The Bone Carver's Apprentice

• Chapter 1 The Relic in the Dust
• Chapter 2 Whispering Bones
• Chapter 3 The Blood-Stained Crown
• Chapter 4 A Face Not Her Own
• Chapter 5 Dawn of the Masquerade
• Chapter 6 Dancing with Ghosts
• Chapter 7 The Ivory Needle
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the High Court
• Chapter 9 The First Lie
• Chapter 10 Secrets in the Enamel
• Chapter 11 The Second Sun
• Chapter 12 Echoes of the Dead
• Chapter 13 The Mirror's Treason
• Chapter 14 Bone and Thread
• Chapter 15 A Deeper Cut
• Chapter 16 Midnight at the Citadel
• Chapter 17 Cracks in the Porcelain
• Chapter 18 Poison in the Chalice
• Chapter 19 The Third Twilight
• Chapter 20 Beneath the Veil
• Chapter 21 The Carver's Sacrifice
• Chapter 22 A Feast of Falsehoods
• Chapter 23 Splinters of Truth
• Chapter 24 The Grand Procession
• Chapter 25 Unmasked
• Chapter 26 The Final Facade

The marrow-dust always found its way to the back of Aveline’s throat, tasting of old rain and calcium. No matter how tightly she bound the linen scrap over her nose and mouth, the fine white powder rose from her scraping tool like a silent, ghostly fog. It settled into the deep creases of her leather apron, turned her dark eyelashes a premature, snowy gray, and coated the rough wooden workbench until the grain of the oak was entirely lost beneath a shroud of white.

To the magistrates of the High Court, bone was a sterile thing, a dead scaffolding to be hidden away beneath perfumed silk and soft flesh. But to Aveline, bone was the only honest medium left in the crumbling city of Oakhaven. It did not rot like wood, it did not tarnish like silver, and it did not lie. At least, not until she taught it how.

She held the curved rib of a mountain stag between her thumb and forefinger, her calloused skin sensing the faint, lingering heat of the animal’s long-departed life. With a tiny, hook-nosed iron gouge, she shaved away a ribbon of ivory-colored matter no thicker than a spider’s thread. A soft, rhythmic shuck-shuck-shuck filled the small, windowless cellar. Above her head, through the thick oak timbers of the floorboards, she could hear the dull, muffled thud of her master’s heavy boots.

Master Malthus was pacing again. He had been pacing since the second bell of the morning, his irregular, limping stride dragging a trail of anxiety across the floor of the shop above. Every few minutes, the floorboards would groan directly over her workspace, followed by the sharp, impatient tap of his walking cane.

"If he keeps that up, he'll wear a hole straight through the cedar," Aveline muttered, her voice muffled by the damp linen mask.

She set the iron gouge aside and blew gently on the stag rib. A miniature blizzard of white dust erupted, swirling into the yellow light of her single tallow candle. Beneath the dust, the bone revealed a delicate pattern of interlocking scales—a defensive ward, meant to make the wearer feel a phantom shell of security. It was a minor piece of work, a simple trinket for a wealthy merchant’s wife who fancied herself too fragile for the crowded streets during the upcoming Festival of the Sun.

The three-day festival was set to begin at sunset the following evening, and the city was already bloated with travelers, charlatans, and pilgrims. The air in the streets above was thick with the scent of roasted sugar-nuts, cheap ale, and the sharp, vinegar tang of dye-vats. It was the busiest time of the year for the guild-approved carvers, who churned out thousands of cheap wooden masks painted with gilt and lacquer. But in the dark of the cellar, Aveline worked on the things that the guilds pretended did not exist.

A heavy, triple-knock rattled the trapdoor at the back of the cellar.

Aveline froze, her fingers tightening around the stag rib. She listened, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The knock was repeated—three rapid strikes, then a long, deliberate pause, followed by a single, sharp tap. It was the signal from the street-level alleyway entrance, the one reserved for those who did not wish to be seen entering a bone-carver’s shop through the front door.

She pulled the linen mask down around her neck, leaving a streak of clean, pale skin amidst the dust on her cheeks. Slipping the half-finished rib into the deep pocket of her apron, she slid the iron bolts of the heavy cedar door back one by one. The metal was cold, sweating with the dampness of the underground air.

When she swung the door open, the cool, damp draft of the alleyway hit her, carrying the smell of wet cobblestones and river rot. Standing in the shadows of the arched stone doorway was a boy no older than herself, his woolen cloak soaked through with the persistent drizzle that had plagued Oakhaven for three days.

"Are you Aveline?" the boy whispered, his eyes darting frantically over his shoulder toward the mouth of the alley. He was shivering, his teeth clicking together like dice in a cup.

"I am," she said, keeping her hand flat against the heavy wood of the door, ready to slam it if she saw the red cloaks of the city guard. "What do you want? If you're looking for the storefront, it's around the corner on High Street. Master Malthus handles the retail."

"No," the boy said, his voice dropping even lower. He reached into the folds of his wet cloak, his fingers trembling so violently he could barely grasp the object he was searching for. "Not the front. Not Malthus. I was told to find the apprentice. The one who doesn't ask questions. The one who knows how to listen to the old things."

Aveline's eyes narrowed. In Oakhaven, the carving of human bone was a capital offense, punishable by the iron collar and a slow drop from the harbor gibbet. Even the possession of ancient bone relics, those carved before the Great Cleansing, was enough to earn a lifetime of hard labor in the salt mines of the eastern waste. To be known as an apprentice who "listened to old things" was a dangerous reputation indeed.

"You've been misinformed," Aveline said coldly, beginning to push the door closed. "I carve stag horn and ox bone for ladies' hairpins. If you want something older, try the riverbed."

"Wait!" The boy lunged forward, wedging his muddy leather boot into the doorframe. Before Aveline could kick it free, he pulled his hand out of his cloak and thrust a small, heavy bundle wrapped in grease-stained sailcloth toward her chest. "Just look at it. Please. He said you would know what it is. He said you would know what to do."

"Who said?" Aveline demanded, but she did not push the door closed. Her fingers had brushed against the outside of the sailcloth wrapper, and a strange, prickling sensation had immediately traveled up her arm, like a thousand tiny needles of ice pricking her skin. It was a sensation she had only felt once before, when she had touched an ancient, consecrated relic in the cathedral ruins outside the city walls.

"The man who died," the boy whispered. His eyes were wide with a terror that seemed to go deeper than the fear of the city watch. "The man who gave it to me in the tavern three nights ago. He had a hole in his chest where his heart should have been, but he was still breathing when he gave me this. He told me to bring it to the shop with the red lantern. He said the girl with the gray hair would save us all."

Aveline looked down at the bundle. The ice-cold prickle in her arm had settled into a steady, throbbing heat. The object beneath the sailcloth was dense, far heavier than any ordinary piece of wood or animal bone of that size. It possessed the gravitational pull of a small lead weight, yet she could feel the faint, rhythmic pulse of something alive beating within it.

Before she could make a conscious decision, her hands took the bundle.

"Get out of here," she hissed at the boy, grabbing his wet shoulder and shoving him backward into the drizzling gloom of the alley. "If anyone saw you come here—"

"No one saw," the boy gasped, stumbling backward over the slick stones. "But they’re looking. The King's Huntsmen. They’re combing the lower wards. They’re looking for her."

"For who?" Aveline called out, but the boy had already turned, his dark cloak vanishing into the gray curtain of the rain like a wisp of smoke.

She slammed the heavy oak door shut, throwing the iron bolts back into place with a series of loud, metallic thuds that echoed off the damp stone walls of the cellar. She stood there for a long moment, her back pressed against the cold wood, her heart pounding in her ears. The cellar felt suddenly much smaller, the air thicker, the shadows in the corners darker and more predatory.

In her hands, the grease-stained sailcloth felt oily and cold.

Aveline walked slowly back to her workbench. She did not set the bundle down on the oak surface. Instead, she cleared away her scraping tools, her jars of rabbit-skin glue, and her boxes of powdered pumice, creating a clean, empty space in the center of the table.

She peeled back the first layer of sailcloth. The fabric was stiff with dried salt and grease, emitting the faint smell of old harbor water and rancid fat. Beneath the first layer was a second wrapping of oiled silk, dyed a deep, imperial purple that had faded to a muddy plum color at the edges. This was no common merchant’s wrapping; this was the silk of the high estates, the kind used to wrap royal decrees and the sacred vessels of the Sun Priests.

With trembling fingers, she unfolded the silk.

Aveline drew in a sharp breath, her hand flying to her mouth to stifle a small gasp.

Lying on the dirty silk was a piece of bone unlike any she had ever seen. It was roughly the size of a man’s palm, curved and slightly hollowed, with the unmistakable porous texture of a human cranium. But this was not the dry, brittle yellow of a grave-find. This bone was a pale, luminous ivory, so polished that it seemed to catch and hold the dim light of the candle, reflecting it back with a pearlescent luster that seemed almost warm.

But it was the carving that made her breath catch in her throat.

The surface of the bone was entirely covered in microscopic incisions, so fine that they looked like the tracks of tiny insects until one looked closer. Using her magnifying lens—a precious circle of cracked green glass she had purchased from a blind peddler—she peered at the relic.

The tiny incisions were letters, written in the dead, angular script of the Old Empire, a language that had been outlawed three generations ago when the new dynasty took the throne. And woven between the forbidden letters were delicate, winding tendrils of ivy and thorns, carved with such exquisite, terrifying precision that they seemed to lift off the surface of the bone, as if they might grow and wrap themselves around her fingers if she stayed still for too long.

"This is treason," she whispered to the empty room. "This is a death warrant."

She reached out, her finger hovering just above the smooth, curved edge of the skull-fragment. She knew she should throw it into the smelting hearth at the corner of the cellar. She knew she should melt it down into a shapeless lump of ash and grease before Malthus came down and saw it. If the King’s Huntsmen found so much as a splinter of this bone in the shop, both she and her master would find their heads mounted on the iron spikes of the High Gate before the sun set on the first day of the festival.

But as her fingertip finally touched the smooth surface of the bone, a sudden, violent jolt ran through her entire body.

The cellar vanished.

For a fraction of a second, Aveline was not standing in her damp, underground workshop. She was standing in a room filled with brilliant, blinding light. The air smelled of crushed lilies, expensive beeswax, and the sharp, metallic scent of fresh blood. She could hear the sound of silk tearing, a high-pitched, desperate scream that was cut short by a wet, choking gasp, and the heavy, dull thud of a body hitting a marble floor.

And then, she saw a face.

It was a girl’s face, incredibly beautiful, with skin the color of cream and gold, and eyes of a striking, unnatural violet. But the face was distorted by a mask of absolute terror, the lips parted in a silent plea for mercy that would never come. Above the forehead, a thin, silver circlet set with three perfect pearls sat crookedly in a mass of dark, blood-matted curls.

Then, the vision shattered.

Aveline gasped, stumbling backward until her calves hit her wooden stool, sending it clattering to the floor. She hit the stone wall behind her, her chest heaving as she fought to draw breath into her lungs. The cellar was dark again, illuminated only by the sputtering, yellow flame of the tallow candle. The smell of old rain and calcium had returned, but the metallic tang of blood still lingered on the back of her tongue like copper coins.

She looked at the workbench. The bone relic lay there, silent and still, but it seemed to glow with a faint, inner light that had not been there before.

"Aveline!"

The voice was loud, sharp, and directly above her. The trapdoor at the top of the wooden stairs creaked open, and a shaft of bright, yellow light from the shop above cut through the gloom of the cellar.

Master Malthus stood at the top of the stairs, his heavy, silver-headed walking cane clutched in his right hand. He was a small, round man with a halo of frizzy white hair and a face that was permanently creased into an expression of deep suspicion. He peered down into the darkness, his eyes blinking against the dust.

"What in the name of the Seven Suns is going on down there?" he demanded, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "I heard a crash. If you've broken another jar of the fish-glue, I'll have you scrubbing the gutters of the lower ward for a month."

Aveline scrambled to her feet, her hands shaking as she quickly folded the purple silk over the bone relic. She threw the dirty sailcloth over the bundle, sliding it behind a stack of rough-hewn oak blocks just as Malthus’s heavy boots began their slow, rhythmic descent down the wooden stairs.

"I’m fine, Master!" she called out, her voice sounding thin and reedy to her own ears. "Just... dropped my stool. The floor is slick with the rain coming through the coal chute."

Malthus reached the bottom of the stairs, his cane making a loud, dry thud on the damp stone. He looked around the cellar, his eyes scanning the workbench with the practiced, suspicious gaze of a man who had spent thirty years hiding his own secrets from the world. He stopped a few feet from her, his nose wrinkling as he sniffed the air.

"What is that smell?" he asked, his eyes narrowing as he looked directly at her. "It smells like... copper. And old wool."

"The alley door draft," Aveline said quickly, pointing toward the heavy bolts. "The rain must have washed some of the slaughterhouse waste down the gutters. You know how the lower ward gets when the storm-drains clog."

Malthus grunted, though his eyes did not leave her face. He took a step closer, his gaze dropping to her hands, which she had hastily tucked beneath her leather apron.

"You're white as a ghost, girl," he said, his tone softening slightly, though the suspicion did not entirely fade from his eyes. "And you're shaking. Have you been inhaling the bone-dust again without your filter? I told you, the marrow of the older beasts carries the mountain rot. If you breathe too much of it, your lungs will turn to chalk before you're twenty."

"I'm fine, Master Malthus. Just tired. The festival prep has me behind on the stag-ribs."

Malthus sighed, a sound that was more like a deflating bellows than a human breath. He leaned heavily on his cane, his eyes drifting to the floorboards above.

"The festival," he muttered, his voice dropping to a low, bitter growl. "A three-day parade of fools and thieves. They spend their last copper on a painted pine mask so they can pretend to be gods for seventy-two hours, while the King's tax-collectors pick their pockets from behind."

"Is the shop busy?" Aveline asked, hoping to steer the conversation away from her workbench.

"Busy? It's a madhouse," Malthus said, spitting into the corner of the cellar. "The High Court has doubled the patrol in the upper district. They say there’s a rumor of trouble. Some whisper that the Princess Aurelia has refused to show herself for the pre-festival blessing. The priests are furious, and the King is... well, no one has seen the King since the last moon."

Aveline felt a cold chill run down her spine. Princess Aurelia.

She looked toward the corner of her workbench, where the purple silk bundle lay hidden behind the oak blocks. The face she had seen in her vision—the beautiful girl with the violet eyes and the crooked silver circlet—could that have been...?

"What kind of trouble?" Aveline asked, trying to keep her voice flat and casual.

"The kind that gets people like us hanged," Malthus said sharply, tapping his cane against the floor for emphasis. "The kind that starts with whispers in the dark and ends with iron collars. That’s why we stick to the stag and the ox, Aveline. We carve the simple things. The things that don't talk back. Understand?"

"Yes, Master."

"Good." Malthus turned toward the stairs, his boots groaning on the damp stone. He paused, his hand on the wooden handrail, and looked back over his shoulder. "Clean up this mess and come upstairs. I need you to help lacquer the sun-masks for the merchant’s guild. They want them bright enough to blind the sun itself, and my hands are too stiff today to hold the fine brush."

"I'll be up in a moment," Aveline said.

She waited until she heard the heavy oak door of the shop slam shut above, followed by the familiar, muffled pacing of her master’s boots on the ceiling.

Once she was sure she was alone, Aveline reached behind the oak blocks and pulled the sailcloth bundle back into the light of the candle. Her hands were still shaking, but her fear had been replaced by a cold, burning curiosity that she knew was far more dangerous than any city guard.

She unfolded the silk once more, exposing the pale, luminous fragment of skull.

She did not touch it this time. Instead, she leaned in close, her eyes tracing the microscopic incisions of the ancient script. She could not read the dead language of the Old Empire—no one in Oakhaven could, save perhaps the high scribes of the Citadel, and they were kept behind iron gates under the watchful eyes of the King's Guard.

But she knew someone who could.

Old Barnaby lived in the bone-yards near the river, in a hovel made of old timber and discarded ribs of river-barges. He was a scavenger of ruins, a man who spent his days digging through the mud of the low flats for ancient coins and broken bits of pottery. He was half-mad, half-blind, and entirely drunk on cheap potato wine most of the time, but he had spent his youth as a scribe’s apprentice in the southern provinces before the purges. He knew the old letters.

Aveline wrapped the bone relic back in its silk and sailcloth coverings, but this time, she did not hide it behind the oak blocks. She slipped the heavy bundle into the deep, inner pocket of her woolen cloak, which hung from a peg near the coal chute.

If she was going to do this, she had to do it now, before the first bells of the festival began to ring, and before the city was completely locked down by the High Court patrols.

She blew out her tallow candle, plunging the cellar into absolute darkness, save for the faint, purple glow that seemed to seep through the threads of her woolen cloak.

The rain did not fall in clean drops over the lower wards; it descended as a greasy, charcoal-colored mist that clung to the stone walls and turned the accumulated filth of the gutters into a slick, black paste. Aveline pulled her heavy woolen hood low over her brow, tucking her hands deep into her pockets. Her right hand remained coiled tightly around the sailcloth bundle. The heat emanating from the bone had intensified, shifting from a gentle throb to a persistent, dry warmth that felt remarkably like a feverish palm pressed against her ribs.

To reach the bone-yards, she had to navigate the twisting labyrinth of the Sinks, a district where the city’s discarded things—and discarded people—eventually washed up. The streets here were so narrow that the timber-framed tenements leaned toward one another like gossiping old women, blotching out what little remained of the gray afternoon light. Beneath her boots, the cobblestones gave way to rotting wooden planks and packed earth, slick with fish scales and cabbage leaves.

Every dozen paces, she had to dodge a reveler or a vendor preparing for the Festival of the Sun. A man with a cart full of papier-mâché effigies of the solar bird nearly ran her down, cursing as his wooden wheels skidded on the wet clay. Behind him, a group of young men in cheap, gilded cardboard masks were already singing the first-night carols, their voices cracked from gin and the cold wind blowing off the river.

"Keep your eyes down, girl," a voice hissed from a dark doorway.

Aveline didn’t look. In the Sinks, looking was an invitation, and an invitation usually cost more than she had in her pockets. She quickened her pace, her heart performing a strange, irregular dance against her collarbone.

The bone-yards lay just beyond the old tanneries, where the stench of ammonia and rotting hides was so thick it could strip the varnish off a dresser. Here, the river-barges dumped the sweepings of the city’s outer ditches, and the earth was a gray, chalky mixture of silt, coal dust, and the skeletal remains of draft animals that had dropped dead in their harness. It was a bleak, desolate stretch of mud flat, dotted with the makeshift shacks of the mud-larks and the bone-grinders.

Barnaby’s hovel was built against the skeletal ribcage of an ancient, grounded salt-barge. The dark, curved timber beams of the ship’s hull rose out of the mud like the bones of a stranded whale, covered in patches of black moss and peeling tar. A scrap of greasy sailcloth served as a door, flapping listlessly in the damp wind.

Aveline slipped under the sailcloth, her boots squelching in the mud floor of the threshold.

"Barnaby?" she called out, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

The interior of the hovel smelled of damp earth, stale tobacco, and the sharp, vinegar tang of cheap potato wine. It was dark, illuminated only by a small, smoking brazier in the center of the dirt floor. Shelves made of driftwood were crammed with a chaotic assortment of junk: cracked teacups, corroded copper coins, bits of green glass, and hundreds of bones. There were skulls of dogs, ribs of sheep, and long, unidentifiable limbs, all sorted by size and color, like the library of a mad physician.

From a nest of dirty sheepskins in the corner of the room, a shape stirred.

"Who’s there?" a raspy voice grunted. "If you’re from the parish, I’ve already paid my gutter-tax. If you’re a thief, I’ve got nothing but the damp in my bones, and you’re welcome to try and pry it out."

"It’s Aveline, Barnaby. Malthus’s apprentice."

The sheepskins exploded in a flurry of gray dust and wool fibers. A tiny, bird-like man scrambled to his feet, his spine so crooked he seemed perpetually folded in half. His face was a map of deep, dirt-lined wrinkles, and his left eye was completely milked over with a thick, white cataract. His good eye, however, was bright, dark, and sharp as an awl.

"The carver's girl," Barnaby muttered, wiping his nose with the sleeve of a coat that had more patches than original fabric. "What’s Malthus doing sending you down here in the rain? If he wants more horse-teeth for those cheap soldier-masks, tell him the price has doubled. The river’s high, and digging in the mud is no work for an old man’s knees."

"Malthus didn't send me," Aveline said. She stepped closer to the brazier, the small heat of the coals doing little to dispel the damp chill in her limbs. "I found something. Or rather, someone brought it to the cellar."

Barnaby’s good eye narrowed. He looked at her hands, which were still tucked into her cloak pockets. He sniffed the air, his chest wheezing. "You smell of old grease and copper, girl. And something else. Something that hasn't seen the light of the sun since the great lords were buried in the deep hills."

"Can you still read the old letters?" she asked, ignored his observation.

"The Imperial script?" Barnaby spat into the brazier, causing the coals to hiss and sputter. "That’s a dangerous question, Aveline. The King's scribes have iron pincers for tongues that speak the old tongue. Why would a bone-carver's apprentice care about the letters of dead men?"

"Because of this," Aveline said.

She pulled the bundle from her pocket and set it down on a flat, grease-stained crate that Barnaby used as a table. With careful, deliberate movements, she folded back the dirty sailcloth, then the faded purple silk.

The moment the pale skull fragment was exposed to the light of the smoking coals, Barnaby’s wheezing breath hitched. He froze, his hands remaining suspended in the air like two gnarled oak branches. His single dark eye widened until the white of it showed rimmed with red veins.

"By the seven fires," he whispered, his voice losing its raspy edge, replaced by a sudden, dry terror. "Where did you get that?"

"A boy brought it to the back door of the shop," Aveline said. "He said a dying man gave it to him. A man with a hole in his chest."

Barnaby took a step back, his boots squelching in the mud. He shook his head violently, his greasy gray hair flying about his face. "Take it away. Put the silk back over it. Toss it in the river, Aveline! If the King's Huntsmen find you with that, they won't just hang you. They’ll flay the skin from your back and use it to bind the royal ledgers."

"Do you know what it is?" she demanded, stepping between Barnaby and the exit, her voice firm despite the cold dread pooling in her stomach. "I touched it, Barnaby. I saw things. I saw a girl... a girl with violet eyes. She was in a room filled with light and blood. She was wearing a silver crown."

Barnaby’s breath came in short, ragged gasps. He looked at the bone, then at Aveline, his single eye darting back and forth as if calculating the shortest route to escape. But his old bones were no match for her youth, and the walls of the hovel were too tight.

"You saw the Princess," he whispered.

"Princess Aurelia?" Aveline felt her heart stop. "The master said there are rumors... he said she hasn't shown herself for the pre-festival blessing."

"She won't be showing herself for the festival at all," Barnaby said, his voice dropping to a low, horrified murmur. He crept back toward the crate, drawn by a morbid curiosity that seemed to master his fear. He reached out a trembling, dirt-caked finger, but stopped just short of touching the polished ivory surface. "It’s a relic-bone. But not from the old graves. This is fresh. Look at the color. Look at the sheen. It hasn't been in the ground for more than a few days."

"What do the letters say?" Aveline pressed, leaning over the crate.

Barnaby squinted, his head tilting at an odd angle as he brought his good eye within inches of the microscopic incisions. He muttered under his breath, his lips moving silently as he traced the angular, foreign characters that wound through the carved ivy and thorns.

"It’s... it’s a lineage," he whispered, his face turning the color of curdled milk. "A blood-record. But it’s written in the imperial passive voice. It’s not a memorial, Aveline. It’s a transfer."

"A transfer of what?"

"Of the face," Barnaby said, looking up at her with an expression of absolute horror. "The old magic. The carvers of the First Dynasty... they didn't just make masks to look like things. They carved the bone of the dead to take their place. If you carve the bone of the skull with the blood-lineage and the correct wards, and you wear it... you become them."

Aveline felt the air leave her lungs. She looked down at the fragment of skull. "You mean... a mask? A bone mask?"

"Not just any bone," Barnaby hissed, grabbing her wrist with a strength that surprised her. His skin was cold and damp, like the mud beneath their feet. "The bone must come from the person you wish to become. And they must be dead when you take it."

The memory of the vision flashed through Aveline’s mind with the force of a physical blow: the scent of crushed lilies, the tearing of silk, the wet, choking gasp, and the dark, blood-matted curls of the girl with the violet eyes.

"She was murdered," Aveline said, her voice shaking. "The Princess is dead."

"If this is her skull-bone, then yes," Barnaby said, releasing her wrist and sinking back onto his pile of sheepskins as if his legs could no longer support his weight. "And someone has carved it. Someone who knows the deep arts. The arts that the King’s ancestors supposedly burned three hundred years ago."

"But who would carve it?" Aveline asked. "And why give it to a messenger to bring to Malthus’s shop?"

"Not to Malthus," Barnaby muttered, shaking his head. "Malthus is a coward. He’s a good carver of stag and alder, but he has no magic in his thumbs. He couldn't wake a bone if his life depended on it. But you..." He looked at her, his white eye gleaming in the dim light of the brazier. "You have the touch, don't you? I've seen the pieces you bring to the market. The little birds that seem to twitch when the wind blows. The combs that make a girl's hair smell like wild thyme even in the dead of winter. You listen to the bones, Aveline."

"I only carve what I feel," she said, her defensive instincts kicking in.

"That is the touch," Barnaby said. "And whoever sent this knew it. They didn't want Malthus. They wanted the apprentice. The one whose hands are still soft enough to feel the marrow-whispers."

Before Aveline could reply, a sound from the mud flats outside cut through the patter of the rain.

It was a sharp, rhythmic splash, accompanied by the distinctive, metallic clink of iron scabbards hitting leather belts. It was a sound every resident of the lower wards knew and feared: the march of the King's Huntsmen.

"They're here," Barnaby gasped, scrambling toward the back of his hovel, where a small opening in the rotting timber led directly out to the dark waters of the river channel. "They’ve tracked the relic. They have the blood-hounds, Aveline! The dogs that can smell the marrow-dust from a mile away."

"Barnaby, wait!" Aveline cried, but the old man was already squeezing his thin, crooked body through the narrow gap in the timbers.

"Hide it!" his voice drifted back through the rain. "If they find it on you, you're dead! If they find it on me, I’m dead! Toss it! Toss it in the deep water!"

A cold panic seized Aveline. She looked at the bone relic on the crate. The polished ivory seemed to catch the red glow of the dying brazier coals, reflecting it back like a drop of fresh blood.

To throw it in the river would be the sensible thing. It would end the danger. It would return her to her quiet, dusty cellar, to her stag ribs and her hairpins, to the boring, safe life of a carver's apprentice. But as she looked at the delicate, microscopic letters, she felt a profound, heavy weight in her chest. The girl with the violet eyes had died in terror. Her face had been stolen, her life cut short, and somehow, her final, desperate truth had washed up in a wet alleyway in the Sinks.

If Aveline threw the bone into the black river, the truth would drown with it.

She grabbed the purple silk, wrapped the relic with frantic speed, and shoved the bundle back into the deep pocket of her cloak.

"Open in the name of the Crown!" a loud, booming voice roared from just outside the sailcloth door.

Before she could move toward the back opening, a heavy, iron-tipped boot kicked the sailcloth aside, tearing it from its leather ties. The cold wind and rain rushed into the hovel, bringing with them three tall figures clad in the dark red leather and iron-studded cloaks of the King's Huntsmen.

The lead huntsman was a broad-shouldered man with a scarred cheek and eyes as hard and gray as river-pebbles. In his right hand, he held a massive iron crossbow, loaded and cocked. In his left, he held a thick leather leash. At the end of the leash was a massive, low-slung hound with hairless, black skin and a snout that dripped with thick, pale saliva.

The hound immediately let out a low, vibrating growl, its nostrils flaring as it began to turn its head directly toward Aveline.

"Well, well," the lead huntsman said, his voice like grinding stones. "What do we have here? A little mud-lark hiding in the bones."

Aveline stood perfectly still, her hands tucked inside her sleeves, her fingers clamped so hard around the bone relic in her pocket that her nails dug into her palms. She could feel the heat of the bone burning through her woolen cloak, a warmth so intense she was certain the huntsman must be able to see it glowing through the fabric.

"I’m no mud-lark, sir," she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She kept her eyes low, adopting the submissive, frightened posture of a common shop-girl. "I’m an apprentice from the High Street. My master sent me to fetch horse-teeth from Barnaby for the festival masks."

The huntsman stepped into the hovel, his heavy boots sinking into the mud. He looked around the small space, his gaze lingering on the shelves of bones, then on the smoking brazier. He snapped the leash, and the hairless hound lunged forward, its wet snout sniffing at the empty air around the wooden crate where the relic had lain only moments before.

The hound let out a sharp, high-pitched whine, its tail stiffening as it turned its head toward Aveline's cloak.

"The dog smells something," the huntsman said, his gray eyes narrowing as he took a step closer to her. He raised the crossbow slightly, the heavy iron bolt pointing directly at her chest. "Something that doesn't smell like horse-teeth. Show me your hands, girl."

Aveline’s heart was hammering so loudly she was sure the huntsman could hear it over the wind. She slowly pulled her hands out of her sleeves, keeping them open and empty. She did not look at her pocket, where the purple silk was hidden.

"I have nothing, sir," she said, her voice cracking. "Only a few copper coins my master gave me for the trade."

"Search her," the lead huntsman ordered his companion, a younger man with a thin, cruel mouth who stood near the entrance.

The young huntsman stepped forward, his leather gloves wet and cold as he grabbed Aveline's shoulder, spinning her around. He began to rough-search her, his hands slapping against the heavy wool of her cloak. He reached her left pocket, pulling out a small bundle of iron scraping tools and a ball of dirty twine.

"Nothing but carver's trash here, Captain," the young man said, throwing the tools to the mud floor.

He reached for her right pocket—the pocket where the relic lay.

Aveline closed her eyes, bracing herself for the cold iron of the shackles, or worse, the immediate bite of the crossbow bolt. She felt the young man's hand brush against the outside of her woolen cloak, directly over the hot bone.

But just as his fingers closed around the fabric, a sudden, wet splash echoed from the river channel behind the hovel.

"He's running!" a third huntsman yelled from the mud flats outside. "The old one! He’s in the water!"

The lead huntsman cursed, snapping the leash of the hound. "Forget the girl! The old man has the prize! After him!"

The young huntsman let go of Aveline’s shoulder, nearly shoving her into the brazier as he turned and scrambled out of the hovel, following the captain into the rainy dark. The hairless hound let out a savage bay, its claws tearing up the mud as it dragged its master toward the riverbank.

Aveline stood in the center of the ruined hovel, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The wind howled through the torn doorway, scattering the white ash from the brazier across her boots like a fresh fall of snow.

She did not wait to see if they caught Barnaby. She knew the old man knew the river-channels better than any huntsman, but she also knew his old legs were slow. If he was caught, they would find nothing on him, which meant the huntsmen would soon realize their mistake and return to the Sinks.

She lunged through the torn sailcloth doorway, turning her back on the river and running as fast as her legs could carry her, back into the dark, protective labyrinth of the city.