Lynn Flewelling - The Bone Doll's Twin

Not knowing what else to do, Ki set after him, letting the ghost lead him as it would. After all, it had the doll now.

Lhel had taken Arkoniel back behind the oak some time ago, leaving Tobin alone at the spring. She knelt where they’d left her, staring down at the face in the pool and feeling the world turning upside down around her.

My face , she told herself.

Girl. Lady. Princess.

The world spun again.

Queen .

Me.

She touched her cheek to discover if it felt as different as it looked in the water. Before she could decide, the image burst in a splash that wet her from face to knees.

A cloth sack floated in the spring in front of her.

A flour sack.

“The doll!” she cried, pulling it out before it could sink. She’d forgotten it in Ero. Brother crouched on the far side of the pool, staring at her with his head cocked to one side, almost as if he were surprised to see her like this.

“Look Lhel,” she called. “Brother brought it all the way from the city.”

Lhel and Arkoniel ran to her and pulled her from the spring. The witch wrapped the catamount robe around her like a cloak, pulling it forward over her face.

“No, Brother couldn’t have done that. Not by himself,” said Arkoniel, scanning the edge of the clearing with frightened eyes.

“Then Brother must have brought Ki,” said Tobin, trying to pull away. “I was so scared when I saw the blood that I just ran away and forgot the doll. Brother must have shown it to Ki and told him to bring it.”

“Yes, the spirit knows his way,” Lhel said, but she was looking at Arkoniel, not at the ghost. “And Ki knew the way to the keep—”

The wizard had disappeared into the trees before she could finish. She sent her voice after him, finding his mind with ease.

“No, you must not harm him.”

“You know what I have sworn, Lhel.”

Lhel almost followed, but knew she couldn’t leave Tobin alone like this.

“What’s wrong?” Tobin asked, gripping her arm.

“Nothing, keesa. Arkoniel gone to find your friend. We start the healing while he go.”

“No, I want to wait for Ki.”

Lhel smiled and placed her hand on Tobin’s head, then spoke the spell she’d shaped in her mind. Tobin fell limp in her arms.

Lhel caught her and held her close as she stared into the trees. “Mother, protect him.”

Brother kept just ahead of Ki all the way to Lhel’s clearing, never close enough to question but never quite out of sight. Then he disappeared, and where he’d stood Ki could see what looked like Tobin through a break in the trees.

He opened his mouth to hail him when Arkoniel suddenly stepped in front of him. Sunlight flashed on something in the wizard’s hand and everything went black.

Tobin woke on a pallet inside the oak. It was hot and his bare skin streamed with sweat. His head felt like it was filled with warm mud, too heavy to lift.

Lhel sat cross-legged beside him, holding the rag doll on her lap.

“You ’wake, keesa?”

A twinge of pain brought Tobin fully awake and he sat up with a cry of dismay. “Ki? Where’s Ki?”

There was something wrong with his voice. It was too high. It sounded like—

“No!”

“Yes, daughter.”

“Where’s Ki?” Tobin asked again.

“He be outside. It’s time for the teaching I tell you of all that time ago, when you bring me this hekkamari.” She held up the doll. “The Skala moon god got path set for you. You a girl, but you got to be a boy looking for a time again. We do another binding now.”

Tobin looked down and saw that her naked body was still a boy’s—lean and angular with a little penis nestled like a mouse between her thighs. But there were a few smears of fresh blood there, too.

“Why am I bleeding there?”

“Binding got weak when your moon time come on you. Fight with the magic.”

“Moon time?” Tobin realized uncomfortably that Lhel must mean the monthly female bleeding Ki had told her about.

“Woman got a tide in her womb like the sea, called by the moon,” Lhel told her. “Give you blood and pain. Give you magic to grow baby in your belly. Some get other magic from it too, like me. And you, too. It give you dreams, sometimes, and the eye. Strong magic. Break some of my stitching.”

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.