Page 167 of The Mirror of Beasts

“Marvelous,” Madrigal said, draping herself over one of the armchairs. She swung a leg idly, kicking at her velvet skirts. “Will you kill the mortal body now?”

The seneschal fought to hide it, but he startled at the question. His master, busy with laying Tamsin across the large desk, did not notice.

“No,” he said. “As long as she is in this world, there is a chance her mother’s spell will snatch the soul away. It must be done in Annwn, where I can be certain of my control.”

He toyed with a strand of Tamsin’s hair, and the seneschal felt an involuntary wave of nausea rise in him.

“Bledig,” Lord Death said suddenly. “You’ll take care of our guest, won’t you?”

For a moment, the seneschal wasn’t sure what—or whom—he meant.

Not until his master tossed him an old brass key.

“We’ve no need for her now,” Lord Death said. “Give her to the Children. They’ll need to be fed before our journey tonight.”

The words sent a shudder down his spine.

“And the priestess’s soul?” the seneschal heard himself ask.

“I’ve enough to satisfy my needs,” he said, stroking a gloved finger down Tamsin’s cheek.

Madrigal braced her chin on her hand, surveying the seneschal as he walked stiffly to the door. “My. Whatever will you do?”

“Whatever my master commands.”

This was the choice he had made. This was what was left to him now.

He climbed the stairs, the key cold in his hand, the dagger heavy where it was strapped to his hip. The bile rose within him, burning his throat until it was all he could taste. Out of the corner of his eye, a small, pale shape flickered, but he couldn’t hear anything over the groaning of the house and his racing heart.

When he reached the top of the stairs and the door to the supply closet came into view, he did not let himself stop.

This was the choice he had made.

He slid the key into the lock.

This was what was left to him now.

Hours later, he followed his master’s slow steps through the knotted tree roots and around boulders covered in lichen and melting snow. And all he could think was, his sister was crying in her sleep.

He scented the tears rather than saw them, taking in the soft touch of salt that filled the air. The seneschal couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen tears streaking down Tamsin’s face. If he really thought about it, his mind could churn up images of the guild library’s dark attic, all those times she would wait until she thought he was asleep to cry silently into her blanket. The times they’d been out on the streets during a storm, when it was impossible to distinguish tears from rain.

Had she cried when they’d met again in the ruins of Avalon? That night felt like another lifetime to him. Everything between then and now had become a blur of shadowy figures. He used to envy her perfect memory. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Deeper and deeper they traveled into Wistman’s Wood. He tried to focus on the smell of the strange blood staining her jacket, and not the way her pale hand swayed limply through the air, as if she were already dead. Her wavy hair glinted gold against his master’s armor, both just barely visible to him from a step behind.

A low growl sounded in his throat. Lord Death inclined his head back toward him, hearing that pitiful noise but, in all his great mercy, choosing not to comment.

Madrigal grumbled behind him as she struggled to maneuver around the boulders. Not another sound could be heard as they made their way through the gnarled, tangled landscape to the dark world of his birth.

It was not lost on Cabell that, to reach it, he had to pass through the very moors Nash had found him wandering as a little lost pup. Or that Lord Death’s portal to Dartmoor had opened on Lych Way—what Nash had once called the Way of the Dead.

For centuries, parishioners had traveled miles on the corpse road, carrying the coffins of their dead to Lydford in the west for burial. He had been riveted by the stories of the spirit lights that were seen by travelers, from restless ghosts who had gone astray, and now, having seen them appear and drift toward Lord Death in utter surrender, he felt no joy or wonder. He felt nothing at all.

Tamsin had never liked scary stories, but he hadn’t been afraid. He still remembered the way Nash had leaned closer to the fire when he told them that the dead would always be carried with their feet facing away from their home, to keep their spirits from finding their way back.

But the seneschal knew, as all the dead must, that you could never return home.

The cold air knifed at his senses. Only a few acres remained of the ancient Wistman’s Wood, but it seemed to expand around them as they passed deeper into its shadows, as if ushering them into the past.

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