Silver in the Bone, page 37
He gripped my shoulder, his voice faded beneath the slow drumming of my heart. My whole body throbbed with each beat.
He’ll see. I drew my wounded arm beneath me, hiding it. He’ll know.
Blackness overtook my vision, and there was no fighting it. As my body released into numb exhaustion, one last ghost of a thought was left to follow me into the dark.
He’ll know I’m one of them.
There was something about the watery light that made it impossible to tell if I was awake or dreaming. It was shifting, swelling against mossy stone walls. Caught, for a moment, like smoke in a bottle.
It would have been easy, so easy, to drift back into the blessed nothingness. To not feel the way my arm throbbed and my skull seemed poised to split open like a clam.
Instead, I forced my eyes to focus through the satin blur around me. I licked at the gritty dirt between my teeth, my tongue dry and heavy. A wind howled as if searching for its lost brothers.
My mind, ever the survivor, took an inventory of my surroundings. Dirt floor, woolly blanket beneath me, the rough arch of a low ceiling. A shadow in the doorway, coaxing a fire from a snarl of twigs.
The smell of sweet, earthy greens so foreign to this hellscape.
My memory was slow to return, as if it knew it was unwelcome. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes as my gaze fell to my arm.
A thick, shimmering ointment speckled with flecks of dried petals and herbs oozed out around the long leaves used to bandage the gash.
Emrys turned from the fire, letting its smoke drift out through the open doorway. Seeing me stir, he came to sit at my side.
“How are you feeling?” His voice was rough. A cold towel pressed to my cheek, gently wiping something away. My stomach curled at the sight of his worried face.
It’s not worry, came a dark voice in my mind. It’s pity.
“Another favor…I owe you…,” I rasped out.
“Bird, don’t you know I stopped keeping score?” he whispered. “It was never about that.”
He leaned over me, his beautiful eyes still assessing as he brought the towel to my forehead.
“Then…why?”
“I wanted you to…I guess I just wanted you to…” He swallowed hard. “To change your mind about me. Not because of anything I’d done, but because you finally…Because you saw me. Knew me.”
My heart seemed to rise with my breath.
Emrys pressed a hand to his forehead. “Sorry. I’m not making any sense.”
I looked around again, desperate for anything other than the sight of his all-too-handsome face. “Where…?”
“One of the watch outposts, not far from the lake,” he said. “The fire’s still burning above us and I set another one at the door. I had to use both your wards and mine to surround this place. I hope that’s okay. But I’m not sure it’s going to be enough to stop the Children once the light is completely gone.”
A chill found its way into my blood.
“What?” I whispered. “You don’t want to make a bet?”
His mismatched eyes were soft. I wondered if he was as afraid as I suddenly felt. “Not about this.”
Go, I wanted to tell him. Go back to the tower.
But the weaker, worse part of me couldn’t. I hated it—hated it. He deserved to be safe. To stay alive. And yet it was always there, that push and pull. The fear of getting close straining against the fear of being alone.
“You shouldn’t…have come,” I said, letting my eyes drift shut. “Why…?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go to the springs. I saw you and Bedivere go into the kitchen, but only Bedivere come back out,” Emrys said. “I was worried something had happened, so I confronted him and made him tell me where you were going. I may have punched him.”
I gave him a look of disbelief.
He held up his bruised knuckles. “I may have also sprained my hand and shattered my remaining pride in the process. And while I wouldn’t dream of lecturing you—”
“Good.”
“But for a very smart person, leaving by yourself to do this was very stupid,” he said. “Really. You wound me, Bird. I thought we did all our clandestine searching together.”
Emrys said it lightly, in his usual way, but there was real strain around his eyes. He was angry—maybe more than that.
“Not. Sorry,” I managed to choke out.
“I know, you absurd human.” Emrys was fading at his edges, splitting into two like the opening of butterfly wings. “Do you want some water?”
“I can…” Do it.
I didn’t need help. I didn’t…
He retrieved the waterskin from my things, wavering a moment beside me. I tried to lift my hand, but it was as if my blood had turned to lead. After a moment, he slid a strong arm beneath me and slowly propped me up, bringing the water to my lips.
I spat out the first of it, needing to rinse the foul taste from my mouth, then, too tired to feel self-conscious, I drank greedily. The smell of him, evergreen and warm skin, wrapped around me.
Emrys had taken off both of our jackets and hung them near the fire to dry. When he lowered me back onto his blanket, the one that smelled like him, the cold crept over me again.
A strange sound, one I hadn’t caught in weeks, drifted in through the doorway. I turned toward it, not quite believing my eyes as the first drops of rain pattered down. After a few moments, it fell harder, rattling the dead leaves on the nearby branches and slanting against the watchtower’s walls.
And for once, I could barely hear the Children at all.
The fire burning at the head of the tower hissed viciously, but it would hold as long as the salamander stones touched one another. Our wards would offer another layer of protection from the Children. For a moment, I could almost believe we were truly safe.
“Try to rest,” Emrys murmured, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. He seemed to realize what he’d done a moment too late and flushed.
But I had liked it, that touch. What it said without speaking. What it could have become.
His hair was redder in the dying light, and the shadows made him seem older—a hundred years, not seventeen. “You lost a lot of blood. I had to utilize my extremely limited first-aid training and stitch the cut on your arm.”
The quiet peace of the moment splintered into thousands of jagged shards.
He saw.
Olwen’s voice sang with the rain. Three magics to be feared…
“Emrys,” I whispered with what urgency I could muster. Already, the shadows were returning for me. “When I die, burn my body. I’m one of them.”
He gripped my hand tightly, leaning his face over mine again. I tried to focus on it. On his eyes, gray as a storm cloud, green as earth. “No, you’re not.”
Three magics to be feared…curses born of the wrath of gods, poisons that turn soil to ash, and that which leaves one dark of heart and silver in the bone.
“Dark of heart,” I said, my thoughts fracturing, my tongue turning lazy. “Silver in the bone.”
“There is nothing dark about you,” he said vehemently. “Nothing.”
“I killed Septimus…” Maybe that had left a mark on my soul. A brand on my very bones.
“The Children killed him,” Emrys said.
My eyelids sank again, and I tried to hold on to his words, to believe them.
But there, in the darkness, I only saw Nash’s bones returning to the earth. Laid out the exact way I was, in an identical tower. Lost and nameless.
Alone.
The sight of him faded like twilight into night.
“Don’t leave,” I begged. “Please don’t leave…”
“You’re the bird,” Emrys whispered. “You’re the one who always flies away.”
Liar, I thought. Emrys Dye was a liar, his words as smooth as a snake’s underbelly. He’d leave if it benefited him. If he knew what I’d seen.
He’d leave like everyone else.
Don’t tell him, I thought. He’ll go and it’s too dangerous. She’ll kill him…
But if clever Emrys wanted it, he’d find a way. He’d find it, and I wanted to know.
I needed to know.
Because you saw me.
“She has the Ring of Dispel,” I whispered, disappearing into the flickering dark. “The High Priestess…she…”
Because you saw m…
When I opened my eyes again, I did see him.
Emrys sat beside me, one arm wrapped around his knees, his perfect face soft as he watched me through his lowered lashes. His fingers were still clasped around mine, and they tightened, as if to say Rest. As if to promise We’re still here, the both of us.
My eyelids fluttered shut.
The daylight was gone, but he wasn’t.
The rain turned to snow.
I woke in time to see the silent, dreamy transformation. The curtain of rain slowed, and in its place came tufts of white, falling through the night air like a shower of stars. Emrys leaned against the doorway watching, his scarred arms crossed over his chest.
Scars.
He’d stripped off his heavy wool sweater and wore only a plain T-shirt. One, like mine, that had seen better days. The muscles of his arms and back were taut beneath the fabric, as if he was bracing for something to emerge from the trees.
Near his feet, the small fire was struggling. The pile of deadwood he’d gathered had already dwindled to its last few branches. The cold seeped inside the watchtower like an uninvited guest, and now, like the cries of the hungry Children that surrounded us, we would never be rid of it.
I shivered, my teeth chattering painfully. Reeling in that last bit of consciousness that seemed to want to slip away again, I tried to curl my legs up closer to my middle. An unexpected but comforting weight shifted over me. Our jackets and his sweater were tucked in tight around my body.
Emrys reached out to catch some of the snow in his palm, his faint smile fading with some unknowable thought.
Something in me softened as I watched him—it had no name, but it was new and strange and dizzying as the sensation spread. My arm throbbed painfully as I moved it, filling with needles as I tried to curl my fingers, remembering the feel of my hand in his bigger one.
I should have been horrified at the thought of him having to take care of me again when I’d always fought so hard to take care of myself.
Yet all those thoughts turned to ash in the wind as Emrys looked at the remaining firewood, then back out to the woods. Weighing the risk. The cost of trying.
Panic fluttered in my chest.
“Don’t,” I croaked out.
Emrys’s expression shifted to that easy lightness that seemed to carry him through life on a gilded cloud. His posture relaxed as he knelt beside me, adjusting the coats.
“I’m thrilled you think I’m brave enough to go out there right now,” he said, his voice scratchy.
“Br-brave wasn’t ex-exactly the word I was thinking,” I said, trembling hard from the cold.
He clutched at his heart. “Ah, her aim strikes deadly and true.”
There was a luminous, hazy quality to him, like a creature who’d escaped from a dream. The rakish hair and those vivid eyes only added to the effect. My thoughts came warm and flushed with something I didn’t want to examine too closely.
“D-do I have a fever or something?” I asked. It was the only explanation for why I leaned into the touch of his palm as he pressed it gently to my forehead. Why it felt so good to have him brush my loose hair off the sticky skin of my face.
“Nah, I just have that effect on people,” he said with a wink. “Well, everyone but you.”
“Th-thanks to N-Nash, I ha-have an immunity t-to charm,” I managed to get out.
Careful to avoid my injury, he rubbed my upper arms beneath the layers of fabric, trying to create some heat. His smile drifted away again, and like a pathetic soft-in-the-head idiot, I immediately wanted it back.
“You have a little bit of a fever,” he explained. “The herbs are doing their work, though. Think you could eat something? I have some bread that didn’t go for a swim with us.”
I shook my head. My stomach was as tight as a drum.
“H-how are you not fr-freezing?” I asked.
“If you were to ask my dear mother, she’d say it was because I was born with gentle fire in my heart,” he said with a strained look in his eyes. “But I think there’s just something wrong with me.”
The heat from his hands felt like it was radiating through our jackets. My jaw locked from the force of the shivers racking my body. Emrys’s face fell with concern.
“That bad?” he whispered.
I nodded. It felt like my lungs had frozen and the silver coating my bones refused to loosen its grip on the cold.
Emrys closed his eyes, turning his face up toward the ceiling of the watchtower, where a winding staircase led to the flat roof. “I am suggesting this in a way that is devoid of anything other than concern for your well-being, and with the full knowledge that you are less likely, in this moment, to be able to punch me for it…”
I stared up at him, exasperated.
“Yeah, I do deserve that look, but…I could warm you?” The words came out in a rush as he looked back up at the ceiling, his throat bobbing hard. “I mean, for your well-being. Not any other reason. I said that already, didn’t I? I’m just trying to make the point that it’s only weird if we make it weird, and we don’t have to make it weird. At all.”
The thought was enough to get the blood back to warming my face.
It won’t be anything different than when you and Cabell were kids, I told myself. In the days we had to sleep outside in the cold, we’d huddle together under the blankets to stay alive. And there was nothing there between Emrys and me to make it any more than that.
There wasn’t. And I was so cold.
To keep him from seeing the way the flush was spreading up from my neck to my ears—and to get him to stop talking—I turned onto my uninjured side, facing away from him. Creating space for him beneath the makeshift covers. It wasn’t fair for me to keep them all to myself, anyway.
His hesitation made my stupid heart give a kick. I stared at the dark stones across from me, my body tensed with a held breath. The firelight flickered away like the sun past the horizon.
There was a soft rustle of fabric. As I drew my next breath like the last one before a deep plunge, the jackets lifted and he slipped in behind me, fitting his body to mine.
Heat enveloped me like a summer day, spreading slowly across my every sense, turning my body from stone to skin again. He inched closer still, until my head was tucked beneath his chin, and I let out a shuddering breath as one of his impossibly warm arms wrapped around my waist.
“Is this okay?” he asked, barely a whisper.
I nodded, closing my eyes at the feeling of his heart pounding against my back. His breath stirred my hair, sending a shiver down my spine. I flushed as warmth pooled low in my belly again.
“Still cold?” Emrys’s voice rumbled in his chest.
His arm tightened around me until I brought my own down over it. Every thought, every nerve in my body, narrowed to where my bare skin touched his. Long legs wove through mine as if they belonged there. I wondered, as his hand spread over my belly, if he could feel the honeyed heat pooling in my core.
I breathed in deeply, no longer able to hear anything over the sound of our hearts racing one another to some unknown end. I felt almost drunk with it, the way his breathing hitched when I traced a vein from the top of his hand down over his wrist. I’d never had any other power but this.
It would be reckless to do it again. Absolute madness to let my finger drift farther through the light dusting of hair, tracing over him like a map to someplace unknown. My hand stilled as the soft skin became rough. Scarred.
Emrys turned his cheek to rest against my hair. “I lied to you before.”
A whisper. A secret.
My eyes opened.
“I didn’t get the scars on a job.” I could barely hear him over the pounding of his heart. He breathed the words as if he were scraping them from his soul. “My father gave them to me.”
It took a moment for me to understand what he’d said. Careful to tuck my wounded arm close to my body, I rolled over and pulled back from his chest to look at his face.
“What?” I whispered.
The tendons of his neck strained as he tilted his head back, closing his eyes. The scar there made my breath catch again. “The things he believes…He’s always been fixated on strange ideas, I guess, but in the last year…it’s gotten so much worse. This was…this was punishment when I refused to do what he wanted me to.”
My mind was too quick to fill in the blanks of what had happened to him. I didn’t dare ask any of the questions racing through my mind. I didn’t know what to say. What could I say to any of that?
Nash had warned me about Endymion Dye years ago, and as with most of his stories, I’d assumed it was exaggerated. The man had always been rigid and harsh, but never, in all my worst thoughts of him, could I have imagined him giving his own flesh and blood such cruel and lasting injuries.
Wordlessly, I drew Emrys close again; I wrapped my arm around his waist and pressed my face to the warm spot between his shoulder and neck. My hand stroked down his spine, and every rough ridge of a scar brought me closer to tears, imagining.
Emrys shuddered, his arm around me tightening. “That’s the real reason I took this job. I have nothing of my own. He controls everything and everyone in my life. I needed money to find a way to get me and my mom out of his reach. Out of his life.”
Stripping away the charming gloss, that beautiful polish of wealth he’d once worn as proudly as his signet ring, what was left was this real boy whose life had been little better than a cruel secret. One who’d been alone inside that gilded cage of pain and blood and quiet terror.
