Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(23)
Author: Alexandra Bracken

 

Hit the hay, Tamsy, he’d said, looking up from where he was scribbling notes into his journal. Get some sleep while you can. We’re leaving at first light.

 

We’re leaving. The worst promise he ever broke.

 

I’d replayed the memory hundreds of times, straining to find some small detail I might have missed.

 

I opened my eyes, bringing my hands to rest on my stomach, feeling the rise and fall with each breath. Even with the wind outside, the silence coming from within the tent was stifling. I drummed my fingers against each other, trying to ease the sensation of swarming flies beneath my skin.

 

Loneliness coiled around me. It was the only way to explain what possessed me to reach into my workbag for a familiar lump.

 

“Oh, all right,” I muttered. “This is deeply pathetic of you, Lark.”

 

Ignatius’s bleary eye blinked open as I set him beside my sleeping bag and lit his wicks. The air around us shimmered as magic spread with the heat of the tiny flames. The eye rolled between me and the roof of the dripping tent, the skin around it wrinkling with disdain. Knuckles cracking, Ignatius tried to curl his wretched fingers down, either to extinguish the flames or scuttle away like a crab.

 

“If you even think about escaping,” I warned him, “just remember that you only need three fingers to work, and if I catch you, I’ll take the middle one first.”

 

Ignatius straightened his fingers but dripped a petulant glob of wax onto the sleeping bag, just to have his say. As it turned out, a staring contest with the hand and eyeball of a psychotic murderer did not, in fact, lessen the hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, or do anything, really, except make me suddenly afraid he might try to light my hair on fire.

 

There’d been a second—many seconds, actually—when I’d almost left him behind. Taking him on a stroll around the grounds of Tintagel to look for magic in full view of tourists had been out of the question, and, well, I hadn’t wanted to believe I might need him. Not with the arrangements I’d made with the Bonecutter.

 

It’s a shame you don’t have the One Vision.

 

The fact that Emrys could have been there the whole time, watching me, laughing at how pathetic my supplies were . . . A fresh wave of anger rushed through me, incinerating that last bit of resistance and fear.

 

If he wanted a challenge, he was about to get one.

 

At the bottom of my satchel was the small brown-paper parcel that had been delivered to the library. I’d woken up in the attic and come down to find that Librarian had left it for me at the base of the stairs. The Bonecutter had only needed four hours to track down what I’d asked for.

 

Inside the rumpled paper was a wooden box, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. The inner compartment slid out with the slightest urging from my thumb, revealing the vial inside. I unwound the long scrap of parchment wrapped around it, set that aside for a moment, and lifted the bottle. It was made of clear glass, twined with decorative silver whorls like vines. The glass dropper barely touched the thin layer of crimson liquid inside, which shimmered maliciously like an oil slick in Ignatius’s revealing light.

 

Basilisk venom.

 

I breathed in deeply through my nose, my hands trembling from cold or nerves or both. I’d read about the venom’s ability to grant a mortal the One Vision years ago, when I was envious of Cabell’s magic. But with the serpents now extinct, their venom was perishingly hard to come by.

 

More importantly, the venom, like every other so-called solution I’d researched, was worse than the problem itself.

 

I picked up the handwritten note again, squinting at the elegant swirl of violet ink letters.

 

 

Dear Miss Lark,

 

 

How splendid to finally have a request that’s not for a Vein key. I have procured the venom as requested and feel I must remind you of its dangers. Should you survive the toxin entering your body, the hours that follow will likely be the most unpleasant of your life. I have heard of agonizing pain, fever, and hallucinations from those bitten by a basilisk and therefore must imagine the same will be true for you, as is the possibility of permanent, rather than temporary, blindness. For your purposes as I understand them, place one large drop in each eye.

 

Proceeding means you recognize I am not liable for your death, altered mind, or any permanent loss of functions, et cetera. As per usual, payment in the form of a favor will be collected at a later date of my choosing. I shall save a special one for you.

 

As always,

 

Your humble procurer

 

More debt, but worth the weight on my soul if it meant saving Cabell.

 

And as for the venom . . . the pain, fever, hallucinations, and blindness I’d known about, and I wasn’t afraid of any of them. Of course, all of that was only if the venom didn’t kill me. Not even Nash had been willing to tempt those odds.

 

There’s nothing wrong with the way you are, Tamsy, he’d said when I’d suggested the venom. If you aren’t born with the sight, that’s the way of it.

 

Clearly there was something wrong with me, otherwise he wouldn’t have left me behind, time and time again.

 

“You’ve never been a coward before,” I said, curling my fingers around the vial. “And you’re not about to start now.”

 

I picked up Ignatius by his candlestick holder and blew out his wicks, then wrapped him in his length of silk. “Time for bed.”

 

With him safely secured in the bag, its straps double-knotted, I lay back on the sleeping bag again. Just unscrewing the dropper was enough to release a truly evil smell into the air.

 

Thinking twice, I reached for my traveling pack’s thick leather strap. I bit down on it as I brought the dropper above my right eye.

 

A single bead of crimson liquid clung to the end of it, shivering as my hand shook.

 

Then it fell.

 

I groaned around the strap, my free hand clawing at my sleeping bag as my body twisted and curled, absorbing the agonizing burn of the venom.

 

I couldn’t do a drop in the other eye—I couldn’t do it—

 

You have to, you have to, you have to, my mind chanted. For Cabell.

 

I lifted the vial again, pulling the last bead of venom into the dropper. Willpower and courage weren’t enough. I had to hold my left eye open to keep my body from instinctively blinking the poison away.

 

My legs kicked up and my teeth tore down into the strap, breaking it. The poison worked through my mind, darkening the roots of my thoughts before setting it all on fire.