Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(21)
Author: Alexandra Bracken

The quiet of the house wrapped around me again, interrupted only by the sudden blare of a neighbor’s TV bleeding through the wall.

 

I poured myself a glass of water, futilely tipping some of it into Florence’s pot. The sight of the plant tore at me in a way I hated. It looked . . . finished.

 

My brother’s words drifted through my mind, slipping into the quiet of the kitchen with the chilled autumn breeze.

 

What’s so great about this life that I have to fight to stay in it?

 

I pressed the edge of the glass to my lips, my gaze sliding back over to the door. If that was what Cabell wanted, to let go, then . . . did I have any right to interfere?

 

“Yes,” I whispered.

 

Before I realized what I was doing, I dug my tarot deck out of my bag and slid the cards free of their velvet pouch. I didn’t shuffle them, I only set them down beside Florence and turned the top card over.

 

On it, a woman in a white dress sat blindfolded, holding two crossed swords in front of her. Behind her, a rocky sea. Above her, a crescent moon. A portrait of balance. Careful deliberation. Advice. Two of Swords.

 

Weigh the options. Take your time. Listen to your intuition.

 

“What the hell am I doing?” I dropped the card.

 

There was a rattle in the bushes outside the window—a blur of movement and color that shook the leaves as it streaked by. I pushed up onto the counter, leaning partly out of the window to see what—or who—it had been. There was nothing but a few footprints that could have come from anyone, at any time. It had probably been nothing more than a feral cat.

 

Still, I shut the window firmly and locked it.

 

My gaze fell back to the tarot card.

 

If I couldn’t force my brother to fight this . . . to want to live . . . I could at least give him a real choice.

 

I gathered what I thought I’d need for traveling, putting the sapphires in an envelope for Cabell and leaving them on his desk, then sent him one last text: Leave the city as soon as you can.

 

I switched the cell phone off. No one was going to use it to track me. And with a final look at the apartment, I inserted my library key into the closet door just as the sky lightened with a dawn I wouldn’t be there to see.

 

 

 

 

 

“—and here Richard, the Earl of Cornwall, one of the wealthiest men in all the land, built his dream of a great hall, with a goal to surpass even the legends of what Tintagel had once been. Centuries before, the settlement had seen trade from all over the Mediterranean, and hosted ancient kings, perhaps even serving as the site of their coronation—”

 

I’d already heard the tour guide give her talk three times now, exuding the same amount of passion earlier, when the skies had been clear, as she did now, when thunderheads loomed on the horizon and bitter winds whipped the sea into a frenzy, warning of worse to come.

 

A true Cornishwoman, undaunted by the sight of the roiling storm making its slow march to shore, she’d merely planted her feet more firmly upon the ground and started shouting. In the last few minutes, it had grown more and more difficult to hear her above the howling air and the churning crash of the restless sea below.

 

Wrapping the oversized flannel coat tighter around my body, I turned my gaze back out toward the dark, rough sea one last time, then retreated farther into the craggy ruins of what had once been Tintagel Castle.

 

A light rain began to patter the slate stones. The steely sky brought an eerie glow to the slick lichen and moss clinging to the crumbling walls. Mist rose from the ground like disturbed spirits, swirling into unknowable patterns around us. A shiver ran along my entire body as it unfurled itself around me, pulling me into its hazy depths.

 

“You can see how the walls of the great hall had to be reconstructed after earlier iterations fell to the sea—”

 

Another guide, wearing a yellow slicker, hurried over to the small group, calling out, “Terribly sorry, but that’ll be all for today. If the winds pick up even a little more, you’ll all be carried off the island.”

 

That garnered a few nervous chuckles and looks from the tourists. It was a typical understatement. Within seconds, the billowing gales were whipping at the foolish lot of us from all sides, and nearly sent an elderly woman soaring into the sea.

 

“Follow me,” the guide shouted, “back to the bridge!”

 

I had come up to the ruins hours ago, refamiliarizing myself with the place after nearly a decade away. Walking it, breathing in the damp brine of the air, noting the sounds of the waves and birds.

 

Remembering.

 

We had come once or twice before that fateful night when Nash left, largely because the man couldn’t resist a windswept landscape of legend any more than he could an Arthurian relic.

 

Convinced that Excalibur had been returned to Avalon before the pathways to the Otherlands were sealed, he’d set his sights on the lesser goal of Arthur’s dagger. He’d searched the ruins here before we’d continued to other parts of England.

 

Finding the dagger had brought me so close to death that I’d learned there was a smell to its presence—a sharpness, like the sky before snow.

 

Now, being back here . . . there was the strangest sense of unraveling in me, as if something had come unknotted without me realizing it. My stomach had been clenched so tight for the last few hours, I hadn’t been able to eat anything.

 

I fell in line at the rear of the tourist pack as we walked to the modern bridge that stretched between the two sections of the ruins. The narrow land bridge that had made the castle nearly unconquerable to enemies in earlier centuries had long since eroded, meaning you had to take one of two footbridges—the modern, upper one, built with steel and wood and slate, or an ancient wooden one below, where the narrow strip of land had washed away.

 

I gripped the handrail of the modern bridge and fought across it, keeping my eyes on the woman in the bright yellow slicker to guide the way. The wind hurried me along, pushing at my back until I returned to mercifully solid, if incredibly slippery, ground.

 

I followed the others down the winding old steps carved into the fiercely rocky ground. The stone’s natural color amid the wild grass made the trails look like silver serpents gliding over the rise and fall of the land.

 

It was as beautiful a place as any for a legend to be born.

 

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae—which Nash referred to as “the racy garbage cult hit of the Middle Ages”—King Arthur had been conceived within the old castle’s walls. His father, Uther Pendragon, had lusted after Igraine, a woman married to Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall. In a twist that would have made the equally questionable Zeus weep with pride, Uther had Merlin, the great druid and later great adviser to King Arthur, transform his appearance so he looked like Gorlois, allowing him to enter the castle and lie with another man’s wife. And poor Gorlois was left to conveniently die in battle days later.