Brood of Bones Read Online Free PDF

hand.
    One girl asked, “Why is it so important? That we quicken.”
    “Because...because....”
    Rather than answering, I reached to touch two more women, feeling nothing but a tautness of skin, and I tried yet another but found only stillness. My hand remained on that abdomen, as I felt myself too weak to lift it.
    “It means the Priest of the Ever Always is wrong. About all of you. There is no life here.”

 

     
    Night Three, Third Trimester
     
    I should not have said it, not in front of the pregnant women. The guilt struck me on the walk back to my carriage, and I began wringing my glove. Maid Janny coaxed the cloth from my fingers to pull it back over my hand.
    Their children had to be deformed. I could think of no better explanation, and I grew dizzy imagining so many babies paralyzed in their wombs, perhaps entirely lacking legs and arms. The thought horrified me, washing me with deluges of heat and shockwaves of cold, and by turns I felt I would melt or shatter. I swayed and sweated, propping one hand against the coiling root of a banyan tree for support.
    This could not be. I had to be wrong, yet any reassuring thought flew from my reach. I had to enter my dream laboratory to clear my mind.
    Staggering into my carriage, I closed my eyes to see the hundred marble steps descending to sleep. I ran down them, even as the stair trembled with my anxiety and rippled from the heat The final step lifted me into the black, round room without doors.
    Feverish warmth subsided into a chill. My dream maintained a cooler temperature to facilitate thinking, and a filigree of frost rimmed my memory mirror. Disordered thoughts flashed nonsense images and flickers of color over the glass. I gripped my head and forced the nonsense away.
    Something was amiss in the bellies of the women in Morimound. If they carried babies, then those babies could never live.
    I had heard once of a pregnancy that held no life, only thousands of pearls of skin, bubbles of flesh that multiplied until the mother burst. The midwife’s story had sounded incredible and, if it was true, would account for an eighth path to death for mothers, in addition to the retching death, which I had forgotten in the Court.
    The midwife had thought that “froth womb” swelled a mother’s belly faster than a true child, and I did not believe that was the case here, given the women I had seen thus far. The length and quality of their hair and nails gave me an estimate of how long they had carried, as those areas were affected by the feminine oils released in pregnancy. The fact brought small solace because, if the women did not suffer from froth womb, then they faced something that I had even less capacity to explain.
    I could mull over the potential causes, such as an epidemic of tumors, yet I sensed the sun had set in the real world, and Sri the Once Flawless would be helpless in her cage. The priests had poisoned her with wormwood then had left her to the mercy of Feasters, condemned for a pregnancy over which I doubted very much she had any control. I could save her; I would save her, lawfully as the Flawless.
    Awaking, I directed Deepmand to travel downhill toward the execution cage. Maid Janny entered the carriage and then closed the door behind her.
    “You can drive tired horses to death if you like,” she said, “but you won’t have me outside at night. My tastiness would be the death of me.”
    “The relative tenderness of your tissues is beside the point,” I said. “Feasters do not consume the physical.”
    “Nothing worse than a picky eater.”
    Janny sat across from me, scrunched against the sideboards. The carriage had been built to hold six people, permitting her just enough room to squeeze inside among my gowns. My enchanted earrings shone blue light over her grey dress and bonnet, which she filled with an amorphous body. Freckles flawed her face like air-bubble inclusions in an emerald.
    Her smile lines remained even as she lowered her chin