The Bone Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

to effusive gratitude. Instead, when he finally took himself to bed and slept for sixteen hours, he woke up to find on his doorstep four eggs, a meat pastry and six golden apples hoarded from the previous year’s harvest, the first of many anonymous offerings. He couldn’t have borne to be thanked for a task he thought botched and poor, but he was grateful for the food and the delicacy of the villagers’ tact.
    The damps began to clear two days later, defying the bleakest predictions that the mine would be forced to close. After the windlass was repaired and a makeshift ventilator erected, a party cautiously went down to explore the mine, and to begin the melancholy task of bringing out the bodies. The remains were winched up on a canvas sling, to be returned to those who gathered, with a patient, silent dignity, by the minehead. Cadvan joined the whole village there when the first party went down, in case he might be needed; but when it was clear that the miners rescued only the dead, he didn’t return. His work was with the living.
    Most of all, he couldn’t bear to witness the stunned grief that hit when all hope of hope collapsed. Many Jouains, no matter how grim the chances, no matter how rationally they knew there was no possibility of survival, clung to a secret belief that those missing were still alive, until the moment they saw the body come out of the shaft. To make things worse, the waterlogged corpses were sometimes unrecognizable: a few still kept hoping until twenty-one bodies made twenty-one deaths unarguable.
    The first to be brought up was Taran’s brother, Inshi: laid out on a bier, his corpse seemed tiny, like a broken bird. Taran, his face expressionless, went up to claim the body. Cadvan watched him walking beside the bier as two miners carried it down the hill to the village, and wished passionately that there was some comfort he could offer; but seeing Taran’s rigid shoulders, braced against pain, speech died in his throat.
    He liked Taran, who lived next door with his siblings: he was a tall, heavily muscled man with a deep fund of kindness. When Cadvan had first arrived in Jouan, he had dealt with Taran to buy the house, which had belonged to Taran’s childless uncle, who had lately died from the lung disease. Although he hadn’t been asked, Taran had helped Cadvan to patch its walls and roof so it was weatherproof, laughingly brushing aside offers of payment. Although he had only recently reached manhood, he was a skilled hewer, the leader of his gang and the main breadwinner for his family. Both his parents were dead, his father the year before from a rockfall in the mine, his mother from a wasting sickness shortly afterwards.
    Later, after Inshi’s burial, Cadvan haltingly gave his condolences. Taran grasped Cadvan’s hand, his eyes lit with sorrow. “Poor lad,” he said. “Nine summers was all he had. An imp, he was. I’ll miss him.” His voice caught.
    Cadvan cleared his throat, thinking of the mischievous boy he had glimpsed running past his door. “At least Hal got out,” he said at last. Hal, a quicksilver girl a few years older than Inshi, had barely suffered a scratch.
    “Aye. Aye. The best of friends, those two were, Inshi and Hal. You’d have thought they sprang from the same egg.” Taran’s face darkened with memory, and then he looked up, his mouth set firmly against his grief. “Truth be told, we were much luckier than some. If I hadn’t cut my foot, I’d have been down there too. And how I cursed my luck at the time! Indira Huna lost her whole family, father, mother, brothers…”
    Indira was blind, and had never worked in the mine. Cadvan had seen her walking around the village, feeling her way with a stick, although he had never had the occasion to speak to her. She was startlingly fair, her unseeing eyes dark and blank in her thin face, and was delicately built compared to most Jouains. Without a family to support her, she would find it difficult to