Page 163 of The Mirror of Beasts

“What!” Neve’s shrill voice drew the attention of the room to us, but she didn’t care, slapping a hand against my arm. “What? I swear to the Goddess, if you’re joking, Tamsin Lark—”

I tried to quiet her; it wouldn’t help us at all if the sorceresses knew. They’d try to keep me under lock and key when all I really wanted to do was find our friends and end this, once and for all.

Neve’s face fell. She read me in an instant, the way she always did. “You’re not joking.”

I told her the rest, as quietly and as quickly as I could.

“Oh no,” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes. “Oh no, Tamsin …”

“It’s okay,” I said, feeling numb to it now. “I like this option better than the last one, when he was coming after you.”

“I don’t!” She nodded toward the envelope in my hands. “Are you going to open that?”

I ran my fingers along the weathered paper, tracing the shapes inside it. There seemed to be a note, but there was something else, too—hard and round, it gave the envelope a surprising weight.

I broke the wax seal quickly, before I could change my mind. Something fell out onto the wooden step, clattering loudly. I unfolded the scrap of paper inside to find three words.

Not for me.

“Tamsin …,” Neve began, a faint tremor in her voice. She’d bent down to retrieve whatever it was. As she held it out toward me, the hot static returned, growling in my ears.

Free of tarnish and dirt, the coin looked more pearlescent than silver. But there were the words I had seen before with the cold winds of Tintagel at my back and the sea roaring below.

I am the dream of the dead.

“I thought you said he used the last one?” Neve whispered.

“That’s what he told me, but it’s like I said. He lies …” I swallowed, then corrected myself. “He lied as easily as he breathed.”

You bastard, I thought. You no good, flea-bitten bastard.

I reached out as if in a trance, taking it from her and turning it over.

The grime and what I’d assumed was blood had been so caked onto the other coin, I hadn’t been able to see the words engraved on the other side.

“I am the dread of the living,” I read.

“And I am the dream of the dead,” Neve finished. “Death, and life.”

A dizzying feeling rushed over me. I tightened my fist around the coin. Bracing my head with my other hand, I tried to regain some semblance of control over my thoughts.

Memories whirled around in a stream of endless color and light. Voices rose and fell like a choir. The woven image of the Goddess shining with joy as she cradled her daughter, surrounded by the blooming beauty of the world she’d created.

All of it rose to a crescendo, clarifying into a single thought. What occupied the space between the cold, deadly grip of winter and the sun-warmed greens of summer? Between the living and dead?

Spring. Rebirth.

And somewhere in that lay the power Nash had tried to explain with his last breaths.

Neve sat beside me. “It’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

I closed my eyes. “How can it be a good thing to have to make a choice like this?”

“What do you mean?” Neve asked.

I shook my head. “Do you remember the original note? He said to not clean the coin. I think it has to have the blood of the person you’re resurrecting when it’s buried.”

She looked back at Nash, his body rendered in stone. There was no blood to use. “So Emrys, then.”

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