Page 57 of Silver in the Bone

I squinted through the dim candlelight as he reached inside his boot and pulled out a small knife, then took a small chunk of wood from his jacket pocket.

“How the hell did you get that by them?” I demanded. They’d searched us thoroughly.

“You think I’m going to reveal my secrets to the only real competition?” he asked with an infuriating wink. “Though if you’re up for a game of Two Truths and a Lie—”

“I think I’ll pass,” I interrupted, rolling my eyes. He had helped us earlier—through his usual brand of charm and lies, of course, but helped us nonetheless. Still, it didn’t mean I had to warm to him and his inane quirks.

“Suit yourself.” He resumed his whittling, focusing on it with surprising intensity.

“What’s that going to be, anyway?” I heard myself ask.

He looked up, and it was only then that I noticed the pallor of his face and the dark stain on the sleeve of his sweater—he hadn’t wrapped his wound.

“Dunno,” he said. “It hasn’t revealed itself quite yet.”

My jeans were torn at the knee, a neat split from one of the creature’s claws. It made tearing a strip of the fabric away easier. Emrys looked over at the sound.

“Here.” I bundled it into a ball and threw it across the walkway between us.

It landed just beyond the bars of his cell. He stared at it.

“I know it’s not clean, but you have to bind your arm,” I told him. “If you bleed to death, I’m not dragging your corpse back up all those steps. Given the size of your ego, your head alone must weigh fifty pounds.”

He reached through the bars carefully, stretching as far as he could until the fabric hooked onto his fingers. “Even with this, you still owe me one.”

“You and your favors,” I muttered. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re square.”

“I got us here, didn’t I?” he said. “Both with the offering and by convincing Septimus that you all had to come.”

I rolled my eyes so hard they actually ached with the force of it. “Here I thought you tricked your father’s henchmen out of common human decency. And the bottle came from Madrigal, so that hardly counts.”

“Fine. We’re even, then.” He knotted the fabric over his arm. “But thanks. Are you okay?”

My heart gave an unwelcome little murmur at the way he was studying me in the flickering candlelight.

“I’m fine,” I told him.

But the memory was there when I closed my eyes. The rush of their spidery limbs over me. The stench of death on their hot breath. Septimus’s look of pure rage.

“I’m fine.”

“You said that already.” Emrys stretched a hand out through the bars again, as if needing to test the distance between us.

The sickening crunch of bone and cartilage. The wet spill of blood on the ground as they ripped Septimus apart. The way his last breath had been a scream.

The creatures had torn him apart, but I had killed him.

I drew my knees in close, trying to gather some warmth at my cold center. It was strange how that realization had been so slow to catch up with me, but now that it was here, it was like a third prisoner in the cell, chained to my conscience.

“He deserved it,” I said hoarsely. “Didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Emrys said, the word searing. He turned more fully toward me, gripping the bars with his other hand. “Look at me.”

I don’t know why, but I did.

“Yes,” he repeated. “Anytime you doubt it, anytime you start to worry you did the wrong thing, I’ll tell you that. And even if we’re old and gray and I can barely remember my own name, I’ll remember this and I’ll still tell you the same.”

I released a soft breath, letting my head fall back against the damp stones. It would have been so easy to reach my own arm out between the bars and see how close our fingers were. It would have been so easy to thank him.

---