Silver in the Bone, page 11
Cabell. My chest constricted painfully. I pivoted back away from the bridge, starting toward the path that would wind down to the wooden bridge below. If I could make it across without anyone seeing me and get to the village…
The rattling of another pack trailed after me.
“Where are you going?” Emrys demanded.
“To help Cabell,” I snapped.
“There’s too many of them,” he protested. “You’ll never get him away.”
“Watch me.”
He lengthened his stride to catch up to me, keeping pace at my side.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You think I’m going to let you out of my sight when you hold all the answers?” he said, shaking his head. “Not a chance, Bird.”
The village was just waking up to the first of a fleet of tourist buses when Septimus and the others turned off the main street and made their way to an old barn at the town’s edge.
I followed close behind, ignoring Emrys the best I could as we approached the rickety building and crouched beneath one of its cracked windows.
The glass was clouded with dust, but I could still make out a few things: crates of cider and beer marked for the Excalibur Pub, excess traffic cones and road signage, and what appeared to be several sets of armor and the back half of a horse costume. The earthy smell of hay and the animals that had once occupied the stalls permeated the walls, a fading reminder of a past life in which Nash, Cabell, and I had slept in whatever shelter we’d been able to find.
I couldn’t make out what they were saying as Septimus pushed Cabell into one of the stalls and a Hollower I didn’t recognize bound his hands with a zip tie.
I rolled my eyes and a moment later saw Cabell do the same. As if Nash hadn’t taught us how to break a zip tie and pick the lock on handcuffs, given his vast experience with both.
For several minutes, neither of us moved or spoke. I ignored the knowing hum that came from beside me.
“What now?” Emrys whispered. “Don’t tell me you’ve already run out of ideas for this daring rescue.”
“Shut up or go away,” I told him. “I’m waiting for a few more of them to leave before going in.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, if we’re going to be here awhile…”
He turned his back to the barn’s wall and pulled out a small knife and a chunk of wood from the side pocket of his trousers.
The movement of his hands was almost mesmerizing as he worked. Soon a spiral shaving dropped to the ground, then another, until he had carved away the grit of the bark and rounded the wood’s harsh edges.
I would have pegged him as having a more upper-crust hobby than whittling—something like foxhunting or collecting Fabergé eggs or summering on a superyacht.
Not that I spent much time pondering what Emrys got up to in his personal time.
“Was Cabell late in meeting you here?” Emrys asked. “Or did the others bring him along?”
I gave him a narrow look. “Why don’t you tell me? Isn’t that Daddy’s pal in there?”
The knife stopped midstroke.
What had Phineas said at the library? We’ll never get it out of the Council’s claws, and then it’ll be Endymion’s wrath we have to worry about…
“If he’s looking for the ring for your old man, why are you working for Madrigal?” I pressed. “Why aren’t you in there with Septimus and the others?”
“That’s none of your business,” he muttered, his gaze fixed on the piece of wood in his hand.
“You’ve now made it my business,” I hissed back. “Don’t tell me—”
Emrys’s head suddenly snapped up, and before I could even think to react, he’d snagged my wrist in his hand and pulled us both away from the wall. “Look!”
Around the corner, a girl emerged from behind a nearby building. Her braids were twisted into buns on her head, and she was still wearing the furry coat she always did—and that hideous fanny pack, of course.
I pressed a hand to my face and groaned. I really hadn’t imagined her earlier.
Neve. From the tarot shop.
“Uh…,” Emrys began. “What is she doing?”
She ran straight for the barn, her face set with determination. She slid to a stop a few feet from the side of the structure and threw an empty aluminum can at the wall. There was something dark on it, almost like…
She’d drawn a spell sigil on it.
“Huh,” Emrys said.
Neve reached into her fanny pack and pulled out a long, thin piece of wood. One end of its narrow body was capped with an obsidian blade, an athame of sorts, used to carve sigils. The other was edged with silver to conduct the flow of magic.
My stomach felt like it was about to fall out of my body.
“Wand,” I said, rising.
“Sorceress,” Emrys finished, clutching his whittling knife in his fist.
“Give me that,” I said, reaching for the blade.
He pulled it away. “And give you the opportunity to stab me with it? I think not.”
I turned back just in time to see Neve grin as she pointed the silver end of the wand toward the can.
“Neve!” I called out. “Don’t!”
The words were lost to the thundering blast of pressure that radiated out from the can, throwing Emrys and me back several feet. I covered my head as the spell shredded the barn’s wall and sent slivers no bigger than matchsticks raining down over us.
Only, they never struck. A grunt came from above me, and a moment later, my mind registered the weight and heat at my back. My face burned as I shoved up against where Emrys was covering me. “Get off!”
A section of the roof buckled without its supports, crashing down with enough force to make the ground shudder. The sorceress leapt back, her mouth forming a small O of surprise.
The men inside yelped and shouted as a violent tremor ran through what remained of the building, threatening to level it.
Cabell, I thought, clawing my way back onto my feet. My ears rang as I stumbled forward—just as Cabell broke his zip tie and used his shoulder to ram his way through the brittle wooden wall behind him.
But by the time I’d rounded the corner to intercept him, he was gone, dodging and weaving his way into the village. I tried to follow the path I thought he might take, pushing through curious townsfolk and tourists who’d come to see what the commotion was, but when I glanced back at the barn, it was Septimus who met my gaze.
“There!” he called, throwing an arm out.
Hide, hide, hide, my mind chanted. Cabell would find somewhere safe to wait them out, and I needed to do the same. All I could see, though, were homes and shops. Until, ahead, a boarded-up pub, clearly undergoing some sort of renovations, called to me like a beacon.
I ran around to the back of it but found the walls stripped down to studs, leaving no place to hide.
The garden was littered with construction materials, but there were no workers around. There was, however, a rickety garden shed. I pulled a bobby pin out of my hair and started to pick the lock, only to find it was already open.
I ducked inside, my lungs burning, my side cramping, and threw the door shut behind me. I locked it, but still searched for something to brace the handle with.
There was nothing inside the shed besides a few broken lawn chairs, storage boxes, and Emrys Dye.
He scrambled to his feet from behind a stack of crates. “No. Absolutely not. Get out.”
“Are you serious?” I said.
“I was here first!” he protested. “Find a different hiding place!”
The shed creaked, trying to settle its weary old bones. Our boots kicked up the smell of dirt and dead grass.
“You find a different hiding place!” I shot back. “You’re the one who insisted on following me here!”
Cold air and sunlight flooded the shed as the door swung open. I launched myself forward to shove my way past whoever had found us. At the feel of hands clamping around my arms, I yanked back, trying to free myself.
“Tams! It’s me—it’s me!”
The warm leather smell of Cabell’s jacket wrapped around me as his arms did. I gripped him back, my throat aching with the depth of my relief.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“I’m fine,” he said.
My relief was short-lived. Behind him, Neve stepped into view, her wand still clutched in her fist.
“You!” I seethed.
“Me!” she confirmed cheerfully. “See, we get to hang out after all!”
I was vaguely aware of Emrys nearby, his hand hovering over the axe in his travel pack. I don’t know what my expression must have looked like for Cabell to put a steadying hand on my shoulder.
“Tamsin, this is the Sorceress Neve,” he said. “And she’s got an offer you’re going to want to hear.”
“Sorceress,” I repeated, letting venom ooze into the word. “That was quite the act you put on for me, pretending you were one of the Cunningfolk.”
“You know each other?” Emrys asked, finally relaxing his stance.
“Yup, we go way back,” Neve said.
“Yeah, all the way back to last month,” I deadpanned.
“Longer than that.” Neve smiled. “And by the way, I never told you I was one of the Cunningfolk. That was your assumption, and you know what they say about assumptions.”
My gaze narrowed. “Explain.”
“They make an ass out of you—” Neve began.
Cabell held up a hand, gently interrupting her. “What my sister wants to know is how you tracked her down in the first place.”
“I was getting to that,” Neve said, crossing her arms over her chest. “So, here’s the thing. My auntie is one of the Cunningfolk, and her magic gift allows her to find lost things.”
Absently, she touched something hidden beneath her shirt, just at the breastbone. A necklace of some kind—a locket or a crystal, maybe.
“Nashbury Lark sought her out seven years ago to see if she might be able to locate Carnwennan, the dagger of King Arthur,” Neve continued. “Auntie couldn’t find it through her scrying or even through vision walking, which frustrated her greatly, as I’m sure you can understand.”
“We are intimately acquainted with dead ends in our line of work, yes,” I said. A feeling winnowed through me, sharp and quick. The memory followed in its wake. “The shop in Charleston?”
Neve’s hands clapped together. “You do remember! I was supposed to be in bed, but I listened at the top of the stairs.”
Tucked behind King Street and open only after midnight, the shop resembled an apartment more than a business. I remembered the way the moonlight had woven itself through the many scrolls of maps tied together in neat bundles. Mountains of them, like stacks of hollow bones, waiting for their turn.
Neve’s aunt, Linden Goode, was easy to recall, with her warm voice, her apron smelling of sweet mint and lemon as she bid us welcome and ushered us inside. Cabell and I had been sent off to a corner with a bowl of stew to wait for her and Nash to conduct their business. We’d only just been able to see her instinctively reaching for maps. Her selenite dowsing crystal had looked like a star amid the candlelight of the dark room.
She had sung low and deep, and the crystal had begun to spin and spin, fruitlessly searching for the dagger Nash so desperately wanted. In the end, I’d been the one to find it through plain old-fashioned research and good guesses.
“We’d chased down every other lead at that point,” I said faintly.
“Normally she won’t help Hollowers find treasures they’ll only sell, but he said he needed it for one of his children, so she agreed,” Neve explained. “Nashbury gave his address as your guild library, so I kept an eye out for you there and you actually showed up, allowing our destinies to collide once more.”
“So what was all that stuff in the tarot shop about?” I asked. “Just to toy with me?”
“I was trying to feel you out,” Neve said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Which I did. And now we’re here, hiding in this shed. You, confused. Me, with an offer.”
“Yeah, about that,” I began. “Could you at least put the wand away first?”
“Oh—yeah, of course.” She glanced down at it as if surprised she was still gripping it, then unzipped her fanny pack, somehow managing to slip the wand inside. It had to be spelled to hold more than it was meant to.
“Okay, seriously, what’s the deal with the bag?” I asked when I couldn’t stand another second of staring at its terrifying cats.
“Isn’t it so cute?” she said brightly. “It even came with a hat that I think would look really good on you if you want to borrow it for a disguise.”
Neve retrieved a dark bundle from the depths of the fanny pack and shook it out, a black baseball cap with two green-lined cat ears attached to the top of it and the words Feline Spooky! embroidered between them.
“She absolutely wants to borrow that,” Emrys said, delighted.
“Your proposal…?” Cabell prompted. I felt his hand shift from my shoulder to grip the back of my jacket, clearly afraid I might launch myself at our smirking rival.
“Yes, proposal. Right,” Neve said. “Here’s the thing—I think we should work together.” She glanced at Emrys. “Not you. I don’t know you.”
“Emrys Dye, at your service,” he offered wryly.
She sniffed a bit at that, and I warmed to her, just a little, for having no reaction to his family name.
“I can use my magic to help locate your father—Nash—and you can use the ring on whatever curse you may need broken,” Neve said. “Then I can claim it for the Council of Sistren.”
The name of the governing body of sorceresses always made the hair on my arms prickle.
“Do you know what they want it for?” I asked.
“I have no idea why they want it.” Neve shrugged. “I only know they do, and I’m going to be the one who brings it to them. It’s the only way I’ll be assigned a tutor and progress with my training.”
“You don’t have a tutor?” I asked. That tracked with her being raised by one of the Cunningfolk, not her mother or another sorceress relation. “Then how are you able to cast?”
“Um, hello,” she said, clearly annoyed. “I taught myself.”
I exchanged a look with Cabell, who only raised his brows in reply. I’d never heard of a sorceress who hadn’t been taught by another sorceress—usually one of her own blood relations.
“Ah, so they won’t accept you into their ranks because you don’t have formal training,” Emrys said. “But the only way for you to get formal training is to be accepted into their ranks. That’s utterly maddening.”
“I’m beginning to like you,” Neve told him. “You can stay. For now.”
“Good,” Emrys said, “because I have an offer of my own.”
“Can’t wait to hear this,” Cabell muttered.
“We all want the same thing, and we all have a piece of the puzzle that will help us get it,” he said. “Neve has her power, of course. Tamsin knows where Nash has gone. And I think I know how he got there.”
“What?” I asked.
“What?” Cabell echoed. “Tams, you know where he went?”
“Oooh,” Neve said, looking from one to the other of us. “This sounds promising.”
I glanced at my brother, flashing him a meaningful look. “Can I talk to you outside for a second?”
He obliged, following me out and shutting the door behind us. We walked a few paces away.
“What exactly are we doing?” I whispered.
“Prague-ing,” he answered simply.
The Prague job had been Nash’s first and only time voluntarily working with a sorceress, long before he found Cabell and me. The sorceress had been a novice, new to her craft, and had hired Nash to retrieve a rumored vial of ichor—the divine blood of gods—from the tomb of her ancestor. Ultimately, he’d used her inexperience against her. The tomb had a rebounding curse so that whoever broke the curse at the entrance could not enter without falling dead. There’d been no ichor inside, and he never had to worry about her coming after him.
I blew out a harsh breath through my nose. “That’s not going to work. She may come off inexperienced, but she’s way too smart and way too knowledgeable about magic to not figure it out eventually. And as you know, withholding information only works for so long.”
Cabell winced at my tone, running a hand through his shaggy dark hair. He looked to me again, his expression twisting with regret. “What I said at home—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It does,” he pressed on, leaning back against the rock beside me. “I shouldn’t have kept the information about the ring and Nash from you, but I promised him.”
“Cab, I do get it,” I said. “For my part, I’m sorry I didn’t see how much you were struggling with everything.”
He was silent for a long time, working his jaw as if fighting the words he wanted to say. There was a hardness to his face that had never been there before, a new piece of armor to hide his feelings behind.
“I shouldn’t have walked away,” he began hoarsely. “I should never have let you leave to do this on your own. I really had my head up my ass about the whole thing. It’s just…hard to hope.”
“The only thing that really matters to me is that you’re here,” I said. “Took your damn time with it, though.”
He let out a rueful laugh. “And my punishment was getting caught by some of the stupidest Hollowers in our guild.”
I tried to summon a smile, but it wouldn’t come. After a moment, Cabell looked down, hugging his arms to his chest. Up close, he looked terrible. His pale skin emphasized the dark, heavy circles beneath his eyes. He’d lost some weight in recent weeks, and it had left a hollowness in his cheeks I hadn’t seen since we were children.
