Page 87 of The Mirror of Beasts

I drew in a sharp breath.

“Didn’t matter in the end,” Nash said. “I was prepared to kill the sorceress, and I was prepared to have her kin come after me for it. But the ring … the moment I touched it, I knew it needed to be purified. Only the High Priestess of Avalon was capable of such a feat. But the poison from Myfanwy’s blade started to take hold shortly after I crossed into Avalon … Should have known something was wrong when the Hag of the Mist wouldn’t take my blood offering.”

“And you just … expected me to find the coin you buried at Tintagel and put all of the pieces together with the barest of clues?” I continued in disbelief.

“It was my last coin—I had to take certain measures to protect it until the time was right,” he said. “I also thought you might find it a trifle faster, given all I’d taught you.”

I all but heard the snap in my ears as the last fraying thread of my patience gave way. “I was a child!”

“An incredibly clever child,” Nash said. “Too clever by half, even. I didn’t want to involve you until it became necessary, and I couldn’t leave a message for someone else to find. I thought you’d work it out.”

“How was I supposed to do that when you didn’t even tell us you were leaving?” I demanded, the words like knives. “You never gave us any indication you were coming back!”

Nash’s hand lowered, setting his coffee cup down. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “You … thought I meant to leave you … forever?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

The man drew in a sharp breath, pressing the back of his hand against his forehead.

“You said it was your last coin,” I said. “How many did you have?”

“Nine,” he said, and I scoffed. Of course. It was almost too perfect. “And before you ask, I got them from a sorceress whose mother smuggled them out of Avalon. Fair trade.”

“What, you didn’t go into that one planning to kill her, too?”

This time, he scowled at me.

“And all this because you’re convinced I’m cursed, when there’s absolutely no evidence of that,” I said, shaking my head. “You really are something.”

“Your curse exists whether you believe it or not.”

I didn’t want to talk about that. I’d come close enough to death these last few days to actually start believing it too.

“Where did you go when you left the apartment?” I asked.

“To Rook House,” Nash said. “I got in a mighty tussle with Madrigal’s pooka. Not exactly a fair fight when one of the participants can turn into a lion, now is it?”

“So you didn’t get inside,” I said. “And you didn’t get the ring back.”

“Course not. I ran for my life, and it was still a damned near thing,” Nash said. “Then I got word from the Bonecutter you’d gone to see her, asking me to come get you out of her hair.”

I bristled. “We weren’t just dropping in. We had business.”

“I’m sure you did. I’ve never known her to like unwelcome dropins, though. I could have told you that, if you’d just stayed put and waited for me to come back.”

I wasn’t about to get into this argument again.

“Is she still under that curse?” he asked, scratching at his stubble. “The one that makes her look like an ever-so-slightly demonic child?”

So it is a curse, I thought. Pride would never let me reveal I hadn’t found a way to confirm that myself.

“Looks like it,” I answered.

I drank down more of the thick sludge of coffee, letting its bitterness fill me. The old bones of the library’s town house groaned as they shifted and settled again.

A hard wind was blowing in from the harbor, and a ghostly choir of moaning bled through the cracks in the walls. Sadness stole through me once more.

The first night we’d heard the wind, wrapped up in our blankets, terrified about what our lives would become, Cabell had started giving each of those “voices” a name—Philbert, Grumbleton, Moorna—and suddenly, we were laughing and crying and laughing.

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