Idol of Bone Read online

  In the darkened bedroom, Jak fumbled to light the oil lamp, and nearly knocked it over when the flame came up with a sputter. “Holy fucking sooth.” The words were out before Jak could stop them.

  Ra had slipped off the cloak and dropped it where she stood. There was nothing underneath. She gave Jak a quizzical look, completely unselfconscious, as though standing naked in snow boots were nothing out of the ordinary. If something untoward had happened to her, there was no sign of it. Not a single blemish or bruise marked the pristine flesh.

  Jak closed the bedroom door and picked up the cloak to shove it back at her. “Look, just—hold on to this for a minute.”

  Ra gathered the awkward garment in her arms beneath the white slopes of her breasts. “It’s warm down here.”

  Jak tried to focus on the ridiculous boots, but it was impossible not to look as Ra came forward into the room to examine the sparse furnishings. She had the palest skin Jak had ever seen, paler still in contrast to the mane of ebony that hung past her hips—just shy of covering her backside while she bent toward the mirror over the dresser.

  Jak swallowed and muttered, “It is now.”

  The pale brow furrowed with some unidentifiable emotion. Ra looked at everything, even her own reflection, with a sort of wonder, as if for the first time. The black sapphire eyes met Jak’s in the mirror, and Jak meant to look away, but couldn’t seem to. A person could get lost in that liquid ink, like staring into a night sky dusted with the brilliance of stars and forgetting the earth. Like her unconscious poise, Ra’s gaze held no shame, only curiosity. The frankness of her appraisal made it feel as though Jak were the one who was naked.

  Jak blushed, turning away to rummage through the wardrobe. “You really need to put some clothes on.” It was doubtful any of Jak’s pants would fit her tall frame, but maybe something with a drawstring waist would do for now. Jak tried to concentrate on anything but Ra’s unadorned skin.

  “Skirt and sweater,” Ra murmured.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any of those.” Jak glanced up, holding a pair of painter’s pants, but Ra was somehow already dressed. The foreign fabric of a long, dark skirt and a cardinal-hued sweater hugged her form perfectly. This time Jak managed to not only knock the lamp over, but slammed a thumb in the wardrobe door as well.

  Cursing, Jak righted the lamp before the oil spilled out. “How did you—?” The question fell unfinished. There was no answer Jak could accept.

  Ra said nothing, her expression unreadable. Images of the dark gods of the Delta sprang to mind—gods who could conjure and kill at a word—but Jak shook the thoughts away. It was superstition and nonsense. The Meer had been nothing more than men. There were no such things as gods—or Hidden Folk, for that matter, even if wisdom dictated that the tradition of honoring the land as a living entity was better heeded than ignored. This was something else, something beyond Jak’s experience. Something completely and utterly devoid of rational explanation. There was nothing Jak hated more.

  “I expect you must be tired from your travels.” Jak took time relighting the lamp. “We don’t get many visitors this time of year.”

  “I’m not daft.”

  With one hand still cupping the burning match, Jak studied Ra’s placid and slightly amused expression. “Sorry?”

  “You were wondering before. I’m not. But I thank you for your hospitality…” Ra paused, at last taking in Jak’s appearance with an expression Jak had seen a hundred times before. “I’m sorry. Is it sir or madam?” Above Ra’s head, the hobnail glass of the windows circling the mound at ground level—Rem’s masterful touch that made their mound the most distinctive in Haethfalt—glittered in the lamplight.

  The flame had burned down to Jak’s fingers. “As a matter of fact,” said Jak, shaking out the match, “I prefer neither.”

  She studied her host as they returned through the sitting room of the souterrain dwelling. Better to puzzle over the identity of this peculiar person than to dwell upon her own. Between the broad lines of the shoulders and back, the indefinable curvature between waist and hip and the fine wrists beneath the brushed cotton shirt ending in long, slim fingers, there were no certain indicators of sex. The pale ashen hair, a vague color as if it hadn’t decided what to be, was tied back in a practical nub, and Jak walked with a brusque and steady gait.

  Ra found herself wanting to touch the creamy skin, to step up behind Jak and stroke her hand down one strong arm to the delicate hip, and farther. She even reached a hand out before she’d realized it, only to snatch it back.

  The strangers rose to greet her when she entered the dining alcove, making room on the bench.

  The old woman smiled, blue eyes crinkling in a pleasant face. “Forgive our manners in not introducing ourselves before. We don’t often have company. I’m Peta, and this is my husband Rem, and our son Geffn.” Peta gave a nod toward the young man with the russet-brown hair beside her and then indicated the other couple. “And our moundmates Mell and Keiren.” The one named Geffn merely grunted his greeting, but the young woman smiled warmly and the man with the fair curls stood and held out his hand.

  “Well met.” He paused with significance as if waiting for something. When she only stared, he reached forward and grasped her palm in a brief, firm shake. Pulling back a bit in surprise, Ra fell onto the bench unceremoniously when he let her go.

  “Your clothes didn’t need drying after all,” he remarked. In light of the obvious discomfort her conjuring had given Jak, Ra gave him a noncommittal half nod. It seemed wisest to exercise discretion.

  Peta offered her a peculiar object, a small vessel of hammered copper with a wooden handle on one side and a spout on the other. “Quite a chilly day for traveling, dear. Have you come far to visit the mounds?”

  Ra took the vessel, not certain what to do with it. It was small enough to wrap her hand around, fingers curled through the handle, and her thumb beneath the spout.

  “A ket’.” Jak eyed her, as though she were behaving oddly. “Keeps the wine warm.” Ra nodded, though Jak might as well have spoken gibberish. “You drink from the spout.”

  She put it to her mouth, holding it as one might hold a horn. When she tipped it forward, warm liquid struck her tongue, buttery smooth and unexpectedly rich with spice.

  The old woman studied her while she ladled out a bowl of simmered beans, and tried again. “You’re not from the settlements.”

  Ra shook her head, taking a heel of bread from the basket Jak passed to her. The awkward silence as her hosts waited in vain for some illumination on her origins ceased to matter as she let the bread tumble between her teeth, sweet and sour, and a contradiction of textures. She chewed, savoring it, and her polite hosts let the matter drop.

  Lingering at the table with Jak over a second ket’ while the others retired to the gathering room, Ra breathed in the scent wafting from the hot kettle like incense burning separately from the sweetness of the wine.

  “I’ve been trying to work out your relation to the rest,” she said. “You’re Geffn’s…?”

  “Mate?” Jak smiled. “I was. But I released Geffn and chose celibacy when I rejected the confines of gender.”

  “And when you say ‘mate’?” Ra prodded.

  The gray eyes were amused at her persistence. “In highland culture, a handfasting is between equal partners of a binding union. Gender is immaterial. It’s one of the reasons our culture exists, the freedom to choose our own destiny. That, and our ancestors’ refusal to pay homage to the city gods.”

  Gods. The word made her uneasy. “But how can one reject gender? What does that mean?”

  Jak’s face was guarded. “I don’t know if we have enough wine for this conversation.” When Ra waited, Jak emptied the wine ket’. “I don’t believe in it.” Jak set the kettle down. “It makes people behave like fools. Why should I be viewed differently based on arbitrary character
istics that have been assigned to me because of a pronoun?”

  “But you have a sex.”

  “I have a sex. But what does it have to do with anything? The only useful knowledge to be gained regarding another’s sex is whether procreation with that person is practical. I have no interest in procreation. There are people enough. So my sex is irrelevant to everyone but me.”

  “And your lover,” said Ra.

  Jak rose without comment and took the kettles to refill them. Ra watched through the doorway, wondering if she’d gone too far. The stoic face was difficult to read.

  “When I was little,” said Jak from the kitchen, “I had a dream. Or a vision, perhaps. Maybe just an embellishment of memory.” Returning with the steaming kettles, Jak gave Ra an almost reluctant grin. “I read a lot as a child, and I suppose I had a fanciful imagination. One of my favorite stories was a folktale about a white-robed mage who lived in the forest and lured little children from their village with a hypnotic song.”

  “Sounds dreadful,” Ra murmured, warm with the wine.

  “Not at all. The mage, Caeophes, changed them from children into swallows, and they soared into the sky, free from their unkind parents. Caeophes left a trail of breadcrumbs for them, should they decide to go home, but in every case, the swallows picked the crumbs from the ground and flew away.”

  Ra rested her elbow on the table with her chin in her hand, watching Jak’s eyes dance with the intoxication of the story. Tiny freckles were scattered beneath the liquid gray. Scattered on the cream complexion like Caeophes’s crumbs.

  “What does that have to do with gender?”

  “Nothing, really.” Jak laughed. “But Caeophes was never described with a pronoun. Just ‘the mage’. Just Caeophes. I remember asking my mother whether Caeophes was a man or a woman, and she said, ‘Caeophes is Caeophes. That’s what’s lovely about it.’”

  Jak started to take a drink and then set the ket’ down. “I dreamt later of Caeophes, taking me into the forest on a white stallion, wearing a white, hooded robe and singing me songs. We slept under the stars, but villagers came and found me at dawn. Before they took me home, Caeophes held me tightly and whispered in my ear: Never let them see your sex.”

  The candlelight was dancing on the copper kettles and Jak’s skin.

  “And that was it? That’s why?”

  “Not just that. It was the pure simplicity of Caeophes, the unencumbered mage’s existence. But I couldn’t forget what Caeophes said to me. It seemed very important. It seemed like words from the gods themselves. I thought for years the dream was real.”

  Gods again. Ra finished her wine and peered beneath the lid, deliberating as she stared into the bottom of the warm vessel. Her head felt thick and her face was flushed. As Jak rose to clear the table, she stood, and the room tilted away from her. Jak caught her by the arm to steady her, and Ra stumbled against the soft cotton shirt. Jak’s eyes were as gray and brooding as snow clouds.

  Three: Rue

  Relinquishing the bedroom to their guest for the night after showing her the indoor water closet, Jak took a pile of blankets to the hearth in the gathering room. Ra was a complication Jak didn’t need.

  Though it was true that the Haethfalt settlement had a tradition of disregarding gender, it was Jak’s eccentricity, as the moundhold liked to call it, that had led to the dissolution of the union with Geffn, not the other way around. It wasn’t, as Geffn chose to believe, that Jak didn’t love him. He’d known from childhood that Jak identified this way. And in the beginning, it hadn’t mattered. But somewhere along the way, a meter of discomfort had emerged in the rhythm of their lovemaking.

  Geffn had been young when they’d pledged themselves to one another. Too young. Everyone had thought so but Geffn and Jak. Time had changed how Geffn felt about sex, or how he approached it, or something—Jak couldn’t quite pin down where things had gone wrong, but wrong it had definitely gone. Celibacy, Jak thought, would bring them some clarity and alleviate the constant tension. Instead, it had hurt Geffn, who took it as a personal rejection, no matter what Jak said. He’d lashed out, and Jak had lashed back. And then the stupid thing with Mell…

  Jak rolled over with a groan. Sex was stupid. Biology was stupid. Human beings were stupid. And Ra had the longest legs Jak had ever seen. Jak growled against the blanket. Legs. That was what Jak had noticed, dammit—legs. Not…everything those legs rose toward with stunning perfection.

  Though it felt like Jak had lain awake for hours without catching a wink, the fire had long since died and Jak’s limbs were stiff and cold when a muffled sound announced an early riser. The creak of wood behind one of the closed doors along the semicircular corridor of the souterrain was from Geffn’s direction. Jak couldn’t stomach his pouting this morning.

  After creeping into the bedroom past Ra’s sleeping form to put the blankets away, Jak paused at the wardrobe. The woman lay draped in a comforter, breath rising and falling beneath the soft layers of boiled wool. The unblemished skin above the covers was pink with warmth despite the unheated room. She was, without a doubt, the most extraordinary person Jak had ever met. It wasn’t merely the oddity of her appearance on the moor, or the mysterious manifestation of her clothing and disturbing lack of history. There was something exceptional and peculiar about her physically—fine and poised, like a Delta doll: delicate and rare. Jak had a mad urge to touch her.

  She murmured in her sleep, brow knitting as the veil between dreaming and waking began to thin. Grabbing a pair of snow boots from the wardrobe, Jak slipped out.

  Ahr rubbed a gloved fist against the steam on the glass as he waited for his pot of kerum to come to a boil. Morning kerum was a highland ritual he’d adopted as his own, though at first the bitter taste of the dark, infused liquid had been difficult to take.

  A circle cleared on the glass, and he looked through the window within a window at the empty landscape. Mounds rose here and there under the snow if one knew where to look for them, but none within the valley Ahr had cultivated. The clans had taken him into their collective without prejudice, teaching him what he needed to be self-sufficient, but he remained outside by his own choice. He didn’t need complications.

  As steam began to cover the glass once more, he caught sight of a gray hood bobbing against the white. Someone was coming over a considerable distance in the cold to pay him a visit. The kerum began to bubble, and Ahr turned to the stove and lifted the iron pot from the fire with a thick cloth. Better pour two cups. It was early yet, as well as frigid, and his visitor would need it.

  The knock came at the door when he set the pot aside, and Ahr ran the gloveless tips of his fingers through his hair in a distracted nod at appearances before climbing the short steps to let the visitor in. The hooded figure shook off the frozen bits of condensation that clung to the coat and drew back the hood, stamping on the mat. Hair the color of birch bark shook out about the reddened cheeks and nose, and a pair of contemplative steel eyes gazed at him as though startled out of deep thought.

  It was typical of Jak. And oddly endearing. The slight air of dissociation contributed to an unconscious sensuality that Ahr found irresistible.

  “Ahr.” Jak nodded in greeting. “I’m sorry to intrude on you.”

  He smiled and took the damp coat. “No intrusion, my friend. My home is always open to you.”

  Jak tied back the chin-length hair with a jute-fiber cord into its habitual queue, straight and stubby like the bobtail of a pedigreed hound, and accepted the steaming cup Ahr offered. “I checked the pipes. Don’t seem to be any breaks. You having any trouble?”

  Ahr leaned against the warmth of the small stove. He was convinced Jak was female, but it would be impolite to say so. Not that it mattered to him. He indulged his guilty pleasure of enjoying the simple clarity of Jak’s movements, the moist fullness of the lower lip, the relaxed posture suggesting a spine curving into things to acc
ommodate, rather than resisting or exerting the usual sort of stiff and laughable bravado that so often came with masculinity.

  “No.” He cleared his throat and took a sip of his kerum, realizing he was staring. “No problems here.” Ahr made a reluctant grimace. “I did lose the last of my late harvest to complacency. The freeze certainly came on fast. Spent all yesterday getting that damn casement in.”

  Jak smiled, pale lips like the blushing pink of a seashell poised against the hot cup. “Highland winter makes no announcement.”

  “Thank you for not gloating, my friend.”

  Jak laughed. “I never say ‘I told you so.’ We all have to learn through our own experience. But I am sorry to hear about your loss.”

  They finished their kerum in silence, Jak lost in some deep contemplation. Ahr had come close to asking Jak to form a new moundhold with him more than once. Always seeming at odds with the members of Mound RemPetaJakGeffenMellKeiren—such an absurd mouthful, they had to shorten it to RemPeta—Jak’s personal anarchy only added to the indefinable charm. And with Ahr’s awkward history—

  “I thought we might take a trip to Mole Downs.” Jak interrupted his self-indulgent thoughts. “Get some last-minute supplies before travel becomes difficult.”

  Ahr smiled. “Some last-minute supplies for the fool Deltan who can’t feed himself, you mean.”

  Jak winked. “Something like that.”

  “Isn’t it a little far to go this time of year? We wouldn’t get there until late afternoon.”

  “We’ll take the haywain. The road’s still passable for a team of qirhu, and we’ll need the bed to haul the supplies.”

  Ume curled around Cree’s sleeping form like a protective cocoon. Working the docks of In’La had made Cree tough and self-sufficient, her brusque exterior reinforcing the assumption encouraged by her dress that she was male. That toughness—with a touch of tenderness underneath that Cree tried to cover—was what Ume had fallen hopelessly in love with. The shell of brittle amber had come later.