Page 103 of Silver in the Bone

He shook his head.

“You’re the one who wanted to make the bet,” I reminded him.

After a moment, he let out a small noise of frustration.

“Because ... I don’t know,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Because my whole life, I’ve never done anything for myself without help. I’ve never worked without my father. I’ve never accomplished anything that lives up to the legacy of the great Endymion Dye or the ancestors all lined up on the walls.”

“Do you want to accomplish something like that?” I asked. “Or do you feel like you have to?”

His brow furrowed. I wondered if anyone had bothered to ask him that question before.

“As far as I can tell,” I continued, “a legacy is just a tool parents use to control their kids.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Emrys said, leaning against the armoire.

“No, I wouldn’t,” I agreed. “I surpass Nash’s existence just by not regularly drinking myself into a coma.”

I heard the bitterness in the words, tasting that bile again. Seven years, I’d lived without the man. I’d accepted that he was never coming back. And now that he’d gone and died ... he’d upended everything all over again, and here I was, giving him control. Letting him reopen that raw part of me I’d seared shut.

I hated him. I hated Nash beyond words and worlds. Better him dead and Cabell and me on our own.

You, on your own, came a dark whisper in my mind. Cabell will leave you, too, in the end.

My fingers curled into fists at my side as I drew in a sharp breath.

“What’s the story with that?” Emrys asked. “You told the others about how he found your brother, but how did you end up in his care?”

“Care isn’t the word I would use for it,” I said, forcing myself to look through another stack of trunks, searching their engravings for any familiar symbols. That spinning feeling was back, faster and faster, pulling up all of the memories I’d kept locked away. Each a knife.

“That wasn’t an answer,” Emrys prodded.

The humiliation of it still stung, all these years later. I didn’t care if it made me a hypocrite. The thought of telling him made me want to vomit.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Emrys said softly. “Really.”

“How generous of you.”

“No, I just—” He shook his head. “Sorry.”

I breathed in the cold air, running my hand along the battered shield in front of me. All at once, the spinning stopped, and that thread ripped free from the spool. There was nothing left to tether that control to.

There was nothing but the need to be known, to be seen.

“My family abandoned me in Boston and Nash took me in,” I heard myself say. “So, let’s just say I know what it’s like to grow up without a legacy, and I wouldn’t recommend that, either.”

The words felt like they were reaching down and drawing my lungs out through my throat. I let him fill in the story’s gaps the way he wanted to. That was what everyone did anyway.

“There’s something I’ve always wondered,” he said, sitting on one of the trunks. “What happened to you in the years between when Nash left and you joined the guild? Where did you go?”

I knew that six-year stretch, from the time Cabell and I were ten to when we could officially claim Nash’s membership at sixteen, had always been a source of speculation among the guild. Our silence on it wasn’t just that they didn’t deserve an answer—it was what would happen if they found out.

“If I tell you,” I said, “you can’t repeat it to anyone. Your father especially.”

Emrys let out a soft hum. “Now I’m even more intrigued.”

“I’m serious,” I told him. “If you repeat what I’m about to tell you, I’ll come down on you harder than any curse.”

“Only increasing said intrigue,” Emrys said.

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