Silver in the bone, p.1
Silver in the Bone, page 1
NOVELS BY
ALEXANDRA BRACKEN
Lore
The Darkest Minds series
The Darkest Minds
Never Fade
In the Afterlight
Through the Dark
The Darkest Legacy
Passenger series
Passenger
Wayfarer
Prosper Redding series
The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding
The Last Life of Prince Alastor
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by Alexandra Bracken
Cover art copyright © 2023 by Filip Hodas
Map art copyright © 2023 by Virginia Allyn
Interior art used under license from Shutterstock.com
Excerpt text copyright © 2023 by Alexandra Bracken.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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ISBN 9780593481653 (trade) — ISBN 9780593481660 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780593481677 — ISBN 9780593650561 (intl. pbk.)
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Or, in the words of the Sistren:
Any thief who dares to steal this book
will find it’s not the only thing they took.
A curse shall fall upon their wicked eye,
ensuring that their love of reading die.
May every page appear as blank as snow
as they suffer in eternal woe.
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Contents
Cover
Novels by Alexandra Bracken
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Part 1: Two of Swords
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part 2: The Wasteland
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Part 3: Blade & Bone
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Acknowledgments
Dramatis Personae
Excerpt from Silver in the Bone #2
Credits
About the Author
_143000293_
For my sister, Stephanie
Seven Years Ago
Lancashire, England
The first thing you learned on the job as a Hollower was to never trust your eyes.
Nash, of course, had a different way of saying it: All sorcery is half illusion. The other half, unfortunately, was blood-soaked terror.
In that moment, though, I wasn’t scared. I was as angry as a spitting cat.
They’d left me behind. Again.
I braced my hands on either side of the garden shed’s doorframe, drawing as close as I could to the enchanted passageway without entering. Hollowers called these dark tunnels Veins because they carried you from one location to another in an instant. In this case, to the vault of a long-dead sorceress, containing her most prized possessions.
I checked the time on the cracked screen of Nash’s ancient cell phone. It had been forty-eight minutes since I watched them disappear into the Vein. I hadn’t been able to run fast enough to catch up, and if they’d heard my shouts, they’d ignored me.
The phone screen blinked to black as the battery finally croaked.
“Hello?” I called, fiddling with the key they’d left in the lock—one of the sorceress’s finger bones, dipped into a bit of her blood. “I’m not going back to camp, so you may as well just tell me when it’s safe to come in! Do you hear me?”
Only the passage answered, breathing out whorls of snow. Great. The Sorceress Edda had chosen to put her collection of relics somewhere even colder than England in the winter.
The fact that Cabell and Nash weren’t answering had my insides squirming. But Nash had never been deterred by the promise of danger, and he was about to discover I wouldn’t be deterred by anyone, least of all my rotten bastard of a guardian.
“Cabell?” I said, louder this time. The cold gripped my words, leaving white streaks in the air. A shiver rippled through me. “Is everything all right? I’m coming in whether you want me to or not!”
Of course Nash had taken Cabell with him. Cabell was useful to him. But if I wasn’t there, there was no one to make sure my brother didn’t end up hurt, or worse.
The sun was shy, hiding behind silver clouds. Behind me, an abandoned stone cottage kept watch over the nearby fields. The air was quiet, which always stirred up my nerves. I held my breath, straining my ears to listen. No humming traffic, no drone of passing airplanes, not even a chirp from a bird. It was like everyone else knew better than to come to this cursed place, and Nash was the only idiot too stupid and greedy to risk it.
But a moment later, a fresh wave of snow carried Cabell’s voice to me.
“Tamsin?” He sounded excited, at least. “Watch your head as you come in!”
I plunged into the Vein’s disorienting darkness. Outside was nothing compared to the barbed cold that wrapped around me now, knifing at my skin until I couldn’t draw breath.
In two steps, the round doorway at the other end of the Vein carved itself out of the black air. In three, it became a vivid wall of ghostly light. Blue, almost like—
I glanced down at the broken chunks of ice scattered around the doorway, at the swirling curse sigils carved into them. I turned, searching for Cabell, but a hand caught me, stopping me in my tracks.
“I told you to stay at the camp.” With his head lamp on, Nash’s face was in shadow, but I could feel the anger radiating from him like the warmth from his skin. “We’ll have words about this, Tamsin.”
“What are you going to do, ground me?” I asked, riding high on my victory.
“Perhaps I will, you wee fool,” he said. “Never do anything without knowing the cost.”
The light from his head lamp danced over me, then swung upward. My gaze followed.
Icicles jutted down from the ceiling. Hundreds of them, all capped with razor-sharp steel, poised to fall at any moment. The walls, the ground, the ceiling—all of it was solid ice.
Even in the darkness, Cabell was easy to spot in his tattered yellow windbreaker. Relief poured through me as I made my way to his side, crouching to help him pick up unused crystals. He’d used the stones to absorb the magic of the curses surrounding the doorways. Once the curses were nullified, Nash had taken his axe to their sigils.
All Hollowers could perform a version of what Cabell was doing, but they could only clear curses with tools they’d bought off sorcere
Cabell was special, even among the Hollowers with special magic. He was the first Expeller in centuries—someone who could redirect the magic of a curse away from one source and into another, deflecting spells from our path.
The only curse Cabell couldn’t seem to break was his own.
“What curse was this, Tamsin?” Nash asked, pointing the steel toe of his boot toward a sigil-marked chunk of ice. At my look, he added, “You said you wanted to learn.”
Sigils were symbols used by the sorceresses to shape magic and bind it to a location or object. Nash had come up with stupid names for all the curse marks.
“Wraith Shadow,” I said, rolling my eyes. “A spirit would have followed us through the vault, tormenting us and tearing at our skin.”
“And this one?” Nash pressed, nudging a chunk of carved stone my way.
“White Eyes,” I said. “So, whoever crossed the threshold would be blinded and left to wander the vault until they froze to death.”
“They probably would have been impaled before they froze,” Cabell said cheerfully, pointing to a different sigil. His pale skin was pink from the cold or excitement, and he didn’t seem to notice the flakes of ice in his black hair.
“Fair point, well made,” Nash said, and my brother beamed.
The walls exhaled cold air around us. An otherworldly song rippled through the ice, cracking and twanging like an old tree playing puppet to the wind. There was only one way forward—the narrow pathway to our right.
I shivered, rubbing my arms. “Can we just find your stupid dagger and go?”
Cabell reached into his bag, retrieving fresh crystals for the curses that lined the hallway. I kept my eyes on him, tracking his every move, but Nash’s gloved hand caught my shoulder when I tried to follow.
Nash tutted. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked knowingly.
I blew a strand of blond hair off my face, annoyed. “I don’t need it.”
“And I don’t need attitude from a sprite of a girl, yet here we are,” Nash said, rummaging through my bag for a bundle of purple silk. He unwrapped it, holding the Hand of Glory out to me.
I didn’t have the One Vision—something Cabell and Nash reminded me of every infernal chance they got. Unlike them, I had no magic of my own. A Hand of Glory could unlock any door, even one protected by a skeleton knob, but its most important purpose, at least to me, was to illuminate magic hidden to the human eye.
I hated it. I hated being different—a problem that Nash had to solve.
“Whew, he’s getting a bit crusty, isn’t he?” Nash asked, lighting the dark wick of each finger in turn.
“It’s your turn to give him the bath,” I said. The last thing I wanted to do was spend another evening massaging a fresh coat of human lard into the severed left hand of a prolific eighteenth-century murderer who’d been hanged for his crime of annihilating four families.
“Wake up, Ignatius,” I ordered. Nash had attached him to an iron candlestick base, but that didn’t make holding him any nicer.
I turned the Hand of Glory so the palm faced me. The bright blue eye nestled into its waxy skin blinked open—then narrowed in disappointment.
“Yup,” I told it. “I’m still alive.”
The eye rolled.
“The feeling’s mutual, you impertinent piece of pickled flesh,” I muttered, adjusting the stiff, curled fingers until they cracked back into place.
“Good afternoon, handsome,” Nash crooned. “You know, Tamsy, a little sugar makes everything nice.”
I glowered at him.
“You wanted to come,” he said. “Think about the cost next time, eh?”
The smell of burning hair filled my nostrils. I switched Ignatius into my left hand, and my view of the world flickered as his light spread along the surface of the ice, bathing it in an unearthly glow. I sucked in a sharp breath.
The curse sigils were everywhere—on the ground, on the walls, on the ceiling—all swirling in and out of one another.
Cabell knelt at the entrance to the path. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he worked to redirect the curses into the crystals he slowly set out in front of him.
“Cab needs a break,” I told Nash.
“He can handle it,” Nash said.
Cabell nodded, setting his shoulders back. “I’m fine. I can keep going.”
A drip of burning lard scalded my thumb. I hissed at Ignatius, meeting his narrow, spiteful gaze with one of my own.
“No,” I told him firmly. I wasn’t going to set him down beside Cabell like I knew he wanted. First, because I didn’t have to obey the commands of a severed hand—actually, I didn’t need another reason beyond that.
Just to torment the impertinent hand, I held Ignatius out toward the wall at my right, pushing the exposed eye closer and closer to its frozen surface. I wasn’t a good enough person to feel guilty about the quiver that moved through his stiff joints.
The heat of his flames cut through the heavy coat of frost on the wall, and as each drip of water snaked down it, it revealed a dark shape on the other side.
A gasp tore out of me. The heel of my sneaker caught the ice as I stumbled back, and before I could even register what was happening, I was falling.
Nash shot forward with a startled grunt, catching my arm in an iron grip. The chill of the nearby wall kissed my scalp.
My heart was still hammering, my lungs throbbing to catch their next breath, as Nash eased me upright. Cabell rushed to my side, grabbing my shoulders, checking to make sure I wasn’t hurt. I knew the moment he saw what I’d glimpsed through the ice. His already white face turned bloodless. His fingers tightened with terror.
There was a man in the ice, made monstrous by death. The pressure of the ice looked to have broken his jaw, which gaped open unnaturally wide in one last silent scream. A shock of white hair framed his ice-burned cheeks. His spine was bent at tortured angles.
“Ah, Woodrow. I was wondering what he’d gotten up to,” Nash said, taking a step forward to study the body. “Poor bastard.”
Cabell gripped my wrist, turning Ignatius’s light back toward the tunnel ahead. Dark shadows stained the gleaming ice like bruises. A grim gallery of bodies.
I lost count at thirteen.
My brother was trembling, shaking hard enough that his teeth chattered. His dark eyes met my blue ones. “There are…there are so many of them…”
I wrapped my arms around him. “It’s okay…it’s okay…”
But fear had him in its grip; it had ignited his curse. Dark bristles broke out along his neck and spine, and the bones of his face were shifting with sickening cracks, taking on the shape of a terrifying hound.
“Cabell,” came Nash’s voice, calm and low. “Where was King Arthur’s dagger forged?”
“It…” Cabell’s voice sounded strange rasping through elongating teeth. “It was…”
“Where, Cabell?” Nash pressed.
“What are you—?” I began, only for Nash to quiet me with a look. The ice moaned around us. I tightened my grip on Cabell, feeling his spine curl.
“It was forged…” Cabell’s eyes narrowed with focus as they landed on Nash. “In…Avalon.”
“That’s right. Along with Excalibur.” Nash knelt in front of us, and Cabell’s body went still. The hair that had burst through his skin receded, leaving rashlike marks. “Do you remember the other name Avalonians use for their isle?”
