between Emi’s fingers was a piece of bone so thin it was nearly diaphanous.

With care, Emi handed the sliver to King Damir. Prince Thane approached his father, saying nothing, but made a small gash behind the lobe of the king’s ear with his own knife.

The king didn’t flinch, simply chuckled at my widened eyes. “You can understand why I only trust my own flesh and blood to draw a knife so close to my throat.” Damir held out Kael’s bone in his palm. “What you did in the jarl’s house, do again. It will not be so overwhelming, for this is no soul bone.”

“You will sense Kael through his bone?”

“At times.”

“Is it not maddening? To feel so many others, I mean?”

“It takes a great deal of focus to sense another soul through the binding, but it is not impossible.”

“Even though you are not a crafter?”

Damir smirked. “Yes. Something about the melding power connects me to these slight pieces of my Stav, creating a sort of bridge between us. I can choose to access it if necessary, or burn it should they betray me.”

Skalfirth was small, secluded, but I thought we understood more than all this. Never had I heard of such a thing being done before. Jorvandal’s Stav Guard was the envy of the kingdoms. Strong, formidable, and some of the most fiercely loyal warriors across the lands.

Because they’d given pieces of themselves.

I laced my fingers together to hide the tremble. “How do I bind the bone, sire?”

The king slid half the shard into the gash in his neck. “Touch it, and your craft should lead you from there.”

The weight of every eye fell over my shoulders. My fingers were unsteady, but with care I reached out to the sliver of bone.

A bite of something sharp, almost like a thorn, pricked my skin. The roar of a furious tide filled my ears and soft light wrapped around the shard.

The same as with the soul bone I melded to Kael, filaments like gold threads webbed around the bone and into the open wound on Damir’s neck, a sort of pattern I could use to stitch the new bone into the king.

I touched one strand, dragging the tips of my fingers downward. The gilded threads fastened along the edge of the shard and I made quick work of nestling the piece half inside the gash on the king’s neck.

It was bloody work, a little sickening to mold and maneuver flesh aside to make way for additional bone fragments.

My jaw tightened against a swell of sick in my belly the deeper I shoved the piece. Each new tug against the glow of craft threads squished and slipped into blood and tissues. I was no healer and the whole of it reminded me of gutting days-old fish.

Soon enough my lips parted, allowing short puffs of breath to flow, all to keep from breathing in the hint of copper and sweat on the king’s skin.

More stitches, more threads, more gold and heat stitched Kael’s finger bone beneath the surface of the king’s neck, shifting it like a bulge of creeping maggots to the hinge of Damir’s jaw.

Melding was curious, subtly powerful, and I could not look away.

It felt as though a dormant edge of my heart awakened with a new thrum and pulse. Kael told me when he used his bone craft to manipulate a fishing hook or blade or to heal a cracked shin of a child, his body heated and his blood swelled in his veins with a new sort of strength.

Before the horrors of Jarl Jakobson’s great hall, I’d never felt the burn of being anything but ordinary. Too bony, too freckled, too dull. In this moment, my craft drew out a side of me I did not know.

Someone braver, bolder, even stronger.

Absorbed in the motion of threading the sliver into Damir’s neck, I never took note how the walls darkened, like a shade pulled over the lancet windows, blotting out the sun. Flames in the inglenook died, filling the hall with the gust of a winter wind.

The eerie glow from bodies of the consorts, the prince, and the queen lined the tattered and chipped table.

My hands stilled and I pulled back. The king’s features burned like a noon sun, his flesh more like a flame than anything. I could not make out his fine tunic or the beads in his beard. All around, much the same as in Skalfirth, bones burned through bodies of those in the palace hall as though their very souls were aflame.

Black dripped off the walls, from the corners and edges of the tables, like moldy refuse.

A mirrored reflection of the world I knew, but rotted and dreary.

Smoke and salt expanded in my lungs with every breath.

I shuddered in the chill, too unnerved to look over my shoulder at the shuffle of steps across damp stones. I clenched my eyes for one breath, two, then shook out my hands and tried to continue stitching the golden thread into Damir.

The small shard gleamed like a polished gold coin, half inside Damir’s aura, but a different shade. In truth, I could make out endless shades of gold on the king. All different shapes and sizes.

“Come to take more souls, Melder?”

Ten paces away, the harsh glow of the phantom’s eyes held mine. His cloak billowed like mists of the night around broad shoulders. This time he was not towering over me; he’d perched atop a blackened stone that dripped in rotted moss and vines.

The golden rope keeping the creature tethered around his waist seemed weaker, more frayed, almost ready to split.

Tricks of the mind, that’s all this was.

“I’m not here to disturb anything.” I turned back to the king’s bones. The threads had faded and what was left was a molten glow around the edges of the sliver, melted down into Damir.

The phantom drifted to my side, the brilliant rope shifted with him, going slack when he stopped at my shoulder.

“What is it that has brought you here?” He tilted his cowled head.

“The command of the king.”

The phantom merely hummed, gaze sliding across my throat, almost as though he were hungry to cut it out. My eyes clenched when he leaned close enough the cool mist of his darkness brushed along my cheeks.

“Why are you seen here?” He spoke like he was asking the question to himself more than to me.

“This is simply in my mind.”

A heavy, strained sort of laugh grumbled from the spectral. “You don’t really believe that. Learn this now, Melder—not everything is as it seems. Those who seem trustworthy might be enemies. Those who seem enemies, well, they might be the fiercest allies.”

“What are you?”

Another hum. The phantom billowed, almost iridescent, like he was fading. “Take a soul, Melder, and I will take one in its place.”

The memory of the screaming figure when I melded Kael’s body would not leave me. A soul for a soul.

The world spun and the same suffocating fog began to fill my head, until I was flung back.

Warmth from an open hearth stung my skin, and my cheek was pressed against something hard, something sturdy.

Gods. My knees must’ve buckled, and I fell against Roark’s damn chest. His strong arms held me around the waist, my face buried into the embroidered wolf head over his heart. For a moment, I didn’t mind.

For a moment, he was my strength.

King Damir chuckled. With care, and a bit of a tug from Ashwood, I found my footing again. The king dabbed a hand over the thin, sealed scar across his neck. Where blood and opened flesh had been moments ago, now it looked like nothing more than a healing scrape.

The king’s eyes flashed in a new kind of life. “I feel it. The addition of it, the strength of it. It took so swiftly. Not even Fadey could settle a binding so painlessly.” He laughed and clapped his hands, delighted. “How glad I am to have you here, Lyra Bien.”

A few courtiers and mistresses offered a gentle applause, with murmured praises.

Damir placed his hands on my shoulders, nudging Roark to step back. The air was colder without the Sentry so close.

“You will be honored in these walls,” Damir told me. “A crucial member of the royal house and Stav Guard. I still see the fear in your eyes. Tell me what I can do to ease your worries.”

There was sincerity in the king’s words, his eyes. What was it about melding that brought such peace, such hope, and fear? How was I to find a way to be free of these walls if I did not understand the craft that brought me here?

“I do not know much about melding craft. I think it would be wise to understand it.”

“I agree.” Damir glanced over my head. “Sentry Ashwood, you’ll see to it.”

Roark dipped his chin and nodded. I schooled my features into what I hoped was something unreadable, something flat. Why Roark? The thought was both a fear and a delight, and I could not explain it.

“You and I will speak in my chambers, Lyra. Then you will be given time to adjust to your life here. You will be shown about the borders of Stonegate and train with the Stav. Melding is a rare craft, and should you find yourself unprotected, you must be able to do so yourself.” The king cupped my chin with his large palms. “Your comfort is my greatest concern. The Sentry is under my command to keep you safe, but I’m certain you’ll hardly know he is there.”