Page 107 of Silver in the Bone

I bent to retrieve Ignatius, then froze. The light from his small flames had bled into the nearest sculpture on the bottom row of shelves, throwing the shapes of the carved sigils onto the stone floor in illuminated patterns. As I knelt, the sigils shifted and began to spin.

“Tamsin,” came Emrys’s sharp voice. I looked up, only to realize I didn’t see him—he’d gone around to the other side of the stairs climbing up from the center of the room. As I made my way toward him, I passed a tarnishing suit of armor and a glass-faced cabinet full of vials and withered black herbs.

The narrow staircase—hardly better than a rickety ladder—led up to the open air, and near its base sat a large cauldron. The first gray light of Avalon’s dawn broke over it, glinting off silver clawed feet and causing its etched sides to shine like polished blades.

Emrys was staring down into it, his face sickly pale. I came to stand beside him, bracing for whatever grisly thing waited inside.

Instead, I found myself staring into a glistening pool of molten silver.

It churned with some unfelt wind, swirling with eddies. The metallic smell was emanating from the cauldron, but when I floated my hand over it, there was no heat. Only blistering cold.

As I stared into its depths, fragments of memories rose unbidden and splintered further. The pale face of the White Lady in the snowy field, calling me forward to join her in death. A flash of darkness and stone and the steel of a small blade. The unicorn, standing beneath a dead tree, collapsing as an arrow pierced its chest.

I took a step back, forcing myself to look away. Emrys looked awful, worse than I’d ever seen him, his skin bloodless and clammy.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Emrys?”

It took a moment for him to look up, his eyes filled with a wrenching, pure terror. He didn’t seem to know where he was, moving from the cauldron until his back hit the wall.

“Emrys?” I asked more urgently. “What is it? What did you see?”

He held up a hand, his throat working hard as he doubled over. “I’m fine—give me—give me a second.”

He wasn’t fine at all. I looked back at the cauldron, my mind bursting with thousands of thoughts. I searched through that storm for a memory—for any passage of a book, or a story, that had mentioned a cauldron in Avalon.

“What is this?” I whispered.

The liquid silver simmered as I leaned over it. An unnameable feeling passed through my body from scalp to toe, an animal instinct that there was something beyond that mirror-like surface. That someone was watching from the other side.

Before I could stop myself, before I could tell myself what a stupid idea it was, I dipped the very end of Ignatius’s candlestick holder into the surface.

Nothing happened for several heartbeats. Then came the tug.

It pulled down, sucking at the holder even as I tried to lift it free. Small shapes spiked in the liquid, rising from the surface like—

Like reaching fingers.

The Hand of Glory’s eye bulged, its burning wicks squealing as if in terror, guttering wildly at the tips of the fingers. Emrys was there in an instant, helping me rip my arm and Ignatius free.

“What are you doing?” Emrys choked out.

A hard gust of wind billowed down the steps, sweeping past us and blowing Ignatius out completely. I held up the end of the holder between us. It was coated in solid silver.

“The bones of the Children ... ,” Emrys whispered.

They were the same.

I stooped, walking around the cauldron, trailing my fingers along the basin until I found a slight rise in the rim. It almost looked as if it had been scratched off, worn down until it was nearly impossible to tell what it was.

Nearly.

I’d seen it before.

I reached into my bag, retrieving Nash’s journal. For the first time in my life, I wanted to be wrong. My hands shook, just that little bit, as I flipped through the pages. I found the page of symbols that Nash had sketched and labeled, and held it up beside the mark.

It was a spiraling knot pattern with a crude sword slashed straight down through the serpentine twists. No wonder I’d felt the stir of recognition at the mark on the statue’s hand—it was a section of this very one.

“Tell me it’s not what I think it is,” Emrys said, his voice barely above a whisper.

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