Page 86 of Silver in the Bone

Emrys stretched his arms up and rolled out his neck. “On that note, I’m off to get some food and start poking around the place to see what I can find.”

After he was gone, Cabell rose and sat again on the edge of the bed. I moved to sit beside him, feeling the silence between us like a third presence in the room. All at once, the anger, the resentment, hurtled through me. My hands curled into fists in my lap as I leaned my head against Cabell’s shoulder. He leaned his head on top of mine.

“He’s really gone, huh?” Cabell said after a while.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Cabell there—the Cabell of seven years ago, small and frail, soaked to the bone with freezing rain after searching Tintagel for Nash. Telling me what I already knew. He’s gone.

When it became just us.

“He’s been gone for seven years,” I said. “It’s just that now we know for sure he’s never coming back.”

“You’ve always thought that,” Cabell pointed out.

“Doesn’t mean I wanted to,” I heard myself admit.

He sat up, craning his neck to look at me. “Maybe we’ll find another journal of his. And it’ll have answers about what he was thinking, coming here with the ring. Or your birth parents’ names.”

My jaw set, and I resented the way my eyes prickled with heat. “It doesn’t matter. We’re all we need, right?”

Cabell sighed, and it was a while before he could bring himself to say, “If it happens again ... if I shift ...”

“It won’t,” I said, straightening. I gripped his forearm, forcing him to look at me. “It won’t happen.”

“If it happens,” he continued, looking down at his hands, “don’t let me hurt anyone, especially not you. I couldn’t live with it. Do whatever it takes to stop me.”

“It’s not going to happen,” I said.

“Tamsin,” he said firmly. I met his dark eyes, hating the haunting way the shadows painted his face. “Whatever it takes.”

I leaned my head against his shoulder again, welcoming the quiet back into the space.

“It’s not going to happen,” I repeated, because I never made promises to my brother I knew I wouldn’t keep.

The endless night stretched into what Olwen called the resting hours, when most of the surviving Avalonians tried to sleep, however impossible that was.

I ate a few bites of the bread and barley stew I was offered by Dilwyn and went to bed early, relieved to find Neve wasn’t there.

I left the room’s hearth cold; my thoughts were clearer in the dark, where their only competition was fear and memory. I lay on my side, staring at the wall until my eyes had adjusted enough to count each stone and my ears no longer noticed the screeching of the Children gathering along the edge of the burning moat.

Trapped. The word was on my tongue like bitter dandelion greens. Every plan I conceived—flying, digging, fighting—collapsed under the weight of its own implausibility.

I turned onto my other side, feeling every bit of the ache in my back and legs.

You’d really leave?

I would, and in a heartbeat, if it meant saving us. Even Emrys. This wasn’t our world. We had no responsibility to it, or anyone in it.

Blowing out a sigh, I rested my cheek against my hands. I knew I should be grateful for the breath in my lungs, and for the fact that we’d made it this far. But everything dissolved into simmering anger beneath my skin.

Come on now, Tamsy, it’s not so bad.

In the stillness of the moment, hundreds of questions rose into a poisonous swarm in my mind. But the crushing truth lay beyond these walls, scattered among his bones.

His remains were the last answer we’d likely ever get. Nash was dead. Nash was dead, along with everything else we deserved to know and now never would. Nash was dead, and he’d taken our pasts with him beyond our reach, into the dark wilderness of death.

I couldn’t even be angry at him for it, not when I was so furious at myself. I’d brought us here. In chasing his ghost, I’d killed us all.

Somehow, impossibly, I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I was aware of was the scuff of the door sliding over stone and the bed dipping with Neve’s weight.

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