Chapter 1
ROSY
The Bone Forest called my name through whistling pine needles and groaning branches. Rosy, it sang. Rosy. Rosy.
“I’m here,” I said, crossing the stark border where groves of silent red cedar became clumps of creaking bone pines. “Can it wait? Got a lot to do today.”
The Forest ignored me, tugging at my hair and skirt like a needy child. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It wasn’t yet dawn and I had a basket of warm breakfast hanging from one arm. I considered brushing the Forest aside so I could deliver the food to Gran first.
The bone pines shook and shuffled, blocking the usual path to Gran’s cottage. Whatever it wanted to show me, it didn’t want to wait.
I gave up and held the basket to the nearest tree. “Keep it safe for me?”
A branch drifted down, slow enough that the unobservant might think it moved by the wind. Of course, they’d have to be unobservant and ignorant not to know that the Bone Forest was alive. Or as alive as anything teeming with bone magic could be.
I let the branch take the basket. Breakfast safely stored, I reached into my heart. Most of the voices waiting there were still groggy with sleep. Few animals were awake at this predawn time. It wasn’t dark enough for the prey to feel safe nor light enough to wake for the day. But I had one voice who was always ready to join with me, and it was that one who rose to meet my call now.
I shifted. My knees and elbows elongated, ankles and wrists lengthening into legs. Hands and feet became paws, nails sharpened into claws. Thin brassy hair shortened to ash-gray fur while more sprouted across the rest of my body. Along the base of my tail and up my entire right front leg, exposed bone rose to the surface of my skin and jutted out above my fur like grotesque pieces of armor.
As a bone wolf, I stood just above four feet tall—only a foot shorter than my human height. I was so used to the shift that it took barely a second to adjust to the change of perspective. The Bone Forest opened a path and I loped down it.
The sky had lightened to a soft bronze by the time the Forest deposited me at the foot of a small mountain-fed river. The sun would crest the horizon soon, though sunrises in the Bone Forest were always more muted than the ones outside it. I’d left early this morning, intending to be back at the ranch before sunrise really began. I loved the Forest, I really did, but it only ever wanted my attention when I had other plans. Moments like these were too common to be anything but aggravating.
Except—just visible, a family of bone otters floated down a large creek. I shifted back to human and put a hand on the nearest pine. I leaned into it, close enough to smell the faint tinge of vanilla that clung to the pine needles. The Forest whistled my name again, softer this time.
“Thank you,” I whispered, sorry for my earlier grumbling.
I’d been wanting a shift that could traverse the water as well as the land. Bone animals were always land mammals, just as ice animals were avian, glass animals reptilian, and flower animals aquatic. As a bone familiar, those bone mammals were the only creatures I could shift into. I didn’t normally mind that, even when my cousin took wing and I was left stuck on the ground. But Forest’s Edge had flooded horribly last spring and ever since I’d wished for a shift that was more capable in the water.
It was months too late, but the Forest hadn’t forgotten my wish. Now I just had to make room in my heart to claim it.
I watched the otters drift together. I’d always thought of otters as playful, but they weren’t playing now. They were holding hands, little paws linked tight as though they couldn’t bear to be parted. I could work with that.
In order for a familiar to gain a new shift, they need to learn the voice—the essence—of that animal. Need to learn it, understand it, and make a place for it inside their own sense of self.
I let the longing well up inside me, the love for my family, the hopeless desire that we might one day be whole again. That Gran might be allowed to leave her prison and return to the ranch, to hold hands with us and never let go.
An otter nestled in my heart alongside the other voices. I waited a single heartbeat to let it settle, then I shifted.
The other bone otters welcomed me with happy chirps. I bumped my nose on the places where exposed bone stood out starkly against their dark brown fur. Two of the pups pulled me into a game of splashing and diving along the creek bed. We played, happy and carefree, as the dawn rose around us.
Then, just as quickly as the otters had accepted me among them, they scattered. The pups gave chirps of fear and the eldest warning hisses even as the group fled down the creek.
I splashed about for a second as I tried to figure out what had scared my new friends away. The otter I’d become wanted to follow, to stay safe in numbers, but I had a human’s mind and there were few things in the Forest that scared me. I swam in circles until I caught sight of the threat.
There, in the shadows of a huge pine, was a silver bone wolf. Its fur was too pale to make out the exposed bone, but no normal wolf was that big. Its golden eyes gleamed like miniature versions of the rising sun behind it.
I scampered out of the creek. Fallen pine needles clung to my wet paws as I bounded toward the wolf. It waited for me, silent and still, until I got close enough to touch noses with it. Only then did the wolf move. With a weary sigh, it nuzzled into my dripping fur.
I shifted, a bit sheepish to have been caught fooling around. My clothes stuck to patches of wet skin and my hair had become a damp, knotted ball. I flung it over a shoulder, trying to hide the mess. “Sorry, Gran. The Forest was insistent.”
The wolf rose to her forelegs, then shifted into an old woman with hair as silver as the wolf’s fur and pale skin marked by wrinkles and age spots. She clicked her tongue at me. “You keep letting these trees pull you this way and that, girl, and one day they’ll pull you where you don’t want to go.”
“Yes, Gran,” I said, though I didn’t take her words to heart.
To most, the Bone Forest was treacherous, untamed wilderness. But to me, the Forest was home. Ever since I’d first shifted among these pines some six years ago, the Forest had sheltered me. Just as it sheltered Gran, though she didn’t see it that way. She must have once. We were both wolf familiars, after all. The wolf was Gran’s only shift and, even though I had many more, the wolf was my first. That made it special. That made us special. Bone wolves were anchor animals for the Forest, and that gave us an important connection to it, and to bone magic.
But Gran ignored her connection with the magic and the land. The Forest was her prison and she didn’t forgive it for keeping her caged, no matter that it wasn’t actually the Forest’s fault. For years, I’d tried to repair the bridge between them, but each time Gran’s weariness only grew more visible.
The otter was close enough to the surface of my heart that I couldn’t resist reaching out to hold Gran’s hand. She squeezed my fingers, already forgiving me for following the Forest instead of coming straight to her. We’d done this dance too many times.
A nearby tree bent down, basket hanging from its lower branches. Gran let go of my hand to grab it.
“Uncle Inge made mini-pies this morning,” I explained. “He said they were your recipe.”
“That boy always did get underfoot in the kitchen,” Gran grumbled, but there was a sweet bitterness to her smile as she lifted the cloth to peer inside the basket. “Eating with me, girl?”
“Can’t, Gran, sorry. Mama asked me to do the market run this morning. I’ve got to saddle up Tempest.” I hesitated, then forged on. “Can I get you anything?”
Like I’d feared, Gran scoffed at my question. “I have everything I need.”
We both knew it was a lie, but I didn’t dare push Gran on it. There was already enough pain hiding behind her scowl.
“I’ll be back later, with lunch.”
Gran waved me away. I didn’t want to leave. I never wanted to leave, even when I simultaneously wanted to go home. But I had to get to the market before Farmer Iktus sold all his best produce.
A few branches reached down to stroke my head as I turned toward my family’s ranch, trying to comfort me. I thanked the Forest one more time, taking solace in the new voice settling inside my heart, chirping alongside all the rest.
* * *
A COMMOTION GREW ALONG THE road leading out of the village as I stood at Farmer Iktus’s stall, counting peppers. Drums beat, disturbing the soft murmurs of market haggling. Forest’s Edge was not a loud place. Whoever was arriving seemed to think they needed to announce themselves as they would entering a city. I winced, ears ringing. I had excellent hearing because of my shifts and it felt like a curse now. At my side, Tempest lifted his head up from the lush summer grass he’d been grazing on, ears flicking toward the far end of the village square.
“Is the jarl here already?” I asked Iktus as I quickly stuffed the peppers into Tempest’s saddlebag.
Our ruling jarl visited rarely, spending most of his time at his manor outside the bustling town of Woodside. We all preferred it that way. Jarl Snass’s visits were a nerve-racking whirlwind of all the families in Forest’s Edge trying to convince him that yes, we really did need all our land and no, we really couldn’t afford to pay more in tithes and taxes.
If the jarl was visiting, I needed to rush home to warn Mama and Papa. After Gran had been arrested, our family’s standing had suffered. Every year, my parents argued themselves hoarse so we could keep our ranch. It had only been nine months since the last time—we weren’t ready. A surprise inspection was the last thing we needed.
Before Iktus could answer, the riders came into view. Metal horseshoes clattered across cobblestone as the first of the riders trotted into sight. Our jarl traveled with a small guard, but these soldiers didn’t bear the Snass family crest. Instead, sewn across the right breast of their military jackets was a distinctive three-eyed raven.
The royal crest.
Half a dozen soldiers rode horseback and another half dozen marched on foot. Two at the front carried drums, which they beat incessantly as the procession filled our village square. All were dressed in dark brown military uniforms, and all bore the royal crest. All except the four figures at the center of the procession, dressed in black despite the unbearable heat.
My stomach flipped. I knew what this was. Toketie had talked about nothing else since coming home from school last week.
“Witches!” Iktus exclaimed. “What are they doing here?”
His surprise was understandable. Forest’s Edge was too small to have a resident witch. Too small to have a permanent military posting, either, though the jarl’s soldiers patrolled the road between us and Woodside.
I hadn’t believed Toketie when she’d said the princess’s procession would include a stop at Forest’s Edge. We sat near the southern border of the kingdom, half surrounded by the densest acres of the Bone Forest. The Forest didn’t tolerate many travelers, so to get to the southern nations, you had to go west and travel through the Waiming Territories. There was no strategic reason for the army to be stationed here and, given how small our population was, not many potential recruits.
But a royal platoon escorted four witches to the center of our village anyway.
A soldier on horseback trotted to the front of the procession. He wore the bright red sash of a thane—an officer—and he lifted his chin imperiously before bellowing, “All bow for Princess Shaw Colchuck, daughter of the Witch King, heir to the Cursed Throne!”
It was easy to tell which of the four witches was the princess. She was the only one who rode a bone horse, a beautiful black-and-white piebald mare with exposed bone that peeked out from underneath her mane and ran down until it disappeared below the princess’s glossy saddle.
Shaw was nearly as striking as her horse. Her hair was dark brown and moved like silk, the ends just barely meeting her shoulders. She had pale sepia skin and high cheekbones that accentuated an otherwise squarish face. She sat upright in the saddle, regal in the way she kept her shoulders back, reins clutched in slender fingers. She looked pristine, like something pure and untouchable—but I knew that was an illusion.
I bowed, if only so I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd. Princess Shaw was the future of the Cursed Kingdom, the only living descendant of the witch who cursed this land and made this kingdom a safe haven for magic. But the future Shaw promised was a bleak one.
I didn’t want to be here, fawning over the girl people called Death’s Heir.
Tempest tried to pull his reins out of my hand as I bowed. I held tight, until the leather bit into my palm, and shook hard at his reins to chide him. Bone horses were more aggressive than their nonmagical cousins and, as a stallion, Tempest was particularly stubborn. It didn’t matter that I’d trained him since he was a colt, he would seize any chance to take advantage of my distraction.
The procession began to circle around the square, prancing about like a few dozen villagers shopping in the morning market were worthy of a full royal parade. The whole thing was an ostentatious show and I didn’t understand why Toketie had been so excited to see it.
According to my cousin, the princess had spent every break this last year touring different areas of the kingdom to drum up support for the military. As if the Cursed Kingdom’s army needed more support. The Witch King had dangled the threat of the prophesied war over everyone’s heads long enough that I figured half the adults in the kingdom were either actively serving or registered military reserve.
Copyright © 2024 by Jasmine Skye