The Bone Queen Read Free Page A

their families as best he could. The count was twenty-one missing and two dead. Fifteen of the missing and both the dead were hewers, all of them the main breadwinners in their families, because hewers were skilled craftsmen and bargained for the highest rates. The other six were haulers, five of them children under ten.
    Sixteen had escaped the mine, and of those, eleven were injured. Healing broken limbs and superficial burns was straightforward; the sickness caused by gas and smoke was less simple but still treatable. But there were two among the survivors who had suffered a great deal worse, who had somehow used a last animal strength to climb the long ladder out of the shaft and spill onto the ground, despite serious burns that blackened their skin. Without salves or medicines, or even a modicum of hygiene, Cadvan had felt helpless: he knew that their injuries were beyond the help of healing, and that the most he could do, all he could do, was to alleviate their agony. And even that was not enough: magery could only do so much. When he first assessed the severity of their wounds, he had expected these two men to die quickly. But they had lingered on for hours, dying in the small hours of the night, before Cadvan had stumbled back to his hut, barely able to stand from weariness.
    They were tough people, the Jouains: tough, proud and unruly. He had already learned to respect their stoicism; today had taught him how deep that went. The explosion was a numbing catastrophe: it meant not only deaths in almost every house in the village, but the possible destruction of their livelihoods.
    The smoke had cleared from the shaft after nightfall, and the chief colliers had sent down caged finches on a rope to check the air. The birds had fallen off their perches at only one fathom. The colliers checked every hour after that, with the same result. Older miners shook their heads. Jouan had always been a safe mine, with no history of firedamp, but perhaps that had changed now. Perhaps the adits that ventilated the mine had collapsed in the blast. Perhaps the hewers had struck a large pocket of gas – firedamp or even blackdamp – that had made the entire pit noxious. Perhaps, they said, the mine would have to be abandoned altogether. Only time would tell.
    Beyond listing the missing, nobody talked about the miners who were still below. There was nothing to say. They all knew that it was possible, just possible, that some had survived the blast and the poisonous airs that followed. Mining lore was full of these stories, of a desperate scramble to a lucky pocket of air, of heroic rescue against the odds, of the miracle that cheated their daily enemy, death. Every man, woman and child knew every morning that they might not return at nightfall. You could be knocked off a ladder, or just fall, as sometimes children did after a day of hauling, their hands too tired to clasp the rungs that led up to the daylight world; or a collapse of rock could stave in your head, as had happened only last month to one of the hewers; or any one of a hundred other mischances.
    If anyone had survived underground today, they would be the unluckiest of all: until the damps cleared, there was no way in or out of the mine. They would die in the darkness, swiftly of the thickening air or slowly of thirst, beyond hope of rescue. Their last hours would be beyond imagining. After Nils had died, Cadvan had used his Bard sense to try to discover if there were any survivors. He set his ear to the ground and sent his Bard-born hearing as deep as it would go. He heard the groan and sweat of the earth, the slow grinding of the rock, the implacable trickle of water seeping into the mine now that the windlass was broken and could no longer pump the tunnels dry. He heard no human sound, no breath or heartbeat or cry.
    He didn’t tell the villagers. At first he thought he must, to save them the torture of illusory hope; but then he uneasily wondered whether he had any right