Chapter Twenty-Three
The Spread Wings
‘A lacelike effect created with a wing needle that pushes the weave of the fabric to either side as it pierces, leaving a hole.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
I opened my eyes, and I was back in the catacombs. Patrick was still slumped against the wall, clearly too injured to move easily, Baldbeak on his shoulder. It was just Mother and me.
She looked quite as she used to, in some ways—her tall, straight form, slightly rounded at the shoulders from long nights of study.
Her hair was long and loose where before it had always been scraped back, but her large, capable hands were the same, as was her manner of glaring at the world as if it had personally offended her.
“You tried to …” I say.
“Oh, don’t make a fuss, Netta,” she said, sounding so human for a second, so like herself.
“You were going to feed me to it,” I said blankly. “That’s why you were learning all those terrible things about making books out of human skin, out of blood …”
She made a face. “Crude,” she said. “But informative. There were things I needed to learn. And the experience was to be more metaphysical than that. I was hardly going to skin you.”
I took a step forward.
“Netta,” said Patrick warningly, but I ignored him.
“You think that’s better?” I asked. In that moment, I was truly not afraid of her—I was furious.
“You used me, from the day I was born! You always planned to … to dissolve me into your book! And you sold it to the Temple! You would have sold me.”
“It had to be the Temple mages, and it had to be the catacombs,” she said.
“I stipulated that I would travel with the book as a condition of the sale. All I had to do was wait for them to cast the spell, and then step in to control the bone magic myself. I knew it would obey because of what I had given it—what I had sacrificed.”
So Mother had planned to betray the Pontiff after all, once she had used his resources for her ends.
“All those years,” she said, and her voice sounded almost the same—low and perfectly modulated, with a rasp of irritation behind each word.
“All that time laboring up there to get every word, every syllable correct, every page precisely measured and cut, every step of the enchantment prepared with absolute precision.” Her voice rose on the last words.
Her skull seemed to glow through her skin; her eyes seemed lit from behind, looking like stained glass. “And you botched it.”
I felt an involuntary shiver of shame, as I always did when I displeased Mother by being too sloppy, too soft, or not clever enough. Then I shook it off.
“I am so sorry,” I said, “that I disappointed you. How selfish of me to resist being sacrificed.”
“It was incredibly vexing,” she said. I wondered if Mother had always been unable to spot sarcasm when it came to her work, or whether something in the transformation process had bled the ability out of her.
“Twenty years of planning almost completely wasted. I should have known you would find a way to ruin it. You were always so untidy about things, Netta.”
As if I had spilled her pot of ink again.
“I am your daughter,” I said.
“In a sense,” she agreed.
“What do you mean, in a sense? Did you not give birth to me?”
“I did, and a most unpleasant experience it was.”
“Then I am your child, Mother! And you were going to offer me as some kind of … of sacrifice to your spellbook!”
She clicked her tongue in disapproval. It made an odd sound, as if her mouth hadn’t quite aligned all its inner parts correctly when it reconstructed itself.
“But Netta, that’s what you were for. You were born from bone magic—created from and for it.
I found a spell in my father’s library—well, I thought it was the ramblings of a madman, at first, but it worked. I invited bone magic in, and it came.”
She sounded almost dreamy now. “It was so lonely. It had been rejected—been alone—for so long. Others had tried to resurrect it, but I was the first to offer it a place to grow anew. A child.”
I felt frozen. I could not move. All I could do was watch her mouth move as she told me this terrible story with such pride, such satisfaction in herself. As she told me that I was barely her child, was barely a person. I was an animal tended and fattened for slaughter.
“It was so grateful,” she said. “It granted me so much knowledge. Oh, I had to work hard, of course, but I felt its willingness. You were rather a disappointment, to be frank. I expected a child of magic to be, well, adept at magic. You were adept at nothing.”
“I am not adept at nothing anymore,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Any power you have now comes from being born of bone magic and of me. It has lain dormant in you for a while and now is stirring, yes … But you will never really be able to wield it as a mage, Netta. It is eager to be free, that is all. I am the one who built the vessel to house it. You were always intended to be its vessel.”
“I cooked and cleaned for you, for years.” My voice cracked. “I held the light for you while you worked. I made your quills, your ink … I made everything you needed to create the thing you wanted to use to destroy me.”
“Hardly destroy you,” she said contemptuously. “Transform, perhaps.”
“But I would be gone.”
“The human part of you, yes.” She waved her hand dismissively.
“But what use had that part ever been, aside from running errands and doing chores? You were a glorified maidservant. You couldn’t even read.
You spent your entire life in one place, quite contentedly.
Please don’t pretend you were some sort of great intellect, that your loss would affect the world in any way. No one even knew you existed.”
Baldbeak gave a loud and warlike caw.
“Fine, except for the raven.” She rolled her eyes. “I suppose he would miss you.”
I stared at her. “Is that really what you thought of me, all this time?”
“Netta, to be frank, I thought of you very little.” Her mouth twisted into a smile, or what I suppose she thought was a smile.
“It is nothing to be ashamed of. Most people are terribly unremarkable. And you were lucky enough to carry something special within you, until such time as I could marry it with the spellbook and bring it all together. Now that is something to be proud of.”
I had no words. I looked into the face of the thing that had been my mother. I did not feel any sadness—that would come later.
“But it didn’t work, did it?” I said. “Because I wasn’t as powerless and worthless as you thought.”
“I suppose not,” she agreed. “And perhaps it was all for the best, after all.”
I looked around at the ruined room, then back to the horror of her form.
“How could any of this possibly be for the best?”
“Because I didn’t need you, in the end,” she said. “I thought I did. I knew that the work required sacrifice, and I thought you would suffice for it. But now I see the sacrifice had to be mine. If all had gone as planned, I would never have learned that.”
She seemed dreamy; thoughtful. “I don’t know what I was so afraid of, now.” She extended one arm and examined it. “It didn’t hurt at all. And now I am free.”
The air in the chamber grew heavier, thick with the smell of iron and earth. The bones in the walls began to stir, rattling faintly.
“I just need those hairs.”
I clutched them tighter. “Why?”
“You pulled them from my head just as I entered the book. My sacrifice is thus not yet complete, and bone magic will not accept any less than all of me if it is to use me as its vessel instead of you. I don’t even need the book now, you see.” She smiled a terrible smile. “I am bone magic, now.”
Patrick cursed under his breath. He started to try to get up, but I shook my head. “Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t come near.” To Mother, I said, “I am here to stop you, Mother. Not to aid you.”
She frowned at me—still not angry, not really, just exasperated. “But it’s inevitable,” she said. “I don’t see why you’re being so difficult. I made you, Netta. Everything you are, you are because of me.”
I swallowed. She had moved towards me, just slightly. “Maybe,” I said. “But I made myself, too.”
She waved a hand lazily, and I was frozen in place, just as I had been in the Tower.
My fists uncurled like a flower. The hairs lifted from my palm and drifted towards her, writhing like water snakes through the magic-curdled air until they rested in her own hand.
She closed her fingers over them, smiling.
When she opened her hand again, they had disappeared.
She placed her hands on the stone to either side of herself and pushed, as if she were rising out of deep water. Her hips emerged, her thighs, her knees, all with that same slick, queasy shine on the skin, and finally she was stepping out of the book onto the sarcophagus.
She stood tall, flexing her arms and legs, tilting her neck from side to side, savoring her own movement. I could not move my head, but I looked as far to the side as I could and saw that Patrick and Baldbeak were frozen just as I was, their faces horrified.
Mother stepped down onto the stone floor and walked towards me, each movement fluid and precise. She seemed to crackle with magic. Behind her, the book still lay open on the stone tomb, but its luster had gone—it looked as limp and lifeless as a garment shrugged off and left to fall on the floor.
The bones in the walls rattled louder, some breaking free and falling to the floor, then skidding across it as they were pulled towards her.
The bones embedded in the catacomb walls responded to her silent call, grinding as they moved, pulling free from stone and earth, assembling themselves into skeletal shapes.
Patrick, Baldbeak, and I still could not move.
“What will you do now?” I whispered.