Page 100 of Silver in the Bone

The Hand of Glory cast a halo around us. Picking him up by the handle, I wondered how I had ever been satisfied with the glimpse of the hidden world of magic it had given me.

“We’re looking for passages to unlock, Ignatius,” I said.

“You ... named that thing?” Emrys stayed a step behind me, watching the Hand of Glory from over my shoulder. “Does it actually understand you?”

“As much as anyone can.” I brought Ignatius to the nearest wall, letting the light fall upon the stones and slowly walking the length of it.

“I always wondered how you managed to work without the One Vision,” Emrys said. “I guess I just assumed that Cabell was very careful about telling you where to step. Obviously, you have it now, even if it meant almost recklessly killing yourself in the process.”

I did have it now. It was strange to have Ignatius’s light reveal nothing more than I was already seeing. The gloom of our situation was clearly getting to me, because I felt the first stirrings of fond nostalgia when Ignatius rolled his eye at me.

“It did change your eye color, though,” Emrys said, still searching the wall.

My face scrunched. Granted, it had been a while since I’d seen a mirror, but ... “No, it didn’t.”

“They used to be a darker blue. Like sapphire,” he said, still running his hands over the stones.

I slowed, chewing at my bottom lip as I tried and failed to figure out how to respond. He looked back and our gazes clashed in the soft, warm light.

“That thing’s a bit peevish, isn’t it?” Emrys said, turning away quickly. “He looks like he wants to strangle me.”

I hissed as Ignatius dripped hot wax on my hand. “You don’t know the half of it.”

We went over the walls twice, but if there was a doorway, either it wasn’t locked, rendering Ignatius useless, or the cloaked figure had been extremely careful in disguising it. Eventually, the call of the scavenge became too tempting for two Hollowers to resist, and we turned our attention to the room’s waiting treasures.

“I can’t get over the fact that you’ve been using a Hand of Glory this whole time,” Emrys said as he flipped a trunk’s lid open. “Those things are incredibly rare. Sorceresses find them so abhorrent, they don’t make them anymore—and believe me, my father has asked. Many times.”

“Nash gave it to me when I was little,” I said, something in me bridling at the memory—at the fact that I was even talking about this, and to Emrys. “And before you ask, I don’t know who he stole it from.”

Emrys set the decomposing blankets he’d pulled out back in the trunk. His forehead creased. “Why do you always do that?”

“Do what?”

“You always seem to assume the worst,” he said, “and you expect everyone else to do the same. But all you’re really doing is punching at phantoms the rest of us can’t see.”

“Can’t imagine why I would do that,” I said, the words tumbling out of me before I could stop them. “It couldn’t possibly be based on years of experience driving that point home again and again.”

“Is it that,” he said, “or is it just another excuse to push people away?”

The darkness caressed his face as he watched me. A whisper in my mind finally put a name to the uncomfortable heat swimming beneath my skin.

Shame.

“You don’t know a damn thing,” I told him, hating the way the heat was building in me again, the uncontrollable burning at the back of my eyes. “About me or my life.”

Get a grip, I told myself. Calm down.

He let out a faint, almost rueful laugh as he opened a tarnished silver box with nothing inside. “Sometimes I wish that were true, Bird.”

He knows the color of your eyes, that same voice whispered.

“I realize your life hasn’t been easy,” he continued, “especially after Nash disappeared, but at least—”

“Please tell me you’re not about to find the bright side of child abandonment and neglect,” I snapped. “Because I assure you, it does not exist.”

Nash was dead. I didn’t want to talk about this. About him. About anything. But it was like I was unspooling, and each turn only spun me faster.

“I would never say that,” Emrys said, moving on to another metal chest. Inside were books bloated and unreadable from water damage. “But at least you can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. You think my life is so easy, but you have no idea. You just ...”

---