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Bones were her toys.
She played with them while sitting amidst the chains and
tattered gowns whenever her father left the door to the bone
chamber ajar. He didn't care that she went in there. He
had stopped caring long ago, and didn't even see her as he
rambled through the halls, beard growing to his knees and
body rank with sweat. Even the goat house with its windows
closed against the hoarfrost smelled better than her father.
The bones, sleek and
white, brilliant and brittle, were smooth under her small
hands. She built grand houses like the ones she saw her in
her picture books, and castles, with walls of spine and
gardens of knuckle-bone. Sometimes, she would take the key
that wept blood from her father's desk and paint, imagining
the droplets where crimson poppies that sprang up on the
seastrand of bleached ribs and plates of shoulder blades.
Her nurse-maid, brown
and snarled from time in the sun, dressed her in frocks of
white and would slap her hands when Aurore dirtied her
dresses with blood.
"Cleanliness is next to
Godliness!" her nurse-maid would shout.
"There is no God in this
house," her father would mutter as he passed by. Sometimes
he would stop and watch as Aurore's nursemaid smacked her
face, but he only laughed.
Aurore hated them. She
built prisons of bone for her father and her nursemaid.
When she was given the husks of the autumn corn to play
with, she wove them into tiny dolls and painted them, blue
for her father and ruddy for Plinka. On her twelfth
birthday, her father presented her with a spy glass. Aurore
used it harness the sun and burned the dolls to ash.
On her thirteenth
birthday, as her first blood began to flow and her
nurse-maid was dismissed, Aurore asked a question: "Which of
the bones is my mother?"
Her father peered out at
her over his beard of blue. "You will never know."
"It is my right. I want
my mother."
Her father laughed and
handed her a gift wrapped in silk. "Here."
Aurore tore the silk
away, not caring that she ripped holes into the swathes of
indigo. "Why must everything be blue?"
"Because I wish it so."
Under the silk was a box
and inside the box, covered in blue paper, was a letter.
"Open it," her father
commanded.
"I don't want to."
Aurore set the box on the floor and kicked it away.
"Aurore," her father
said.
She glared at him. "I
don't want it."
"Then I'll open for
you!" he raged, storming over to snatch the box up. She
kicked it again, sending it flying across the smooth tiles
of her father's study. The box hit the wall, breaking in
two and spilling its contents onto the floor. Her father
seized the letter and broke the seal, and as he unfolded, a
ring with a great sapphire fell to the floor.
"Put it on." He pushed
it into Aurore's hand.
"I won't."
"You will," he said,
drawing his face so close to Aurore's that she reeled from
the stink of his onion-fouled breath. One moment longer and
she would have bit his nose, but he pulled away and
sneered. "You will, or I will lock you in the room with
your bones."
Aurore glared at him.
"On your ring finger.
Your wedding finger," he ordered as he began to read. "I
request the hand of your daughter, Aurore, as my wife. In
return, I will grant you amnesty and see to your comfort as
long as you live. Ioan, Duke of Jaune."
"I won't marry him."
"You wear his ring. Try
to remove it, if you will."
Aurore tugged at the
ring, but it wouldn't budge. "You tricked me!" she screamed.
Her father only
laughed. He thrust the letter into Aurore's hands and
strode away, laughing all the while.
With tears slipping from
her eyes, Aurore fled to the chamber of bones and locked
herself in. She burned the letter with her spy glass, then
stood at the window, gazing out at the land beyond her
father's house. Wind tossed the trees, dancing over them,
bending them to its will. As she watched, she twisted the
ring around her finger, trying to wrench it away from her
skin. The more she pulled, the tighter the ring held to her
finger until it burrowed into her flesh.
Bright droplets of blood
fell onto her frock, but Aurore did not care.
"Why do you cry, lady
with hair of blue?" the wind moaned.
"Because I cannot get
out."
"But you can. You are
not bound here."
"But this ring," Aurore
said, holding it up so that it glittered in the sunlight,
"marks me as property of another."
"Then it must be so,"
sighed the wind. "But I expected more from one who knows
the secrets of bone and fire."
Before she could ask it
what it meant, the wind died away. The trees danced no
more. No bird rode its eddies. And, Aurore was alone.
She wanted to weep, but
she did not. Instead, she turned and gathered together the
piles of bones, sorting and stacking them until like was
with like. Long, smooth femurs. Blades of rib. Girdles of
pelvis. Long bones with long bones, the short ones with
short. As she worked, a little whisper tickled her ear.
Listen, Aurore. Listen
to us. We speak.
Aurore nodded and bent
to her task. At dusk, she lit a single candle and did not
go to her bed. She heard her father stride past, but he did
not stop. His laughter, however, rained down the staircase
as he went to his bedchamber, taunting her, his sad
daughter, playing with bones.
Listen to us, the bones
whispered.
Aurore worked all night,
and then through the next day, sorting and piling and
arranging until she had found homes for all the bones. When
she was done, she slipped out of the bone chamber, down the
hall, and into her father's study.
The key sat on his desk,
glistened with bright blood. She snatched it up just as he
entered the room.
"What have you there,
Aurore?"
"Paper for writing a
letter to my betrothed, Father."
"Paper that bleeds?" he
said, pointing at her stained frock. "Give me the key."
"No, Father. I'm going
to paint my bones."
He shook his head and
laughed. "All right. One last time. I don't want your
betrothed to know he's taking a simpleton as a wife."
Aurore nodded and ducked
past her father before he could change his mind.
She closed the bone
chamber door and locked it, hoping that it could not be
opened from the outside. And then, as the amber rays of the
dying sun burst through the window in a curtain of fire, she
painted the bones with the blood from the key.
It wasn't enough. White
still shimmered in the sun, and so with a great sigh, she
twisted the sapphire ring into her skin, again and again
until her own bone glistened under the sinews and tendons of
her hand and her blood until the pearl of the bones was
stained with menstruum.
Aurore bound her hand,
sat down against the stone wall, and waited.
You've fire yet to
weave, whispered the bones.
Aurore nodded and tore
her frock into strips, then wrapped them around the bones.
With the nub of her little candle, she lit each strip.
Great wafts of smoke
filled the air. Aurore drew back against the wall, letting
the chill of the stone seep through her skin, soothing her
heart and her aching lungs.
Just before she dropped
into oblivion, a knock came at the door.
"Aurore, open the door!"
"No, Father," she
coughed.
Wood splintered as an
axe worked to break the door in, but before her father could
enter the room, the wind burst into the room. A sea of blue
tendrils covered Aurore's face as the smoke disappeared and
revealed three ladies, naked, but tall and beautiful.
"Who are you?" Aurore
said.
"We are children of bone
and smoke, long dead at the hand of your father," said the
fairest lady.
"You have given us life
again. We will see you safe," said the darkest.
With that, the tallest
lady unlocked the door.
Aurore's father stood on
the other side. Flecks of saliva dotted his beard of blue
and his eyes were red with anger.
"Hello, husband," the
tallest lady said.
"Husband," said the dark
one.
"My husband," said the
fairest, "I would give you a kiss."
The tallest woman seized
his arms. The darkest wrapped her hands around his waist,
holding him fast and the fairest kissed him, sending streams
of smoke into his mouth.
"Daughter, help me," he
cried as the fair lady released him and exchanged places
with her dark sister.
Aurore waited as the
three ladies guided her father into the chamber, then handed
them the key of blood. "This is my home now. Do as you
wish." With a smile, she took her father's dagger and
closed the door, then glided to his study, laughing as his
cries for help filled the air.
With the wind dancing
outside the window, Aurore placed her hand on the desk and
severed her ring finger from her body, then fed it to the
fire.
As the flames licked at
her bones and the sweet reek of her flesh filled the air,
Aurore vowed that no man would bind her ever again.
Fire and bone were hers
alone.
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