Page 100 of The Mirror of Beasts

“Can you get him a healer?” I asked. “Feel free to add the favor to his tally. He just can’t travel in his condition.”

“Oh?” the Bonecutter said. “Are you also anticipating an interesting journey?”

“Something like that,” I said, sitting heavily on the edge of one of the tables. But as her words replayed in my mind, they snagged on a single word. Also.

I looked up, scanning the room, but I already knew what I would find—or, rather, who I wouldn’t.

“Where’s Nash?” I asked.

I had gotten so accustomed to his absence over the years, my tired mind hadn’t bothered to remember he was supposed to be here.

“Where is he?” I asked again, hearing the anger building in those words.

Caitriona looked as though she wished I’d asked her anything else.

“Son of a—” I blew out a hard breath. “He left?”

“I’m so sorry,” Caitriona said. “I closed my eyes for just a few minutes, and when I woke up, he was gone.”

“That rotten bastard,” I bit out.

“One cannot handle a feral cat and not expect to get scratched,” the Bonecutter said. “Do you truly have no idea where he might have gone?”

“No, I—” The words fell away from me. Seeing his coffee mug next to the book in Librarian’s office should have been warning enough that he’d try something like this. “He knows where it is.”

“Where what is?” the Bonecutter asked, too innocently.

“Excalibur,” Neve answered. “The Mirror of Beasts.”

Caitriona shook her head. “No—it can’t be. The sword’s been lost for an age.”

“Are the rumors true?” I pressed the Bonecutter. “Is it in Lyonesse?”

The Bonecutter’s lips twisted with thought, as if she was weighing the options in front of her now.

“Bran,” she said slowly. “Retrieve young Master Dye, will you? Put him up in the flat where he won’t be such a depressing eyesore.”

“Yes, miss,” the bartender squawked. And, sure enough, when his face passed through a beam of sunlight slipping in through the window, his eyes had an aquamarine sheen. My already bad mood worsened.

“Is it in Lyonesse?” I asked again. “What do you even want? You’re a sorceress, aren’t you? You’re in danger too as long as the Wild Hunt is tearing through this world.”

“I am not a sorceress, not anymore,” the Bonecutter said coldly, watching as Bran lifted Emrys in his arms and lumbered toward the stairs up to the flat. “But if it’s Excalibur you seek, I’ve uncovered a memory that may be of interest.”

She motioned for us to follow her into her workshop. Her smile was too sharp, too knowing. “And perhaps it will answer yet more of the questions that plague you.”

For once, that possibility frightened me.

It was a dagger to my soul that the Bonecutter, not Olwen, sang the echoing spell.

The pedestal creaked as it started its slow spin, Viviane’s vessel throwing light onto our weary faces and tattered clothing.

“In your absence, I have scoured the High Priestess’s memories for references to the sword or Lord Death,” the Bonecutter said. “But with the damage wrought to it, many of them have been reduced to mere fragments. Useless for our purposes. But there was one complete memory …” She turned her small body to address the vessel. “Show me the memory discussing the daughter, and the fate of Excalibur.”

That word, daughter, echoed in my mind, even as the memory dripped into place and the thought was drowned by smears of shadows and firelight.

Viviane stood at a table, her hands braced on either side of a large book. Her agitation was clear in the rigid line of her spine, the hunch of her shoulders. Her white hair glowed gold in the light of the small fire burning in the hearth.

She hummed softly to herself as she turned the page, but kept her thoughts in. A piercing screech tore through the night-dark chamber, forcing her gaze up to the opening of her window. The line between her brows deepened as she worried her top lip.

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