Free Heaven's Bones by Samantha Henderson Page A

placed her wood on a pile behind it. “There always is.”
    The stew was lamb: delicious, and followed by hot tea with a bite to it like mint, and as Nicolae sat with him and carved at the top of his walking stick with a short knife they talked about the river, how it linked the small towns of Alabama like beads on a string necklace, and the animals they’d seen, and all manner of inconsequential things that afterward Alistair would try hard to remember, knowing that somewhere inside Nicolae’s innocuous words there was some nugget, some clue that was of immense importance.
    The woman’s name was Tariel, and when he asked after the girl’s name she smiled and stroked the girl’s blonde hair. The girl looked at him unblinking, with dark eyes, incongruous with the rest of her coloring.
    â€œShe hasn’t told us her name yet,” was all Tariel would say.
    The girl sat nearby, listening to Alistair and Nicolae’s conversation. When Tariel gave her a close-woven basket, telling her to find berries, she pulled Alistair by the hand until he followed her between the birches, across a patch of meadow to a shady bower where blackberries clustered, swollen and dusky purple, thick and close to the ground. They filled the basket, staining their fingers and scratching their arms on the brambles.
    All the time she never spoke to him, but after a while she did begin to smile.
    Long afterward Alistair would remember bringing the berries to Tariel, and eating something thick and sweet that he’d never had before, and sitting on the bay horse as it paced the paths of the meadowlands. Perhaps once he slept, because he could remember Nicolae and Tariel speaking nearby, their words drifting like silt through the wide-meshed net of his drowsing.
    â€œDo you see anything?” Nicolae’s voice was husky, and a little sad.
    â€œOnly what you know already,” replied Tariel. “Only what we both know about the Children of Jaelle.”
    â€œSo it’s true, then? Her seed scatters further than I’d guessed.”
    â€œIt’s the nature of the Vistani to wander.”
    â€œHe hasn’t the Sight.”
    â€œNor Curse neither. But he holds inside him the capacity for great good and great evil, like two halves of a ripening peach, and an empty space inside where the pit once was. I can’t tell which will stay and which will wither away. It won’t be an ordinary life.”
    â€œShall we take him, then?”
    In his half-dream, Alistair stirred, fear and joy threading through him:
Take me! Take me
Home.
    â€œYou know we are not permitted.”
    Alistair must have awakened, because Nicolae was standing before him, his expression at once stern and kind.
    â€œYou must return to your family, boy, and the day is growing old.” It was true; the shadows were creeping across the ground and the sun was low and swollen-red.
    Alistair said good-bye to Tariel and nodded at the silent girl, and Nicolae and Mala walked him back to the bee-tree, where the hive was settling down and humming drowsily. It felt like a curtain slowly closing across the last, tantalizingly incomplete final scene of a play he didn’t want to end.
    â€œCan you find your own way back? Just keep left of the river, and right at the triple-trunk oak.”
    Alistair nodded, too overcome to say anything more.
    He was well on his way before he wondered how Nicolae knew the way he should take to get home.
    He half-turned, but in the darkening twilight all he could see under the honey-oak was the dog, Mala, who stared after him. Then even the dog looked away, as if someone was calling her, and then she was gone.

    Sometimes, after the Fire, when Alistair Weldon left the confines of the house and the whispering of unseen attendants and walked beside the river, he saw the shimmer of pollen or heard the humming of a bee and thought that it might happen again—that the smell of dried honey would lead