The mirror of beasts, p.1
The Mirror of Beasts, page 1
NOVELS BY ALEXANDRA BRACKEN
Lore
Silver in the Bone series
Silver in the Bone
The Mirror of Beasts
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 © 2024 by Alexandra Bracken
Cover art copyright © 2024 by Tomasz Majewski
Frame art copyright © 2024 by Virginia Allyn
Interior art used under license from Shutterstock.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bracken, Alexandra, author.
Title: The mirror of beasts / Alexandra Bracken.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. | Series: Silver in the bone ; book 2 | Audience: Ages 14 and up. | Summary: “Tamsin and her friends look for a magical object strong enough to trap Lord Death”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024003958 (print) | LCCN 2024003959 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-48169-1 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-48170-7 (library binding) | ISBN 978-0-593-48171-4 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Fantasy. | Magic—Fiction. | LCGFT: Fantasy fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.B6988 Mi 2024 (print) | LCC PZ7.B6988 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
International Edition ISBN 9780593896587
Ebook ISBN 9780593481714
Editor: Katherine Harrison
Cover Designer: Liz Dresner
Interior Designer: Jen Valero and Jinna Shin, adapted for ebook
Copy Editors: Artie Bennett and Melinda Ackell
Managing Editor: Jake Eldred
Production Manager: Tim Terhune
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Or, in the words of the Sistren:
May worms feast upon the mind
of any thief so wicked and unkind
to take this book from off its rightful shelf
and from its rightful owner: you, yourself.
And should they crack the spine or tear a page,
then by my curse, they’ll know your seething rage.
ep_prh_7.0_147679595_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Greenwich, Connecticut
Part One: The Winter Host
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Greenwich, Connecticut
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two: The Mirror of Beasts
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Bath, England
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three: The Drowned Kingdom
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Greenwich, Connecticut
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Greenwich, Connecticut
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Part Four: The Way of the Dead
Chapter 43
Greenwich, Connecticut
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Epilogue: Three Months Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_147679595_
For LD—
May your life be full of magic and wonder.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
THE UNMAKERS
Caitriona—Once chosen to be the new High Priestess, Caitriona was the de facto leader of Avalon until it was destroyed. She now struggles to adapt to the modern world.
Neve Goode—A cheerful, caring self-taught sorceress who searches for information about her parentage and mysterious powers.
Tamsin Lark—Thrust into the world of Hollowers as a child, Tamsin possesses no innate magical ability, but does have a photographic memory and a keen business sense. She’s determined to save her brother from Lord Death’s influence.
Olwen—The half-naiad former healer of Avalon, who fights to hold her friends together as darkness descends.
HOLLOWERS
Emrys Dye—The scion of the Dye dynasty, founders of the North American guild. Unimaginably wealthy, annoyingly charming, and a Cunningfolk Greenworker, he is Tamsin’s main rival within the guild and enjoys provoking and flirting with her.
Nashbury Lark—Tamsin and Cabell’s guardian. A notorious figure among Hollowers and sorceresses alike, known for his roguish ways and elaborate storytelling.
Hector Leer—A crony of Septimus and Endymion.
Edward Wyrm—The leader of the London guild at Rivenoak Manor.
Septimus Yarrow—An infamous Hollower who was killed in Avalon, he is best known for recovering Herakles’s club.
SORCERESSES & MAGES
Acacia—Cruel in nature, she is one of the sorceresses who takes Tamsin, Neve, Caitriona, and Olwen captive.
Hemlock—A sorceress Tamsin meets at the Dead Man’s Rest.
Hestia—One of the sorceresses, along with Acacia, who takes Tamsin and the others captive.
Isolde—A skittish sorceress who attends High Sorceress Kasumi.
Kasumi—The High Sorceress of the Council of Sistren.
Madrigal—A mysterious crone sorceress known for her deadly dinner parties. Hires Emrys and Tamsin to find the Ring of Dispel.
Morgan—Leader of the priestesses who rose against the Druids and were later exiled. Half sister to King Arthur, and lover to Viviane.
Robin—Going by the gender-neutral title of Mage, Robin is a recordkeeper for the Council of Sistren.
THE WILD HUNT
Lord Death—Having posed as the knight Bedivere and now King Arthur, Lord Death has crossed into the mortal world and is intent on revenge against the sorceresses.
Endymion Dye—Emrys’s cold and imperious father, who once ruled the guild with an iron fist.
Cabell Lark—Tamsin’s brother, who seems to be suffering a curse that turns him into a monstrous hound. He now serves Lord Death as his seneschal.
Phineas Primm—Formerly a member of Tamsin’s Hollower guild.
OTHERS
The Bonecutter—An enigmatic figure who procures skeleton keys to open Veins, as well as other oddities, such as basilisk venom.
Bran—The pooka bartender at the Dead Man’s Rest.
Dearie—The sorceress Madrigal’s pooka companion, who acts as both her butler and enforcer.
Elaine, The Lady of Shalott—An unfortunate love rival to a sorceress, she was temporarily trapped in the Mirror of Shalott.
Franklin—Tamsin’s lovesick tarot customer, who would really benefit from actual therapy.
Griflet—A kitten given to Mari.
The Hag of the Mist (or Gwrach-y-Rhibyn)—A primordial deity who occupies liminal spaces and has the ability to pass between the boundaries of worlds unimpeded.
The Hag of the Moors (or Rosydd)—Like her sister, the Hag of the Mist, she is a primordial deity able to open the boundaries of worlds and who has a penchant for eating mortals.
Ignatius—The hand of glory Tamsin carries to tap into the One Vision, also capable of opening any locked door.
Librarian—An automaton that tends to the library and protects its many treasures. Has a passion for soft, fluffy things and vacuuming.
Merlin—Once a Druid and mentor to King Arthur, he attached himself to the Mother tree to survive a duel and now babbles nonsensical prophecy to the few who will listen.
The Nine of Avalon—Arianwen, Betrys, Caitriona, Fayne (Flea), Lowri, Mari, Olwen, Rhona, and Seren.
Viviane—The last High Priestess of the Arthurian age, who lived for centuries as she waited for the new Nine to be chosen.
Greenwich, Connecticut
Summer storms had a way of waking the house’s slumbering ghosts, drawing them out of the shadows and through locked doors forgotten decades ago. They peeled away from the walls, wilting with the faded silk coverings. They fell like dust from the sheets that covered once-sparkling chandeliers and the ornate furniture. If you closed your eyes, you could feel them gliding like ribbons around you, greeting you in every dark hall.
The trouble with these old houses, Emrys decided, was that the longer they stood, the more magic and energy and darkness they absorbed, until they became living things themselves.
They allowed their families to repaint their faces, to break the bones of their walls and reset them. They watched as children left and never returned, suffered the silent indignation of being sold to wealthy strangers. And all the while, as years turned to centuries and the houses remained, they patiently collected the dead of their families, swallowing the magic woven into their souls before their bodies had the chance to cool in their beds.
Once, when Emrys was five, maybe six, barely old enough to understand that death was the only certain promise of life, his mother had told him to talk to their house. To greet it as he came and went, and treat it like a friend, so that it might treat him like one in kind.
So he had. Hello, house; goodbye, house; you look exceedingly lovely today, house…Good morning, house. Sleep well, house…
And sometimes, in the haze of exhausted delirium, or after polishing off one of the lustrous bottles in his father’s liquor cabinet, he could have sworn Summerland House recognized him. Answered back.
Hello, boy.
And each time it happened, all he could think was I can’t die here.
Not like the generations of ancestors who’d come before him. The ones who’d laid the house’s first stones. The ones who’d expanded it into an estate. The ones who’d found the first relics now lavishly displayed in its halls. Both sides of his bloodline were brimming with Cunningfolk, and he knew the house had greedily sipped at their magic as they performed their talents, the way he could sometimes feel it doing to him when he worked in the gardens.
Named for the Otherland of the mysterious, and perhaps mythical, beings known as the Gentry, Summerland House wasn’t so much a member of Emrys’s family tree as the tree itself. All their lives had been carved into it, or maybe from it.
Emrys cleared his throat as he made his way down the shadowed hallway, listening to the rain battering the roof. With the invading damp came the musty smell of age. It clung to the carpets and velvet drapes, revived the moment the storm clouds appeared in the distance. The wind tore at the side of the house, as if trying to rip it out from its rotten roots. His garden would be a mess by morning, the flower beds flattened and the vegetables drowned.
“Evenin’, Grandmother,” he said as he passed the portrait of a stiff-backed, glowering woman. Emrys stooped slightly, using the clouded antique mirror beside the painting to tame the waves of his rain-slick hair. “How’s the view from down in hell?”
He almost laughed when a crack of thunder answered.
“That’s what I thought,” he murmured. He could practically feel her long fingernails digging into his earlobes to silence him. “Stay toasty, you old bag.”
The note crinkled in his jacket pocket as he tucked his shirt back into his jeans. He’d found it on his bed after crawling up the trellis to get back into his room. His father’s precise handwriting had sent a chill through him. See me in the study once you’ve returned from your tantrum.
Tantrum. His top lip curled.
After a dinner that saw his mother’s face cut by his father’s wineglass, and the struggle to get her safely to her room, which had left him hoarse and burning with rage, Emrys had gone for a drive. Through town. Through the next. Through the empty, winding roads until the sky was cloaked with midnight and the car’s gas gauge was begging him for mercy.
He’d had to get out of the house before he added one more ghost to its collection of Dyes.
Not for the first time, Emrys had been frightened by his own fury. Suffocated by knowing he’d inherited that darkness and it lived inside him like a seed, only waiting for the first drop of claimed blood to bloom.
I’m not like him, Emrys told himself, the words sounding as hollow to his ears as they felt in his heart. He could never keep that icy veneer of control that came so naturally to his father. I’m not a monster.
His lungs gave a painful squeeze as he checked his appearance again, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth.
The note hadn’t been a surprise. This was their routine, and Emrys knew what to expect next: his father would be brooding in his study with a glass of Scotch. Emrys would apologize. His father would not. They would agree never to speak of it again.
On and on, turning like the Wheel of the Year.
His feet slowed as he passed his parents’ wing of the house, but if his mother was still barricaded inside her bedroom, he couldn’t hear even a whisper of evidence. Rain thrashed against the windows, as desperate to get in as his mother was to escape. Neither ever succeeded.
On sunny days, Emrys could make a case for Summerland House feeling like a museum dedicated to the accomplishments of his great-something-or-others. The sword of Beowulf, its ferociousness dulled by age and the glass case that imprisoned it. Herakles’s bow. On and on; countless relics, stolen and traded and bought.
But on nights like this, when a chill crept through cracks in the window frames, when there wasn’t another soul around and the ornate sconces cast even the most brilliant treasures in ghoulish light, Summerland House felt more like a mausoleum.
The long hallway brought Emrys to the marble staircase in the foyer. Then, just to the right of the entrance hall, the ancient black oak doors that guarded his father’s study. The spiraling patterns of crystals and iron hammered into the wood had their own dark beauty, but also told the story of his father’s poisonous paranoia. The sigils carved around them created a protective ward, impenetrable to anyone—mortal or otherwise—without an invitation.
