Page 119 of The Mirror of Beasts

“I didn’t ask you to come.”

“You didn’t have to,” he said simply. “I meant what I said. I would follow you anywhere. Through dusty library stacks … into cursed woods … across drowned kingdoms … You’ve become the map of my life. There will never be any adventure worth having, any prize worth finding, that’s greater than you.”

My heart sped, even as the shadowy world around me slowed.

I didn’t know what to say to that. It didn’t make sense—nothing did. His words. Him being here. The way he kept looking at me like he used to. The fact that he was still so beautiful, his profile perfectly sculpted. He ruined all of my thoughts, threw all of my plans into disarray just by being here.

“I know I don’t deserve it,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment. “But if you’ll let me stay beside you, just a little longer … just to make it right …”

His words faded in my silence. The knot tightening in my throat made speaking impossible. I’d felt he was keeping something from the rest of us, but this …

“Tamsin,” Emrys said, his voice rough, “are we even now? Can we please be even?”

I didn’t know how I found my voice again to speak.

“I thought you were done keeping score,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he answered. “But you aren’t.”

I settled back against the wall behind me, staring at him across the narrow mound. My throat worked, as if trying to summon a denial, but it wouldn’t come. Maybe I had been keeping score, but he was the one who kept changing the rules of the game.

“Is that why you did it?” I asked, that moment rising again in my memory to slash me to the quick. “Why you pushed me out of the way at Rivenoak? You wanted to be even?”

“I did it because if you die, there’s no point to any of it,” he said. “Not for me.”

The words moved through me like lightning, shocking me into stillness.

“Gods, Tamsin,” he said, pressing his fists to his temples. His words turned tortured. “I should never have left. I know why I did it. I can try to justify it a thousand different ways. But all of this … everyone who died …”

Every now and then, I felt the phantom weight of the bodies I’d carried to be cleaned and burned, as if it weren’t just enough to have the memory of their dead faces, but my body needed to remember the trauma of it too.

Emrys drew in a deep breath. “I never should have left you.”

“You …” The word felt like shards of glass in my throat, cutting me up from the inside.

“I can’t take it back,” he said. “Any of it. If I could give you the ring, I would. I’d let you kill me for it. It would be less of a punishment than your hatred.”

“I don’t hate you because you took the ring,” I said, something tearing open inside me.

“If not that, then what?” he asked.

My fingers curled tightly against the dark air, trying to find anything to steady myself with. “You hurt me so badly because … it was different … it was different between us, and you broke whatever we could have been. And maybe none of it was ever real to you, but it was real to me, all right? It was, so congratulations, you really did win—you got that one over on me.”

“Tamsin …”

“I don’t need you,” I told him. “I don’t. But every time something’s happened … every time I’ve felt lost … I wanted to be able to talk to you about it, the way we used to.”

He looked shocked by my words, and I was terrified for a moment that my tone had revealed more than I’d meant to.

“I want that too,” he said. “I want all of it, and all of you.”

My whole body warmed at his words.

“You don’t,” I said, fighting back the burn in my eyes and throat. “You said horrible things to me—you told me not to even touch you, like I’m something disgusting to you—”

“No!” he said sharply, pressing his fist to his forehead again. “Damn it, no—that’s not why.”

“Then tell me what’s going on,” I pleaded. “Tell me why you’ve been acting like this.”

---