Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“Why, go out into the kingdom, of course,” said my mother.
“And claim my rightful place. But I shall need attendants, naturally.” She looked about her, assessing.
The bones were having some difficulty putting their pieces together in the right order, but I could see they were gradually becoming full skeletons.
As I watched, one groped about the floor searching for its skull, which had rolled a little distance away. Hysterical laughter bubbled up in my throat at the horror and the ridiculousness of it both.
My mother, a bone mage—the embodiment of bone magic itself. Raising a skeletal army. Marching on Virelith.
But what could I do? I was frozen in place, able to move only my eyes.
My powers were nothing compared to hers.
And I had no idea what she would do with me, Patrick, and Baldbeak once she turned her attention back to us.
Would we be discarded as no longer useful?
Or twisted and controlled, forced to join her?
“Wait,” I said.
Mother paused. “What is it, Netta? I am very busy.”
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the magic.”
She snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I felt Patrick and Baldbeak watching me in confusion. “You said I was born from it. I want to speak to it.”
Bone magic watched me from behind my mother’s face. I felt its interest as I would feel the sudden attention from a predator’s eyes gleaming in the forest. The skeletons that had been forming around her turned their sightless eyes to me.
“I’ll be your wielder,” I told the magic. “Your vessel, as intended.”
To my mother I said, “I challenge you.”
She snorted. “Ridiculous. What do you know of bone magic? I have studied it all my life and my father before me. I have read every book on the subject—cast every spell.”
“And I am its daughter,” I said, “just as much as I am yours. I have a greater claim to it.”
She scoffed at this. But I was not speaking to her. I was speaking to that other immense consciousness that I knew was listening.
“A fanciful notion,” she said. “Magic knows nothing of daughters or sons. It knows words. Rules. Rituals.”
“I know you believe that,” I said. “But I have come to believe that magic is a lot less rigid than you taught me. And I also believe that there is much more to it than we know, despite all our spellbooks and scholarship.” I looked past her eyes, into what lay beyond them.
“Take me instead,” I said. “Choose me. I won’t try to imprison you, I promise. You know me. Choose me.”
Whatever was behind Mother’s eyes surged forward, enveloping me. I was somewhere else again—not in the Tower this time, but in a place that had no up and down, no surfaces.
In this strange Otherness where I stood, I was aware of my Hair swirling around me—not as hair, of course, but as a bright flame of awareness. Many glowing threads were tangled in it—no, not tangled, but woven.
The pattern was ever-shifting, too complex for my eyes to understand in the same way I could never quite see rightly when Baldbeak lent me his sight.
I was only human, after all, and this was magic—my magic.
Not stunted or stuck, as I had always believed, but alive and crackling with energy.
There were bones in it, too, I felt, forming a long spine that moved beneath the thread and the flame.
The Hair and the bones and the threads were their own individual selves, but together made another, greater self, and that in turn was part of an incomprehensibly large and powerful Self that was all magic, everywhere.
It is difficult to explain, now that I am not standing in that impossibly bright place beyond time, but in the moment, I had a glimpse of how magic was in everything and everyone, and our determination to categorize it—to separate it into disciplines and order it to march in inky lines on the page, to imprison it between covers, to limit it to a collection of syllables on a human tongue—had gone against its most essential nature.
That was the Plague—the warped, unhappy, limited form of magic we had forced into being when we tried to make it smaller and more palatable in order to control it better.
It was a wonder it hadn’t rebelled sooner, and worse.
It had always yearned for me to see it fully, I understood now, just as I had always yearned for it.
“I am sorry,” I whispered to it. “I understand better now.”
A shift in its vast consciousness. It was listening.
“Mother doesn’t know,” I said. “She thinks she can control you. But I am made from you. I will help you to be free again, if you let me.”
I found I could move again, and I stretched out my hand, palm forward, and felt it flow through and around my fingers.
Bone magic poured from Mother and into me in long, shining ribbons of light, gleaming like mother-of-pearl.
I gasped as it filled me like strong wine. My skin felt tight to bursting with it.
Mother reached out as if to grab the insubstantial threads of magic, but they were unraveling too swiftly. The skeletons that had been forming around us, even those that were complete, collapsed like houses of cards.
“Netta,” she cried, sounding human again for a moment. “Help me.”
Magic filled me to the teeth. My Hair was a copper storm about my face. I felt as if even my eyelashes were alive and bristling with power. But through all that, I still felt a pang as Mother reached for me, pleading.
“I am sorry,” I whispered, and drew the last gossamer strands of bone magic into myself.
Mother fell, and as she fell, she separated for a moment into her disparate parts.
Her hair, her skin, her bones frayed like a thick thread unwinding itself.
The clatter of her teeth and fingernails as they hit the floor echoed in the wide room.
The sound echoed through the catacombs, fading into silence as the last remnants of her power dissolved.
“Is it over?” said Patrick into the silence.
My body seemed to fizz and spit like a poorly laid fire. I could tell from Patrick’s expression that my Hair was even wilder than usual, but I could barely feel it over the overwhelming sensation that filled me. My tongue felt large and unwieldy in my mouth as I said, “I think so.”
Around us, the great bone-studded stone walls shuddered and groaned. Dust rained from the ceiling.
“The catacombs are collapsing,” said Patrick matter-of-factly, clutching at his side. “We won’t make it out.”
“We will,” I said through my teeth. “We have to.”
He shook his head. “The tunnels are under half the city. If they cave in …”
“I think I can prevent that.”
“And how are we to get out if it is collapsing around us? My shadows will not withstand that.”
I knelt among the collapsed skeletons that Mother had been trying to raise.
They were still now, but the bones were alive under my hands, and willing.
I closed my eyes and imagined the swift flight of my needle dancing through cloth.
As it always did, the image focused my thoughts, made them sharp.
I imagined a pattern forming. The bones gave a convulsive shudder.
“Netta,” Patrick whispered, his voice filled with horror. “You can’t … That’s what caused the Plague. If you start making the dead walk …”
I turned to glare at him. His face was white; his eyes dark and enormous with superstitious fear. I had to suppress a slightly gleeful satisfaction at finally unsettling him.
“I’m not raising an army of the dead, Patrick,” I said flatly. “I’m getting us out of here. Now please, will you stop talking for once in your life and let me do this?”
He pressed his lips together and nodded, still pale.
I turned my attention back to the bones.
I closed my eyes and felt my way into the magic again.
Immediately, I was calm. It was a clean, orderly world down there, in that cold white space.
Everything connected. Everything made sense.
I could see what I was trying to create, feel the neat precision of all its parts and how they interlocked so neatly, each piece so perfectly made and perfectly suited to its neighbor.
Inside the bones, the long-dead marrow now pulsed, red and malleable and so easy to bring to life now that I knew how.
That was not my purpose now, though, and so I let my awareness move through the white tunnels, searching for—Ah, there it was.
I could hear Patrick’s voice faintly, and the terrible cracking of the old stone walls of the catacombs, but they were muffled.
The Hair floated about me as I kept my hands pressed to the bones.
As delicately as threading a needle, I took the remnants of their magic and stitched it into my own, forming the picture that was in my mind.
Now, the feathers.
I opened my eyes, spread my arms, and splayed my fingers, trying to keep the image in my head. I imagined my mind as a darting needle again, holding that image of delicate stitchery and my vision of feathers all together.
More bones skittered across the stone towards me.
Patrick cursed, stepping over the ones that passed too close to him, muttering something that could have been a prayer.
The sound of them coming together, the clicking and clacking, reminded me of the rat-tat-tat of the masked Plague dancer in the parade as she had swooped and spun.
A long spine formed, made of a thousand tiny bone fragments; then an immense head with blind sockets where its eyes should be; then an ivory beak. Long, spindly limbs locked themselves fast to the bones of the shoulders and pelvis, sprouting toes and reaching fingers.
This was the most difficult part.
I willed the shafts of the feathers into being, feeling a forest of them splinter and pierce the bone, like the spines of my old porcupine mask, and then snap open, unfurling a fan of white barbs: a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand of them across the whole skeletal body, more like quills than feathers, with no softness to them.