The Bone Season

For the dreamers

Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere.

—Charlotte Brontë

Contents

The Seven Orders of Clairvoyance

The Penal Colony of Sheol I

1 The Curse

2 The Liar

3 Confined

4 A Lecture upon the Shadow

5 The Indifferent

6 Community

7 The Bait

8 Of My Name

9 Variety

10 The Message

11 Of Weeping

12 A Fever

13 His Picture

14 The Sun Rising

15 Fall of a Wall

16 The Undertaking

17 The Will

18 The Good Morrow

19 The Blossom

20 A Little World

21 A Burnt Ship

22 The Triple Fool

23 Antiquary

24 The Dream

25 The Dissolution

26 Change

27 The Anniversary

28 The Prohibition

29 His Parting from Her

Glossary

Acknowledgments

1

The Curse

I like to imagine there were more of us in the beginning. Not many, I suppose. But more than there are now.

We are the minority the world does not accept. Not outside of fantasy, and even that’s blacklisted. We look like everyone else. Sometimes we act like everyone else. In many ways, we are like everyone else. We are everywhere, on every street. We live in a way you might consider normal, provided you don’t look too hard.

Not all of us know what we are. Some of us die without ever knowing. Some of us know, and we never get caught. But we’re out there.

Trust me.

I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. That was in the year 2056. AS 127, if you use the Scion calendar. It was expected of young men and women to scratch out a living wherever they could, which was usually behind a counter of one sort or another. There were plenty of jobs in the service industry. My father thought I would lead a simple life; that I was bright but unambitious, complacent with whatever work life threw at me.

My father, as usual, was wrong.

From the age of sixteen I had worked in the criminal underworld of Scion London—SciLo, as we called it on the streets. I worked among ruthless gangs of voyants, all willing to floor each other to survive. All part of a citadel-wide syndicate headed by the Underlord. Pushed to the edge of society, we were forced into crime to prosper. And so we became more hated. We made the stories true.

I had my little place in the chaos. I was a mollisher, the protégée of a mime-lord. My boss was a man named Jaxon Hall, the mime-lord responsible for the I-4 area. There were six of us in his direct employ. We called ourselves the Seven Seals.