Page 127 of The Mirror of Beasts

“Looks like it,” I murmured.

At the center of the panel was a pale-haired woman, her figure wrapped in silky white robes. Something about her face, the serenity of her smile, stirred a thought at the back of my mind, but I didn’t know the right memory to reach for.

Around her outstretched arms, a garden was forming, and creatures of every kind gathered.

“And here we have men,” Emrys said, pointing to the figures below the garden. “Struggling to spark fire, to harvest—”

“Not men,” I said. “The Firstborn.”

Emrys looked over, surprised.

“The Gentry. The Tuatha dé Danann. The Aes Sídhe. Tylwyth Teg,” I said. “According to the Bonecutter, they’re all names for the same beings. Born with magic and immortality, but not invulnerable to death.”

He scratched at the stubble growing along his jaw as he moved to the second panel, revealing it with a few careful swipes of his arm.

There were the mortal men, with the Firstborn lording over them with magic and crowns. Swords appeared, and the scenes of duels became battles. In the third, a man with a silver hand reached out toward a group that looked to be his children. Three sons, with wheat-colored hair and gray eyes. To my disappointment, the next panels were too torn and darkened by decay to see what they depicted.

A thunderous clatter sounded above us, like a wall collapsing. We froze in place as dust shook loose from the ceiling.

“Please tell me we’re not going to investigate whatever unthinkable dark horror that was,” Emrys said.

But I was already running for the door.

The entry hall was guarded on either end by spiraling sets of stairs. I let my feet guide us to the one on the right, straining my ears for an echo of the sound we’d heard. Other than the clatter of small loose stone and drifts of dust, the castle had fallen back into deathly silence.

The stone steps were partially caved in and tricky to navigate, but when a sound like dry, scraping stones drifted down the stairwell to us, we hurried to climb them before we lost the trail again. The noises seemed to be coming from the third floor.

“Neve?” I called softly at the top step. “Cait?”

The hall was littered with filthy clothing and broken furniture, as if they’d been dropped in the rush to flee the castle, and the open doors revealed bedrooms in various states of disarray, from once-grand beds reduced to matchsticks to wardrobes caked with grime.

Emrys ducked into the first, giving it a quick search. I tried to stop him, but he mimed holding a sword, raising both brows.

I sighed. He was right; regardless of where the others were, and what had made the noise, we were here to find Excalibur.

I leaned into the next bedroom and took a quick look around. Inside I found little more than furniture draped in disintegrating cloth. Every time I lifted one of the sheets to search for signs of the monster or Excalibur, I could feel traces of the rot rubbing off on my skin.

Something built in me, room by room—an urge. Not to run, not to speak, not to fight. It had no name, but it haunted me with each step. Not even the reassuring feel of Emrys’s eyes tracking my every move was enough to dispel it.

Halfway down the hall, we were greeted by one of the vilest smells I’d experienced in my life—like sun-roasted sewage. I shrank back from it, and despite my stomach being empty, it heaved.

Emrys coughed, covering his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his jacket. He sent a wary look my way. “You know, we could go back down and wait for the others.”

I wanted that more than my next breath, but this was one of those incredibly rare moments in which purpose prevailed. “No, we have to keep going.”

He took a step forward with obvious reluctance.

“Are you scared, Dye?” I whispered, teasing.

“Yes.” He turned his big eyes on me. “Will you hold my hand?”

The air was bitterly cold, but it did nothing to stop the hot flush that overtook my cheeks. “No.”

I hurried ahead of him, making quick work of the rooms on the right side of the hall as he searched the left. With his longer legs, he caught up to me easily as I reached one of the last doors on the hall. And, together, we discovered the source of the rancid stench.

It took all the restraint I had left to not rub the phantom feeling of itchy decay from my arms. The rot overwhelming my senses gave the horrifying impression that it was my own body that was decomposing. As we hovered in the doorway, I pushed up my sleeves to make sure skeins of dead skin weren’t falling from my bones.

My silver bones.

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