The Thread that Binds the Bones Read online

  “He didn’t say much,” said Tom. He flexed his hands on the steering wheel and looked at Laura. If what she said was true, why was her whisper giving him promises of Home? She wore a face of despair and resignation.

  —Truth? his Hannah part whispered.

  —Danger, said Laura’s whisper.—Come on!

  —Why?

  —I need you.

  Laura frowned. “What is it?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Why are you making faces?”

  “Just talking to you underneath.”

  “What?” She gripped his arm. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “Me,” he said. “Tom.” Tom who moved seventeen times between the ages of nine and thirty, he didn’t say, either underneath or aloud, Shadow-Tom. Nowhere Tom/Everywhere Tom. Tom who could find his feet in any situation.

  “How can you talk underneath?” said Laura. “Are you one of us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How can you talk to me underneath, anyway?” she said in a dazed voice. “I can’t talk underneath.”

  “I noticed you don’t seem too connected to what you’re saying,” he said, and grinned.

  —She believes she has no voice, said the whisper.—Tom. We’re scared of going home. Please come. Please.

  “Oh, please,” said Laura in an annoyed voice. Then her eyes widened. “I get it. This is a trick.” She leaned against the seat back, her shoulders sagging. “A trick. You’re a cousin I’ve never met. You’re going to betray me to the Arkhos for talking about forbidden things to strangers, and they’ll cut the thread that binds the bone and cast me out unfamilied.”

  “Laura, I’m not a member of your family. I don’t think I’ve even met any of them. I won’t repeat what you say to me to anyone.”

  She reached out and flicked a thumb and two fingers in front of his face in a complicated gesture. For a second a tiny blue flame danced in the air. “Truth,” she murmured, “as you understand it. What could you be, then? I don’t trust surfaces. You are too perfect to be real.”

  “What?” he said, staring at her.

  “You are my dream: an Outsider, tall, dark, handsome, friendly. Gifted. And you speak of swallows’ eggshells, and look at me with appreciation. Can someone as perfect as you exist? I doubt it. Therefore—I get it—lifeskin. Michael has animated a log and placed it where I would stumble over it and desire it, and when I kiss you, you’ll turn back to wood and he’ll laugh.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Tom, turning the engine off. They sat in the resulting silence. Crickets chirped from the dried grass beside the road. Tom held out his hand. Laura reached toward him. Her hand hovered, trembling, above his a moment, and in her eyes he saw doubts rise up and fade. She put her hand in his.

  Though they waited a moment, he did not turn to wood. He felt the warmth in her palm and fingers. Her thumb stroked his knuckles. She smelled of sage and cedar. He waited, eyes half-closed, a long time, then tugged her closer. She slid down the seat to him, leaning into his embrace as he put his arm around her, her sandy eyes looking up into his, flushing golden. “Are you real?” she whispered, but her other voice whispered.—I know you’re real. I want you.

  Of all the whispers that he yet had heard, that one was the most charged, colored with all the shades of longing. He looked at her kindling eyes and knew he had never met anyone else he wanted so much to connect with, even though he didn’t know her at all. He leaned down just as she tilted her face up, and they kissed.

  Crickets cocooned them in sound; the cab’s window was open, and the merest breath of breeze touched them, as if blowing into the autumn air from a next-door spring. The warmth in them grew. Her hands crept up to grip his head.

  After a little while she relaxed her grip and he lifted his head. She sighed and snuggled against him, her hands sliding down to clasp his windbreaker. She opened sleepy eyes a moment later, and peered up at him, her smile spreading wide. She touched his cheek. “Still warm, still flesh,” she said.

  “Not everything exists just for your benefit.”

  “I learned that, Outside. It was a hard lesson, but I felt so much better. It’s just that—when I get this close to home, every pebble on the road, every weed, every gnat could be a part of someone’s plan, and most of my family’s plans hurt somebody.”

  “Why not reverse it? Bring a pebble of your own.” Tom touched his chest.

  “No, Tom.” She took his hand and kissed the palm. “Whatever—whoever you are, I want you safe.”

  The faintest sound of gravel grating on gravel, and then the car joggled and tilted. Tom reached out and grabbed the steering wheel. “Bessie?” he asked.

  The landscape outside—low cliffs to their right, willows walking beside the stream to their left—dipped, and the seats pressed up on them, then relaxed. They were flying, car and all.

  Chapter 3

  Soundlessly, the car lifted higher than the treetops and cliffs, then cut straight across country, skimming over the stream as it wandered, over the road as it followed the stream, and over the flatlands, where brown and black cattle grazed on tough scrub and dried grass. Chill air whispered in through the open window. Ahead of them, the horizon was much too far away; a butte thrust up from the gently rolling hills.

  Tom gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, everything in him stilled to a stop while he waited to understand what was happening. A prickling pain flickered behind his eyes.

  They were flying. Flying.

  He accepted it, and relaxed. The pain in his head intensified from pin pricks to ice picks.

  “Damn,” said Laura. “You see? Not even near the house, and someone’s found us, probably Michael. It’s too late for me to send you home, Tom, but I tried.”

  He managed to smile at her. “You tried,” he said, his voice cramped by the pain. “Whatever happens next, I chose to be here for it.” Out the window, trees passed silently below. He closed his eyes and the throbbing behind them deepened.

  The car flew silently, without motor noise or wings.

  As the kids had flown down off the building, when he pulled on the purple sky skins—

  Pain dived down into the center of his brain. He gasped, clutched his head, and opened his eyes.

  “Tom?” Laura murmured, as he gasped again.

  Lavender wood grain streamed across the earth, across the sky. Knots and furls and ripples rose, sank, bumped, kissed, faded. The car rode on a purple wave, and it was being tugged by a twist of copper thread that disappeared into the sky ahead of them. A thin pink thread reached from the same distance, plunged through the car’s hood and dashboard, and dove into Laura’s chest. She was staring up at him, her eyes flecked with gleaming gold, her palms marked with glowing blue-and-gold spirals.

  Tom took quick deep breaths. After that last overwhelming explosion of pain, his head had stopped throbbing. He reached out and touched the pink thread with the tip of his index finger, and felt warmth in his finger, followed by a thickening in his throat: affection. Affection stained by fear.

  “What?” Laura said. “What is it?”

  He rubbed his eyes hard enough to print purple stars inside his eyelids, then looked at her again. The wood grain, the threads, the glowing bits of Laura had all disappeared and everything looked normal again.

  “I just saw—” he said. “I just saw the weirdest—”

  “What?”

  “Purple, and pink, and threads, and—” He took her hand and looked down into the palm. He touched the center. “Blue and gold.”

  Her eyes widened. She held her right hand over her left palm, and moved her fingers quickly. A blue and gold symbol dared in the air above her hand, then faded. “Like that?” she said.

  “Sort of,” he said, and traced the track of a spiral on her palm. “Does this sound crazy?” There were so many things he had learned not to talk about while he was growing up. He had seen layers of past lying transparent across the present, people and th
ings he could walk through who didn’t react to him. When he mentioned what he saw to the people he was living with, he usually ended up living with some other relatives. Learning not to see the things nobody wanted him to talk about had helped a lot. This deterioration of his self-imposed blindness bothered him.

  Laura could flick her fingers and coax colored flames out of the air.

  “No,” said Laura, closing her hand around his. “It doesn’t sound crazy this close to Home.”

  —Othersight, said her whisper.—Rare, but not unknown.

  —Thanks, Tom’s Hannah voice replied. Tom slid his arm around Laura’s shoulders, and she shifted to get comfortable. They sat watching the world approaching them out the front window.

  “Have you seen things like that before?” Laura asked presently. “The colors?”

  “Only once, like that. I used to see other things. Mostly ghosts. I gave it up years ago, but it’s been sneaking back this year.”

  “And you’re not a relative of mine? You’re sure?”

  —Am I? he asked underneath.

  —Nobody we know, answered her whisper,—and we’ve met every relative we have, here and at Southwater Clan. If you’re related to us at all you must be from one of the Lost Tribes, who disappeared almost three hundred years ago.

  “You know I’m not,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, giving him a smile.

  Faintly they could hear the brook below, and occasionally the calls of crows. Then the brook noise faded, and the landscape in front of them changed from scrubby autumn sparseness to legions of dark evergreens. The cool air smelled of clean pine. The ground dipped down between hills, and the car lowered to maintain a cruising height a few feet above the highest treetops. At last the car tilted groundward. Trees rose up around it. Unlike Arcadia’s tamed and well cared for trees, these trees looked tough and sassy.

  The car sank and settled on a grassy spot facing the from of a house. Traces of a rutted road wandered off behind the car to disappear into the forest darkness. Before them, the house presented a central white front with a big wooden door set deep into it. On either side of the white section, the house straggled off into the forest in a mix of architectural styles, as if pieces from sixteen different jigsaw puzzles had been put together to form one picture—all the pieces fitting, without making sense. The center piece looked adobe, many storied, flat roofed, thick walled; the next piece on the left swelled from the earth, a mud bubble with trees on the roof and caves for windows. Spike-topped minarets showed through treetops, Persian tile patterns girdling them. What looked like a yellow cottage stood off to the right, smoke puffing from a crooked chimney set in a steep thatched roof, and ruffled gingham curtains showing at the windows. Beyond it loomed a weathered wooden bam, mostly obscured by trees. Something like a hex sign was painted above the barn doors, but it had no circle around it and it reminded Tom of the sign he had seen flaring above Laura’s hand.

  A man stood between the car and the front door, dressed dark so that he almost blended with the door. The house was so overwhelmingly weird that Tom didn’t notice the man until he took a step toward the cab. His short curly hair was the same streaky blond as Laura’s. He looked upset. He leaned over and peered in through Tom’s open window. “What is this? Laura, are you fetchcasting now, of all times?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you figure that out when you did the come-hither?”

  “No, I just grabbed. You were getting too late.” He frowned. “Besides, how could you fetchcast?”

  “Well,” she said, shrugging and reaching for her beret. Tom slid his arm from around her and they climbed out of the car. “Hi, Michael,” Laura said, and stretched, then reached back for her suitcase and her coat.

  Tom worked his shoulders, walked around the car, and took Laura’s suitcase from her. Michael came after him. “Thanks for the ride,” Tom said. He held out his hand to Michael. “Tom Renfield.”

  Michael took two steps back, his gray eyes catching fire. “Haven’t you even started training?” he asked Laura.

  “This is my brother Michael,” Laura told Tom. “Michael, Tom is not my fetch. He is my guest. I grant him salt privilege.”

  Michael breathed loudly through his nose for a moment, then took Tom’s hand. “Welcome,” he said, gripping Tom’s hand and releasing it. “Now, Laura? Why now?”

  “Skaloosh plakna,” she said. “Anyway, you’re the one who snatched the cab. He was going to drop me off and leave.”

  “You mean he’s not even someone you know?” Michael opened and closed the hand he had gripped Tom’s with, as if to shed Tom’s touch. “Let’s put him in the lower caverns and work on him tomorrow.”

  “No,” said Laura. “Guest.”

  Michael looked at Tom with narrowed eyes, then shrugged.

  “When’s the wedding?” Tom asked.

  “Tomorrow, Powers and Presences willing,” said Michael. His shoulders were tight with tension. “Ritual purification starts in less than an hour, and you have to get ready. Were you planning not to come?” he asked his sister.

  “I got here as fast as I could. The car broke down this morning and I had to catch the bus, and the cab—”

  Michael sighed, irritation coloring it.

  “Do you have an extra robe for Tom? He didn’t have time to pack,” she said.

  “Come on,” Michael said, turning and leading the way into the house.

  Laura paused on the threshold after Michael had crossed over, her hands in fists, and sketched some signs in the doorway with her thumbs, speaking softly in a language Tom had never heard before. A curtain of green and gold sparkles rippled across the doorway, then parted in the middle, the edges around the split lined with the welcoming orange of campfires on cold nights. “Wow,” Laura said, looking back at Tom with a wide grin. She reached for his hand, and drew him through the opening; the curtain widened to accommodate him, then faded. Michael stood in the hall waiting for them, his arms crossed, his eyes wide, his face unreadable.

  The front hall was dark and wood paneled, but as they walked, it widened into a mine shaft, timbers supporting scooped-out earth walls and ceiling, a board walkway granting them a path above an inch of chill standing water on the floor. The air smelled dank, edged with mildew. Swirls, spots, starbursts of green light flowed across the ceiling and in some places the walls, once even diving down below the water. At first Tom found it as dim as walking in a spook house at a fair, but then his eyes adjusted. It was still strange, but at least it was visible. Openings into rooms above water level on either side of the hall beckoned. Through doorways Tom saw rooms resembling pictures from various pasts: some like lived-in caves with firepits in the walls, furs on the earthen floors, and dressed stone furniture; others like castle interiors, tapestries hanging everywhere, heavy wooden furniture, and torches or candles in sconces, lit with flames that did not flicker; others held museum-quality artifacts from cultures all over the world, stone statues from Central America, wooden sculptures from Africa, an antique globe the size of a weather balloon, a glass-fronted case full of crystal and ivory figurines, a wall of amulets on red velvet behind glass, a Chinese vase as tall as a child, the lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus.

  Michael rushed them, so Tom caught only intriguing glimpses. But he noticed two things: no people, and no electricity.

  “You want your old room?” Michael asked Laura.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Is he staying with you?”

  She looked up at Tom. Suddenly he felt overwhelmed with the strangeness of the whole chain of events—meeting her, plunging into conversation, talking about things he had never discussed with anyone before, kissing her, flying here, and now her being asked if she wanted to share a room with him. After his mother died, he had learned to enter every relationship warily, watching and thinking and listening a long time before making a move; and even then maintaining distance—except for his relationship with Hannah, of necessity sudden.

  Laura
stared up at him with tawny, gold-touched eyes. Her arm was warm linked with his, and he had the growing conviction that he never wanted a door to close with her on the other side of it again. He smiled at her.

  —Are you ready for this? he asked underneath.

  —Are you? she answered, and he sensed a laugh in her voice. “Yes,” she said to Michael.

  The tunnel swelled out into a wide cold space, the ceiling vanishing up into darkness, pierced by five chips of white daylight. The green light curled and twinkled along the walls, vanishing down other tunnel mouths around the cavern. On the right, stairs chiseled from stone rose along the cavern wall. “Come on,” said Michael, grabbing Laura’s hand and dashing up the stairs, with Tom trailing after.

  They climbed above the cold that pooled in the bottom of the cavern. The hall at the top of the stairs reverted to wood paneling and a more summery temperature. Frosted globes along the walls held moving blue-white light inside. Tom tried to stop and study one, since it looked as if a winged fairy were trapped inside, but Laura pulled him on down the hall.

  There were doors along the hall, differing from each other in shape, size, and composition. Michael stopped in front of a standard rectangular wooden door with a crystal knob. Laura grasped the doorknob. “Thanks, Michael,” she said. “Remember, Tom needs a robe.”

  Michael’s eyes kindled again. “If you were any kind of a Bolte, you—” he began, then frowned and held his hands out toward Tom. He flicked his fingers. Tom felt the air tighten around him. He looked down at his chest and watched as the colors faded out of everything he wore.

  After everything else that had happened, this was minor. He buried his hands in his now-white windbreaker pockets and shrugged.

  Laura glared at Michael. Tom could sense the anger surging inside her, then felt it stop and freeze. “Your marriage,” she said. “Your Purification. Your choice.”