Lhel clucked her tongue against her teeth as she took out a slender silver blade and picked out a few of the stitches on the doll’s side. “Never do a binding for so long time. Maybe not meant to hold so long. Skin strong, but bone stronger. We use bone this time.”
“What bone?”
Lhel pulled a handful of yellowed wool and crumbling dried herbs from the body of the doll and felt through it until she found what she wanted. Holding out her hand, she showed Tobin three ivory-colored fragments: a tiny curved splinter of rib, a fragment of skull cupped and thin as eggshell, and one whole bone small and fine as the wing bone of a swallow. “Brother’s bone,” she said.
Tobin’s eyes widened. “His bones are in the doll?”
“Most. Some little bits still be in ground by your mama’s house in the city. Under a big tree there, near cooking place.”
Tobin reached up for the chain around her neck and showed Lhel the ring. “I found this in a hole under a dead tree by the old summer kitchen. Tharin says it was my mother’s. Is that where he was buried?”
Lhel nodded. “I call to bring up bones from earth and flesh. Your mama—” She mimed digging into the earth, fingers bent like claws. “She make them clean and sew into the doll so she can care for the spirit.”
Tobin looked at the doll with revulsion. “But why?”
“Brother angry to be dead and still skin bind to you. His spirit be demon worse than what you know if I didn’t teach your mama to make the hekkamari. We take up his little bones and put them in the doll. I bind her to it, just as I bind you. You remember?”
“With the hair and the blood.”
Lhel nodded. “She his blood, too. His mama. When she die it pass to you. You know the words. ‘Blood my blood. Flesh my flesh. Bone my bone.’ That’s a true thing.”
Lhel snapped off a tiny sliver from the broken rib bone and held it up. “I put this in you, you be bind again, have Brother’s face until you cut it out and be girl outside. But you know you girl inside now, keesa.”
Tobin nodded miserably. “Yes, I know. Just make me look like my old self again, please?”
Lhel pressed Tobin back down on the pallet and placed the doll beside her. Then she began to sing softly under her breath. Tobin felt very sleepy all at once, though her eyes stayed open. Brother came into the oak and lay down where the doll was. His body felt as solid and warm beside her as Ki’s ever had. She looked over at him and smiled, but he was staring straight up, his face as rigid as a mask.
Lhel dropped the rough dress from her shoulders. The firelight made the tattoos on her hands, breasts, and belly seem to crawl across her skin as she wove moon white patterns in the air with the silver blade and a needle. A net of light hung over Tobin and Brother when she was done.
Tobin felt the cold touch of metal between her thighs, and a sharp needle prick under her boy sac. Then Lhel was painting red on the air, so that the patterns looked like—
—blood on river ice
Tobin wanted to look away but she couldn’t move.
Chanting softly, Lhel balanced the tiny shard of infant bone on the tip of her knife and waved it through the flames beside her until it glowed blue-white. Brother floated up into the air and turned over, so that he hung nose to nose above Tobin. Lhel reached through his luminous body and plunged the hot bone shard into the seeping wound on Tobin’s breast.
The flame of the burning bone shot out under her skin, encasing her in heat. She tried to cry out in pain and fear, certain the flesh would boil off her bones, but she was still held tight by Lhel’s voice. White light blinded her for a moment, then the pain lifted her off the ground and she and Brother floated together up the smoke hole of the oak, and still higher above the trees. Like a hawk, she could see everything for miles around. She saw Tharin and his men coming on at a gallop from Alestun. She saw Nari and Cook doing the wash in the kitchen yard at the keep. And she saw Arkoniel kneeling over Ki, who lay on his back just outside Lhel’s clearing, looking up at the sky with unseeing eyes. The wizard had one hand pressed to Ki’s brow, the other over his own eyes as if he were weeping.
Tobin wanted to go closer, see what the matter was, but something lifted her higher, until she was flying west over the mountains to a deep harbor below a cliff. Long arms of rock embraced the mouth of the harbor, and islands guarded it. She could hear the waves breaking against their steep sides now, and the lonely cries of the grey-winged gulls—
Here, a voice whispered to her. The white light swelled again, filling her eyes. Then, You must go back, and she was falling, falling back into the oak, into herself.
She opened her eyes. Brother was still hovering over her, but Lhel’s chanting had changed. She’d exchanged knife for needle and was stitching up the bloody edges of the wound in Tobin’s chest as deftly as Nari used to mend the rents in her tunics.
Nari knew all along—
But now Tobin was the tunic and had to watch as the silver needle rose and fell in the firelight, drawing a barely visible thread silvery as a snail’s trail through the air, through her skin. It didn’t hurt, though. With each successive flash and tug of the needle Tobin felt herself being drawn together, made whole again.
Patched, she thought dizzily.
With every stitch Brother shook above her and his face twisted into a mask of true pain. She could see the unhealed wound on his chest again, how the blood fell from it drop by drop with every pass of the witch’s needle through Tobin’s living flesh. His lips drew back from his white teeth and bloody tears fell from his eyes. Tobin expected to feel them on her face but they disappeared somewhere in the air between them.
Stop it! she tried to cry out to Lhel. You’re hurting him. Can’t you see you’re hurting him?
Brother’s eyes flew wide and he stared down at her. Let me go! It was a scream inside her head.
“Be still, keesa. Dead don’t know pain,” Lhel murmured.
Lhel pulled the final stitch tight and Brother slowly sank down onto Tobin, then through her, and for an instant she felt the coldness of his presence in every inch of her frame.
You must go back—
Then Brother was gone and Tobin was free, curling away from Lhel’s stained hands, curling into the sweet-smelling softness of the catamount skin, and sobbing aloud with the hoarse, ugly voice of a boy.
About the Author
LYNN FLEWELLING’S first novel, Luck in the Shadows, was chosen by Locus as a Recommended First Novel and was a finalist for the Compton Crook Award. Traitor’s Moon, the third book in what has become the Nightrunner Series, was a finalist for the 2000 Spectrum Award. The Nightrunner books have achieved worldwide popularity and are currently published in eight countries, including Russia and the Czech Republic.
Flewelling currently resides with her family in East Aurora, New York. Her website address is www.sff.net/people/Lynn.Flewelling.
Be sure not to miss
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HIDDEN WARRIOR
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THE BONE DOLL’S TWIN
A Bantam Spectra Book / October 2001
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Copyright © 2001 by Lynn Flewelling
Maps by James Sinclair
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v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
The Skalan Year
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part Three
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
About the Author
Copyright