The Temple of Heart and Bone (20 page)

“Drothspar,” she exclaimed in
mock exasperation.

“I know,” he wrote, “it was wrong
and unforgiving, and selfish.” He turned his head from side to side as if looking
for someone who might be hiding. “It still felt really good though.” He added
his hand drawn smile at the end.

Chance laughed at his admission
and his little smile. Drothspar hung his head feeling slightly embarrassed.
He’d never admitted to anyone that his exuberance during his field lessons was
simply masked revenge. He looked up and noticed that Chance was still looking
at him, as if trying to make up her mind.

“I am a little hungry,” she said
finally. “Do you have any ideas?”

“I can try to set some traps for
rabbits in the woods,” he suggested. We could try our hand at fishing, but…”

“But?”

“It’s not a good time of year for
trapping,” he wrote, “and it’s been some time since I’ve tried to fish here.
I’m worried about what might happen to you if we don’t succeed quickly.” She
read his slate and looked at him thoughtfully.

“Why don’t we ‘try our hand’ at
fishing tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve never done it before, but you know, I’ve
always wanted to try. We’ll let the fish decide. If we catch more fish than we
can handle, I’ll have food and we’ll be safe for a while. If we fail miserably,
we can put our heads together and think about alternatives. Sound like a deal?”

“Yes it does.”

“Excellent,” she said, clapping
her hands together once. “Now, if you don’t mind, I really need to sleep.”

Drothspar nodded and got up to
leave the cottage.

“You don’t have to leave,” she
called after him, surprising herself with the urgency in her voice. “I mean,
I’m not afraid anymore.” She furrowed her brow wondering why she’d just said
that. Drothspar looked at her, enigmatic as always. She felt she had to say
something else, something to cover her surprise. “If you can’t sleep, though,
just please try not to make too much noise.”

Drothspar nodded his head slowly.
He moved away from the fire and leaned his back against the northern wall. He
watched the young woman settle herself down to sleep. He smiled internally,
happy she hadn’t asked him to wait the night outside again. He didn’t mind the
cold, he didn’t mind not sleeping. He admitted to himself, however, that it had
hurt him to be turned away because he was different. He wondered if he’d have
felt something else if he’d have been a normal, living man. It could be considered
inappropriate to spend the night in such close quarters to a stranger. Yet, he
wasn’t normal or living, and he was grateful to not be cast away again.

The
next day dawned bright and cool. Before the sun cleared the horizon, Drothspar
decided to slip as quietly as he could from the cottage. His cloth wrapped feet
made little noise as he padded to the door. He paused briefly to pick up a
cracked wooden bowl. He opened the door slowly, watching Chance to make sure
she was still sleeping. Stepping out into the brisk, humid air, he closed the
door softly behind him.

He had done a fair amount of
fishing when he’d been alive, and he knew they were going to need some good
bait. Once he was off the wooden porch, he moved away from the cottage to avoid
making any unintended noise. He walked into the shadows of the forest and
started rooting around under fallen branches, rotten logs, and larger rocks. He
collected a goodly number of night crawlers in his bowl and walked it back to
the porch.

He returned to the woods to find
a pair of long, springy branches to use for fishing poles. He knew he wouldn’t
be able to use deadfall branches, they could snap if the fish were large
enough. He found two sturdy branches he thought would make good poles and
hacked them away from their trees. He shook his head. He was hacking at
branches with the dagger that had killed him. Of course, he thought, how much
more strange was it for the skeletal remains of a defrocked priest to be
looking for fishing poles? He shrugged and tucked the dagger back under his
cloak. Either way, he was glad he’d stolen it from his killer.

Walking back to the cottage he
realized he’d forgotten the line inside. He had always kept a supply of waxed
fishing cord in a cabinet near the door. He had some fish hooks there as well,
but he hadn’t checked for either since he had returned. He’d have to wait for
Chance to wake up before he could go looking for them. He seated himself on the
edge of the porch and examined his collection of worms. They squirmed about in
confusion, unaccustomed to the chill, moving air. Their day was about to get
worse, but that was the nature of fishing.

The sun was much higher in the
sky when he finally heard evidence that Chance was stirring. He listened closely
to make sure she was actually moving and not just tossing and turning.
Convinced by shuffles and scrapes and a series of coughs, he knocked softly on
the door.

“Hello?” he heard her question
from inside. He opened the door and walked in, waving to her as she blinked at
the light streaming in the door.

“Good morning,” she said, her
voice still thick with sleep.

“Good morning to you,” he wrote,
picking up the slate he’d left on the table.

“Did you spend the night
outside?” she asked, a note of concern rising in her voice.

Drothspar shook his head. “I
slipped out just after sunrise to get a few things we’ll need.”

“How thoughtful of you,” she said
smiling. Her eyes brightened noticeably as she remembered what they had planned
for the day. She reached for her ceramic water bottle and drank to wash the
dryness of sleep from her throat. “Do we have everything we need?”

“I’m going to look now,” he
wrote. He set his slate back down on the table and opened his old fishing
cabinet. A few coils of waxed cord were still in place, though several more
were missing. He imagined they were probably lining some mouse’s home. A
cluster of rusted hooks had congealed near the line, but the corrosion was too
far gone. The first one he tried to pick up had rusted solid to several others.
He found one by itself, but it snapped like an old, dry twig when he tested its
strength in his fingers. None of the other hooks were any better. Chance had
been watching him curiously as he searched for supplies.

“Well?” she asked, her curiosity bubbling
over.

“We’ve got most of what we need,”
he wrote, picking his slate back up. “Unfortunately, we’re missing a key
element—hooks.”

“What do you use for hooks?”

“Metal,” he replied. “Hard wire
works well.”

Chance thought for a moment
before her eyes flashed with excitement. She rifled through her travel pack,
searching for something inside. It seemed to Drothspar that she was trying to
shield her bag with her body, as if there were something inside she didn’t want
him to see. After a few moments of searching and sorting, she produced two
pieces of very hard wire, each about four inches long. Drothspar stared at the
wire with an amazement that couldn’t show on his face. He took the two bits of
wire she offered him and tested them in his fingers. He would need something to
bend them around, but they would work almost perfectly.

“What do you use these for?” he
asked, his writing unable to express the depths of his curiosity.

“My hair,” she answered far too
quickly. He was certain she’d been waiting for the question. “I use them to
keep my hair in place when I wear it up.”

He nodded and let the question
drop. He was fairly certain noble young women could find better pins for their
hair than thin bits of black-metal wire. Whatever she carried them around for didn’t
really matter at the moment. They’d make fine fishing hooks.

“So what do we do now?” she
asked, eager to begin.

“First, we have to sharpen one
end of the wire. Then, we’ll bend them into hooks.” He beckoned to her with his
arm and led her out of the cottage. He stopped to pick up the poles and walked
with her out to the pier. He laid the poles out on the pier and picked up two
coarse rocks from the shore.

“Rub the wire on the rock until
one end is very sharp,” he wrote. He took one of the bits of wire and rubbed it
back and forth along the rock. Part of the metal ground away and he showed it
to Chance. After a few minutes of scraping, they each had a decently sharp
point.

Next, Drothspar slowly drew his
dagger out from under his cloak. Chance took a deep breath but didn’t flinch or
step back. He laid the dagger on the pier and placed the sharpened edge of his
wire beneath the flat of the blade. He bent the length of the wire up and
around the flat, producing a “J” shaped hook. He did the same for the opposite
end of the wire, though he bent it further, closing the loop of the hook. He
repeated the process for her wire and then put his dagger away.

Drothspar took her hook and tied
the closed end to a length of waxed cord. He tied the other end of the cord to
one of the springy branches he found earlier in the morning. When he was
finished, he handed Chance her fishing pole. She took it and examined it as he
worked to assemble his own. She lashed the pole like a riding whip, listening
to the whistle of the string in the air.

On her third attempt at lashing
the rod, something caught and the pole nearly jerked free of her hands. She
turned to follow the trail of the line. The hook had embedded itself in
Drothspar’s robe, which she’d pulled slightly off the ground, exposing his
legs. His hollow eyes turned to look at her. A bright red flush flared in her
cheeks and she started to apologize immediately.

“I’m
so
sorry,” she
exclaimed, looking at his displaced robe and spindly, white legs. “I didn’t
mean to catch you!”

Drothspar continued to stare at
her, his face unreadable.

“Let me unhook you,” she begged
and reached out for the hook in his robe. She realized she’d need both hands to
pull the hook loose from the cloth. She tried to drop the fishing pole, but she
had wrapped herself in the line when she turned to see what she’d caught. The
pole draped over her shoulder and bounced with every move that she made. She
worked frantically to unhook the pin from his robe, surprising Drothspar by how
quickly she accomplished it.

The episode, for him, had been
too much. Though he had no voice to express it, his mirth spilled out of
control. Chance looked up at him, her pole still balanced around her shoulders.
She noticed that he was shaking, his shoulders rising quickly up and down. Her
first thought was that she’d hurt him.

“Oh my God,” she said, “Are you
okay? Did I hurt you?”

The shaking in his shoulders
quickened and he finally set one hand on the dock to steady himself. Chance
eyed him suspiciously.

“Are you laughing at me?” she
asked, her voice rising in pitch.

Drothspar shook even harder and
sat down hard in the stones.

“You’re laughing at me,” she
accused him, pointing a threatening finger in his direction. The hand she chose
to point with, however, still contained the hook and line. As she thrust her
hand forward, the pole slid around her shoulder until it pointed at him as
well.

Drothspar fell back in the stones
shaking so hard that she thought he’d shake himself to pieces. She looked at
the pole that was balanced over her shoulder and down at the pile of robes
shaking on the shore. The flush deepened in her face. A look of resignation
crossed her brow, and she, too, began to laugh. The sight of the skeleton
rolling in its robes on the rocks was just too much. She hadn’t really laughed
since she’d left Petreus. The sound of her laughter echoed out over the water,
and she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes.

After a few moments, Drothspar
gathered control of himself and sat upright in the rocks. Every so often, his body
would convulse. He even raised his hand once to cover his non-existent smile.

He had never heard Chance laugh
before, and he was amazed at the rich, contagious tone of her laughter. It was
healthy, he thought, the laughter of a good soul. He reached up on the dock for
his slate and pulled his charred stick from his pocket. He didn’t write a
single word, but drew only a large smile.

Chance smiled back warmly at him,
her mirth maintaining the glow in her cheeks. It was the strangest thing, she
thought, to be smiling at a skeleton. She had to admit, however, that as hungry
as she was in this odd situation, she was actually happy. She reached out her
hand to help Drothspar to his feet. He looked up at her, no longer shaking. His
head focused on her hand, and he reached out to take it. She leaned back and
pulled, tugging him upright. He had surprisingly little weight. She was certain
she could have picked him up entirely if she’d have wanted.

Drothspar held her hand for a
moment, and touched the back of it gently with his other hand. He let her go
and wiped the smile off of his slate. “Thank you,” he wrote, and Chance swore
she could feel warmth in the words. She watched the slate, hoping he’d write
something more that might confirm or deny that strange sensation, but he put
the tablet down and reached for his fallen fishing pole.

He pointed up on the pier and
walked out with Chance walking next to him. He dangled his feet over the edge
as he’d done before and held his tablet in his lap. Chance sat down beside him
and lashed her line out into the water. Drothspar looked at her and she smiled
back.

“You have to bait it,” he
explained, pointing at the line in the water.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You have to give the fish a
reason to bite the hook. You have to put bait on it.” She read the tablet and
pulled her hook out of the water.

“Okay,” she said, taking her
dripping hook in hand, “how do I do that?” Drothspar gently tapped his hand to
his head to indicate he’d forgotten something. He set his pole aside and walked
back to the cottage. He came back in moments with a battered bowl in his hands.
He got back into position on the pier and handed her the bowl.

“You’re not serious,” she said
flatly, looking at the wriggling mass in the bowl.

He nodded emphatically.

“How do you get them to stick
when they writhe around like that?” A harrowed look passed over her face as
suspicion crept into mind. “You’re not serious,” she repeated.

Drothspar picked up his hook and
one worm from the bowl. He pierced one end of the worm with the hook and
slipped its body over the metal like a sleeve. Chance gagged once as she
watched the worm still wriggling on the hook.

“You’re not serious,” she said
again, her voice almost a whisper. “I’m not sure I can do that,” she admitted.

Drothspar looked at her with his
hollow eyes. He set the bowl behind them and took her hook in his hand. He
turned to bait her hook hoping to cover the process with his shoulder. As
disturbed as she was by the action, she leaned out to peek over his shoulder
anyway. When he was finished, Drothspar released her hook and took up his pole.
He leaned back slightly and cast the line out into the water.

Chance watched him and lashed her
pole so her hook slapped against the surface of the lake. Drothspar pushed his
pole under his thigh bone and took up his tablet.

“Cast your line a little more
gently,” he suggested. “If it makes too much noise when it hits the water,
it’ll scare the fish.”

“Cast?”

“That’s what it’s called when you
throw your hook and line out into the water,” he explained. “It’s supposed to
be a smooth and fluid action.”

Chance pulled her line out of the
water, eager to try it again. She wanted to do it properly. She hadn’t always
enjoyed her physically educational classes at school, but whatever they tried
to teach her, she worked very hard to get it right. There was always time for
experimentation later, she believed, once you had learned what the supposedly proper
form was. The difference between experimentation and floundering around was
whether or not you could do something the way it was supposed to be done.