Page 144 of Silver in the Bone

The Children crept over the boulders and through the trees, staying in the heavy shadows of the forest, just outside their hated light. Dead moss and lichen rained silently to the forest floor as they scaled the branches with terrifying grace. Others perched on knobby roots that clawed into the ground. They chittered with excitement, huffing and sniffing.

No, I thought. It couldn’t be ... Olwen had said ...

Olwen had only said they weren’t as active during the day. That they hated the light. Not that they all slept. Not that none would try to attack us.

Emrys turned slowly, slowly toward the stench of vile death. The Children’s panting breath became the mist, and the mist their breath.

He released me gently back to the ground with a heart-shredding look and rose onto his haunches.

The sword slipped from my hand to Emrys’s and I moaned as the flames flickered out to hissing smoke. He looked down at it, bemused, as he stood to face the Children alone.

One crawled out in front of the others, spittle flying as it growled. One of its long, bony limbs reached out through the mist, slick with sour sweat and scaled.

It tilted its gray hairless head at an unnatural angle. Its eyes were lidless and wide, and the thin, pallid skin around them was puckered. But past the exaggerated and sunken features, there was something disturbingly familiar about the way its lips curled into a smirk.

I knew that face. Those eyes with their wolfish gleam.

It was Septimus.

Or what remained of Septimus.

My nails tore at the dead grass and cattails. I tried to push myself up. To stand.

Emrys swung the sword in wild arcs to hold the Children back, but without the threat of fire, they were undaunted, clambering over one another with cracking bones and snarls to be the first to get to him.

A screech echoed across the lake. The monster—the revenant—rose from the water and drifted to shore. Mud, twigs, and dead grass floated to her outstretched arms and the exposed half of her rib cage. Sickly mist amassed around her feet as the creature was restored to her full form.

Pressure built in my ears. My chest. More Children appeared in the darkness of the spiky bramble around her.

“What the hell is that?” Emrys gasped. “Is that—is that the High Priestess?”

Her head swung around at those words, and when she screamed, the sound rent the air. I clutched at my ears. Emrys staggered down to one knee.

The revenant called again, scaling the rocky hill of the opposite bank, vanishing into the woodland at such speed it stripped the bark from the black craggy trees. The Children around us moved back, deeper into the forest’s darkness. They barked and growled as they circled the wide body of the lake at a gallop. Chasing her.

Or summoned to her side.

Summoned to her side.

She’s controlling them. The words drifted through my mind, trying to take root. High Priestess Viviane is controlling them.

Emrys dropped the sword and fell into a crouch. “I don’t know what the hell just happened, but we’re losing the light. Can you—?”

He gripped my shoulder, his voice faded beneath the slow drumming of my heart. My whole body throbbed with each beat.

He’ll see. I drew my wounded arm beneath me, hiding it. He’ll know.

Blackness overtook my vision, and there was no fighting it. As my body released into numb exhaustion, one last ghost of a thought was left to follow me into the dark.

He’ll know I’m one of them.

There was something about the watery light that made it impossible to tell if I was awake or dreaming. It was shifting, swelling against mossy stone walls. Caught, for a moment, like smoke in a bottle.

It would have been easy, so easy, to drift back into the blessed nothingness. To not feel the way my arm throbbed and my skull seemed poised to split open like a clam.

Instead, I forced my eyes to focus through the satin blur around me. I licked at the gritty dirt between my teeth, my tongue dry and heavy. A wind howled as if searching for its lost brothers.

My mind, ever the survivor, took an inventory of my surroundings. Dirt floor, woolly blanket beneath me, the rough arch of a low ceiling. A shadow in the doorway, coaxing a fire from a snarl of twigs.

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