The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton Read Free Book Online Page A

that I had never known before as I tried to free her lips, her teeth, her tongue.
    As I said, my talent never ran to likenesses of individuals. In this case the pattern lay before me, her very face was visible under my knife and my fingers, and I don’t know where I could have gone wrong, but I did. From the ragged caricature I had made of her mouth, a scream burst forth, a scream strangled by the blood that sprayed over me. In a sudden burst of anger and despair whose onset gave no warning, I drove the heavy blade between her eyes. Sometimes I can delude myself that I did it to cut short her suffering, but it was my own pain that impelled the knife into the wood.
    Unable to look at her, I turned my attention to the baby, a perfectly formed boy. I cut the cord and tied it, I washed him in the water of the cursed well, I wrapped him in my shirt and rocked him, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I suspected he was hungry. I turned to his mother. Now I saw nothing but a tree, a dead tree whose drooping branches trailed silky leaves on the moss.
    “Oh, you wretched man!” screamed a voice beside me. “You miserable fool! What have you done to my finest creation?”
    I didn’t care that I had been discovered, that I had enraged the wizard or that his hulking slaves stood near at hand. I watched the old man’s frothing, stamping rage with curious detachment, and I hardly heard his threats as I noticed that his body held images begging to be freed. The shapes that I saw were those of bones, muscles and entrails, and I seized him in order to liberate each and every one of those images with my knife.
    I succeeded brilliantly.
    When I came to my senses, I wondered why the slaves had not defended him. They seemed to be lying dead or stunned, but when I examined them, I found that the things I had mistaken for fallen men were nothing but heaps of rotting vegetation. I snatched up the baby and fled, not liking the way the branches thrashed and clawed the face of the moon. As I ran from the Bower, I saw the trees bending as if to feed.
    All but one.
    * * * *
    I left Crotalorn that night, taking only a milk-goat from the wizard’s menagerie to provide for my son. It was my intention to bring him to this castle and claim for him the status of a Sleith, whatever it might cost me.
    It was an unfortunate journey. Perhaps goat’s milk disagreed with him, or perhaps my clumsiness and ignorance did, but the baby fretted when he wasn’t screaming. Busybodies pestered me until I found that I could discourage them by explaining, between suppressed coughs, that the poor child’s mother had died of the plague.
    He seemed to calm when we came into the forested hills of your domain. I believed that he sensed he was coming home and would soon be in the better care of his maternal relatives. He gurgled and cooed at the trees.
    Near the place where you found me today, I paused to collect my thoughts and rehearse the speech that would introduce Dendrard to his grandparents. I bathed him at a spring and set him naked on soft moss while I washed myself. When I returned to pick him up, I found that I could not. The earth gripped him.
    I didn’t know what to think. An animal, a snake, something held him to the ground. I pulled, and he screamed more loudly than ever before. I babbled at him, fussed over him and managed to calm him, but at the same time I very gently rolled him to one side to determine how he was caught, and by what.
    My knife was out, for I didn’t know what I would see, and I’m glad—I suppose I’m glad—that I refrained from striking at once, for my first sight suggested that the foul tentacle of some underworld creature gripped my child at the base of his spine. What stayed my hand, I think, was Dendrard’s apparent contentment. Not even my screaming changed his look of pure happiness.
    Though my hand cringed, I forced it to explore the thing that held my son. I expected a texture of scales, a chill of slime, but the reality was