Idol of Bone by Jane Kindred

Author:Jane Kindred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gods;goddesses;shape-shifters;gender bending;reincarnation
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2015-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Thirteen: Expurgation

Ra pushed herself up from the cold floorboards, stiff and empty, her elbows shuddering with weakness. She lay on the floor of a rented room with no idea of the passage of time. Not too long, she supposed, or the tavern keeper would have come wanting his money and found this corpse of a woman on his floor. Deep furrows were gouged into the boards, and there were splinters beneath her nails. Perhaps she’d been trying to dig her way back into the grave.

She climbed to her feet and peeled off the dirty gown. As she lowered her arms with the cloth in a ball inside her fist, she saw her reflection. In the mirror over the washbasin, warped and fissured, stood a naked woman, disheveled lengths of black hair clinging to her breasts. The empty woman stared at her. Ra couldn’t place her with herself. She dropped the gown and threaded her fingers through the patch of hair between her legs, and with the other hand she covered one breast and squeezed it cruelly. Why had she bothered with this flesh? She might have been what Jak wished to be: truly unsexed.

What had driven her from peaceful oblivion to create this pointless shell? It took tremendous will to form the body from thought, an ardent desire for life. She couldn’t have had either of these, after…after. Had she come for revenge? Had she meant to punish Ahr for her sins? Ra pitched forward in the grip of nausea and swallowed bitter acid in her throat. She ought to eat, but that would only prolong things. She straightened again and looked into the marred reflection. The woman was starving. Let her. She spat at herself, and watched the spittle slip down the glass.

Ra conjured a simple garment in the style she’d seen on commoners upon her arrival. She chose black, a dress that covered her from head to toe, with long, straight sleeves that covered the backs of her hands, and a skirt with a high waist. She wore her boots; those would do. The sable cloak would not. It was an absurdity. Instead, she manufactured a light, hooded cloak of flax, again in black, and hid her Meerish hair beneath it. Between her head and the hood, she draped a thin scarf of translucent white to form the veil that would protect her face from curiosity and disguise her as a virgin—which, technically, she supposed, she was.

As she wound the cloth about her throat and drew the hood over her head, she looked once more in the mirror. The image stung her with the force of raw memory peeled back like skin torn from her flesh. The last face MeerRa had seen had worn such a veil, a veil that had fallen only as one more assault against him.

The Meerchild’s drawings were subdued. Nesre cursed himself for the foolishness of his outburst. It had damaged the child’s confidence at the worst possible moment. The child continued to draw

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