From the No.1 New York Times bestselling author of Lore and The Darkest Minds trilogy comes this stunning series opener inspired by Arthurian legend and fuelled by love, revenge and pure adrenaline - cementing Alexandra Bracken's status as one of the top fantasy authors writing today.
Tamsin Lark is a Hollower - breaking into the ancient crypts of dark sorceresses in search of the treasures inside.
Now, rumours are swirling about a powerful ring from Arthurian legend, a ring that could free her brother, Cabell from a curse. But they aren't the only ones who covet it . . .
As word spreads, greedy Hollowers start circling, and many would kill to have the ring for themselves. Tamsin is forced into an alliance with her rival Emrys, the last person she wants to rely on. Together, they dive headfirst into a vipers' nest of dark magic, and expose a deadly secret with the power to awaken ghosts of the past and shatter her last hope of saving her brother. . .
Driven by love, revenge and pure adrenaline, this is the stunning new novel from one of the top fantasy authors writing today.
(P)2023 Listening Library
Release date:
April 4, 2023
Publisher:
Knopf Books for Young Readers
Print pages:
496
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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 sorceresses.
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?”
Cabell’s face started to shift back, and he grimaced in pain. But his eyes never left Nash’s face. “Ynys . . . Ynys Afallach.”
“Got it on the first try, of course,” Nash said, rising. He put a hand on each of our shoulders. “You’ve cleared the bulk of the curses already, my boy. You can wait here with Tamsin until I return.”
“No,” Cabell said, swiping at his eyes with his sleeves. “I want to come.”
And I wasn’t going to let him go without me.
Nash nodded and started down the hallway, passing the lantern back to Cabell and aiming his head lamp down the stretch of bodies. “This reminds me of a tale . . .”
“What doesn’t?” I muttered. Couldn’t he see that Cabell was still rattled? He was only pretending to be brave, but pretending had always been enough for Nash.
“In ages past, in a kingdom lost to time, a king named Arthur ruled man and Fair Folk alike,” Nash began, carefully making his way around the crystals. He used the tip of his axe to scratch out the curse sigils as he passed by them. “But it is not him I speak of now—rather, the fair isle of Avalon. A place where apples grow that can heal all ailments, and priestesses tend to those who live among its divine groves. For a time, Arthur’s own half sister Morgana belonged to their order. She served as a wise and fair counsel to him, despite how many of those Victorian-era shills chose to remember her.”
He’d told us this tale before. A hundred times, around a hundred different smoky campfires. As if Arthur and his knights were accompanying us on all our jobs . . . but it was a good kind of familiar.
I focused on the sound of Nash’s warm, rumbly voice, not the horrible faces around us. The blood frozen in halos around them.
“The priestesses honor the goddess who created the very land Arthur came to rule—some say she made it from her own heart.”
“That’s stupid,” I whispered, my voice trembling only a little. Cabell reached back, taking my hand tight in his own.
Nash snorted. “Maybe to you, girl, but to them, their stories are as real as you or me. The isle was once part of our world, where Glastonbury Tor now proudly stands, but many centuries ago, when new religions rose and man grew to fear and hate magic, it was splintered away, becoming one of the Otherlands. There, priestesses, druids, and Fair Folk escaped the dangers of the mortal world, and lived in peace . . .”
“Until the sorceresses rebelled,” Cabell said, risking a look around. His voice was growing stronger.
“Until the sorceresses rebelled,” Nash agreed. “The sorceresses we know today are the descendants of those who were banished from Avalon, after taking to darker magic . . .”
I focused on the feel of Cabell’s hand, his fingers squeezing tight as we passed by the last body and moved through a stone archway. Beyond it, the ice-slick path wound its way down. We stopped again when Cabell felt—before he even saw—a curse sigil buried underfoot.
“Why are you so desperate to find this stupid dagger, anyway?” I asked, hugging my arms to my chest to try to keep warm.
Nash had spent the last year searching, blowing off paying work and easier finds. I’d found us the lead for this vault . . . not that Nash would ever acknowledge the research I did.
“You don’t think finding a legendary relic is reason enough?” he asked, swiping at his red-tipped nose. “When you desire something, you must fight for it tooth and claw, or not at all.”
“It’s clear,” Cabell said, standing again. “We can keep going.”
Nash moved ahead of us. “Remember, my wee imps, that Sorceress Edda was renowned for her love of trickery. All will not be what it first seems.”
It only took a few steps to understand what he meant.
It began with a kerosene lantern, casually left beside one of the bodies in the ice, as if the hunter had merely set it down, leaned forward against the freezing surface, and been swallowed whole. We passed it without a second look.
Next was the ladder, the one that offered safety for the long climb down to a lower level. We used our ropes.
Then, just as the temperature plunged deeper into a killing freeze, a pristine white fur coat. So soft and warm and just the kind that an absent-minded sorceress might have left behind, tossing it over an equally tempting crate of food jars.
Take me, they whispered. Use me.
And pay the price in blood.
Ignatius’s light revealed the truth. The razors and rusted nails lining the interior of the coat. The spiders waiting in the jars. All but one rung missing from the ladder. Even the lantern was filled with the Smothering Mother, a vapor that tightened your lungs until breathing became impossible, made from the blood of a mother who’d killed her children. Anyone who opened the glass to light the wick would be dead in an instant.
We passed it all, Cabell redirecting the dark magic of the curses laid between each trap. Finally, after what seemed like hours, we reached the inner chamber of the vault.
The round chamber shone with the same pale, icy light. At its center was an altar, and there, sitting on a velvet pillow, was a dagger with a bone-white hilt.
And Nash, who never struggled for a word, was silent. Not happy, like I would have thought. Not bouncing on his toes with glee as Cabell broke the last of the curses protecting it.
“What’s the matter with you?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me it’s not the right dagger.”
“No, it is,” Nash said, his voice taking on a strange tone. Cabell stepped back from the altar, allowing Nash to come forward.
“Well,” he breathed out, his hand hovering above the hilt for an instant before closing around it. “Hello.”
“What now?” Cabell asked, peering down at it.
A better question was probably who he was going to sell it to. Maybe, for once, we could afford a decent place to live and food to eat.
“Now,” Nash said quietly, holding the blade up into the gleaming light. “We go to Tintagel and recover the true prize.”
We traveled to Cornwall by train, arriving just as a fierce storm blew in over the cliffs and ensnared the dark ruins of Tintagel Castle in its wild, thundering depths. After we battled to set up our tent in the lashing rain and wind, I crashed into sleep. The bodies in the ice were waiting for me in dreams, only now they weren’t Hollowers, but King Arthur and his knights.
Nash stood in front of them, his back to me as he watched the surface of the ice rippling like water. I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Not even a scream as he stepped forward through the ice, as if to join them.
I jolted awake with a gasp, twisting and thrashing to free myself from my sleeping bag. The first bit of sunlight gave the red fabric of our tent a faint glow.
Enough for me to see that I was alone.
They’re gone.
Static filled my ears, turning my body to pins and needles. My fingers were too numb to grip the zipper on the tent’s flap.
They’re gone.
I couldn’t breathe. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. They’d left me behind again.
With a frustrated scream, I broke the zipper and ripped the flap away, tumbling out into the cold mud.
The rain came down in torrents, battering my hair and bare feet as I swung my gaze around. A thick mist churned around me, blanketing the hills. Trapping me there, alone.
“Cabell?” I yelled. “Cabell, where are you?”
I ran into the mist, the rocks and heather and thistle biting at my toes. I didn’t feel any of it. There was only the scream building in my chest, burning and burning.
“Cabell!” I screamed. “Nash!”
My foot caught on something and I fell, rolling against the ground until I hit another stone and the air blasted out of me. I couldn’t draw in another breath. Everything hurt.
And the scream broke open, and became something else.
“Cabell,” I sobbed. The tears were hot, even as the rain lashed against my face.
What good will you be to us?
“Please,” I begged, curling up. The sea roared back as it battered the rocky shore. “Please . . . I can be good . . . please . . .”
Don’t leave me here.
“Tam . . . sin . . . ?”
At first, I thought I had imagined it.
“Tamsin?” His voice was small, almost swallowed by the storm.
I pushed up, fighting against the sucking grass and mud, searching for him.
For a moment, the mists parted at the top of the hill, and there he was, as pale as a ghost, his black hair plastered to his skull. His near-black eyes unfocused.
I slipped and struggled up the hill, clawing at the grass and stones until I reached him. I wrapped my arms around him. “Are you okay? Cab, are you okay? What happened? Where did you go?” “He’s gone.” Cabell’s voice was as thin as a thread. His skin felt like a block of ice, and I could see a tinge of blue to his lips. “I woke up and he was gone. He left his things . . . I looked for him, but he’s . . .”
Gone.
But Cabell was here. I hugged him tighter, feeling him cling back. Feeling his tears become rain on my shoulder. I had never hated Nash more for being everything I always thought he was.
A coward. A thief. A liar.
“H-he’ll be back, won’t he?” Cabell whispered. “Maybe he just f-f-forgot to say where he was g-going?”
I didn’t want to ever lie to Cabell, so I didn’t say anything.
“W-we should go b-back and wait—”
We would be waiting forever. I felt the truth of it down to my bones. Nash had finally unloaded his hangers-on. He was never coming back. The only mercy was that he hadn’t taken Cabell with him. “We’re okay,” I whispered. “We’re okay. We’re all we need. We’re okay . . .”
Nash said that some spells had to be spoken three times to take hold, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that, either. I wasn’t one of the girls from the gilded pages of storybooks. I had no magic.
I only had Cabell.
The dark bristles were spreading across his skin again, and I felt the bones of his spine shifting, threatening to realign. I held him tighter. Fear swirled in the pit of my stomach. Nash had always been the one to pull Cabell back to himself, even when he fully shifted.
Now Cabell only had me.
I swallowed, shielding him from the driving rain and wind. And then I started to speak: “In ages past, in a kingdom lost to time, a king named Arthur ruled man and Fair Folk alike . . .”
PART I Two of Swords
1 No matter what they say, or how much they lie to themselves, people don’t want the truth. They want the story already living inside them, buried deep as marrow in the bone. The hope written across their faces in a subtle language few know how to read.
Luckily for me, I did.
The trick, of course, was to make them feel like I hadn’t seen anything at all. That I couldn’t guess who was heartsick for a lost love or desperate for a windfall of money, or who wanted to break free from an illness they’d never escape. It all came down to a simple desire, as predictable as it was achingly human: to hear their wish spoken by someone outside themselves—as if that somehow had the power to make it all come true.
Magic.
But wishes were nothing more than wasted breath fading into the air, and magic always took more than it gave.
No one wanted to hear the truth, and that was fine by me. The lies paid better; the bald-faced realities, as my boss Myrtle—the Mystic Maven of Mystic Maven Tarot—once pointed out, only got me raging internet reviews.
I rubbed my arms beneath the crochet shawl, eyes darting to the digital timer to my right: 0:30 . . . 0:29 . . . 0:28 . . .
“I’m sensing . . . yes, I’m sensing you have another question,” I said, pressing two fingers against my forehead. “One that’s your real reason for coming here.”
The glowing essential oil diffuser gurgled contentedly behind me. Its steady stream of patchouli and rosemary was powerless against the smell of deep-fried calamari drifting up through the old floorboards and the rancid stench of the dumpsters out back. The cramped, dark room circled in tighter around me as I breathed through my mouth.
Mystic Maven had occupied its room above Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace for decades, bearing witness to the succession of tacky seafood restaurants that cycled in and out of the building’s ground level. Including, most recently, the particularly malodorous Lobster Larry’s.
“I mean . . . ,” my client began, looking around at the peeling strips of floral wallpaper, the small statues of Buddha and Isis, then back down to the spread of cards I’d placed on the table between us. “Well . . .”
“Anything?” I tried again. “How you’ll do on your finals? Future career? Hurricane season? If your apartment is haunted?”
My phone came to the end of the playlist of harmonic rain and wind chimes. I reached down to restart it. In the silence that followed, the dusty battery-powered candles flickered on the shelves around us. The darkness gathered between them hid just how dingy the room was.
Come on, I thought, half desperate.
It had been six long hours of listening to chanting-monk tracks and mindlessly rearranging crystals on the nearby shelves between what few customers had come in. Cabell had to have the key by now, and after finishing up with this reading, I’d be able to leave for my real gig.
Franklin opened his mouth, only to be cut off by the digital wail of my timer.
Before I could react, the door swung open and a girl barreled inside.
“Finally!” she said, parting the cheap beaded curtain with a dramatic sweep of her hands. “My turn!”
Franklin turned to gawk at her, his expression shifting as he assessed her with clear interest—the way she all but vibrated with excited energy made it difficult to look anywhere else. Her dark brown skin was dusted with a faint shimmer, likely from whatever cream she used, which smelled like honey and vanilla. Her braids were twisted back into two high buns on her head, and she’d painted her lips a deep purple.
After giving Franklin a quick once-over in return, she quirked her lips in my direction. In her hand was her ever-present portable CD player and foam-covered earphones, relics of simpler technological yesteryears. As someone incapable of throwing anything away, I was begrudgingly charmed by them.
But the charm quickly faded as she turned her belt around and tucked both into what appeared to be a pink fanny pack. One with fluorescent cats and the words i’m meow-gical emblazoned across it in glow-in-the-dark green.
“Neve.” I tried not to sigh. “I didn’t realize we had an appointment today.”
Her smile was blinding as she read the painted message on the door. “Walk-ins Welcome!”
“I was going to ask when we’re getting back together—” Franklin protested.
“We have to save something for the next time, don’t we?” I said sweetly.
He grabbed his backpack with an uncertain look. “You . . . you’re not going to tell anyone I came, are you?”
I gest
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