Page 160 of The Mirror of Beasts

What? I thought helplessly.

Nothing useful, clearly. Nothing that could have stopped all of this from happening. And if this sensation was what he’d meant, then I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to feel like death was constantly walking in my shadow, combing its bony hands through my hair, or that I was slowly being buried alive in a shallow grave of rot.

You felt it in the cemetery, the spark of potential, the call of new life.

What did that even mean?

The dead sorceresses and mages had died by death magic, their souls claimed by Lord Death, but they hadn’t transformed into Children of the Night. Not yet. Burying their dead might have brought the surviving sorceresses a modicum of peace, but the High Sorceress had felt that the risk was too great.

The one small mercy was that Neve wasn’t among the bodies laid out around me. After the fighting was over, I hadn’t been able to reach her before she was swarmed by a protective cluster of sorceresses, who had watched her with awe and trepidation.

I’d listened silently to Mage Robin, their face still streaked with sweat and soot, as Neve was led away. Excalibur had reacted to Neve’s touch and awakened the full potential of her power because it recognized her as its rightful heir. The granddaughter of the first Lady of the Lake, who had been one of the Firstborn, like Gwyn ap Nudd. Like his brother … Nash.

No, my mind corrected. Erden.

And Neve’s gift was the same as her mother’s, and her grandmother’s before her—she could call on the purifying power of the Goddess’s light.

I needed to go find her, to see for myself again that she was all right, but I couldn’t let myself leave this room. Not until I did what needed to be done.

I drew in another steadying breath; then I forced my body to move. To stand. To turn. The sorceress’s quavering song filling the silence. My hands curled around the bucket’s handle and the rag.

Nash’s stone face was still turned in my direction, only now his blank eyes seemed to gaze through me, as if seeing something just beyond my shoulder. His lips were curved in a small smile, unafraid. He hadn’t been caught in amber, but he was frozen at the moment of his death all the same.

I wondered then if there was another life for him, if his long-dead family had come to greet him at the end, or if his soul would forever be trapped in that stone.

Nothing could be done for him. The High Sorceress had said as much. The stone had destroyed his body.

Still, I found myself dipping the cloth into the water and wetting the stone planes of his face to clean the ash and dust away.

“In ages past,” I murmured, “in a kingdom lost to time, a king named Arthur ruled man and Fair Folk alike, but this is the account of his end. Of the barge that emerged from the mists and carried him to the isle of Avalon …”

My throat ached as I told him one final story, my hands working steadily, slowly. And when my work was done, when the tale had reached its end, I turned to the other body. Forced myself to look at his beautiful face.

They shut his eyes. A spark of fury moved through me at the thought. No one should have touched his face. They had no right. Water dripped from the rag onto the floor and my boots.

“Tamsin,” came Neve’s soft voice. “I can do that. You shouldn’t have to.”

No, I thought fiercely. It has to be me.

Neve was back in the clothes she had worn when we’d left Lyonesse, her curly hair loose and cloud-soft around her face. She had fresh water and a new rag. Wordlessly, I traded with her, letting her take the soiled set away. But when she returned, I still hadn’t moved.

“What happened?” The tears in her voice were catching, and the fortress of anger I’d tried to wall myself up inside crumbled.

“Why did you do this to me?” I asked her hoarsely. “Why did you have to make me care?”

“You’ve always cared,” Neve said, coming back up the stairs. “You just didn’t want to.”

“No,” I said, the word breaking. “No, I didn’t. I was okay. I was safe. Nothing touched me. I was safe.”

But that wasn’t true either. Deep down, the part of me I couldn’t kill—that little girl. She was in pain all the time, and I’d never let her wounds heal. To survive, I’d had to be strong. I’d had to build a tower within myself.

When Neve was one step below me, she stopped, her expression heartrending. “What do you need?”

Hot tears spilled over my face, and I hated them, hated myself, hated the sharp pain that radiated from my chest. I doubled over and she was there in an instant, wrapping her arms around me and holding me there. I clung to her, sobbing.

“It hurts,” I told her, pressing a hand to my chest. “It hurts so much … I can’t make it stop …”

“The hurt is real,” Neve said in my ear. “Thinking you can protect yourself from it was always the illusion. When we lose someone, we can’t bury our feelings. Denying them won’t make them go away. You have to feel, you have to remember, because it keeps them alive with us.”

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