The Skeleth Read online

  ALSO BY MATTHEW JOBIN

  The Nethergrim

  My heartfelt thanks to Timothy King and to Melodie Yen for their invaluable assistance in the creation of the Dhanic language and the other languages in the series.

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Jobin. Map copyright © 2016 by David Elliot.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Philomel Books is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17253-1

  Edited by Michael Green.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket art © 2016 by Bart Bus

  Jacket design by Kristin Smith

  Version_2

  Contents

  Also by Matthew Jobin

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  For my father

  Visit http://bit.ly/23LFB5d for a larger version of this map.

  All truly wise thoughts have been thought before; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Prologue

  Katherine. Wake up, child.”

  Katherine opened her eyes. “I’m awake, Papa.”

  Her father let go of her shoulder. “It’s started.” He turned and strode from her tiny bedroom.

  “Has she broken?” Katherine sat up in the twisted mess of her blankets. Her rag-doll horse tumbled out onto the floor.

  “Not yet.” Her father leaned over the fire in the hearth, in the room just past her bedroom door. He held out his hands to the warmth—deep orange light traced every line of his palm. “She’s down on her side, though. It won’t be long.”

  Katherine reached for her boots and pulled them on over her breeches. “Who was that man, Papa, the one who came by just after dark? I’ve never seen him before.”

  Her father made no answer. She watched him through the narrow, crooked doorway of her bedroom. The fire did no more than edge the shadows of the walls around him. He plucked out something from his belt and turned it over on his palm: a worn old silver penny marked with cuts and slashes on both sides.

  She got to her feet. “Papa?”

  He shut his hand over the coin. “Soot’s been up and down three times, child—pawed at the bedding, had her lip back.” He turned from the hearth. “She’s ready. We shouldn’t leave her alone for long.”

  Katherine rolled up her blankets in a ball and stepped from her bedroom. She turfed down the embers of the fire, then turned to find her father holding out her thickest cloak.

  “Every time you stand up, you’re taller.” He placed the cloak around her shoulders. “You’ll pass me before you’re done.”

  “I don’t want to get much taller, Papa.”

  “It’s your mother in you. She never minded it.” He pushed back the door and she followed him out.

  Katherine’s back drew in tight against the cold outside. A late frost crunched underfoot. Clouds spindled out in strips beneath the stars. The wind blew sharp from the mountains—it took loose locks of her long dark hair and whipped them in her eyes.

  She took a few jogging strides to come level with her father on the path down to the stables. “When did we breed her, Papa?”

  “The last full moon before the planting.”

  “She’s early. Especially for a colt.”

  “I know. You’re right again, Katherine—you always are about these things.” Her father pulled his cloak around his arms. “Five fillies in a row, child, five new mares for breeding but not a single warhorse. Lord Aelfric will not be pleased.”

  Katherine stepped into the stable behind him and tucked her wind-thrown hair behind her ears. Pigeons flapped between the rafters above. Two rows of heads poked out over the doors of the stalls along the central passage of the stable—not a single horse slept despite the lateness and the dark. Yarrow whickered, seeking for a pet on the nose. Butterburr looked to want the same, but Katherine knew that she would try to nip. Poor old Clover could not rest with all the stirring; she let out a snort, ears cocked toward the birthing stall at the far end of the stable.

  Katherine’s father took up the lantern from the door. Its glow picked out the gray from the brown in his beard and showed her a face creased with the sort of look he got when he stared at the wall all night, lost somewhere she could not follow.

  Katherine hated it when he got that look. “Papa, what is it?”

  “It’s a big foal. Very big.” He drew back the door to the birthing stall, and there within lay Soot, a horse as black as the gaps between the stars, down on her side in the straw with her legs out and rigid, hooves twitching with every breath.

  Katherine dropped to her knees in the straw of the stall, her stomach sinking. She had started helping her father with the foalings when she was seven and had come to know a hard one when she saw it. Soot jerked her head up and back in time with her grunts. Her coat had taken on a sheen of sweat—the stall smelled of it, smelled of fear. The swelling in her belly looked all wrong.

  Katherine’s father hung up the lantern and plunged his hands into the bucket of water in the corner; it made Katherine shiver just to see it. He crouched down by Soot’s hindquarters. Soot twitched—her next grunt was a groan.

  “Hush. Hush now, all is well.” Katherine put a hand to Soot’s cheek. “Papa, she’s hurting.”

  Her father sat back. He put his clean hand to his forehead.

  “Papa?”

  He looked up at her. “It’s a breech. The foal’s backward.”

  Katherine cradled Soot’s head.
“Is it alive?”

  “Tried to bite me, just now.”

  “Can you turn it, Papa? Can you get it out?”

  “I don’t know,” said her father. “Biggest foal I’ve ever felt in a mare her size, and it’s an awful tangle in there. I can’t work out where to start.”

  Soot’s back bunched, the whole of her pulsed in an effort to push out the foal. She strained and contracted, strained again, then released. Katherine’s father tensed and tried to turn the foal, set his shoulders and tried again. He breathed out a snort through his nose; so did Soot. He let go.

  “Papa, her water’s broken.” Katherine felt along Soot’s flank—a big foal, huge, kicking and struggling; helpless, all wrong. “We’ve got to birth the foal soon or we’ll lose it. We might lose them both.”

  “Curse me for the worst of fools,” said her father. “I knew we shouldn’t have bred her to Break-spear for her first—but Lord Aelfric wants his great warhorses, wants his new blood. Curse me for a fool and him for a knave.”

  Katherine ran a hand through the mare’s sodden mane. “You can do it, Soot. You can. Please don’t give up.”

  “Yes, come, girl. Come, Soot. We’ll do it together.” Her father got up on his knees and strained with careful effort for a long, long time, pulling, shifting and pulling again. The other horses whickered and stamped. One of the barn cats paced by the stall, looked in on the proceedings, then kept on with his nightly rounds.

  Soot let out another groan, softer than before. Her contractions slowed and weakened. She sank exhausted in the straw, her gaze withdrawn from the world.

  “Please keep trying.” Katherine rubbed under Soot’s chin. “You can do it, keep trying. Please.”

  “Katherine.” Her father kept his head low. “Please go and get the slaughter mallet.”

  Katherine’s belly gave a lurch. “Papa, no!”

  “We can’t let this go on, child. We cannot let them suffer.” Her father sucked in a breath and tried again, but his voice spoke defeat.

  “Please, Papa!”

  “Get the mallet, Katherine. You don’t have to stay.”

  “No!” Katherine got up and ran from the stable. The wind greeted her face with a slap. She sank down on an old stump by the wall and wrapped her arms around her middle.

  Clouds slid hissing through the sky. Night proceeded in its fall toward the moment of its deepest chill. The moon rose in a slow arc at the horizon, the first crescent of spring.

  Katherine’s father stepped out into the cold. Blood traced in runnels down his hands, dripping from the ends of his fingers. “Come inside, child.”

  “No, Papa, please. I can’t.”

  “Come.” He led her inside and down the passage. It felt like some appointed cruelty, some hard lesson about hope, about death. He opened the door to the birthing stall.

  The foal raised its head, its ears pricked up high, slick with the fluids of its birth.

  “Papa!” Katherine seized her father’s hand, bloody though it was. “Papa, you did it!”

  “They did it.” Her father leaned against the door. “I don’t even know if I helped. All of a sudden, it just happened.”

  Soot stood up, snapping the cord between her belly and the foal. She turned and bent her head to lick its dark fur.

  “You were wrong, Katherine.” There was a note of teasing triumph in her father’s voice. “A colt, a boy—and a big, strong one. He’s bound to be a warhorse of the first rank or I’m the Duke of Westry. Lord Aelfric will be pleased with us after all.”

  Soot licked her foal clean with careful vigor, then she lowered her head and gave him a nudge with her nose. The foal let out an indignant snort, but his mother persisted, so after a few more pushes he made an attempt to stand. He cranked his untested muscles and propped up his rump on his gangly hind legs—then looked at a loss for what to do next. He scrabbled his forelegs through the straw and tried to lever himself to all fours, but succeeded only in collapsing the lean-to he had made for his rear end and crashing back to the ground. Katherine laughed—her father laughed.

  The foal shook his head, blew hard through his nose, and got his hind legs raised again with such speed that the motion seemed powered by embarrassment. Then, with his mother supporting him, he stood up on all four of his tiny hooves. His mother turned around, and with sure swiftness he found a teat and began to feed.

  “I’ll never get tired of seeing that,” said Katherine’s father. “Not if I see it a thousand times.”

  The foal tottered over to Katherine with his mother close behind. The lantern wavered, deepening the coaly darkness of his coat, gray falling to black through a shadowed hint of blue. He looked up at Katherine, tiny and frail—and bold, springing upon the world as though a blast of trumpets had announced him. She felt a shiver; from the ground, from her feet to her eyes.

  She reached out her hand. “Your name is Indigo.”

  Chapter 1

  Let the light of the stars descend.” Edmund Bale held forth his hand, indicating the place where the spell should begin. “Stars, attend me. Surround me. Let your light descend.”

  Nothing happened. Edmund sighed and turned to light a torch.

  How can you know what light is, if you do not know what darkness is?

  Edmund startled and dropped the torch in the moorspike grass. “How many times do I have to tell you?” He reached out, scratching his hands against the toothy leaves, and retrieved it only just before he set the land around him ablaze. “I’m not listening. Go away.”

  He drove the torch upright into the earth beside him and sat down on the spread of blankets he had used to make his seat. He found his place in the book he had brought with him, turning the parchment page to catch the torchlight, and started reading the passage he had marked the night before: The Nethergrim has taken many shapes and guises through the ages of the world. Ever and again does it rise to—

  Edmund. The Voice came without sound, like a thought that Edmund could not recognize as his own. I am right here. Why search a book to learn about me?

  “Because you lie.” Edmund could not work out why the Voice sometimes came to him as words, sometimes the fleeting ghosts of unfamiliar feelings, and sometimes merely a hanging presence, the sense that something was watching him from just over his shoulder. He had gathered all the books he could find to help him learn and understand, but that did not amount to much. He was, after all, just a fourteen-year-old boy, the son of peasant innkeepers, and the village where he lived stood at the crossroads of nothing and nowhere.

  Ever and again does it rise to throw down the works of men. The letters scribed upon the parchment page seemed to float in the orange flicker. Slay one form, and it takes another. Defend against its claws, and fall victim to its honeyed smile. I lacked the power to halt this eternal cycle, but I could slow it long enough that others might one day do what I could not. If destroying the body of the Nethergrim could do it no lasting harm, then I would trap it in a sleep of centuries. I—

  How I have longed to hear the sweet music of your thoughts once again. The Voice felt the same as it had beneath the mountain, amongst the swirling smoke before the seven-pointed star. Wayward though you are, still you find your way back to me. I can only think that this means you care.

  Edmund plugged his ears, even though he knew it was useless. “Go away. Just go away.”

  But I have missed you, child. Have you not missed me?

  “No!”

  Edmund. The Voice seemed somehow both near and far, inside his thoughts while at the same time feeling as though it had come from between the distant stars above. Do you truly wish to learn the art of magic?

  “Not from you.” Edmund shut the book, then shut his eyes. Sometimes, if he concentrated, he could make the Voice recede and tease out his own thoughts from the thoughts it tried to worm into his mind.

  It is a sim
ple thing, at heart, said the Voice. Consider again, child—can you know what light is, if you do not know what darkness is?

  Edmund started to make a retort, but the idea the Voice had planted took root within him.

  It might help you to imagine that you were born blind, and that everyone you knew was also blind. How then would you know that what you saw was darkness?

  “I suppose I wouldn’t know.” Edmund shook his head. “Does that make me stupid?”

  Not for one of your kind. Open your eyes, Edmund.

  Edmund did so. He half expected to see the form the Nethergrim had taken in its chamber in the mountains—coils twisting within coils, mouths and eyes bubbling forth from a roll of smoke. Instead he saw only his burning torch, his book and blankets, and beyond that the moonlight touching gray upon the rises of the dead and empty moors.

  Take up your cup, Edmund. Fill it with water. Hold it to the light.

  Edmund reached for the stoppered jug he had taken from home and poured out some water into an earthen mug. All the while, something in him told him to stop, to disobey the Voice, but at the same time something else told him to listen and learn.

  Touch the water, spoke the Voice. Watch the waves.

  Edmund touched a fingertip to the surface. The waves spread in ripples around it, stuttering in the torchlight.

  What do you call a wave that has a crest, but not a trough? A top, but no bottom?

  Edmund considered. “Nothing. There is no such thing.”

  Then what is a wave?

  Edmund sat watching the waves dissipate, dying to a glassy flatness. He tried to find the words—he could not, but he could find the thought. A feeling of certainty grew in him, a tingle on his neck that was more than the icy touch of the wind.

  Douse the torch, Edmund.

  Edmund poured out the water over the torch, then ground it in the dirt, frightened all the while by his obedience. “Why are you telling me all this? Why are you trying to teach me?”