The Bone Doll's Twin (16 page)

Like Mama’s hair on the ice
—

The thought came and went like a dragonfly skimming the river’s surface.

Then the demon attacked his city.

It tore wooden houses from their places and threw them into the air. People and animals flew at the wall. Tiny ships scattered as if a gale was driving them.

“No! Stop it!” Tobin shrieked, fighting his way free of the fallen tapestries to protect the cherished toy. A flock of
clay sheep flew past his head and shattered to bits against the wall. “Stop it! That’s
mine!
”

Tobin’s vision seemed to narrow to a long, dark tunnel, and all he could see at the end of it was his most cherished possession being torn to pieces. He struck out wildly, flailing with his fists to drive the hateful spirit away. He heard a loud pounding from somewhere nearby and fought harder, blind with fury, until his hand connected with something solid. He heard a startled cry. Strong hands grabbed him and wrestled him down to the floor.

“Tobin! Tobin, stop that!”

Gasping for breath, Tobin looked up at Nari. Tears were streaming down her plump cheeks and blood trickled from her nose.

A red droplet on a grouse’s beak—the same bright red on river ice
—

Tobin’s vision went completely black. Pain blossomed like a flower of fire in his chest, pressing a ragged wail from his lungs.

His mother’s birds beating themselves against the tower walls behind him as he looked down on her—

No, don’t think—

—broken body at the river’s edge
.

Black hair and red blood on the ice.

The fiery ache disappeared, leaving him cold and empty.

“Oh Tobin, how could you?” Nari wept, still holding him down. “All your pretty things! Why?”

“I didn’t,” he whispered, too tired to move.

“Oh, my poor love—Maker’s mercy, you spoke!” Nari gathered Tobin into her arms. “Oh, my love, you’ve found your voice at last.”

She carried him next door to his bed and tucked him in, but he hardly noticed. He lay limp as the doll, remembering.

He remembered why he’d been in the tower.

He remembered why his mama was dead.

Why he had the doll.

She hadn’t given it to him.

Another swift, sharp stab of pain pierced Tobin’s chest, and he wondered if it was what Nari meant in her bedtime stories when she spoke of someone’s heart breaking.

She lay down beside him and held him close through the covers, stroking his hair the way she always did. It made him drowsy.

“Why?” he managed at last. “Why did Mama hate me?” But if Nari had an answer for this, he fell asleep before he heard it.

T
obin woke with a start in the night, knowing he’d left the doll lying somewhere in the toy room.

He slipped out of bed and hurried next door in his nightshirt, only to find that the room had been put right already. The tapestries were back on the walls. The wardrobe and chest were in their places. The ink was gone, and all the scattered toys. His city lay in ruins in the middle of the floor and he knew he must fix it before his father came home and saw.

But the doll was nowhere to be seen. Leaving the room, he searched the house, room after room, even the barracks and the stables.

There was no one else in the house. This frightened him terribly, for he’d never been so alone. Worse yet, he knew that the only place left to look was upstairs in the tower. He stood in the courtyard, looking up at the shuttered windows above the roofline.

“I can’t,” he said aloud. “I don’t want to go up there.”

As if in answer, the courtyard gate swung open with a creak of hinges, and Tobin caught a glimpse of someone small and dark slipping away across the bridge.

He followed but as soon as he was through the gate he found himself deep in the forest, following a path that
ran along the riverbank. Far ahead, half hidden by branches, he caught movement again and knew it was the demon.

He followed it to a clearing but it disappeared. The moon was up now and he could see two does grazing on the silvery, dew-covered grass. They pricked up their ears at his approach, but didn’t spring away. Tobin went to them and stroked their soft brown muzzles. They bowed their heads under his hand, then sidled away into the dark forest. There was a hole in the ground, like the entrance to a fox’s burrow, where they’d been grazing. It was just big enough for him to crawl into, and he did.

Wiggling through, he found a room below very much like his mother’s tower chamber. The windows were open, but blocked by packed earth and roots. It was bright all the same, though, lit by a cheerful fire on the hearth in the center of the room. A table beside it was set with honey cakes and cups of milk, and next to that was a chair. It was turned away from him, but he could see that someone was sitting there, someone with long black hair.

“Mama?” Tobin asked, caught between joy and terror. The woman started to turn—

And Tobin woke up.

He lay there a moment, blinking back tears as he listened to Nari’s soft snoring beside him. The dream had been so real, and he’d wanted to see his mother again so badly. He wanted her to be smiling and kind. He wanted for them to sit at the table by the fire and eat the honey cakes together, as they never had on any of his name days.

He burrowed deeper beneath the blankets, wondering if he could slip back into the dream. Suddenly a fragment of it brought him fully awake again.

He
had
left the doll in the toy room.

Slipping out of bed, he took the night lamp from its stand and went into the next room, wondering if it would all be the way it had been in his dream.

But the room was still a shambles. Everything lay where it had fallen. Trying not to look at the broken city, he hauled the heavy tapestries aside, looking for the doll where he must have dropped it.

It wasn’t there.

Crouched miserably with his arms around his knees, he pictured someone—Nari or Mynir perhaps—finding it and shaking their head in disapproval as they carried it away. Would they tell his father? Would they give it back?

Something struck him on the head and he toppled sideways, choking back a cry of alarm.

There was the doll on the floor beside him, where it most certainly had not been the moment before. Tobin couldn’t see the demon but he could feel it, watching him from the far corner.

Slowly, cautiously, Tobin picked up the doll and whispered, “Thank you.”

N
ot daring to risk losing the doll again, Tobin moved it back to his room, tying it up in the flour sack and burying it deep in the unused clothes chest under his parchments, some old toys, and his second-best cloak.

He felt a little easier after that, but the dream of going into the forest came to him three more times over the next week, always ending before he could reach the woman in the chair.

It was the same each time in every detail except one. In these dreams he was bringing the doll back to his mother, knowing she would keep it safe for him in her room under the ground.

Another week passed, and the dream came again, growing so real in his mind that he knew at last that he must go see for himself if there really was such a place. This meant disobeying everyone and going out by himself, but the dream was too strong to be denied.

He bided his time and saw his chance one washing day in mid-Gorathin. Everyone would be busy in the kitchen yard all day. He worked with them in the morning, hauling buckets of water in from the river to fill the wash cauldron and dragging bundles of branches from the woodshed to start the fire. The eastern sky, so clear at dawn, was darkening ominously over the treetops and everyone was in a hurry to finish before the rain came.

He ate his midday meal with the others, then asked to be excused.

Nari pulled him close and kissed him on the top of his head. She always seemed to be hugging him these days.
“What will you do with yourself, pet? Stay and keep us company.”

“I want to work on my city.” Tobin pressed his face against her shoulder so she wouldn’t see that he was lying. “Do you … do you think Father will be angry when he sees?”

“Of course not. I can’t imagine your father ever being angry with a boy as good as you. Isn’t that right, Cook?”

The woman nodded over her bread and cheese. “You’re the moon and sun to him.”

The ash shovel by the hearth jumped off its nail with a loud clatter, but everyone pretended not to notice.

Freeing himself from Nari’s embrace, Tobin ran upstairs and waited by his window until he could hear everyone out in the yard again. Then, hiding the doll beneath his longest cloak, he crept downstairs again and slipped out the front gate. He half expected to be magically transported to the forest, as he always was in the dream, but simply ended up outside the wall. As the gate swung shut behind him, he froze for a moment, overcome by the enormity of what he was about to do. What if Nari found him gone? What if he met with a catamount or a wolf?

A rising breeze stroked his face with the scent of rain as he crept between the courtyard wall and the riverbank toward the forest. Robins were singing of the storm somewhere nearby, and doves called mournfully to each other in the trees.

The gate of the kitchen yard was still open. He could see Nari and Cook at work there as he passed, laughing as they stirred the wash pot with their wooden paddles. It felt very odd, standing out here looking in.

He continued on, following the wall past the base of the tower. He kept his eyes down as he passed the boulders where his mother had died.

He reached the cover of the trees at last, and only now did it occur to Tobin that he had no idea where to go; in his dreams, he’d had the demon to guide him. But
there had been a river in the dream and he had a river here, so he decided to follow it and hope for the best. He paused to check the sun’s position over his shoulder the way Tharin had taught him. It wasn’t so easy today. The sun was little more than a bright blur behind the haze.

The river is as good as a path
, he thought.
All I have to do is follow it home.

He’d never been this way before. The riverbank was steep and the trees grew down close to the water. To follow it, he had to clamber over rocks and wriggle through thick stands of willow and alder. In low places he found animal tracks in the mud and scanned these nervously for signs of prowling catamounts. He found none, but still wished he’d thought to bring his bow.

The sky grew darker as he toiled on, and the wind began to toss the branches around overhead. There were no doves or robins calling now, just some ravens croaking nearby. Tobin’s arm cramped from carrying the doll. He thought of all the hiding places he’d seen on his rides, but the few holes he found here were all too wet. Even if he did find a dry hiding place, he wasn’t sure if he’d dare come out and visit it very often. On the heels of that thought came the realization that he did not want to be parted from it at all.

Better to keep going and look for that hidden room, he told himself.

But nothing looked the way it had in his dream. There was no clearing, no friendly deer waiting for him, just rocks and roots that caught his feet, little biting flies that buzzed in his ears, and mud that soaked his shoes. He was almost ready to give up when he struck a clear trail leading up to a pine grove on higher ground.

The way was much easier here. Fragrant rust-colored needles lay thick underfoot and his feet hardly made a sound as he walked. He followed this path eagerly, certain it would lead him to the clearing and the deer. Instead,
it gradually grew fainter until it disappeared altogether beneath the thick, straight trunks of the pines. Turning around, he couldn’t see his way back. His feet had left no impression in the thick needles. He couldn’t even hear the sound of the river anymore, just the first patter of rain through the boughs. No matter what direction he turned, it all looked the same. The bit of sky he could see through the thick branches was an even blanket of grey with no hint of the sun.

The breeze had died and the day had turned close. Flies with big green eyes joined the clouds of tiny midges buzzing around him, biting him on the neck and behind his ears. The grand adventure was over. Tobin was hot, frightened and lost.

He cast around frantically to find the path but it was no use. At last, he gave up and sat on a rock, wondering if Nari had noticed that he was gone yet.

It was quiet here. He heard a red squirrel’s angry trill and the sounds of small creatures creeping in the undergrowth around him. Little black ants toiled in the needles around his feet, carrying their eggs and bits of leaves. Exhausted, he leaned forward to watch them. One had a shiny beetle’s leg in its pinchers. A long black snake as thick as Tobin’s wrist emerged from a hole under a nearby tree and slithered past his foot, paying no attention to him at all. Rain fell softly through the branches, and he could hear the different sounds the drops made, striking dead leaves, plants, rocks, and the needles on the ground. Tobin wondered uneasily what catamount’s feet sounded like on pine needles, or if they made any sound at all.

“I thought you come today maybe.”

Tobin nearly toppled off his rock as he whirled around. A small, black-haired woman sat on a mossy log just a few yards away, hands clasped in her lap. She was very dirty and wore a ragged brown rag of a dress decorated with animal teeth. Her hands and bare feet were
stained, and there were sticks and bits of leaf tangled in her long, curly hair. She grinned at him, but her black eyes held no mockery.

Tobin thrust the doll behind him, shamed at being caught with it, even by a stranger. He was scared, too, noting the long knife sheathed at her belt. She didn’t look like one of his father’s tenants, and she spoke strangely.

She gave him a broad smile that lacked several teeth. “Look what I got,
keesa.”
She moved her hands and he saw that she held a young rabbit on her lap. She stroked its ears and back. “You come see?”

Tobin hesitated, but curiosity overcame caution. He rose and slowly walked over to stand before her.