The same as with the soul bone I melded to Kael, filaments like gold threads webbed around the bone and into the open wound on Damir’s neck, a sort of pattern I could use to stitch the new bone into the king.

I touched one strand, dragging the tips of my fingers downward. The gilded threads fastened along the edge of the shard and I made quick work of nestling the piece half inside the gash on the king’s neck.

It was bloody work, a little sickening to mold and maneuver flesh aside to make way for additional bone fragments.

My jaw tightened against a swell of sick in my belly the deeper I shoved the piece. Each new tug against the glow of craft threads squished and slipped into blood and tissues. I was no healer and the whole of it reminded me of gutting days-old fish.

Soon enough my lips parted, allowing short puffs of breath to flow, all to keep from breathing in the hint of copper and sweat on the king’s skin.

More stitches, more threads, more gold and heat stitched Kael’s finger bone beneath the surface of the king’s neck, shifting it like a bulge of creeping maggots to the hinge of Damir’s jaw.

Melding was curious, subtly powerful, and I could not look away.

It felt as though a dormant edge of my heart awakened with a new thrum and pulse. Kael told me when he used his bone craft to manipulate a fishing hook or blade or to heal a cracked shin of a child, his body heated and his blood swelled in his veins with a new sort of strength.

Before the horrors of Jarl Jakobson’s great hall, I’d never felt the burn of being anything but ordinary. Too bony, too freckled, too dull. In this moment, my craft drew out a side of me I did not know.

Someone braver, bolder, even stronger.

Absorbed in the motion of threading the sliver into Damir’s neck, I never took note how the walls darkened, like a shade pulled over the lancet windows, blotting out the sun. Flames in the inglenook died, filling the hall with the gust of a winter wind.

The eerie glow from bodies of the consorts, the prince, and the queen lined the tattered and chipped table.

My hands stilled and I pulled back. The king’s features burned like a noon sun, his flesh more like a flame than anything. I could not make out his fine tunic or the beads in his beard. All around, much the same as in Skalfirth, bones burned through bodies of those in the palace hall as though their very souls were aflame.

Black dripped off the walls, from the corners and edges of the tables, like moldy refuse.

A mirrored reflection of the world I knew, but rotted and dreary.

Smoke and salt expanded in my lungs with every breath.