Kieri did, and did not. The father he barely remembered, the bearded man who had picked him up and swung him about … that was a live man, however brief his memory. Bones meant death, meant he would never see his father in the flesh again. But it was tradition, and he followed the Seneschal farther into the ossuary.
“Here he is,” the Seneschal said.
The bones were neither fresh nor ancient, each set neatly as near to its place in life as possible, and each painted in brilliant colors, scribbled with thin black lines that Kieri now realized were script.
His father. His father’s bones. Kieri stared at the skeleton, wondering what he was supposed to feel. The colors made him uneasy: white bones, clean bones, were natural things, but these colors, this writing, seemed … alien.
“You may not be familiar with the script used,” the Seneschal said. “It is very old. I can translate for you.” Without waiting for Kieri’s word, he bent over the pelvis. “This, right here, tells of your birth. See, the background color is that used for sons, and it gives your birthdate, your mother’s name—”
Kieri shivered. He could read the script now, as he could not a few moments before; the words flowed through his mind in a voice he knew instantly was his father’s.
For on this day my son Falkieri was born, and we rejoice in his strength and pray all the gods for his long life, health, and joy.
“I can read it,” Kieri said, fighting the lump in his throat. He could read all of it, the writing voicing itself, the colors and script together making pictures as well as words, telling the story of his father’s life. Not far from his own birth was the birth of his sister. Not far from that, the anguish his father felt when his wife—Kieri’s mother—and Kieri disappeared, when word came back of her certain death, and his presumed. His father had grieved for years, pouring all his affection onto the sister … had died of grief, in the end.
Tears rolled down Kieri’s cheeks, through his beard. He could feel them, but he could not stop them; he did not try. His father … what would his father have thought of the man he’d become? He could be glad his father did not know what had happened to him, those bitter years of captivity; he wished his father could have known how his son was saved by a family he loved—his friends. He felt now, bone to bone, that human kinship; he knew his father’s favorite flavors, colors, pursuits, as if they were his own.
More than the elven sword, more than the Council’s acclamation, bound him here now. This was the human half of him, bone and blood, not song and immortality and the uncertain bounds of the elvenhome kingdom where his grandmother ruled. This was truly home, not just a childhood memory, but the place his bones knew, and where his bones would lie.
At last he turned from his father’s skeleton. “My sister?”
“Over here, on the women’s side.”
Laid with her were the few fragile bones of her child born dead. She had been taller than their father, as he was; her skull bore the shape of her elven blood, and her pelvis had not yet broadened as much as it might have, had she lived longer. The writing on her bones included the stories she’d been told about him, about the older brother who had disappeared, about her sense of duty, born of his loss. She had resented it sometimes; she had once or twice blamed him for their mother’s death, since that journey had been for him, but she had transferred that blame to their grandmother, and that—no forcing by a nervous Council—was the real reason for her early marriage, her decision to bear a child when the Lady advised against it. It had not been her brother’s fault, she had decided, but their grandmother’s, for insisting that the boy must come to the elfane taig to have the sword pledged to him and his own powers wakened.
Yet she had been, within her understanding, a good queen: loving, diligent, worthy of all the honor heaped on her. He remembered her now, her voice coming to him and wakening all the old memories of her birth, her baby face, her first struggling steps. He had been told he must care for her, protect her, that his status as elder brother meant responsibility, not power … and she had died because he was not there.
He could not have been there. Tangled in that he felt all that had happened over again, including Aliam’s decision not to tell anyone he might be the prince. He did not blame Aliam … but was that true? Had he not, for an instant, blamed Aliam? He had, just as his sister had blamed him … but fifty-odd years of experience refused to lay that guilt on the man. We are not gods, to know all. We do the best we can. Aliam had said that, when someone made a mistake and Kieri had laid blame. He could not have known. You would not have known. His sister had not known. She had been willing to die for her kingdom, but she need not have died, and the kingdom would have prospered more if she had not.
He would not blame her. He would not blame Aliam. He would not blame the Council that had pressured her, or their grandmother, who had told their mother to bring him.
When he was ready to leave that chamber, the Seneschal offered a green cloth, to wipe his tears, and then another. One was laid on his father’s breastbone, and the other on his sister’s. Kieri had no more tears to give.
With his boots back on, he came out into the spring sunlight, aching a little as one does after long sorrow’s ease. The King’s Squire he had left to wait for him stepped forward. Kieri turned to the Seneschal. “The leaves?”
“Connect the bones to the living earth, to Alyanya of the Flowers. So the bones remember their life, and the living remember those whose bones lie there.” He said it as if Kieri should have understood that himself, and Kieri realized he would have, in a few minutes.
He felt the sunlight on his face, on his shoulders through his robes, striking warm and comforting as his parents’ hands once had. Through the air came scents of spring, green things growing, flowers’ sweetness. When he died, his bones would have that connection, would not forget that he had lived, had been nourished by the same soil, the same air and water, that fed the great trees. His growing taig-sense felt the trees, steady, comforting.
“Thank you, Seneschal,” he said. “Thank you for all you have done, and do, and for teaching me, who should not need teaching—”
The Seneschal bowed, a deeper bow than before. “My lord king, it is an honor to guide one who needs no teaching, but only the chance to learn. Your father is well pleased; you have taken away the fear and grief of his life and death.”
“You felt that?”
“Oh, yes. No one may serve there who cannot sense the bones.” The Seneschal looked past Kieri to the trees. “I know, my lord, that you are trying to heal the breach between human and elf, and this is a fine thing to do, and something that must be done. But here, in the house of bones, this is a human thing. It is not what elves do; it is, they have said, beyond their understanding. We keep very old ways here, my lord, and they have agreed it is right for us to do so.”
“It is in my bones, too,” Kieri said. “I have no wish to interfere, even if all your assistants are of pure human heritage. And yet you lay out the half-elven, such as my sister.”
“It is hard to explain, my lord. You are right: only those of human blood—and old human at that—serve under me. The bones need those around them who understand, and elves do not.”
“Yet I am part-elf and they spoke to me.”
“They are your ancestors and relatives; it is a family thing with you. With others, not of the family, it is harder.”
“I will not interfere,” Kieri said again. “I do not fully understand, myself, and perhaps that is my elven heritage showing. I do understand that it is a good—no, a vital—task that you perform, and you have my goodwill in it.”