The Bone Orchard

Eiran rose before the chiming of the bone-trees, because the first light in the Bone Orchard was not sunrise but vibration. A lattice of bells and brittle branches leaned above the alleys like a cathedral of removed teeth; each bell hung from a vertebra of some nameless ruin, each rope threaded through the hollows and plucked by the wind into small slow laments. The air tasted of old metal and lacquer. Aelis slept with her head on a coil of braided gut that belonged to their father, and when Eiran slid his hand beneath her cheek he felt the faint pulse of someone who still believed the orchard could be mended.

Their hovel was narrow as a hollow bone. Smoke stained the ceiling, and the window looked out at the orchard's nearest trunk where a bell the color of old milk swung and drew breath. Eiran dressed his palms with oil and braided the leather of his ringer-thong. He had been apprenticed too long to be a child — the orchard taught a kind of economy that made every gesture count. Aelis knew how to hush; she whistled the teeth that fed the small lamps that smelled like rosemary and copper. "You move as if you mean to steal the dawn," she said, folding her hands about the little copper bowl they used for porridge.

Across the lane, the bone-menders had hung their wares: rib-braids, little bells made from fused jawbones, and tokens stamped with the city's old sigil. Vendors argued without loudness. The orchard's market was built on quiet commerce; voices traded in murmurs because loudness drew the Hush, that slow, unavoidable suction that visited those who had more to give than they could keep. A boy bared a finger where the Hush had taken a sound and sailors spat on the stones. Eiran moved among them like a shadow with a purpose. The routine is what steadied him: oil the clappers, test the harmonics, note the anomalies. There was a gauge his master taught him to read, a halo of tremor at the lip of each bell. That morning the halo was off.

He climbed the nearest trunk and pressed his ear into the cold metal. A note shivered there that did not belong: an inward scrape like a nail on glass. Eiran's fingers, stained forever with bronze, traced the seam where metal met bone. The seam was a scar. He frowned; the seam thinned as if something beneath it were being shaved away. "Aellis," he called without breath. When she answered, her voice came from the well behind their house, a distant bright pop like a dropped pebble.

He dropped down and went for the well to listen. The Wispwell held echoes, the place where the orchard pooled what it could not digest. The water's surface was a skin of memory: children's songs trapped beneath its luster, a choir that did not climb out. Eiran cupped his hands at the lip, but the sound that rose was not a memory. It was the absence of one. The well gave him a hollow answer: a breath like paper slit.

He turned back to the lane and then saw it. The air between two trunks had folded inward as if someone had pinched cloth. It gaped like a seam torn and still bleeding shadow. From within that darkness came a small sound — a thin, bright, ordinary voice — and then, as if a hand had plucked a string, the voice snapped away. Aelis stood close beside him, eyes wide.

Before Eiran could act, the seam widened in a slow, practiced way. Fingers of cold slid across the stones, and where they touched the voice went thin then ceased, like a struck string that had lost its loop. Aelis gasped; the sound lodged in Eiran's throat like a stone. He reached for her and the seam seized, curling a strip of air uphill, and there, like the pull of a tide, the orchard drew her in.

Eiran's hands closed on nothing. The world around him fell into the stuttering rhythm of those who had witnessed a taking and had learned the art of pretense. A vendor tied his wares more tightly, a child fetched his mother. No one barged into the seam. No one parented the city itself. Eiran's knees hit the cobble. He could hear the bells in the distance — the milk-colored one, the small pair that winked in the east — but their notes were suddenly thin, and the hollows of the orchard seemed to listen for a new tune and not find it. He clawed toward the seam and felt the coldness like a mouth at his sleeve, tasting and not speaking. Aelis was still there, her eyes bright, but the sound of her breath had been taken. Where the seam curled, a sliver of voice swam and disappeared down a fissure that went into the Orchard's underbelly.

Eiran dragged himself back into the lane and held nothing in his hands: no rope, no hook, not even the ring of his father's key. The city continued its small obligations. Someone swept the doorway next to theirs as if sweeping could fix that which had been unstitched. He pressed his palms to the trunk nearest the seam and felt an echo answer that was not his sister but a note like a throat scraping metal. Something unseen watched from beyond, and in its watching it waited to be named.