10

Flesh and Bone

IT IS 1746. The magister makes Leonore a gift.

He says, “Here is a finger to replace your own, the one you have given up for the charmed child Rose.”

Flesh and bone.

Leonore asks, “How could you make a finger that can replace the one heaven gave me?”

“Ah,” says the magister as he turns to stoke his fire. “This is so finely wrought that none shall see it for what it is in the broad daylight. Only in the dark shall sight and sound betray; only the light of the full moon shall reveal.” He does not add that heaven could never be party to this making. He does not add that his skill of invention is bought with old magic. He does not tell her what he does with her payment of flesh and bone.

“To keep this gift,” he says, “you cannot leave the castle or the town or the fells that surround them.”

Payment made.

When the charmed fish-girl Rose does not bring Leonore’s lord back from the brink of death, Leonore wants to try again.

She should have taken a boy first, and now she will. Her lord would want a boy to be his heir. She will go back to the magister and ask for a boy, before the heather purples the fells. A boy that Leonore can save from a life of misery, a boy she will raise from poverty and shame, much as she has saved Rose.

And there is that other thing, that feeling that came from her chatelaine with the charming of Rose, a feeling almost as good as love. With her cold new-minted finger she pushes the charmed Rose aside.

Her sacrifice is blood and bone. But the children sacrifice something far more valuable.

By rock and bone, by blood and stone, not life, nor death, but lost, alone . . .