The pain began before his fingers arrived.
A hand's breadth from the ulna, Raider's eyes started to sting — the old test, the old language, the prickling that had once graded every bone in the formation for him. But where the radius had stung like sunlight on tired eyes, this was needles. The ulna did not glow any brighter than its brothers. It simply sat there in the formation's curve, slim and white and quiet, and looking directly at it felt like staring into a wasp's nest with the lid off.
Then came the pressure.
It fell on him from nowhere and everywhere, the way the whole weight of a pond falls on a diver who goes too deep — his shoulders, his spine, the back of his bowed neck. The stone under his knees creaked. A month ago, that pressure would have laid him flat and held him there like a beetle under a boot.
Raider noted, distantly, that he was still upright, and did not pause to wonder why.
It never occurred to him that the pressure was immense, and that so was he.
His fingers closed around the ulna.
The bone bit.
Not with teeth — with an aura, erupting out of the slim white shape like a storm out of a clear sky. It lashed him. There was no other word: lines of stinging force whipped across his forearm, his shoulder, his cheek, and where they landed his skin opened in long thin cuts, as if the air itself had grown edges. One lash. Five. A dozen, striping him in his own blood, each one a syllable of a single unmistakable sentence:
Let go.
"No," said Raider, through his teeth, to a dead man's bone.
And he pulled.
The ulna moved.
Through the pain, the shock of it nearly undid him — nothing else had moved that first night, not the skull, not the femur, not one knuckle of one finger, the whole skeleton fixed in its formation like stars in the sky. But the ulna slid, grudging, a finger's width through the formation's light, and the lashes doubled, and Raider set his tempered body against it the way he had once set himself against twelve years and hauled.
He had been beaten before. He knew how to carry pain like luggage — you did not fight the weight, you packed it, you stacked it, you left your hands free. The aura flayed at him and he packed it away, strip by strip. Blood ran into his sleeve. The bone moved another finger's width. Another.
Above the skull, an ember of light watched, utterly still.
The ulna came free of the formation with a sensation like a nail leaving old wood, and for one whole breath, everything stopped — the lashes, the pressure, the needles behind his eyes. Raider knelt in the ringing silence, striped in blood, holding a second bone in a shaking fist.
The bone lit yellow.
'Oh,' he had time to think. 'The price.'
The world turned white.
...
What Master Bones saw, from above the skull, was this: a thunderbolt the height of a man, born in the boy's closed fist, unfolding around his whole body in one instant like a seed becoming a tree — trunk of white-gold fire, branches into every limb — and then the chamber ringing like a struck bell, and smoke, and a small burnt shape crumpled at the formation's edge with its fist still closed.
For the first time in tens of thousands of years, the spirit was too astonished to speak.
It moved. That was the impossible part — not the bolt, the bolt was simply Lightning being Lightning. The bone moved for him. The formation's law was older than the Settlement's canyons: what does not accept, cannot be lifted. The radius had accepted the boy. The ulna had not — the spirit had felt its refusal, bright and clear as a slammed door. And the boy had pulled on the slammed door until the door came off its hinges, and the ulna had gone with him — furious, exacting its toll to the last drop, but it had gone.
Acceptance could be given.
Apparently, it could also be taken — if the taker simply declined, with his whole body and his whole ruined childhood, to be refused.
"Kid," breathed Master Bones, to the smoking chamber, "what are you?"
Then the smoke shifted, and he saw the state of what was left, and stopped caring about the question.
The boy was charred. Blacked skin, cracked to the red beneath, from crown to knuckle; hair burnt to stubble; the slow terrible stillness of a body deciding. His heartbeat stuttered in the spirit's perception like a candle in wind — catching, guttering, catching.
Master Bones was beside him faster than light moves, and his hands went to the small ruined shoulders, and passed through them.
Of course they passed through. Everything passed through. The immunity that had made the boy impossible to possess, impossible to refine, impossible to seed, made him — the spirit discovered, in the worst moment of his long death — impossible to help. No healing art would enter. No strength could be lent. Tens of thousands of years of power hung in the air around a dying twelve-year-old, useless as smoke.
There was exactly one door into that body, and the boy himself was lying on the threshold of it, unconscious.
So the most powerful being the East Canyons had ever hidden did the only thing left to a master whose hands go through his apprentice.
He talked.
"RAIDER." The name cracked through the chamber like the bolt come back. "Apprentice of Master Bones, you are not excused. Do you hear me? You took the bone. You kept it — it's in your fist right now, you mule, you glorious little mule, the price is PAID. Now you will not waste it. Find your hands. The method, boy. The tempering. Both bones. Breathe."
...
The world was a ringing whiteness, and somewhere at the bottom of it, someone was calling him a mule.
Raider knew the method the way his lungs knew air — five days of it, nine breaths in, the slow rhythm, permission. He could not have said, then or ever after, whether he began it or whether it began in him, dragged into motion by a voice that would not stop counting.
In. Two. Three...
Warmth from his right fist: the radius, cool and broad as a river, pouring into the cooked ruin of him, and everywhere it flowed, the pain banked down from white to red.
Out. Two. Three...
Heat from his left fist: the ulna — and its warmth was nothing like the river. It was bright, jagged, jittering, a current that entered like a lash and settled like a brand. But it settled. Furious, exacting, it flowed where the method called it, side by side with the wind through the channels of his skeleton, and where the two currents ran together, ruined flesh drank from them both and mended.
It mends as it makes, a memory said, in a smug, raspy voice. This method once knit me back together from wounds that should have scattered my soul.
'You might have mentioned,' Raider thought, from very far away, 'that I'd be testing that.'
Time went strange. The whiteness ebbed by shades. And through all of it, without pause, without sleep — the spirit needed neither and would have refused both — the voice kept on: counting his breaths when the counting was all that held the rhythm, and between the counting, talking. Stories. The names of dead friends. The taste of a fruit from a vanished world. A duel retold three ways, each version more flattering than the last, tied off — every time Raider's attention guttered — with a sharp: "Stay awake. This is the good part."
Raider stayed awake. He would have said, if his mouth had worked, that it was the good part.
...
On a day he could not have numbered, Raider opened his eyes, and the chamber's light did not hurt them.
He sat up slowly. Burnt skin cracked and fell away from him in black flakes, sloughing like a shed shell — and what emerged from underneath was not the pale boy who had reached for the ulna. The new skin was a deep dun-dark, dry, tight over muscle, netted with fine pale seams where the lashes had healed — a body that looked older than twelve and harder than any twelve had a right to be.
In his right fist: the radius, humming its low river-note.
In his left: the ulna. It hummed too, now — a bright, restless, wasp-in-a-jar note, but turned inward, a wasp that had, after long negotiation, decided the jar was acceptable.
Raider lifted his left hand and looked at it. Between his fingers, small and obedient, a thread of white-gold light crawled and snapped.
"So," said a voice above him, elaborately casual. "It kept you."
Master Bones hung over the formation in his usual place, in his usual pose, as if he had merely happened to be passing these last however-many days. His light, Raider noticed, was dimmer than it had been — the ember of something that had burned hard and long.
"My left ulna," the spirit went on. "It holds my understanding of Lightning. Wind, kid, accepted you — Lightning was taken, and Lightning forgets nothing. It will serve you truly; it paid itself out of your hide in advance and considers the account settled. But it will always test you. When it runs hot, it is not malfunctioning. It is remembering."
"Understood," said Raider. His voice came out low and scorched, a stranger's voice. He rather liked it.
"And hear the rest." The ember flared once, hard. "Never again. Not this way. You survived Lightning because Lightning's answer is quick — one bolt, one bill, paid in full. The bones further in do not answer quickly, kid. Reach for my femur the way you reached for my ulna and it will answer you for a year. There is a road to the rest of me and it is called being accepted, and from today you will walk it like a person, not like a mule. Swear it."
Raider thought about it — actually thought, which the ember seemed to find grimly satisfying.
"I swear it," he said. "One question. How long was I down here?"
"Twelve days."
The word went through him colder than the bolt had.
I'll be back in a week.
The rulebook. Twelve copies in twelve houses, a village already split down its middle and handed its first argument, a deadline five days dead — and Soho, patient, courteous Soho, who had been waiting for exactly one thing: proof that the boy and his borrowed power could not be relied upon.
Raider was on his feet before the last flake of burnt skin hit the floor.
"Go," said Master Bones, before he could speak. "I've had twelve days of your company; I'll survive the lack. Come back when the wind-bone is truly yours — and kid—" the ember steadied, and the old voice went, for one rare breath, entirely gentle. "You did not disappoint me."
Raider stopped at the tunnel mouth. Then he turned around, walked back, and bowed to the skeleton and its ember — properly, deeply, the way he had seen the clanspeople bow to the founders' shrine and had never once, in twelve years, been permitted to bow to anything.
"Thank you for staying with me, Master."
"Tch. Go home, apprentice."
He went up the abyss like an arrow loosed from the bottom of the world, wind roaring in his wake — and this time something rode the wind with him, bright and jagged and jealous of the sky. Static crackled along the walls of the shaft. Above the barren flats, the afternoon light began, unseasonably, impossibly, to dim.
Far away, on the rim of the Barren Settlement, a sentry looked up from the divided, murmuring square — at a wall of storm cloud assembling itself out of a clear sky — and felt every hair on their arms stand on end.