Page 68 of Silver in the Bone

“To remind myself curses are only dark because of how they’re used,” Cabell said.

Betrys looked as if she might say something else, but she only turned, hurrying up the steps with our things.

“You have to stop doing that,” I whispered to Neve, coming to the edge of my own bath.

“Doing what?”

“Telling them everything before we figure out how they’ll react,” I said. “The whole leap-before-you-look thing with you is getting old. We need them on our side if we’re going to be able to look for Nash.”

“You really don’t trust anyone, do you?” Neve said, shaking her head.

“I trust people will always lash out when they’re afraid,” I said. “And that they’ll do anything when they’re desperate enough.”

Neve sank back down into the water with a grateful sigh. Guilt, my least-favorite emotion, bit at me.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. “You’ve had a rough few hours.”

That was putting it far too kindly. In truth, I’d seen a lot of the world and expected the worst of it, but I’d been shocked by the malice toward her.

“Yes,” she said with her usual resolve. “But I’ll be better once I have my wand back and we find Nash and the ring.”

I nodded.

The thing was, you spend so long being afraid of sorceresses and all the ways they can hurt you that you don’t necessarily think about the way the world hurts them back. The way it punishes them for that same power.

I’ d brought her here, to a place where sorceresses were reviled. Where she was outnumbered and just as much at a loss about what was happening as Cabell and I were. A place of monsters.

I sank down, letting the water rise above my chapped lips. The stinging there eased within a heartbeat, but the regret lingered.

“Avalon is a place of beauty,” Neve said softly. She stared straight into the mist gathered in front of her and recited from memory. “The most beautiful of all of the Otherlands, for it was born of the Goddess’s heart, as dear as a child. The groves are ripe with ancient secrets and a bounty of golden apples ...”

“Not the noxious stench of impending death?” The joke was grating, even to me.

“After everything I’d read,” Neve started again, keeping her back to us, “I had this vision of it in my mind for years. It was as sacred to me as the stories my auntie told me about my mother. They were both distant and beautiful.”

I leaned my head against the edge of the pool, my hair dripping over my face, curling around my cheek like a tender hand. “Does it really feel like a curse to either of you?”

Before the One Vision, I’d been able to sense magic the way you could feel a shift in the air’s pressure. It had been amorphous and ever-changing. Sometimes, with the older curses, you could even feel the fury or spite radiating from the sigils. Gaining the second sight had ripened those senses, making them fuller, and it was still expanding in ways I couldn’t completely comprehend.

“It does,” Cabell said, “and then it doesn’t. I’m not sure how to explain it.”

Neve finally turned to face us, drawing herself up. I did the same, watching their faces in the cerulean light.

“It feels similar—icy and harsh—but somehow more concentrated?” Neve groaned. “I’m not making any sense.”

“I agree,” Cabell said. “I think it was the druids and whatever magic they gained from Lord Death. It doesn’t feel like the magic we draw from the universal source.”

It felt good to fall into our usual back-and-forth pattern of theories.

He had always been the more valuable player in our work partnership, but I’d made it a point to retain as much knowledge as possible.

“I don’t know much about Lord Death,” Neve said, brow furrowed.

“There are a number of different legends about him,” I said. “The one Nash told us was this—he was a powerful enchanter in the time of King Arthur and at one point even traveled with Arthur and his knights. But he broke an oath and was placed in charge of Annwn as punishment, as much a king as a jailor for the souls too dark to be reborn.”

“What was the oath?” Neve asked.

“Nash never said, so I’m not sure he knew,” Cabell said. “I’ve never read that account anywhere, either, so he could have invented it. Most know Lord Death as the leader of the Wild Hunt, roaming between worlds to collect wicked souls for Annwn. His power allows him and his retinue to pass through the mists separating the Otherlands.”

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