The Bone Queen Read Free Page B

to rob them of even that. The knowledge gave him some small comfort. He was as sure as he could be that no one had survived the accident, only to face the worst death of all, in the dark, alone.
    If anyone deserved such a death, he thought, it was Cadvan of Lirigon. And yet he lived and breathed, facing nothing worse than his own nightmares. If any further argument was needed that the world was unjust, he would be the clinching evidence. Cadvan lived on, useless to anyone, while good people whose lives were needed, who were loved and missed, died without reason.
    When sleep wouldn’t come, Cadvan found himself obsessively retracing the choices that had led the rising star of the School of Lirigon, the man who had been hailed as the most gifted Bard of his generation, to his present disgrace and exile. In the bitter clarity of hindsight, there were no excuses: his own condemnation was absolute, more unforgiving even than his harshest judges in Lirigon. He had taken every step willingly and recklessly, heedless of those who had warned him… But here his mind flinched. He forced himself to finish the thought: he had been heedless even of she who loved him most, she who had paid the price for his folly as surely as if he had murdered her with his own hands. For such a crime, there was no redemption.
    Sometimes, in his weaker moments, he wondered if this pit in which he found himself had been his destiny, a fate that he could not escape. It was a thought he always pushed away, as the cowardly plea of a man who would not face his own actions. All the same, the Dark had been there from the very beginning.

II
    C ADVAN had been raised with his four siblings by his father, Nartan, in a small Lirhan village, not far from Lirigon. He didn’t attend the Lirigon School until much later than most children with the Gift. He was an attractive child, clever and quick with his hands; and he knew he was different from his brothers and sisters. He came into the Speech, the inborn tongue of magery that signalled he was a Bard, when he was about five, shortly before he lost his mother, Mertild. His father never quite recovered from the death of his wife, and was frightened of his son’s precocity. He was often harsh with the boy, and when Cadvan’s Gift became evident, he ordered him to tell no one. Even had he wished to, it was impossible for Cadvan to conceal it completely, and soon the whole village knew that he had the Speech.
    When Cadvan was nine years old, the Lirigon Bards, as was the custom, came to Nartan’s house to discuss his attendance at the School of Lirigon. Being a Bard was considered an honour in Lirhan; it was not a place where those with the Speech were shunned. Nartan was surly with the Bards, and would not hear of Cadvan attending the School. Perhaps he was reluctant to lose another member of the family, or perhaps he needed the hands of his eldest son to help with the younger children and his cobbling. The Bards told him that to leave a boy with the Gift untrained was asking for trouble, but Nartan turned a deaf ear. They said they would come the following spring and ask again, but Nartan turned his face away and would not speak another word, so they sighed and left.
    Cadvan had not been allowed in the room during the visit, but he knew they were talking about him, and he eavesdropped easily enough using his listening. What he heard excited him, and he decided that he wanted to be a Bard more than anything else. His father cuffed him and told him to get on with his work.
    After that, Cadvan conceived a great resentment against his father. He began to run wild, leading other children on his escapades. It was nothing very harmful: raiding orchards, throwing stones and other such mischief as occurs to small boys. Because he had the Gift, he could go hidden and speak to animals, which gave him the edge in their pranks. He was stretching his powers, but his use of them was wilful. His behaviour worried his aunt, his