Page 152 of The Mirror of Beasts

“Like the emptiness that thrives inside you now,” Nash said. “It has fed on your anger and hatred for years and hollowed your heart. All because you were denied what was never yours.”

“All because she was taken from me!” Lord Death stalked toward us again, and this time Nash didn’t retreat. I flattened back against the nearby wall, unable to make myself run.

“She made that choice herself,” Nash said. “Only you couldn’t accept that.”

“How does it feel to finally be the lesser son?” Lord Death taunted. “You may have been Father’s favorite, but where is your kingdom now? Where is your power, your glory? I subjected the dead to my will, I won my crown. And you, Erden, you are what you have always been. A pathetic, waning shadow behind greater men. Nothing.”

I shifted, sliding along the wall until my foot struck a large stone that had come loose.

“It seems you need to convince yourself of that pretty speech more than me,” Nash noted.

Lord Death sneered, bringing the tip of his sword to Nash’s neck.

Above us, the Wild Hunt raged through the building, rattling more stones loose from the ceiling and walls. Glass shattered in a nearby room. As I looked back, sorceresses bolted past the doorway at the top of the stairs, throwing curses over their shoulders as the hunters pursued on foot or ghostly steeds. The air screeched with the clash of metal against metal and the hunters’ cries of fury.

“Gwyn,” Nash said quietly. “You were my brother. I would have fought by your side until the sun failed to rise and all the worlds withered to dust. But you made a terrible choice, and we are all still paying for it. Is your pride so great you still cannot see that?”

“She was mine,” Lord Death growled. “I loved her.”

“That was not love,” Nash told him. “That was obsession. Envy.”

“Nash?”

My gaze swung toward the base of the stairs, where Cabell stood. Silky gray smoke billowed through the hall behind him, making his black hair and black clothes all the more severe. And somehow nothing that had happened in the last few days had managed to kill that unconscious relief that came from seeing that my brother was all right.

But the blood of Avalon, the dead at Rivenoak, the ashes of the guild library flooded the chasm between us.

He looked terrible—his cheeks had hollowed and his eyes were underscored by bruised darkness. Yet there was a flicker of something in his expression, and he looked like the boy he had been, not the monster he’d become.

Nash said nothing, but I could feel the wheels of his mind spinning and spinning. It was only then, as Lord Death lifted his sword and took a step back, that I understood that something had drastically shifted.

Lord Death looked between the stunned Cabell and Nash, a low, menacing laugh building from the pit of venom in his chest.

“Surely not,” Lord Death said, his lips curling as his gaze slid back over to Nash, and then to me. “Surely.”

Terror turned my heart to stone. I fought for my next breath, even as the shadows of the hall encroached on my vision.

This is not the curse, I told myself. I’m not dying here.

“Nash, what are you—” Cabell began, coming toward us. He held out a hand, his expression bewildered, as if he wasn’t sure that what he was seeing was real. His voice broke over the words, “Are you really here?”

“Yes, Cab,” Nash said finally. “I’m sorry I was so long in coming.”

Cabell stopped a short distance from us, his eyes drinking in the sight of Nash after so long.

My brother had dreamed of this moment for years. He’d believed that Nash would come back until I killed that hope in him. And it was as if everything our life could have been if that one thing had changed, if we had never gone to Tintagel, surrounded us like ghosts now, tantalizingly close but never to be had.

The strange spell that had overtaken the room shattered with a single word.

“Her?”

Lord Death turned to me, his expression of disgust and dismay warring with the way his body shifted closer.

“She’s not a stranger at all, is she, brother?” Lord Death hissed.

Cabell flinched with surprise at the word brother. “What?”

“He told me of his guardian, the one who had vanished in search of the Ring of Dispel,” Lord Death continued. “A Hollower. A disreputable man.”

---