Page 41 of Silver in the Bone

“You don’t have a tutor?” I asked. That tracked with her being raised by one of the Cunningfolk, not her mother or another sorceress relation. “Then how are you able to cast?”

“Um, hello,” she said, clearly annoyed. “I taught myself.”

I exchanged a look with Cabell, who only raised his brows in reply. I’d never heard of a sorceress who hadn’t been taught by another sorceress—usually one of her own blood relations.

“Ah, so they won’t accept you into their ranks because you don’t have formal training,” Emrys said. “But the only way for you to get formal training is to be accepted into their ranks. That’s utterly maddening.”

“I’m beginning to like you,” Neve told him. “You can stay. For now.”

“Good,” Emrys said, “because I have an offer of my own.”

“Can’t wait to hear this,” Cabell muttered.

“We all want the same thing, and we all have a piece of the puzzle that will help us get it,” he said. “Neve has her power, of course. Tamsin knows where Nash has gone. And I think I know how he got there.”

“What?” I asked.

“What?” Cabell echoed. “Tams, you know where he went?”

“Oooh,” Neve said, looking from one to the other of us. “This sounds promising.”

I glanced at my brother, flashing him a meaningful look. “Can I talk to you outside for a second?”

He obliged, following me out and shutting the door behind us. We walked a few paces away.

“What exactly are we doing?” I whispered.

“Prague-ing,” he answered simply.

The Prague job had been Nash’s first and only time voluntarily working with a sorceress, long before he found Cabell and me. The sorceress had been a novice, new to her craft, and had hired Nash to retrieve a rumored vial of ichor—the divine blood of gods—from the tomb of her ancestor. Ultimately, he’d used her inexperience against her. The tomb had a rebounding curse so that whoever broke the curse at the entrance could not enter without falling dead. There’d been no ichor inside, and he never had to worry about her coming after him.

I blew out a harsh breath through my nose. “That’s not going to work. She may come off inexperienced, but she’s way too smart and way too knowledgeable about magic to not figure it out eventually. And as you know, withholding information only works for so long.”

Cabell winced at my tone, running a hand through his shaggy dark hair. He looked to me again, his expression twisting with regret. “What I said at home—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It does,” he pressed on, leaning back against the rock beside me. “I shouldn’t have kept the information about the ring and Nash from you, but I promised him.”

“Cab, I do get it,” I said. “For my part, I’m sorry I didn’t see how much you were struggling with everything.”

He was silent for a long time, working his jaw as if fighting the words he wanted to say. There was a hardness to his face that had never been there before, a new piece of armor to hide his feelings behind. “I shouldn’t have walked away,” he began hoarsely. “I should never have let you leave to do this on your own. I really had my head up my ass about the whole thing. It’s just ... hard to hope.”

“The only thing that really matters to me is that you’re here,” I said. “Took your damn time with it, though.”

He let out a rueful laugh. “And my punishment was getting caught by some of the stupidest Hollowers in our guild.”

I tried to summon a smile, but it wouldn’t come. After a moment, Cabell looked down, hugging his arms to his chest. Up close, he looked terrible. His pale skin emphasized the dark, heavy circles beneath his eyes. He’d lost some weight in recent weeks, and it had left a hollowness in his cheeks I hadn’t seen since we were children.

I swallowed against the lump in my throat. This was what we always did after we argued: kept things light so we could float above the dust settling between us. When you only had each other in life, no fight was worth the risk of shattering that bond. It should have been enough that he’d changed his mind and come; that was its own apology.

But it wasn’t. Something ugly had been revealed the last time we’d been together, like overturning undisturbed soil to find worms and bones hidden below. And now, having seen the truth of it, I didn’t know how to go back—that was what scared me the most.

“You’re with me on this, right?” I asked, feeling myself choke up. Feeling that searing desperation again. It had to be fine. We had to be fine.

“All the way,” he said. “I want to find the ring, and I want to know what happened to Nash, and I really don’t want you to get yourself killed stumbling around without the One Vision.”

“About that ... ,” I began.

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