Heaven's Bones (12 page)

Vines are beginning to twine around the ruins of Riverbend. Daniel Greensmith works for a man, once a slave and now a sharecropper, who might be his father. For the sake of convenience they assume so, since his mother did not live to testify to it. After Freedom, everybody makes their lives, their families, their futures as best they can.

Daniel ventures to Riverbend sometimes, because there's a crook of the river where the water stills and just before a rain it's the best place to catch trout.

The skies are gray and he readies his pole and line. Something makes him glance at the carcass of the house behind him and he catches a glimpse of white behind a fallen pillar, white as a cabbage butterfly in the wild anise.

But it's much bigger than a butterfly, and he goes cold all over. He's heard the stories that this blasted site is haunted, that the slight figure of a little girl sometimes walks the ruins, searching for something, a child awake in an unfamiliar place.

He lays the pole down on a flat rock and approaches the house. The last time he stood here the grass was manicured and he watched the plantation house burn. Now the grounds are thick with weeds and wildflowers, and the persistent vines that entwine everything eventually.

The humid air is warm and he is sweating but his body feels cold and clammy. There, where he thought he saw the flicker of a white dress—there's nothing now. And yet he knows he's not alone.

They knew at the time, as they stood and watched Riverbend burn, that Beatrice and Fanny Weldon were still in the house. They might have walked out, they murmured later, and none would have interfered. Why didn't Weldon send his wife and child away to safety? Let their deaths, like those of the slaves found in Weldon's dreadful abattoir, be on his head.

And yet, and yet. No trace was found of the Weldons. Perhaps it was fitting that the Devil took them straight to Hell.

But the little girl. She was inside, and he did nothing. Nor did Suz, nor the house servants. Perhaps they thought that it was a matter of balance, Fanny for Sadie, an innocent for an innocent.

Daniel watches a long time, until the rain comes and ruins the fishing. He doesn't see Fanny Weldon that day.

But years later, after his father's passed and he's got forty acres of cotton himself, he comes back after the trout and he does see her exploring the ruins. He decides there's nothing to fear from a little dead white girl.

He speaks to her; he realizes she doesn't know she's dead. He wonders if that's a mercy.

A year or more later he sees her again and realizes she doesn't remember him. It's unreasonable, perhaps, to expect a ghost to remember anything. He's curious about where she is when she isn't here.

One summer he sees a wagon among the gangly trees that have started to invade the property. The wagon is old but it's freshly painted bright yellow and green. Two draft horses graze free a short way away.

A woman stands watching the grounds as if something might stir inside them, her hand resting against the smooth bark of a sapling. Her skirt is green as her wagon.

She's pale and her hair is yellow but her eyes are dark, as if smudged in with charcoal. She stands preternaturally still, and doesn't glance at Daniel as he approaches.

He doesn't know what he's going to say when he opens his mouth, and listens with some curiosity to his words.

“Have you seen her?”

At first he thinks she didn't hear. Then she answers in a voice that's hesitant, and rusty from disuse.

“No. I came to find what's become of Alistair Weldon.”

She turns her great, smoky eyes on him, and he tells her about the plantation, the burning, the bones in the chamber beneath the ground. It seems at one point that her eyes brim with tears, but none fall. When he finishes she nods briskly and straightens, wiping her hands on her green embroidered skirt.

“So it ended,” she says in her creaky voice that's far too old for her. “We are done, then, with Alistair Weldon.”

She goes to the horses and takes one by the bridle, and he follows and helps her hitch them to the gypsy wagon. When they're done she mounts the box and takes the reins in hand.

She looks down at him, backlit by the sun. There are fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes; she's older than he thought at first.

“Daniel Greensmith,” she says, although he hasn't told her his name. “If there's a ghost about, lost between worlds, it might be that she's lost her bones but is still bound to them. Was she buried proper?”

“No,” he says, remembering the sound of the windows cracking. “She never was.”

She gathers the leather together and clucks at the horses.

“Find the bones,” she says, turning away. “And bury them, somewhere sacred, somewhere friendly. That'll settle her, if anything can.”

He nods his thanks and the wagon creeps away, bumping over the abandoned ground to the dirt road that leads to the thoroughfare.

It was a good season, and the Vadoma had broken over thirty horses at Lord Harkon's pleasure. Twelve were destined to mount his private bodyguard, magnificent creatures of noble bloodlines, gelded so they'd be biddable but spirited enough for all that—for it was the gift of the Vadoma that they could bring a horse to bridle without breaking its soul, and there was a memory of the freedom of the meadows in the stamp of their hooves and the curl of their nostrils.

There was dancing in the camp that night, and the smell of the roasting meat that was the lord's customary gift drifted to Tibor as he sat at a distance, and it made his stomach rumble.

Tonight was his chance. Tomorrow they'd break camp and journey over the mountains, and such a collection of horseflesh would not be under his hand for a long time. This was why he'd returned, stealthy and secret, to the clan's spring campsite.

Sometimes a small voice told him he should wait, hone his skill on more small creatures and study the forbidden books more closely, and a still smaller voice told him he should abandon his plans entirely.

But he wouldn't listen to the first, much less the second. He'd worked hard, first to master the language of the Voyna Codex, second to puzzle the difficult treatises and instruction from the book. And upon his last visit to Grayhalme, he'd started on a path from which he could not turn.

He must have been rising twelve or thirteen when he first met the old man, rooting in the wares of a bookseller at the unfashionable end of the Grayhalme market, well away from where the ladies bought their silks and perfumes. Under the distrustful gaze of the proprietor, Tibor was rifling through the tattered, falling-apart leather bindings of the cheaper books, tossed in a barrel and sold for a penny apiece. Most were useless—dull, archaic histories of this or that noble Grayhalme family, or a housewife's recipes for conserving rancid meat, or a book of bad love poems by a dullard with more cash for fancy bindings than common sense.

Once Tibor had found a small clothbound book, barely clinging onto its covers with a few rotten threads, which looked at first like a housewife's amateur herbal, with crude scratching for writing and a few poorly-rendered sketches. Something about it appealed to him and he bought it with a carefully hoarded copper, intending it as a winter holiday present for his sister or his aunt.

But puzzling over the obscure notes by candlelight one night, he realized that this was no herbal that made sense—there was a queer, almost sly intent crawling behind the chicken scratch. Some words had been blackened darker than the others, as if they were of special significance, and he thought they might have something to do with the pictures of common herbs and weeds in the margins—something that went beyond teas for upset stomachs and tisanes to rouse a lover's flagging interest.

Creeping apart from the caravans where his cousins slept, Tibor collected a handful of common chickweed—he'd identified it by one of the illustrations—and took the book to a birch hollow where he liked to hide sometimes. Arranging the greenery in front of him, he pronounced the bold words on the page with the picture of the chickweed.

Nothing happened except that perhaps the ragged leaves trembled slightly. But when he tried it again, this time pronouncing the words with deliberation and thinking about them, thinking about the sound of them and how they fitted together like puzzle pieces, the result was immediate and unambiguous.

The leaves and stems drew up together, as if trying to escape, and with a final shudder, disintegrated into blackened slime.

He looked at the little heap and thought: Very impressive—but what does it accomplish? It's a parlor trick, nothing more.

But after a moment's consideration he drew his kerchief, sprinkled a few shreds of chickweed on top of it, and tried again. The kerchief disintegrated as well.

From then on he searched the booksellers whenever he had the chance, looking for tomes that held the tantalizing hints of a magic forbidden him by tradition, but irresistible to him by his nature.

He was reaching for a promising fragment of a manuscript when a hand, yellow and wrinkled as old parchment, grasped it first. Tibor straightened up, thwarted and angry, and met the gaze of an old man who regarded him with faded blue eyes.

He wore the long robe of a scholar, and although he was bent by age he still topped the young Vistana by at least a foot.

Tibor began to say something but stopped—there was something in the look of the old man that counseled restraint. The skin around his eyes was deeply scored with wrinkles and the corners of his lips were quirked up in a smile that was more calculating than pleasant.

He held the yellowed papers between his long fingers, which seemed to have too many joints to be quite human.

“A Vadoma lad usually seeks horseflesh, not useless bits of paper,” he said. “And a Vadoma you must be, since you've been allowed to live thus far, unstrangled.”

He nodded at Tibor's startled look. “Oh yes, I see you've been
touched
. But whether your gift is to see or to curse has yet to be determined; it's veiled from me, and with the Vadoma, it's one or the other. But I have my suspicions.”

He tilted his head, still staring at Tibor intently, and Tibor felt at the same time dizzy and rooted to the spot, as firm as the cornerstone of the market square, which marked the heart of the city. His vision began to blacken at the edges, and he heard a sound like the roaring of a thousand seagulls whirling around the dead body of a seal. The sound grew louder and louder, and he knew that it was as possible to be as lost in that sound as for an unwary traveler to be lost in the Mists.

Tibor squinted at the old man, fighting the urge to close his eyes, to let everything go, to
lose
himself.

Louder the seagull sound grew, and louder, and he braced against it as against a drowning wave, and just when he knew his head would explode under the pressure the man shifted his body and everything—the sound, the darkness—stopped. Tibor staggered, as if he'd been pushing against a barrier suddenly gone, and steadied himself against a bookshelf.