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ANTON
If there was blood at all pulsing through Anton’s bones, the movement would have been desperate and enraged. What lay before him was quite unexpected, but it shouldn’t have been. He didn’t say a word to Nahli, not until they were all the way out of the dead woods.
Angling his head over his shoulder, he met the hungry gaze of the three ghastly beasts, watching with their hundreds of eyes, and waiting for Anton and Nahli to return. But the creatures didn’t step out from the twisted trees.
Anton came to a halt near a round cluster of bones and breathed hard, ragged breaths.
Nahli lifted her skeletal hand in the air and made a spherical motion. “It’s wonderful to know this place wraps around in one large circle. So now we have that particular riddle figured out,” she spat with sarcasm.
Anton’s bones grew heavy, and he took another deep breath to relax himself. He already missed having a weapon in his hand for defense. “Now we know not to attempt that fate again, either.”
The fog around the Bone Valley had thickened, pressing itself to their bodies in a blanket of sorts. A heart-stopping crack sounded from the sky as new skeletons plummeted to the hills and ground, breaking apart.
Anton moved forward, but gasped and stopped when a sharp throb came from his leg.
Nahli’s flames lowered as he touched his trousers. “You’re hurt!”
“I’m fine. It’s only a little ... black blood.” Like the beasts’ wounds, tar-colored liquid coated and stained his pants.
He pulled up the trouser leg, and eight puncture wounds bled from his bone where the beast had torn into him. The injury had come in a wave of pain that he didn’t know how to describe. While it had stung like death, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been if he’d had skin, muscle, and nerves. Lifting his finger, he brought it to his leg bone and rubbed away a glob of blood.
Nahli knelt, clasping her hand around his leg to examine the injury. “It’s not bleeding anymore. That seems to have stopped rather quickly.”
“Could you expect anything less?” He shifted his leg out of her hold.
She wiggled her index finger and stood, her flames dancing. “You’re right.”
“I think I’ll go wash off in the lake.” Blood caked his leg, dirt covered his body, and he needed to calm himself down. He needed to do something.
“There’s a lake?”
“Yes, let me take you on a proper tour since it looks like we’ll be here for a while.” He sighed and waved her on, while walking toward the lake and pointing out all the bone decorations to her. He didn’t know if she realized he was being humorous or if she thought him serious. But he smiled to himself, nonetheless.
“Do you know why the fog is thicker?” Nahli asked, sweeping her hand back and forth to part it as best she could.
“It’s the Bone Valley’s way of telling us it’s night time, I suppose. The fog is less dense in the morning, then gathers more throughout the day.”
“That seems logical.”
They passed a mountain of remains, bones protruding in all shapes and sizes, some filthier than others. Each mound became smaller as they reached the familiar tree with the locked door. Anton was tempted to shake the handle again, but he was done with that for now.
I wonder what Maryska would think of Nahli, though she did tell me bones were my only company. He didn’t know when she would come back, but perhaps she’d forget about him like she had with this entire valley of bones. But he knew he wouldn’t be so lucky.
Taking a turn down a path of broken rock, he pointed Nahli in the direction of the lake, right past the cottage he’d been staying in. He might as well call it his home.
Nahli halted in front of the gray lake, surveying the water. “In a way, it’s beautiful.”
“Besides the dead fish at the bottom,” he said, tapping his toe at the edge of the dirt and stripping off his tunic.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked, as though the act of removing his tunic was the biggest abomination she’d seen thus far.
He tossed the shirt to the dirt and reached for his belt. “I’m getting cleaned up.”
“Without clothes?” Nahli whirled away from him, her voice breaking on the last word.
“Have you never seen a skeleton before?”
“Are you jesting?” she asked, sounding amused but still nervous.
As he attempted a smile and stepped into the liquid, he couldn’t feel if it was warm or cool, only the gentle rippling against his bones.
“You can get in now, if you want. I don’t bite ... much,” he called.
“That’s truly hilarious.”
“I’ll get out, if you prefer,” Anton tried again.
Dirt still clung to Nahli’s bones from when he’d gathered her fragments to build her, and blood spotted her skull after she’d decapitated the creatures. But he didn’t want to tell her that.
“Just look the other way,” she whisper-shouted.
His flames shifted to the sky, yet he spun to face the other direction to make her comfortable. A moment later, the splash of water echoed around him as Nahli entered the lake.
“You can turn around now,” she said.
He whirled to face her. Nahli pulled her braided hair loose and dipped her skull beneath the water’s surface.
Tilting his head back, Anton wet his own hair and ran his hands through the tangled locks. He scrubbed his leg with the heel of his skeletal hand, chipping away flecks of the dark blood.
“What made you become a thief?” he asked, hoping to make their bathing situation less awkward for Nahli.
She didn’t answer for a while as she stared past him at a cluster of razor-sharp bone bushes. “What’s it to you?”
“Just curious why you were at my sister’s booth that day.”
It was to take the herbs, but he wanted to know more about the reasoning behind her thieving. Was it a thrill for her? Was she desperate for coin? Thieves couldn’t be defined to one answer. He knew, like everyone, they each had their own unique story.
“I needed coin, and Daryna uses herbs to brew things. She would have paid a good lump for that.”
“The one the village calls a witch?”
His father had never mentioned anything about her being one, but he also hadn’t spoken much about what happened when he’d stolen and sold items.
“So they say.” Nahli shrugged and dipped her head beneath the water once more.
That still didn’t answer Anton’s question as to why she’d become a thief, but he decided to let the subject rest for now.
“Why did you start doing ... what you do?” she asked, not meeting his gaze.
“Become a whore?”
Nahli flinched in response. “I didn’t mean that it’s lowly. Only, I’m curious as to how you started doing it.”
The answer was a simple one, but when Anton thought about his parents, if they had still been alive, he wondered what he would have accomplished instead. Would he have become better at woodwork since he could have spent all his time focusing on it? No matter what, he would never have been good enough with a sword to become a soldier like Pav could.
“My mother killed herself when I was young, shortly after my little sister was born. The pressure was great on my father, so he started thieving to support us.” Anton paused and his flames connected with hers. “He was caught and both of his hands were sliced clean off in punishment. Later, he died from infection.”
“Is that why at the market you mentioned the possibility of my hands being cut off?”
“Yes.” Every time he thought about a thief, Anton couldn’t help but compare their situation to his father’s and feared the same outcome.
“And so, you started selling yourself to help out your siblings?”
“Yes,” he said simply, but the meaning behind it was more than that casual word.
Anton didn’t like to recall the memory of the first time he was paid to tumble someone. He’d just turned seventeen and had never bedded anyone, although he had kissed quite a few village girls at dances at the market.
A widowed woman in her late thirties offered to pay him coin to help her get over her husband. Because she was his only lover, she paid him double. It was an easy enough way to make money and, at first, he didn’t mind the task. Later, he realized how wrong he’d been. All women and men weren’t like the widow. Most thought they owned him, demanding things from him that he didn’t want to do.
“That was a courageous thing for you to do,” Nahli whispered.
Anton waded toward the edge of the lake as something swelled in the hollowness of his rib cage, thinking of what she’d said and not feeling courageous about it at all.
“I think I’ll retire for the evening.” He glanced back at her. “You have your choice of where to sleep. All the cottages are empty, as you might have guessed.”
Plucking his clothes from the dirt, he made his way to the cottage and slammed the door behind him. Things were different now that Nahli was in the Bone Valley. Before she showed up, he’d only had himself to converse with, whether it was his voice or his thoughts filling the bone-clattering silence. With people came questions, and those led to memories, and that reminded him why he was trapped there. But really, he’d always been imprisoned by his own mind, condemned by his own judgment.
