The Ember-Tide Protocol: The Bone Bridges of Calanthys

The first vertebra caught the moonlight like a curse made solid. Tessa Marwick stood at the forest's edge, one hand pressed flat against the rough bark of a fossilized dragon spine, and felt the hum travel up her wrist, through her elbow, into the cage of her ribs where her heart had decided to beat twice as fast as it ought. The thing was taller than the mizzenmast of the Sea Siren, taller than any tree had a right to be, and it curved overhead in an arch that should have collapsed under its own weight centuries ago. It did not collapse. It sang.

"Oh, that's not right," Brennic Cole whispered beside her. He had gone pale in the grey light, his freckles standing out like flecks of rust against milk. "That's not right at all."

"Keep your voice down," Tessa murmured back, though she could not have said why. The forest was empty. She was certain of it. They had walked for hours through the grey scrubland south of the Weavers' tunnels, and nothing had followed them. Nothing had watched them. Nothing had stirred in the brittle grass except the wind, and the wind had been kind enough to point them east, toward Calanthys, toward the bone-bridges Matriarch Yelka had promised would carry them over the Ashfall into the free territories beyond. The Matriarch's word. The Matriarch's bond. The Matriarch's clever eyes as she had pressed the bone-token into Tessa's palm and told her to trust no one but the road.

The road. As if a road were a person. As if a road could lie.

Tessa pulled her hand away from the vertebra. The hum lingered in her fingers like the memory of a bell. She flexed them once, twice, and the sensation faded into the deeper ache of exhaustion that had been her companion since before dawn.

"Smuggler's oath," Brennic muttered, mostly to himself. "Smuggler's oath and every god that ever took a tithe. I didn't sign on for singing trees."

"You didn't sign on at all," Tessa said, turning to look at him properly. "You stowed away in the bilge of the Sea Siren when you were twelve, and you've been freeloading ever since."

"Semantics." Brennic's mouth twitched toward a grin that never quite arrived. His eyes kept drifting back to the arch of bone above them. "And I was thirteen. Give a lad his dignity."

"You lost that when you ate the captain's wedding cheese."

"That cheese was a crime against the dairy arts. I did the man a favor."

He was talking too much. He always talked too much when he was frightened. Tessa knew the pattern. Three years of running cargo through Imperial patrols, of hiding in salt cellars and false-bottomed crates, had taught her to read Brennic Cole the way a captain reads a sky: the more chatter, the worse the weather. She put a hand on his shoulder. The bones of his shoulder were thinner than they ought to be. He had not been eating enough in Lowmarket. She made a note to scold him about it later, if later came.

"Stay close," she said. "Step where I step. The ground here is wrong."

The ground was wrong. She could feel it through the soles of her boots, a subtle give that had nothing to do with soil or stone. The earth beneath Calanthys was laced with the smaller remnants of whatever great beasts had died here, their smaller bones pressing upward through the dirt like the tips of buried knives. Each step produced a faint, brittle crunch, and each crunch was answered by a note from the trees above. The forest was tuned to itself. It knew when it was being walked upon.

They went in.

The first bridge spanned a dry ravine that might once have been a riverbed. The dragon's ribs arched over it in a fan of pale, pitted bone, each one as thick as Tessa's torso and as long as a longboat. They had fused together at their bases where they met the spine, and they curved upward and inward until their tips nearly touched, forming a tunnel that glowed faintly with the trapped light of a hundred dead moons. The surface of the bone was smooth in places, rough in others, and warm. Warm in the way that living things are warm, the way that a hand held too long begins to feel like part of you.

Tessa set her boot on the first rib. The note it gave was low and long, almost a moan, and it traveled ahead of her down the bridge and came back as an echo that was not quite the same pitch. The bone had memory. The bone was listening.

"Tessa." Brennic had not moved. He stood at the bridge's mouth, one hand clutching the strap of his satchel, the other hanging loose at his side. His knuckles were white. "Tessa, I can't."

She turned back to him. The grey light made his face look younger than sixteen, made him look like the boy she had found in the bilge four years ago, thin and defiant and so very sure that the world owed him a place at its table.

"Can't what?"

"That." He gestured at the bridge, at the singing arch, at the dark space between the ribs where the moonlight pooled like spilled quicksilver. "The bone. It's looking at me."

"It's not looking at you. It's bone. It's been dead longer than the Empire."

"It's looking," he insisted, and his voice had gone thin and high in a way she hated. "I can feel it. In my teeth. In the back of my head. Like it's tasting me."

Tessa crossed back to him in three steps and took his face in both hands. His skin was clammy. His pulse beat against her palms like a trapped bird.

"Listen to me," she said, low and firm. "Listen. I have walked worse than this for lesser pay. I have walked through Imperial checkpoint inspections with forged manifests and a hold full of salt-tax whiskey. I have hidden you in a crate of fish guts while the captain's wife asked questions. This is bone. Bone does not taste. Bone does not see. The dead do not care about us, Bren. They have their own concerns."

"That helps," he said, though he did not sound convinced. "That helps enormously. Truly. I feel so much better."

"Good. Now move."

He moved. He always moved when she used that tone. It was the tone she had learned from Captain Rook, the tone that brooked no argument and allowed no room for the kind of thinking that got people killed. Tessa climbed onto the bridge and did not look back to see if he followed. She knew he would. He always did.

The rib-bones were narrower than they had appeared from the ground. They ran in parallel curves from one side of the ravine to the other, and between them the gaps gaped wide enough to swallow a careless foot. Tessa picked her path carefully, testing each surface before she committed her weight. The bone hummed under her boots, a different note for each rib, and the notes braided together into a chord that shifted and reformed as she moved. It was not unpleasant. It was not pleasant. It was the sound of something that had outlived its purpose and had not yet decided what to become.

Behind her, Brennic's breath came in short hitches. His boots found the bone with more confidence than she had expected, and the note he drew from each rib was higher, almost reedy. The forest sang back to him in minor keys.

"Don't think about it," Tessa said over her shoulder. "Think about the map. Think about your stomach. Think about anything but the singing."

"I am thinking about the cheese," Brennic said. "The wedding cheese. I am thinking about how I would sell my sister for a wedge of it right now."

"You don't have a sister."

"Exactly. I would buy one just to sell her."

The bridge curved upward toward its apex, and at the apex the ribs thinned enough that Tessa could see through them to the sky beyond. The sky was wrong. The stars were in the wrong places, or rather they were in the right places but they were the wrong stars, older and colder and arranged in patterns that no living navigator had ever charted. She looked away. That was the kind of looking that got people lost in more ways than one.

They reached the far side of the ravine and stepped off the bridge onto solid ground. The ground here was carpeted in a pale moss that gave underfoot like old felt, and beyond it the forest thickened into a cathedral of vertebrae and fused skulls. Some of the skulls were small, no bigger than a child's head, with eye sockets that stared up at the stars in perpetual surprise. Some were enormous, great domed things the size of ship's hulls, their jawbones fallen away to reveal chambers within chambers, hollow spaces where the wind moved and produced the deep, organ notes that gave the forest its name.

"Calanthys," Tessa murmured. The name tasted of dust and old sorrow. "The Matriarch said the Weavers used to raise their hatchlings here, before the Ashfall. Said the bones sang them to sleep."

"Hatchlings," Brennic repeated. "Of dragons."

"Of something."

"I liked it better when it was just singing trees."

Tessa pulled the bone-token from her belt pouch and held it up to the grey light. It was a small thing, no longer than her thumb, carved from what she had assumed was ivory but now suspected was something else. The carving on its face was a weaver's knot, the symbol of the underground rail, and beneath the knot, in script so fine it was almost invisible, a single word in the old Iskani tongue. She had asked the Matriarch what it meant. The Matriarch had smiled the way a cat smiles at a mouse it has already eaten.

"Forward," Tessa said, and put the token away.

They walked. The forest shifted around them as they walked, the vertebrae leaning in closer, the skulls turning on their fused necks to follow their progress with empty regard. Or perhaps it only seemed that way. Perhaps the bone was merely settling under its own weight, adjusting to the small tremors of their passing, finding new arrangements in the dark. The singing changed with the density of the trees. In the open places, where the great spines arched high enough to admit the moon, the notes were thin and clear, like bells struck far away. In the close places, where the ribs tangled overhead and the skulls leaned together like conspirators, the notes were thick and slow, almost a drone, and the air itself seemed to thicken with them until Tessa felt she was wading through warm water.

She did not like it. She had walked through worse. She had walked through the Drowned Stars at low tide, with the black water lapping at her knees and the lights of the drowned ships glowing beneath her feet. She had walked through the salt flats east of Iskan with the sun beating down like a hammer and the salt crust cracking under her boots like the skin of something vast and dying. But those places had been honest. Those places had wanted nothing from her but her passage. This place was listening. This place was patient.

"Bren," she said, low, without turning. "When I give the word, you run. You don't stop. You don't look back. You take the eastern path through the ravines and you don't slow down until you hit the river."

"What about you?"

"I said don't argue."

"You didn't say anything about you."

"That's because there's nothing to say. I have the token. The forest will take me or it won't."

"That's not a plan. That's a resignation."

"It's experience." She glanced back at him. His face was a pale smear in the grey light, his eyes too wide, his mouth set in the stubborn line she had come to know so well. He was terrified. He was also, she realized, ready to argue with the bones themselves if she asked him to. That was the thing about Brennic Cole. Fear in him was not a weakness. Fear in him was a kindling that lit something brighter and hotter, something she had learned to rely on in tighter spots than this.

"Matriarch Yelka trusts the road," she said, more gently. "The Matriarch does not trust easily."

"The Matriarch is a spider," Brennic muttered. "A very elegant, very well-dressed spider who has eaten every fly that ever wandered into her web."

"Spiders keep the flies alive as long as they're useful. That's the bargain."

"And when they're not useful?"

Tessa did not answer that. The bones answered for her, a long low note from somewhere deep in the forest that sounded, for just a moment, like laughter.

They came to the second bridge near midnight, or what Tessa assumed was midnight. The stars here did not move in the patterns she knew, and she had stopped trusting her pocket-watch when it had begun to run backward somewhere between the third and fourth ravine. The second bridge was wider than the first, built across a chasm that dropped away into absolute blackness. She could not see the bottom. She suspected the bottom did not exist, or existed only in the way that old grief exists, as a presence that pulls at the edges of everything above it.

This bridge was different. Where the first had been a fan of ribs, this was a spine laid flat across the chasm, vertebra linked to vertebra in a chain that curved gently downward and then up again, a single long arc that would require careful footwork to traverse. The vertebrae were smaller here, each one no larger than a wagon wheel, and between them the cartilage had been replaced by a substance that gleamed like black glass in the moonlight. The whole structure thrummed with a single sustained note, so low it was more felt than heard, a vibration that settled into the bones of her skull and made her teeth ache.

"No," Brennic said, very quietly.

"Bren."

"No. Tessa. No. I can't walk on a dead god's spine over a hole that has no floor."

"You can."

"I literally just said I can't."

"And I literally just said you can." She turned to face him fully. The grey light caught the edge of her jaw, the line of her mouth, the small scar above her left eyebrow that she had never bothered to have healed. She had been beautiful once, in the way that smuggler's seconds-in-command are beautiful, which is to say roughly and without apology. Now she was tired. Now she was gaunt. Now she looked like her brother's map had etched itself onto her face. "Bren. I need you to do this. I need you to walk on that bridge and not look down and not stop until you reach the other side. Can you do that?"

He stared at her. His lips moved, forming words he did not say.

"Can you do that?" she repeated.

"I can do that," he said, and his voice was steady in the way that a rope is steady when it has been pulled taut. "I can do that. I can absolutely do that."

"Good."

"I am going to die doing it, but I can do it."

"You are not going to die."

"You don't know that."

"I know you owe me three years of back wages and a new lockpick set. You can't afford to die."

That, finally, earned her the ghost of a grin. It flickered across his face like a candle flame in a draft, gone almost before it arrived, but it was there. It was enough.

Tessa stepped onto the bridge.

The first vertebra rocked under her weight, just slightly, just enough to remind her that the bone was not stone, that it had memory, that it had been something alive once and might remember what that meant. She steadied herself. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way the captain had taught her, the way you breathe when the hold is flooding and the only thing between you and the deep is a plank and your own refusal to sink.

She stepped forward.

The second vertebra held. The third held. The fourth sang a single pure note as her boot came down on it, a note that hung in the air for a long moment and then faded into the hum of the bridge. She did not look down. She did not look at the blackness beneath her. She looked at the far side of the chasm, where the bone ended and the earth resumed its patient, ordinary solidity, and she walked toward it one step at a time.

Behind her, Brennic's boots found the first vertebra. His breath caught. His breath released.

"Keep going," she said, without turning.

"Keeping," he said. "Going. I am. Keeping. Going."

The bridge sang under them. The song was not the same song the first bridge had sung. It was slower, more deliberate, as if the bones were taking their time with them, savoring the weight and the warmth and the small persistent hope that walked across their ancient surfaces. Tessa thought of her brother. She thought of the map fragment she carried against her chest, wrapped in oilskin, pressed against her sternum where it had worn a small pink patch into her skin. He had walked places like this. He had walked into places worse than this and never walked out. She had promised him, once, that she would finish what he started. She had not known, then, what it was he had started. She knew now, or thought she knew, and the knowledge sat in her chest beside the map like a second stone.

Halfway across, the bridge changed its key.

It happened without warning. One moment the hum was low and almost gentle, and the next it climbed into a register that made Tessa's vision blur at the edges and her inner ear scream protest. She staggered. Her arms pinwheeled. The bone beneath her boot trembled, shifted, and she felt the whole structure sigh under her like a living thing adjusting in its sleep.

"Bren!" she shouted.

"Here!" His voice came from behind her, cracked and high. "I'm here, I'm on it, I'm on the thing, please don't ask me to look at it."

"Don't look at it. Move. Move now."

They moved. The bridge sang around them in atonal cascades, the vertebrae producing notes that clashed and contradicted each other until the air itself seemed to vibrate in jagged shards. Tessa ran. She had not planned to run. Running on a bone bridge over an infinite chasm was the kind of decision that got people killed, but her body had made the decision for her, her body had decided that standing still on a structure that was trying to decide whether it was a bridge or a throat was no longer an option. Her boots struck the vertebrae in a staccato rhythm, each impact producing a single sharp note, and the notes ran together into a melody that was almost, almost a song.

She reached the far side and threw herself onto solid ground. The earth came up to meet her with the smell of moss and old stone and nothing singing at all. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the sky and tried to remember how to breathe.

Brennic's boots hit the ground beside her half a second later. He collapsed in a heap, his satchel strap twisted around his arm, his face pressed into the moss. He did not move for a long time.

"Bren," she said, when her breath had returned enough to form words.

"Mm," he said, into the moss.

"Are you hurt?"

"Mm."

"Brennic Cole, if you have broken anything I am going to be very inconvenienced."

He rolled over onto his back. His face was a mess of moss and pale terror and something that might, in better light, have been triumph. His chest heaved.

"I walked," he said, "on a dead god's spine, over a hole that has no bottom, while it sang at me, and I did not die."

"You did not die."

"I am officially the bravest person in the known world."

"You are officially a liar and a freeloader."

"That too." He sat up slowly, brushing moss from his coat. His hands were shaking. He did not try to hide it. "Tessa. Why did it do that? Why did it change?"

She sat up as well, slowly, feeling the bones of her spine protest the motion. The bridge behind them had returned to its low, almost gentle hum, as if nothing had happened. As if it had only been testing them, and they had passed, and now it could rest.

"I don't know," she said. That was the truth. She had lied to him about many things, in the three years they had run together, but she tried not to lie about the things that mattered. The things she did not know, she did not know. "The Matriarch said the bridges would test us. She didn't say how."

"She also said the bridges would carry us over the Ashfall. She didn't say they would try to eat us."

"They weren't trying to eat us."

"You don't know that."

"No," she admitted. "I don't know that."

They rested for a while. Tessa shared the last of the flatbread she had brought from the Weavers' tunnels, and Brennic drank from the canteen and made small unhappy noises about the taste of the water, which tasted of minerals and old bone. She let him complain. Complaining was how Brennic processed fear, and processing fear was how Brennic stayed useful, and staying useful was how Brennic stayed alive. She had learned this about him the way she had learned most things about him, by watching him almost die and then watching him complain about it afterward.

When they stood to move again, the forest had changed around them.

The vertebrae were closer together here, their arches tangled overhead into a canopy so dense that the moonlight reached the ground only in scattered coins of silver that moved when the wind moved. The moss was thicker, softer, and it gave off a faint luminescence that made the path ahead visible as a trail of pale green glow winding between the trunks of fused bone. Somewhere in the distance, deeper in the forest, something was moving. Not walking. Moving in the way that water moves, or the way that sound moves, a presence that shifted from one shape to another without ever quite arriving at a shape at all.

Tessa's hand went to the hilt of the knife at her belt. The knife was a simple thing, a sailor's knife with a bone handle and a blade that had been sharpened so many times it had lost its original shape. She had carried it since she was fourteen. She had killed with it twice. She had no desire to kill with it a third time, but she was prepared, and preparation was its own kind of comfort.

"Stay behind me," she said.

"I am always behind you."

"Then stay there."

She moved forward into the green-lit dark, and the forest of Calanthys closed around her like a hand, and the singing began again, softer now, almost tender, as if the bones had decided to let her pass.

The movement in the deep forest resolved itself into voices, low and rhythmic, and then into a circle of lanterns hung from the lower arches of bone. The lanterns were not lanterns at all. They were jars of pale fire, each one suspended by a chain of woven tendon, and inside each jar something that was not quite liquid and not quite light shifted and pulsed in time with the singing. The smell reached her before she saw the people: woodsmoke and rendered fat, and beneath that, older smells, the chalky sweetness of bone dust and the copper-bright tang of old blood.

A dozen figures stood in the circle, their faces painted in patterns of white ash that followed the lines of their cheekbones and jaw. They wore garments stitched from hide and scaled leather, and around their necks hung necklaces of finger-bones strung on sinew. They watched her approach with the patient stillness of people who had been expecting her, and at the center of them, on a seat carved from a single massive vertebra, sat a woman.

The woman was old in the way that tide-smoothed stone is old, worn down to something that had outlasted its original shape. Her hair was white and cropped close to her skull, and her eyes were the color of the moss-light, a pale green that seemed to glow from within. She wore a headdress made from the antler of some creature, and from its points hung small bells that did not ring even when she moved. In her hands she held a length of rope braided from hair, and her fingers moved along it as if she were reading it.

"You are the one who carries the broken map," the woman said. Her voice was low and clear, and it carried through the bone-forest the way the singing carried, as if it had been practiced. "I am Yelka. I am the mother of the mother of the Weavers of Vorr. Sit."

It was not a request. Tessa sat, lowering herself onto the moss with the knife still at her belt and her hand still near it. Brennic crouched beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his shoulder against hers. The Driftfolk watched them with the same patient stillness, and one of them, a young man with ash-painted eyes, set down a clay cup between them. The liquid inside was dark and smelled of bitter herbs.

"You do not drink that," Yelka said. "Not yet. First we speak of the toll."

"We have coin," Tessa said. "If you will take Lowmarket steel."

"Steel forgets," Yelka said. "Steel does not remember the hand that held it or the song it was meant to cut. We do not deal in steel here." She lifted the rope of braided hair and let it fall across her knees. "You would cross the bone-bridges. You would pass through the spine of the god who died to make this forest. The bridges are not roads. They are the bones of something that was once alive, and to walk on them is to wake something in them, and to wake something is to pay for the waking."

"I don't know what coin you'd take from us," Tessa said. "We have no heirlooms. We have no title."

"Memory," Yelka said. "The coin of the self. The only thing that a person carries that cannot be replaced. You will give me a memory, and I will give you a bone that will sing in answer to the fragment you carry. The map you hold is broken. The bone I give you will know the shape of the breaking, and it will harmonize with what remains. With it, you may read what your brother could not finish."

Tessa's hand closed over the bundle at her chest. Inside it, the fragment of the Ember-Tide Map pulsed against her palm, a slow heat that she had learned to live with the way one learns to live with a scar.

"And if I refuse the toll?" she asked.

Yelka's pale green eyes did not change. "Then you walk the bridges unguided, and the singing in the bones will become a different kind of singing, and the bridges will know you are not paying, and they will close beneath your feet. Some have crossed without paying. Their bones are in the river now. They sing, too, but only in one note."

Brennic shifted beside her. She could feel the question in the way he held his breath, the way his weight leaned toward her, ready to run, ready to fight, ready to do whatever she told him to do, because he had decided somewhere along the road that she was the one who told him what to do, and he had not yet decided whether that was a comfort or a cage.

"The memory," Tessa said. "Any memory?"

"The memory must be a true one," Yelka said. "It must be a memory that you would keep if you could. It must be a memory that has weight. I will know if it is false. I have been taking this toll for sixty years, and I have heard every kind of lie."

Tessa thought of her brother. She thought of the morning she had found him, the way the light had come through the porthole, the way his hand had been open, the way she had not been able to close it afterward. She thought of the night before, the argument they had had about a cargo manifest, the words she could not unsay. She thought of these things and knew they were too heavy to give, not because they were precious to her but because they were not yet finished, they were still moving in her like a fish on a hook, and to give them away would be to give away a thing that was not yet hers to give.

She thought of other things. The smell of the harbor at low tide in Iskar. The first time she had run a cargo through the reefs without her brother at her side, and the strange, sharp pride of it. The feel of the tiller under her hand during the storm off the Scour, the way the waves had risen like walls and she had steered between them, singing to herself because no one else was there to hear. These were memories, true ones, memories with weight, but they were not the heaviest thing she carried.

The heaviest thing she carried was her mother's face.

She had been five when her mother had died of the lung-rot that took so many of the children of the Iskani lowtowns. She had been five, and she had stood at the bedside, and her mother had looked at her and smiled, and Tessa had seen the smile but had not, in the years since, been able to bring back the face around it. The smile remained. The eyes remained, sort of. The shape of the mouth. But the whole woman, the way her hair had fallen, the way the light had caught the line of her jaw, the way her hands had rested on the blanket, the way she had looked at Tessa as if Tessa were the only thing in the world worth looking at, all of that had worn away the way the face of a coin wears away when it has passed through too many hands.

She had not known, until this moment, how much she wanted it back.

"My mother's face," Tessa said. "When I was five. The day she died. I want to give you that."

Yelka's fingers stopped moving on the rope. For the first time, something shifted behind her pale green eyes, something that might have been surprise, or might have been a kind of recognition.

"That is a heavy memory," Yelka said. "You understand what you are offering. You will not remember her face again. You will remember that you remembered it. You will remember the room, the light, the sound of her breathing. But the face itself will go from you as if it had never been."

"I understand," Tessa said.

"It will not come back," Yelka said. "Not in dreams. Not in the moment before death. Not ever. Are you certain?"

Tessa closed her hand more tightly around the bundle at her chest. The fragment inside it pulsed, slow and steady, and she thought of her brother, and she thought of the map he had died to bring her, and she thought of the woman she had been when she had still known what her mother's face looked like, and she made her choice.

"I am certain," she said.

Yelka rose from the seat of bone. She moved to Tessa and knelt in front of her, and the Driftfolk in the circle did not move but their lanterns pulsed brighter, and the singing in the forest rose in pitch and volume, a sound like wind in a rigging, like the hum of a ship's hull in a heavy sea. Yelka took Tessa's face in her hands. Her fingers were cool and dry, and they smelled of bone dust and woodsmoke.

"Look at me," Yelka said.

Tessa looked.

The memory came. It came the way a wave comes when one has stopped watching for it, rising out of the dark water of the self, and it broke over her with all the force of the original moment. The light through the shutter. The smell of the boiled mint her mother had been drinking. The weight of the blanket. The way her mother's hand had lifted to touch her cheek, and the skin had been paper-thin and warm, and the eyes had been bright and the mouth had shaped a word that Tessa had never been sure she had heard correctly, and then the face had turned toward the window, toward the light, and her mother had smiled.

The memory held for a heartbeat, then another, and then Yelka's fingers pressed, and the memory came loose.

It did not hurt the way Tessa had expected it to hurt. It was not a tearing. It was more like a tooth being drawn, a slow pressure, a release, and then an absence that was somehow larger than the thing that had been there. She felt her mother's face leave her. She felt it go the way one feels a held breath go out of the body, the way one feels warmth go from a hand that has been held too long in cold water. And then it was gone, and the space where it had been was clean and strange and very quiet.

Yelka drew back. In her hands she held something that was not quite visible, a shape of light that flickered and shifted, and she placed it into a jar of pale fire that one of the Driftfolk had brought to her. The jar sealed itself with a soft sound, like a kiss, and was taken away into the deeper dark of the circle.

"The toll is paid," Yelka said. "The bridges will know you now. You may pass."

She turned to one of the Driftfolk, the young man with ash-painted eyes, and spoke to him in a language that Tessa did not know, low and guttural, and he went into the dark and returned with a small object wrapped in a cloth of woven moss. Yelka unwrapped it and held it out to Tessa.

It was a locket made from a section of vertebrae no larger than the first joint of her thumb, the bone polished to a pale honey color and pierced with a hole at one end through which a thin leather cord had been threaded. Inside the locket, visible through a gap in the bone that had never been fully closed, there was a sliver of something darker, a fragment of marrow or of stone, and it pulsed with the same slow heat as the bundle at her chest.

"Take it," Yelka said. "Wear it. The bone will know its kindred in the map you carry. When you bring them together, the map will open to you in a way it has not opened before. You will see what your brother left unfinished."

Tessa took the locket. The heat of it against her palm was almost the same heat as the map-fragment, and when she brought the bundle at her chest close to it, the two heats met and merged, and she felt them settle into a single rhythm, a single pulse, and somewhere in the marrow of the bone-locket something hummed in answer to the singing of the forest.

"It will not give him back," Yelka said, and her voice was different now, quieter, and there was something in it that Tessa had not heard before, something that might have been grief, or might have been the long acquaintance with grief that becomes a kind of second skin. "The bone will not undo what has been done. It will only show you the road he was walking. What you do with the road is your own affair."

"I understand," Tessa said.

Yelka studied her for a long moment. Then she inclined her head, a small movement that the bells on her headdress did not accompany, and the Driftfolk in the circle parted, and beyond them the path opened between the trunks of fused bone, and in the distance, through the arches, the moonlight fell on something wider and higher than the path, a span of bone that crossed the ravine like the back of some ancient animal.

"The bridges are ahead," Yelka said. "Walk them at the pace of the singing. Do not run. The bridges do not like to be hurried."

Tessa stood. Her legs felt strange beneath her, as if the ground had shifted an inch to the left while she was not looking. She took Brennic's arm, and he took it without being asked, and she was grateful for the weight of him, for the solidity of his shoulder, for the way his hand found hers and held it in the particular grip they had developed on the road, his thumb across the back of her knuckles, a pressure that meant I am here and I am not going anywhere.

"Yelka," Tessa said, and she did not know why she said it, except that the woman had given her something that could not be repaid, and there are moments on a road when one says a name because saying the name is the only honest thing left to do. "Thank you."

Yelka did not smile. But something in her face changed, a softening at the corners of the mouth, a shift in the pale green of her eyes.

"I have taken many tolls," she said. "Few have been so honest. Walk the bridges well, daughter of the Iskani. The god who made them died with a song in his mouth, and the song is not finished yet."