Silver in the Bone, page 31
Behind us, where the sludgy moat lapped against stone, the dank water began to gurgle. Roil.
Mist rose, sweeping past us with stunning force. And within the depths of it, four shadows emerged, scaling the edge of the platform.
The moment turned gauzy around me. As surreal as my waking nightmare just moments before.
No. This was—it was—
“Run,” Emrys breathed out. “Run.”
We made it all of five feet before the first of the Children screeched, scrabbling after us. Ten before Cabell realized I couldn’t keep up and stopped to throw me over his shoulder.
My body ached as it was jostled, but my attention was fixed behind us. The Children broke ranks as we passed through the antechamber back into the tunnel. They clawed their way up and over the walls, crawling along them. Rather than being repelled, their jaws snapped around Neve’s lights, devouring them one after another. That threw the tunnel behind us into complete darkness and made them appear to ride the wave of an unnatural shadow.
The tunnel dead-ended where the platform was meant to lower down from the armory. Cabell slid to a stop, and to my left, I saw Emrys dive for an iron lever on the wall. The platform rumbled as it started to lower.
“Now, Neve!” Cabell shouted.
Her scream pierced the pathway a breath before the spell’s lights did; they roared across the stone, tearing through the Children until there was nothing left but ash.
As soon as the floor was low enough, Cabell dropped me on it and turned back toward the others. The sorceress swayed, her face graying with exhaustion from the spell. Emrys caught her arm, and he and Cabell lifted her and themselves onto the slowly rising platform.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Cabell told Neve.
“How…,” she gasped out between heavy breaths, “did…they get in?”
“There must be some kind of gap in the walls around the moat,” Emrys said, running a hand through his hair and clenching it. “We have to tell the others. Now.”
But as the platform finished its ascent and leveled out with the armory’s floor, the Children’s screaming didn’t stop. It only amplified into a roar, engulfing us like a thunderstorm.
I pushed to my feet and ran to the nearby window. Betrys was visible through the rippled glass, a sword clutched between her hands, her back to the building. She ran into the courtyard with a ferocious battle cry.
“Holy gods of night.” Cabell ran to the doorway, throwing it open before I could stop him.
My mind finally grasped what I was seeing.
The racks around us had been emptied, and the courtyard was on fire.
Lines of flame blazed on the fortress’s walls and between the buildings, dividing the open space and trapping Children within flaming cages. Some threw themselves forward, undaunted, trying to get to where Caitriona, Arianwen, and Rhona were defending the main entrance to the tower, hacking and slicing through any of the Children who tried to enter.
Emrys helped a stumbling Neve forward. I looked to her, desperate.
“I need…” She held up a hand, visibly anguished. “I need a few minutes before I can cast the spell again…”
“Stay in the armory,” I told her, tossing a glance toward Emrys. He nodded, his expression fierce with resolve. “We’ll buy you some time.”
We ran forward into the raging chaos of the fight, searching for a torch or weapon to defend ourselves.
“Flea!” Caitriona’s shout drew my attention to them again. The girl bolted from the tower. Dragging a sword nearly as tall as her, she ran to join the fray on the ramparts.
Horror punched me in the chest as Caitriona broke from the others, chasing her. The other Avalonians were spread out between the infirmary, the kitchen, and the stables, fighting desperately with fiery arrows and staffs.
A single word rang through my mind as I searched the smoke, the fire, the darkness. Cabell.
I spotted him again near Bedivere, who blocked the entrance to the stables, defending the horses and goats from the ravenous creatures dropping like spiders from the roof.
The dead, Children and human, were everywhere. The sheer carnage brought me up short. A flaming arrow singed the air to my right, piercing the skull of a creature I hadn’t seen coming.
Seren’s sunshine-gold hair was splattered with dark blood as she nocked another arrow and shouted down to us. “Get to the tower!”
“Tamsin!” I turned just as Emrys tossed me his axe. He knelt to pick up a dead man’s sword.
“Can you buy me a few minutes?” Neve gasped out, her breathing hitching again. “I can try to figure out what I did before, but I need time!”
Without a word, Emrys and I moved into position around her. My eyes stung from the smoke and the wall of heat radiating from the fires, but the stench of blood and roasting flesh was worse. With a cry, I swung the axe into the darkness around me, striking stone, striking monstrous flesh, striking, striking, striking until it felt like my body was burning too.
A terrifying growl rose at my right. I whirled around, the blade of my axe cutting into the darkness, but I wasn’t met with the gray face of the undead.
It was the snarling mouth of an enormous black dog.
I released my grip on the weapon just in time, narrowly avoiding its head. The hound’s teeth were white knives as it dove for my ankle, locking its jaws around my boot. The breath blew out of me as my back hit the ground. I tried to twist, to claw at the stones, but it dragged me forward—away from the other predators that threatened its prey.
“Tamsin!”
Emrys ran forward, but I threw my other hand out to stop him. The hound yanked me toward a break in the fire line around the newly planted crops. The Children were there tearing up the soil, polluting it with their foul blood.
“No, Cabell, please!” I shouted. “Please!”
Emrys leapt forward, trying to grip the hound’s jaws and pry them off me. When that didn’t work, he picked up a loose stone and threw it at one of the dog’s red eyes.
The hound whimpered, releasing me as it retreated. Emrys hooked his arms around my chest and lifted me. I gasped as I tried to put weight on my ankle, my vision blacking out with pain.
The hound howled as it sighted new vulnerable prey. Neve, her eyes closed. Concentrating. Undefended.
Cabell’s quiet voice flooded my mind, drowning out the desperate voices around me. Don’t let me hurt anyone.
“No!” I screamed. I dove forward, but the hound was too fast, too strong—it leapt over fire, over bodies, its gaze never wavering from the sorceress.
Someone else got to her first.
Caitriona jumped down from the wall, landing in a crouch before Neve. Her armor glowed gold in the fire of battle. She raised her sword, her face rigid with determination.
I couldn’t live with it.
“Cait!” Flea screamed from the wall.
“Hold her, Seren!” Caitriona called back.
Do whatever it takes to stop me.
Seren shouted something down to us, but I couldn’t hear a word over the blood roaring in my ears.
Whatever it takes.
“Don’t kill him,” I begged. “Don’t kill him!”
Caitriona showed no signs of having heard me. Her gaze was sharp and assessing. When the hound sprang, she drew in a hard breath.
And let the sword fall from her hand.
The full weight of the beast slammed into her, tackling her to the stones beside Neve. Her armor clattered as it rolled, but it wasn’t half as terrible as the hound’s victorious howl, and Caitriona’s agonized cry.
The hound had clamped its teeth around her steel gauntlet. Emrys and I tried to lock our arms around its shuddering frame, to pull the hound away from her, but it was thrashing, baying, impossible to hold. Heat radiated from its fur as its pulse rose with killing intent.
Caitriona slammed a fist into the side of the creature’s neck and it howled in rage. Claws extended from the paw that was pinning her chest to the ground, piercing the metal.
Whatever it takes.
Reaching down toward her boot with her free hand, Caitriona tried to pull free the dagger there. Emrys cut at the paw pinning her, but the hound was lost to its bloodlust. It released her chest and I watched in horror as it bit down at the place where her neck met her shoulder, puncturing the armor to rip into the skin and muscle below.
Caitriona screamed.
An arrow slid into the hound’s back, but not even the pain loosened its jaws as it thrashed her around like a doll. Blood streaked Caitriona’s face as she tried to pound against its snout, its eyes.
Whatever it takes.
A strong arm shoved me out of the way, and then Bedivere was there, gripping the struggling beast around its middle and lifting it from Caitriona’s prone form.
The moment fractured around me.
Seren and Flea ran toward us.
Emrys pressed his jacket to the priestess’s shoulder to stanch the flow of blood, shouting for Olwen.
Bedivere shouted, “Master it, master it—”
The hound began to shift into something like a human.
And the light of Neve’s spell flooded the courtyard, incinerating the Children, washing all of it, and all of us, away.
The darkness returned like a smothering hand. Motion blurred around me.
Flea sobbed as she pressed her face to Caitriona’s chest, her breath fogging the armor where it wasn’t already wet with blood. She kicked and screamed as a stone-faced Lowri pulled her away. Lowri hugged the girl to her tightly, allowing Rhona, Seren, and Emrys to lift Caitriona’s limp form.
Olwen was already directing the wounded into the great hall. She cried out when she saw their group coming, rushing down the steps to meet them. Others screamed in disbelief or began weeping at the sight of Caitriona.
“Start searching the tower and the underpaths,” Betrys shouted up to the men and women watching in terror from the wall. “I’ll get Ari and meet you in the springs.”
The magic that had fed the lines of fire across the courtyard released with a hiss. Through the smoke, I saw Betrys and Arianwen pull their swords from the twitching body of one of the Children, Arianwen crying as she gently touched one of its grotesque limbs.
A low moan of terror rose behind me. Cabell was white as milk in the dark, fighting to stand as his legs shook. His breathing turned erratic as his shock set in, and through the storm of death around us, his eyes found Neve.
The sorceress took several steps back, her face stricken.
“No,” he moaned again. Cabell tore at his face and hair, his clawed fingers cutting angry red welts over his skin, until it became impossible to tell if the blood on his hands was Caitriona’s or his own. His clothing hung in tatters from the shift.
“It is all right now, lad,” Bedivere said, his voice low and soothing. “It’s done.”
“Cab—”
His head shot up, and the look was so accusatory, so terrible, it stole the breath from me.
Whatever it takes.
Bedivere’s hand came to rest on Cabell’s shoulder, but the touch sparked something. He wrenched himself away and ran through the shuddering clouds of smoke.
I followed, weaving through the wreckage of the battle, gasping for a deep enough breath to fill my lungs. The living moved around me like sleepwalkers, limping toward the tower. Ahead, Cabell disappeared into the stables. I followed.
The animals inside were in a state. The horses kicked at their stalls, unable to see that the threat had passed. Terrorized goats raced around in dizzying circles, bleating with the same animal desperation I’d felt in the courtyard. The sound of Cabell’s ragged breathing led me to an empty stall at the back.
He slid down the wall into a crouch.
“No…no…no…” The word was hysterical, an agonized prayer. I approached slowly from behind. Until I smelled the blood.
He was frantically digging his nails into the cut Emrys had given him, ripping at the skin as dark blood poured down his arm.
“Stop—Cabell!” I dropped to my knees in front of him, trying to pull his injured arm away. He fought me hard enough that I was knocked onto the ground. “Stop!”
“I have to see—I have to see—” He chanted the words, teeth chattering. There was still blood around his mouth and chin.
I scrambled over to him, gripping his blood-slicked wrist again, trying to wedge my body between his arms to block his clawed nails. “You have to see what? What is it?”
When I turned his face toward mine, his eyes were empty. The waves of remorse and pain that had racked his body quieted and he was suddenly still. His eyes deadened, and I knew, I knew without him saying it, that I had witnessed the last light in him gutter out.
“To see if it’s silver,” he whispered hoarsely. “If I’m one of them.”
My heart surged in my chest. I wrapped an arm around his shoulder and pressed my hand against his open wound, trying to hold the skin together. To hold him together.
“No, you’re not,” I said. “I swear, I swear you’re not.”
“I killed her.” It wasn’t a question.
“No, you—” I wanted to protest, but the truth was I didn’t know. I didn’t know what would happen next, or what they might try to do to him, and that was what scared the hell out of me. I didn’t have a weapon to protect him, or the training to. I couldn’t even sneak him out of the tower without drawing him into worse danger.
If the Avalonians believed that the darkness was slowly corrupting all magic on the isle, would they deem Cabell just as tainted as the Children?
Who’s to say he isn’t? came the dark voice at the back of my mind. He’s losing control more and more…
“Your ankle,” he rasped out, seeing the blood, the bite mark. “I hurt you again…I…”
I held him tighter, trying to keep him there, with me. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
“You promised,” he said, agonized. “You promised.”
“We’ll fix this,” I whispered, holding him as he shook. “We’ll fix you, I swear, we’ll fix you.”
“Lass.”
I looked up to find Bedivere watching us. The battle had painted his face in cuts and bruises, but his expression was soft. He tilted his head away, toward the other end of the stables. I resisted, searching Cabell’s face one last time for any sign of emotion amid the bleak nothingness in his eyes. Ripping the bottom of my tunic, I used the strip of fabric to bind the wound on his arm the best I could.
He didn’t react, not even a flinch, as I knotted it tightly where the flesh was coming apart.
“I’ll be right back,” I promised.
As the old knight moved to the entrance of the stable, he brushed a hand over each of the animals, soothing them into a settled quiet. The horses watched us with dark eyes.
Bedivere looked out into the courtyard, where Betrys was helping a man with a gashed leg struggle toward the tower.
I gripped his arm, drawing his attention back to me. I didn’t care how desperate I looked or sounded. “He didn’t mean to do it. He would never have wanted to hurt her or anyone else—”
He covered my hand with his own. The skin was heavily callused and surprisingly cold to the touch. “There’s no need to convince me, lass. I saw with my own eyes how he fought the shift.”
I understood in an instant why the Nine looked to Bedivere with such adoration and trust. His unflinching calm was a ballast to the storm raging in me. He neither tried to hide the problem nor offered false assurances. His long life, and all that it had shown him, had shaped him into a rare source of dependability in Avalon.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, my throat thick.
“I see your pain,” he said quietly. “You have cared for him all these many years. He has spoken of how you have protected him, and how honorably you have tried to find the answers to his struggles.”
“He’s my brother,” I said. “He’s my responsibility.”
“Yes,” Bedivere said, nodding. “But I’ve been working with him these last few days and I see potential in him. I believe, with more time, I can help him find some measure of control over his magic until the blessed day comes that his curse is broken.”
I knew better than to hope, but it was so hard not to cling to the idea of what he was offering. More time. “How?”
“It is fear and pain that spark his transformations,” Bedivere said, “and both can be conquered. I will teach him what I know of these things.”
I hesitated, glancing back toward Cabell.
“You have been alone in this for so very long,” Bedivere said. “If I may relieve you of some of this weight, if only for this small measure of time, please allow me that honor. I care for the lad, and I believe this is what he himself desires.”
Maybe that’s what was bothering me. That Bedivere had been the one to truly help Cabell, and not me. Not after years of trying and searching.
I’d failed him, but maybe Bedivere wouldn’t.
“What if he shifts again?” I asked. The adrenaline had faded and now exhaustion battered me from all sides. “What if the others want to kill him for what he’s done?”
“I swear to you, lass, on my life and on that of my lord and liege, that I will let no one harm him,” Bedivere said, kneeling with his oath. “I believe I may be able to suppress most shifts with what small magic I possess. That will ease the fears others may harbor.”
It would. The others, even Caitriona, listened to him. Respected him. They would never hurt Cabell so long as the knight was there, defending his humanity. If I couldn’t get us out of this hell, I could at least give him the best chance of surviving it. I could do that.
“It’s his choice,” I forced myself to say.
Bedivere bowed his head, drawing his hand across his chest as he rose. “I shall speak with him, then.” When I started to follow, he held out a hand, stopping me with an apologetic look. “I think it best I speak to him alone.”
