and salt and the weight of Tavin in her arms as the Well of Grace swallowed them whole.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MERCY
They called her the Eater of Bones, and she was the last of her kind to die.
One by one, she had seen her siblings to their graves: Gen-Mara in his beloved magnolias, Brightest Eye in her cove, the Mender in their field beneath the open sky. Dena went gnashing into her grave, delighted and furious; Rhensa went dancing, lovely as ever. And when they were laid to rest, she took them to the Covenant, to see the life that came next.
It was a great working, their Covenant: a bargain between the first gods and their thousand children, all for the sake of what were meant to be toys. But toys for gods needed the capacity to think, to breathe, to love. Yet that was what made them more than toys. That was what demanded they choose their own way in the world.
That was what the thousand gods had been willing to die for: choice, true free will, in a world they would forge themselves. The Eater of Bones had helped build the Covenant that made it so. And they needed her more than any other god, for she was the god of the sunset and sunrise, of the fire and the ash, of the worms that ate the flesh and made the soil that grew new life.
They called her the Eater of Bones. She was the goddess of rebirth, and she was the last of the gods to die.
* * *
Fie had not expected saltwater.
It flooded her nose, her mouth, her lungs as she gasped and choked. The hymn of the Well of Grace pounded through her bones, harsh, demanding—she would burst from the roaring in her veins—and then—
Sparks.
The well had eaten scores of thousands of bones over the centuries. Time had worn them down to little but dust in the water … but the water had stayed.
So, too, had the bone.
Fie had called for it the moment she sank below the surface.
Now she was drowning in it.
* * *
Before she laid in her grave, the Eater of Bones made sure her children had their Birthright.
The terrible thing about free will was, of course, that anyone could choose to be terrible. And she and her brethren had debated long and hard about how to spare their children from the worst of themselves.
The answer was imperfect, but the best the thousand gods could manage was this: the Covenant already measured every soul it embraced in death, so it could send them to a fitting new life. If, at any point, it found a soul that would only continue to harm others in the life it led, they gave the Covenant the power to intervene and pluck that soul from the world like a ripe grape. They had built the Covenant and its divine apparatus with all the wisdom, all the knowledge of good and evil, all the love the thousand gods could give, and they knew it would not act lightly.
Still … the Eater of Bones was not satisfied.
She wanted better. She wanted more.
And so she gathered her children by her grave, and she gave them the gift of mercy.
Their lot was not an easy one: she had chosen humans who wished a simple life, who valued family born or built, who believed in the dignity of even the lowest creature. Their trade would be the undertakers for wealthy or poor, for lives ended in sickness or violence, for the kind and the cruel.
And the world was bound to be cruel if it could. So she would spare them the cruelty of the Covenant’s plague and grant them a gift with which to barter. They alone had the ability to spare others. They needed but two things: a bone for every Birthright, and twelve among them who would welcome the sinner into their own.
* * *
Fie felt it all: fire, blood, desire, refuge, truth.
Chief among them, though, roared memory. The Birthright of the Owls clung to her, borne on the water, singing to her of the bones at the bottom, kings and beggars and heretics and, before them all: a god.
She saw—she saw—she saw—
* * *
She was reborn just like everyone else, and they called her Huwim, and she walked with her people and carried the dead and spared them from the Covenant’s judgment if she could. She taught all the nation to save their milk teeth, to give them freely each year