The ossuary lay underground. Kieri had no idea what to expect, but did not expect to be impressed by mere bones. He’d seen enough of them on battlefields, especially that last year in Aarenis, when every field sprouted bones instead of grain.

The Seneschal unlocked a brass-bound wooden door. Above it Kieri saw fresh green branches laid across wooden pegs. “This one’s the ancestors’ home and that other one—” He jerked his head toward another similar door. “—is the treasury.” The treasury door had no green branches over it. “Now, this line of green stone, my lord, this is for respect. We go barefoot here.” He kicked off his palace slippers, revealing knobbly old man’s feet, blue-veined, and looked at Kieri’s boots. The look conveyed a command, but he said nothing. Beside the door was a bench; the Seneschal waited until Kieri sat on it, and then knelt to help him pull off his boots and socks. Kieri’s bare feet looked incongruous to him, under the formal robes he wore, but the stone felt warm and smooth, almost comforting.

When the Seneschal pulled the door open, Kieri expected a musty smell, familiar from cellars and barrows, part earth and stone enclosed, part bone. Instead the air had the freshness of spring outside. He’d expected a dim chamber filled with dusty old bones, cream, white, yellow-brown, gray. Instead, the ossuary blazed with color against whitewashed walls. Kieri stared. Human bones didn’t come in those colors—colors as bright as fresh-dyed yarn, as flowers, scarlet, green, blue, yellow. Here and there light glinted from other things—from curves of metal, copper and bronze and gold and silver. And on every skeleton, fresh green leaves, one between the teeth, one across each eyehole, one on either side, where ears might have been. They looked as if they’d been picked that very morning.

“What—?” Kieri choked back all he was tempted to say and instead said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” the Seneschal said, obviously pleased at the surprise he’d arranged. “This is the old way, you see. Remembrance is a form of honor, so nothing should be forgotten that is honorable to a king or queen. In the old days, before the magelords came, it was mostly simple things—this one was good with sheep, that one was a good cook. Simple dyes and a little knife-work made that clear. But kings, my lord, as you know, have more complicated lives, and so their bones must hold more … the first few kings, indeed, were scarce honored more than their people; their bones hold simpler stories and the old-fashioned decoration. You’ll see that in a moment. It was two or three generations before a king thought to find a bone-artist while he still lived, and explain what he wanted. But here’s your father, you’ll want to see him.”

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.