Lynn Flewelling - The Bone Doll's Twin

Thanks as always to my husband, Doug, and our boys for their love, support, and feedback. Matt pronounced this one “Disturbing, but in a good way.” Quite apt, I think.

Thanks also to my parents, because. To Pat York and Anne Bishop for their feedback on the early chapters. To Anne Groell and Lucienne Diver, for their help and patience. To Nancy Jeffers, for her boundless enthusiasm for this project. To all the good folks at the Internet Fantasy Writer’s Association, for their always swift and valuable replies to last-minute research questions. To the late Alan M., for being a good friend to writers, too briefly known.

To Mike K. wherever he is, for being.

I. Winter Solstice—Mourning Night and Festival of Sakor; observance of the longest night and celebration of the lengthening of days to come.

1. Sarisin: Calving

2. Dostin: Hedges and ditches seen to. Peas and beans sown for cattle food.

3. Klesin: Sowing of oats, wheat, barley (for malting), rye. Beginning of fishing season. Open water sailing resumes.

II. Vernal Equinox—Festival of the Flowers in Mycena. Preparation for planting, celebration of fertility.

4. Lithion: Butter and cheese making (sheep’s milk pref.) Hemp and flax sown.

5. Nythin: Fallow ground ploughed.

6. Gorathin: Corn weeded. Sheep washed and sheared.

III. Summer Solstice

7. Shemin: Beginning of the month—hay mowing. End and into Lenthin—grain harvest in full swing.

8. Lenthin: Grain harvest.

9. Rhythin: Harvest brought in. Fields plowed and planted with winter wheat or rye.

IV. Harvest Home—finish of harvest, time of thankfulness.

10. Erasin: Pigs turned out into the woods to forage for acorns and beechnuts.

11. Kemmin: More plowing for spring. Oxen and other meat animals slaughtered and cured. End of the fishing season. Storms make open water sailing dangerous.

12. Cinrin: Indoor work, including threshing.

An old man looks back at me from my mirror now. Even among the other wizards here in Rhíminee, I’m a relic of forgotten times.

My new apprentice, little Nysander, cannot imagine what it was like to be a free wizard of the Second Orëska. At Nysander’s birth this beautiful city had already stood for two centuries above her deep harbor. Yet to me it shall always and forever be “the new capital.”

In the days of my youth, a whore’s cast-off like Nysander would have gone unschooled. If he were lucky he might have ended up as a village weather-caller or soothsayer. More likely, he would have unwittingly killed someone and been stoned as a witch. Only the Lightbearer knows how many god-touched children were lost before the advent of the Third Orëska.

Before this city was built, before this great house of learning was gifted to us by its founder, we wizards of the Second Orëska made our own way and lived by our own laws.

Now, in return for service to the Crown we have this House, with its libraries, archives, and its common history. I am the only one still living who knows how dear a price was paid for that.

Two centuries. Three or four lifetimes for most people; a mere season for those of us touched by the Lightbearer’s gift. “We wizards stand apart, Arkoniel,” my own teacher, Iya, told me when I was scarcely older than Nysander is now. “We are stones in a river’s course, watching the rush of life whirl past.”

Standing by Nysander’s door tonight, watching the lad sleep, I imagined Iya’s ghost beside me, and for a moment it seemed as if it was my younger self I gazed at; a plain, shy nobleman’s son who’d shown a talent for animal charming. While guesting at my father’s estate, Iya recognized the magic in me and revealed it to my family. I wept the day I left home with her.

How easy it would be to call those tears foreshadowing—that device the playwrights are so enamored of these days. But I have never quite believed in fate, despite all the prophecies and oracles that shaped my life. There’s always a choice in there somewhere. I’ve seen too often how people make their own future through the balance of each day’s little kindnesses and cruelties.

I chose to go with Iya.

Later, I chose to believe in the visions the Oracle granted to her and to me.

By my own choice, I helped rekindle the power of this good strong country, and so may rightly claim to have helped the fair white towers of Rhíminee rise against this blue western sky.

But on those few nights when I sleep deeply, what do I dream of?

An infant’s cry, cut short.

You might think after so many years that it would be easier to accept; that one necessary act of cruelty could alter the course of history like an earthquake shifts a river’s course. But that deed, that cry, lies at the heart of all the good that came after, like a grain of sand at the heart of a pearl’s glowing nacre.

I alone carry the memory of that infant’s brief wail, all those years ago.

I alone know of the filth at the heart of this pearl.

Iya pulled off her straw wayfarer’s hat and fanned herself with it as her horse labored up the rocky trail toward Afra. The sun stood at noon, blazing against the cloudless blue. It was only the first week of Gorathin, far too early for it to be this hot. It seemed the drought was going to last another season.

Snow still glistened on the peaks overhead, however. Now and then a plume of wind-blown white gusted out against the stark blue of the sky, creating the tantalizing illusion of coolness, while down here in the narrow pass no breeze stirred. Anywhere else Iya might have conjured up a bit of wind, but no magic was allowed within a day’s ride of Afra.

Ahead of her, Arkoniel swayed in his saddle like a shabby, long-legged stork. The young wizard’s linen tunic was sweated through down the back and stained drab with a week’s worth of road dust. He never complained; his only concession to the heat was the sacrifice of the patchy black beard he’d cultivating since he turned one and twenty last Erasin.

Poor boy , Iya thought fondly; the newly shaven skin was already badly sunburnt.

Their destination, the Oracle at Afra, lay at the very heart of Skala’s mountainous spine and was a grueling ride any time of year. Iya had made the long pilgrimage twice before, but never in summer.

The walls of the pass pressed close to the trail here, and centuries of seekers had left their names and supplications to Illior Lightbearer scratched into the dark stone. Some had simply scratched the god’s thin crescent moon; these lined the trail like countless tilting smiles. Arkoniel had left one of his own earlier that morning to commemorate his first visit.

Iya’s horse stumbled and the reason for their journey bumped hard against her thigh. Inside the worn leather bag slung from her saddle horn, smothered in elaborate wrappings and magic, was a lopsided bowl crudely fashioned of burnt clay. There was nothing remarkable about it, except for the fierce aura of malevolence it gave off when not hidden away. More than once over the years she’d imagined throwing it over a cliff or into a river; in reality, she could no more have done that than cut off her own arm. She was the Guardian; the contents of that bag had been her charge for over a century.

Unless the Oracle can tell me otherwise. Fixing her thin, greying hair into a knot on top of her head, she fanned again at her sweaty neck.