Page 121 of The Mirror of Beasts

“The next thing I knew, I woke up in Rook House,” Emrys said, the words going thin. “Spilling out of a cauldron of some kind, naked as the day I was born, but … whole. Alive. I almost screamed at the feeling of the heart beating inside my chest. My mother was there, but she was so … changed. And Madrigal. She laughed when she saw me. She was delighted by it all.”

My hands fell back into my lap. “What cauldron?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “But it was death magic, clearly.”

The wind let out a guttural moan as it battered the front door. I forced my gaze over to it as Emrys tugged his shirt and sweater back on.

“What did Madrigal do to your mother to age her that way?” I asked.

He rubbed at his arms, his expression strangely empty. “It was part of the spell to resurrect me. She had to give her own vitality, a piece of her soul. Mom had heard rumors about Madrigal and brought my …” He trailed off, but the word he hadn’t spoken, body, fluttered like a moth’s wings through my mind. “She brought me to Rook House. What was left of me.”

The nausea was back again, rising swift and burning in my stomach. I wanted to clamp my hands to my ears like a child, to tell him to stop—but how could I?

“You’re still you,” I whispered.

“Am I?” he wondered. “I didn’t even tell you the whole truth before, because I didn’t want you to know the worst of it—that part that would make you scared of me, or see me the way I see myself.”

“You don’t scare me,” I said.

He ran his hand back through his hair, gripping it in his fist. The look he gave me was pleading, as if begging me to make that true. “They didn’t just kill me, Tamsin. As part of the ritual, they cut the heart out of my chest and burned it.”

A terrible silence overtook us.

“That’s—” I croaked out. “No, that can’t be right—”

“It can, and it is,” Emrys said. He looked down at his upturned palms. “I could tell something was wrong when I woke up. That I was wrong. But Madrigal waited until I brought the ring to her, when I thought I was finally free and could go back to Avalon. She waited until that exact moment, when I felt like my world had opened back up again, to tell me she had made me a new heart. With death magic.”

“And you believed her?”

“I didn’t have to,” he said, rubbing at his chest. “My mother confirmed it.”

Oh, my mind whispered.

“Madrigal laughed as she told me some part of my heart would always beat for her,” Emrys continued, anger creeping into his tone. “And that if I ever crossed her, or displeased her, she could unmake it just as easily.”

“But you brought her the ring,” I said. “You repaid that debt.”

“I know,” he said. “She released me, but there’s still a leash. I feel it every second of every day. I feel it when I run, when I try to sleep, when I look at you … Do you understand?”

His expression was almost desperate, as if he needed me to accept it. To believe it.

“I am never going to be completely free,” he said. “I will always be under her control, in some way or another. I can live with the knowledge that she could yank the leash at any moment, or cut the thread of my life short, but I can’t ask you or anyone else to. And if she asked me to hurt you …”

He trailed off, as if not wanting to give the idea life. “I thought it would be easier if you hated me. I tried to get you to despise me, the way I despise myself.”

“Emrys, all of us could die at any time—” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.

“I just keep thinking,” he said, “death magic makes monsters, not men. We saw it. We saw what death magic does to the dead. A shadow lives inside me. A monster’s heart. I’m so quick to anger, to succumb to those dark feelings … I don’t see how it could be anything else.”

I could barely summon the words through my shock. “Or it’s just grief. Powerful grief. Because of what your father did, what your mother gave up, and what you lost. Because of what happened to us in Avalon.”

Emrys’s eyes remained on his hands, as if he could shape something out of the darkness, something that might make me understand. “I wish like hell that were true.”

“Could a monster feel love?” I asked. When he looked up, I added, quickly, “You love your mother, don’t you? Or regret? You regret what happened in Avalon. You wanted to help everyone there. We’ve seen monsters, Emrys. We barely survived them.”

“Still …,” he whispered.

“You said there was nothing wrong about me, even after you saw the silver bone,” I said stubbornly. “Do you still believe that?”

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