Page 51 of The Mirror of Beasts

His breath mingled with mine. My heart fluttered in my chest, like a small bird trying to break from its cage. His lips moved, shaping a word without giving it voice.

Real. The word winged through my mind, breathless. Real.

But then Emrys straightened, pulling back. Tapping a finger on the open book in front of him, he returned his attention to the page, letting out a thoughtful hum—as if it had never happened.

As if I weren’t right there in front of him, like a discarded thought.

In that moment, with the color burning high in my cheeks, I wasn’t sure who I despised more: him, for all his little games, or me, for letting him win that round.

I blew out a hard breath through my nose and looked down at the page. It was labeled MIRROR OF SHALOTT at the top, and two different hands had written dates and names beneath it.

January 1809–June 2000 Laurent Perreault, Paris Guild—Attic of home?

Sold August 2000 to Edward Wyrm, London Guild—Rivenoak

“My forefathers may have been at home here with the rodents,” Emrys said, “but even I can admit they kept good records.”

“God’s teeth,” I said. “Wyrm?”

“Good old Wyrm,” Emrys confirmed. “I seem to remember he and Nash had some kind of tiff … ?”

“That’s a very nice way of saying that Nash used him as a human shield while opening a vault and cost him a kidney,” I said.

“Is that all?” Emrys asked dryly.

“It was such a stupid thing for Wyrm to be upset about,” I said, glaring at the paper. “He has a second, perfectly fine one.”

A smile ghosted Emrys’s lips. I forced myself to look away.

“Don’t you dare laugh,” I warned him. “He banned us from entering Rivenoak in front of his whole guild.”

“I know,” Emrys said. “I remember.”

“You remember?” I repeated, feeling the mortification of that moment wash over me anew. “You were there?”

He nodded. “And for the record, he later got drunk and admitted it wasn’t Nash’s fault at all. He triggered the curse and wasn’t fast enough getting away. And Nash let him lie to spare his pride. He’s an arrogant ass.”

Emrys could have knocked me over with a flick of his fingers. Nash not being at fault for once was one thing, but Emrys telling me that was almost … kind, which made it all the more confusing coming from him after the day we’d had.

Well, I consoled myself, the gods might have hated me enough to allow him to witness that first degrading moment, but at least they’d spared me the second.

Emrys’s brow furrowed, as if he sensed my thoughts. “… Why do I get the impression that’s not the only reason you despise him?”

“I need another reason?” I shot back. He didn’t really care, and I wasn’t about to give him another little dagger to gut me.

I hadn’t let myself think of what had happened with Wyrm in years, content to let it melt away in the bitter sea of resentment I felt toward my own guild after they’d abandoned Cabell and me as children.

I was grateful, then, that I hadn’t let my guard down enough to tell Emrys the full story of the years we’d lived in the library. How, a few weeks after Nash’s disappearance, Wyrm had contacted Librarian, asking if he could come and speak to Cabell and me. How he’d shown up in all of his finery, smelling like expensive wood, and sat with us in front of the fireplace. How Wyrm had told us in a revoltingly gentle voice that we would be coming to live with him at his palatial estate, and wouldn’t that be just wonderful?

At the time, at all of ten years old, I’d been willing to overlook everything that had happened in the past because I was so angry at Nash myself, and because Wyrm was promising all of the things I couldn’t: that we would never go hungry, that we would never have to sleep rough out in the bitter cold, that we could go to school and not have to travel from town to town every few days. That I wouldn’t have to watch my brother suffer, and see every day that I was failing him.

Looking back, I knew better than to believe in the fairy tale he was selling. I really did. But I’d been so desperate for it to be true, to believe that someone could care, and that things could get better for us, that I’d gone along with it. I hadn’t noticed the subtle line of questioning about where we’d recently traveled with Nash, about what he’d been looking for, that Wyrm threaded through all of his promises. I didn’t know back then that he had been looking for Arthur’s dagger too, and that he’d have no qualms about using two children to dig for information about it.

What I knew was that he’d told us to pack our things and wait for him to return in the morning, and we had. We waited all morning.

All day.

All night.

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