The Temple of Heart and Bone (16 page)

“Maybe we should,” he wrote in
reply.

That night, Drothspar and Chance
began to work out ways for him to move around in public. The robe would cover
much of his body, but it clung to his thin bones too obviously. Chance gathered
tattered curtains and other scraps of cloth from around the cottage to pad his
robes. The lining of his hood was doubled and stitched to the outside of the
hood itself. Nervously, Chance cut loose the stitching of the lining while the
hood was pulled up over his head. She worked cautiously, as if she could break
him with a single wrong move. In truth, part of her behavior stemmed from the
fear of just such a thing. She had only seen his uncovered skeletal form
briefly when they had first met, but he seemed to her very awkward and fragile.

Once the lining had been
released, it extended the edge of the hood another few inches. The extra
length, combined with the bare state of his head, covered his face deeply. It
would force anyone but a child to lean down and stare up to see within the
hood. Chance told him how well the cowling worked and he nodded his
appreciation, the movements barely visible in the covering cloth.

Their next project was to work on
his hands and feet. Drothspar demonstrated how he could withdraw his hands into
his sleeves. It was something he’d always enjoyed playing at as a novice. His
feet, however, posed another problem. The robe he wore was long, but as he took
steps, the tops of his feet became visible. They searched the cottage for a
pair of old boots or shoes, but came up empty-handed. They decided that looters
had probably recovered anything that might have been left after his death.
Drothspar paused for a moment, wondering what else of his life had been stolen
away by thieves and scavengers.

“We could use some of the rags
you’ve stuffed in your robe,” Chance suggested. “You could bind them about your
feet the way the churchyard beggars do.” Drothspar had seen what she referred
to many times. Hoping for some measure of mercy after the spiritual lessons of
the service, beggars lined up and silently lifted their palms for coins. The
vast majority wore similar clothing, the battered remains of their former
lives. Drothspar and his brethren would distribute better clothing to the
beggars when they could, but by the next service, their clothing would be the
same rags.

Instead of shoes, many beggars
wore rags wrapped multiple times around their feet. The visual effect was more
devastating than even the most patched tunic. In practice, he heard, the ragged
wraps were warm and functional, so long as they didn’t get wet. They were also
easier to replace. Drothspar pulled some rags from his robe where Chance
indicated it was possible. He had a small supply to work with, but his
bare-boned feet were easy to cover. He wrapped them around and lengthwise to
cover his toes. When they were done, Drothspar stood to allow Chance to examine
him.

“It’s not perfect,” she said
warily, “but in the dark or at distance, we should be able to get you by. We
can also look for things along the way, or pick up some things in Æostemark. If
we’re not really concerned about fashion, we can probably purchase what we need
without spending too much. I should have enough coin with me to get all that we
need.”

Drothspar felt awkward padded
down in his costume. His hood fell far down over his eyes, but somehow did not
impede his vision, just as his hands had not impaired it when he had covered
his eyes before. His wrapped feet felt different on the ground, giving his body
a new balance to assimilate. The softness of the padding, however, cushioned
the bone-jarring impact of his steps on the stone floor. Looking up from his
feet, he noticed Chance shaking her head.

“What’s wrong?” he wrote, feeling
very self-conscious.

“I think I’ve said before that
I’ve had entire classes devoted to why life after death does not exist,” she
answered. “Now, here I am, dressing up a skeleton for a walk into town. If you
had told me prior to graduation that I would be doing this now, I would have
suggested a year or two at an asylum—or at least less alcohol.” She smiled
wryly. “Someday, if we ever get the chance, there are a few professors I’d
love
for you to meet.”

Drothspar bowed to her, almost
toppling on his newly padded feet. Regaining his balance he wrote on his slate.
“Sounds like fun.” He drew another smiling face after the words.

Chance looked at it and laughed.
“That’s really cute,” she said smiling herself.

“You never really appreciate
facial expressions,” he wrote, “until you can’t make them.”

“Or read them,” she agreed.

“Is that one of the reasons it’s
hard for you to look at me?” he asked.

“It’s one,” she said blushing.
“It’s probably the major reason. I think the other reason is because I feel
like I’m peeking at something secret, something I’m not meant to see at all.”
She frowned. “That’s the strange part,” she added, “I’m usually the first to
peek into things that aren’t my own.” She cut off the sentence abruptly, as if
she were afraid she’d gone too far. If she had, Drothspar didn’t notice.

He nodded his head to show he had
heard what she’d said. He nodded often now, he noticed, trying to compensate
for his lack of expression. He felt that his nodding helped her to see what she
might normally read in his eyes or on his face. He thought he’d noticed her
nodding a bit more than she had when he’d first met her. He wondered if his
assumed mannerism had carried itself over to her, a contagious gesture.

“Okay,” she said, dismissing his
question and continuing with the next day’s disguise, “You’re going to be a
beggar.”

“A beggar,” he confirmed on his
slate.

“And I,” she said humbly, “will
be a young noble woman, leading you to the ruins of Æostemark to atone for sins
past.”

“Yours or mine,” he asked.

“Both. You’re going to atone for
your behavior during the invasion, asking the fallen defenders of Æostemark to
forgive you for… abandoning your post as a border guard.” She paused, tapping
one finger to her lip. Her eyes lit as she made up her own sins. “I’ll be
leading you in order to break myself of the sin of pride.” She adopted a mournful
tone of voice. “I had spent so much time among the upper classes that I looked
upon the poor as a lower form of life. I took no more notice of them than I did
of a dog lying in the street.” She snuffled slightly and raised her kerchief to
her eyes and nose. “The Maker is merciful, however, and He has shown me the
error of my ways. One of His portly servants suggested this ‘pilgrimage’ to
help me see that all of us are gifted with the Spirit of Life, the high-born,
and the lowly alike.” A look of skepticism filled her eyes as she spoke this
last bit, replaced at the end by blind hope and devotion.

Drothspar could see she was
enjoying herself immensely. It seemed to him that she had created their stories
very quickly. He wasn’t entirely certain, because he wasn’t entirely certain
just how much time had passed. The one thing he was sure of, however, was that
she became her part. She spoke with a vapid and pampered air until she came
upon the subject of the poor. Her voice would change ever so slightly,
indicating the topic was as difficult for her as putting on an out-of-fashion
gown. Drothspar had seen plays performed by actors and wondered if Chance had
studied the art. He took up his charcoal and slate to ask her.

“Did you study acting at school?”

“No,” she laughed warmly. “Well,
yes, I guess I did, but it wasn’t my main focus of study. Father would never
have approved of something as frivolous as acting.”

“You’re very good at it,” he
encouraged her.

“I’ve had a few successes,” she
blushed. She paused only briefly, her face unchanged as her eyes instinctively
examined the area where his face should have been. She blinked a few times and
stifled a yawn. “It’s getting late,” she suggested, “and I’m ready to sleep. We
can work out more as we travel.”

Drothspar nodded his head and
wrote on his tablet.

“‘Goodnight’ to you, too,” she
read and replied. She yawned once more and made her way to her spot in front of
the fireplace.

Drothspar stepped out into the
cool night air and took a seat beside the front door. His wrapped feet made no
sounds as he seated himself on the wooden planks of the porch. He leaned back
against the cottage and began to think about the trip to Æostemark.

The
next morning, Chance woke early. Drothspar could hear her stirring in the
cottage. He waited patiently outside. Eventually, Chance called out that she
was ready, and Drothspar stood from his place. He moved away from the door just
as she stepped out to join him. She was once again dressed in her black cloak,
though she had the hood down. Her hair was caught up in a plain cloth, and her
eyes were excited. She had her bag slung over her shoulder, and her dagger, as
far as he could tell, was well concealed. She asked him if he was ready, and he
nodded slowly. Chance closed the cottage door behind her, and the two walked
out toward the lake.

From the outset, Chance began a
running commentary on the wonders of nature. She reminded Drothspar of her
urban upbringing and marveled at the sheer size of the lake. She noticed the
low mist hovering over the surface and mentioned the splashes of fish as they
jumped for insects just over the water. She didn’t know at first that the
splashing had actually been fish. She asked Drothspar excitedly, and he wrote
the answer on his slate. She asked him questions for a while, but finally lost
herself in her own adventure. They walked along the southern lakeshore for
hours, then struck out to the east, leaving the lake behind. The lake had
provided a break in the forested landscape, a vast area of light and open, if
inaccessible, space. Once past the lake, however, the forest closed in around
them with gnarled and naked arms.

Chance continued to comment on
the new wonders she encountered. No longer answering questions, Drothspar lost
himself for a time in his own thoughts. Although he heard the young woman’s
voice, he honestly wasn’t paying attention to her words. When her wonderment
worked its way into his thoughts, he smiled internally, happy for the company.
Chance, for her part, wasn’t the least bit bothered by Drothspar’s lack of
attention. She was simply happy to be moving east instead of west.

They did not meet any other
travelers or woodsmen. The forest, itself, was quite still, as if some familiar
accompaniment were missing. The deeper they pressed into the trees, the more
the stillness settled on Chance, depressing her mood with an invisible weight.
She eventually stopped talking altogether, the silence of the woods becoming contagious.

At first, Drothspar didn’t notice
the change in her mood. His thoughts ranged from the time they had spent in the
cottage to questions about their entry into Æostemark. He thought about Chance
closing the front door as they had started out, an action he had seen Li
perform many times. He wondered how it had come to pass that he watched another
woman close the door to his home—watching through the hollow eyes of a
fleshless skull. He wondered how others would react to that same, animate
skull. He questioned the effectiveness of his disguise. He worried about what
would happen if a sudden wind caught his hood and pulled it down, or if a
border guard demanded he identify himself. What would they do? What would
happen to Chance?

What had happened to her? He had
grown so accustomed to the sound of her voice that he wasn’t even certain when
it had stopped. He looked at the young woman and saw the change in her manner.
She no longer walked with her head up and her eyes everywhere. Instead, she
watched the forest floor, her shoulders slumped forward. His mind focused on
the moment, and he noticed a deeper silence in the woods.

The animals were quiet. They had
been quiet around the cottage just after the rains, but life had returned to
them once that storm had passed. Here, however, the animals were still quiet.
True, he thought, it was late in the year, but as far as he could guess it was
still too early for them to have all flown away or gone to winter’s sleep.

“Are you all right?” he asked,
holding his tablet low for Chance to see.

“Yeah,” she said curtly, wanting
to avoid conversation. Drothspar watched as her brow furrowed. “No,” she said
abruptly, “I don’t think I am.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “I
was fine, just watching the world go by. I mean, this is all pretty common to
you probably, well, I mean the forest part. It’s all still new to me. The last
time I came through the forest, to get to the cottage, I was trying to get
there as fast as I could. Anyway, I wasn’t paying much attention that time, so
this trip was exciting for me.” She paused for a moment, looking up from the
forest floor for the first time since she started speaking.

“Then I just started feeling…
different,” she groped for the word. “I don’t know when, I think just a little
while after we came back into the trees.” She searched for a way to describe
her feelings. “I feel like I’m walking over row after row of graves in a spooky
old cemetery. It’s like a combination of an unwelcome awkwardness and how I
felt when I saw those bodies at the farm—and you, for the first time.”

“I don’t know what to say,”
Drothspar wrote.

“It’s okay,” Chance replied. “I
actually hadn’t even been fully aware of it, I think, until you asked me about
it. I’ll try and keep my spirits up.” She smiled wanly at him.

Drothspar nodded then stopped,
and stopped walking entirely. His vision centered on a still animal form lying
beside a tree. The brown of the animal’s fur had blended with, and been buried
by, the dead leaves blown down by the recent storm. Drothspar walked to the
body and pushed some of the leaves aside. The deer’s neck had been snapped.
Oddly, the animal showed no signs of being eaten, either by its attacker or by
any scavenger. Chance had come up behind him and looked down at the carcass. He
heard the sharp intake of her breath.

“Look at its eyes,” she said, her
voice little more than a whisper.

Drothspar moved to look at the
deer’s eyes. He twisted the head with its antlers to get a look at both sides.
The eyes had been torn out, leaving streaks of bloody tears to mourn their
passing. Drothspar let go of the antlers and stepped away from the animal.

What could do this, he wondered.
What
would
do this? What creature would leave such prime prey uneaten?
Why bother with the eyes? Blackbirds, he had heard, would occasionally pluck
eyes from a corpse, attracted to their shine. No blackbird, he thought, no
matter how industrious, could have moved the deer’s antlered head to get both
eyes.

He silently said a simple prayer
for the dead, hoping it would be appropriate for the creature. When he
finished, he folded his hands.

“Amen,” he heard Chance say. He
turned quickly, asking her what she said, but his jaws only clicked loudly.
Chance looked startled, almost frightened.

“What did you say?” he wrote
urgently on his tablet.

“I said, ‘amen.’ You looked like
you were praying,” she explained.

“I thought you had heard me,”
Drothspar wrote, “I’m sorry if I scared you.” A small flash of disappointment
ran through his mind.

“It’s all right,” Chance replied.
“I understand. It was just the way your teeth were snapping together, I guess,
mixed with all this other stuff. You just made me a little nervous is all.”

Drothspar nodded. “I’m sorry,” he
wrote again, feeling slightly guilty.

“It’s no problem, really.” She
looked around, her eyes still nervous. “Can we keep going, though, I’d really
like to get away from here.”

The gloom of the forest deepened
as the day passed into evening. The fading light brought a chill to the air and
lengthened the shadows around them. A few hours after they encountered the
mutilated deer, they found a clearing in the woods. Several of the surrounding
trees had been reduced to stumps, their remains lying on their sides, ready to
be cut into pieces.

Drothspar and Chance entered the
clearing gratefully, eager to be out from under the growing shadows of the
forest. As they neared the center of the clearing, they recognized the simple
sawhorses that woodsmen used to reduce trees into unfinished logs. In the
fading light, the travelers could clearly see the glint of metal abandoned in
the leaves.

Drothspar wondered what the local
woodsmen would leave behind. As he walked around the sawhorses, he found
abandoned tools scattered in the leaves. What surprised him most, however, was
the dark, dried liquid that had been splashed all over the area. He knew
immediately that the stains were blood.

Chance stayed outside of the work
space, watching Drothspar from several feet away. She was a stout-hearted
woman, but she decided she had seen enough death over the last few days. She
was certain, watching the way Drothspar examined the area, that death had been
working in this camp. She put her finger on the feeling she had experienced
since they entered the forest. She felt like a living creature among the dead,
out of place, and unwelcome. She watched as Drothspar returned.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?”
she asked, certain of her intuition.

“There’s a lot of blood,” he
wrote, “but no bodies.”

“Nothing?” she asked, incredulous.

“Abandoned tools.”

“No bodies,” Chance repeated,
still unable to reconcile her feelings with his words. She stepped around him
and walked into the work area.

She was amazed by the amount of
blood covering the ground. Her eyes sought out the dark stains with morbid
fascination. The blood wasn’t merely pooled, she realized, it was splashed and
scattered in all directions. She walked to one of the sawhorses on the far side
of the clearing. In the remaining light, she could just make out the print of a
hand on the wood, a hand that had been soaked in blood. She walked back to the
work area and kicked the leaves off of the tools with her feet. She was looking
for, hoping to find, blood on the tools. Maybe it had all been a terrible
accident. The only blood she saw on the tools fit with the patterns of the
blood splashed in the area.

Drothspar, guessing at her
intentions, pushed some of the leaves aside with his own wrapped feet.
Uncovering a large saw, he noticed bits of material stuck to the blade. He lifted
the tool and looked at it closely. Bits of old cloth were caught in the teeth,
along with a white, wood-like matter. It was unlike any of the wood in the
clearing. Most of what the loggers had been working on was recently felled, not
fully aware its body was dead. Chance finished her search, a haunted look in
her eyes.

“Please,” she said to him simply.

He nodded, understanding. They
walked away swiftly, trying to get as far away as they could in the remaining
light.

Their increased pace allowed them
to make good time. Although they were still a few hours from the edge of the
forest, they had walked a comforting distance from the woodsmen’s camp.
Nightfall dictated the end of the journey for the day, spreading like a blanket
over the forest, and dissolving the spindly shadows into the surrounding
darkness. Drothspar took his flint and a nail from the pocket of his robe.

“Don’t,” Chance said, “please
don’t make a fire.” Drothspar put the flint and nail back in his pocket. He
started to write something on his tablet. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t read
what you’re writing in this light.”

Drothspar sat confounded in the
darkness. He couldn’t speak to her, he couldn’t make light, and he couldn’t
write. He thought he understood her request to forgo the fire. He was fairly
certain she didn’t want anything to draw attention to them. He sat quietly,
listening.

“Drothspar,” she said, “I’d like
to ask you something.” She became quiet for a moment. “How about this, I’ll ask
you something, and if your answer is yes, clap your hands twice. If it’s no,
just clap once. Understand?”

Two soft smacks, like dry sticks
struck together, sounded in the darkness.

“Excellent,” she said, a thin
enthusiasm returning to her voice. “Okay,” she started, “do you sleep?”

She heard a single clap.

“You stay awake all the time?”

She heard two claps.

“I know I’ve asked you to go
outside for the nights, to go away from me. I’m sorry about that. I can only
hope you understand—”

She was interrupted by two claps.

“Well,” she continued, “I’m
actually really nervous tonight. Frightened might be a good word, a better
word. Do you think—could you not go away tonight?”

She heard him clap twice.

“Thank you,” she told him, relief
sounding in her voice. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I can sleep,
either. If I do sleep, I’m not really sure I want to dream. Oh well. Please,
though, please don’t leave me, okay?”

Again, she heard two claps in the
darkness.

“Thank you, Drothspar,” she said
earnestly. “I’ve really got to lie down now. I’ll see you in the morning. Great
Maker, I hope it comes quickly.”

Drothspar wished that he could
say “goodnight.” He settled up against a tree and looked out over her reclining
form. He rustled his feet in the leaves to let her know exactly where he was.
It was strange, he thought, that she couldn’t seem to see him at all. It was
dark, certainly, and he couldn’t make out every detail around, but he could
make out her form in the leaves. He leaned back against the tree and waited for
morning.