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chapter 46
fragile fractals
teizel
I’ve done my best to let Esme explore her family grimoire on her own; partially, because it’s her own heritage, and it feels as though she’s entitled to discovering it on her own terms, and partially because the mere sight of Isabel’s handwriting makes me want to puke my entire guts out. But I can’t ignore my little witch nor her grimoire forever, and in reality I might even be of some assistance as she studies up on her spells.
After all, I did steal most of those incantations from across Europe with my own two hands.
“Come in,” Esme’s voice calls from the other side of the bedroom door when I knock. Tentatively, I peek my head inside. Sure enough, she’s perched in the middle of the king-sized bed with her long legs criss-crossed and the grimoire open in front of her. She lifts her gaze to me and smiles, and any negative thoughts I may have been thinking are washed away by that warm, all-encompassing feeling that spreads from my chest whenever I can command her attention like this.
With a few long steps, I join her on the bed, perching on a corner. “Found anything interesting?”
“Matter of fact,” she says, with her chest puffed like a prying bird, “I think I did.”
She flips a few pages back and forth until settling on a specific one, tapping her finger on it before turning the book in my direction. I study the spell, which is as most others in the grimoire written in Catalan. As it’s often the case with witchcraft, it veers more into poetry than instruction, but the gist of it seems to have to do with creating objects — trinkets — from pieces of a person’s soul.
“How’d you figure one would take pieces of a soul, though?” I ask. “Without someone noticing, especially.”
Esme looks at me with her bottom lip pulled taught between her teeth, as if biting back a question, but it never comes. Instead, she flips the pages back again, two, three, four at a time, until she’s at the very back of the grimoire. “I’ve read this thing top to bottom. And I don’t know if this is common practice or not, but one thing I found is that Isabel uses the back as kind of a… I don’t know, an appendix, maybe? It’s an odd mix of an appendix and a journal. She tells stories of how she developed each spell, how she got it to work; sometimes they’re more instructions, sometimes they’re more anecdotes.”
My body goes rigid at the thought of what words could be immortalized for posterity in those yellowed, woody-smelling pages. “Does she talk about me?”
Esme’s hand reaches for mine, fingers lacing through my own. “Would it matter if she did?”
“I stole, cheated, and hurt people for her. To gather the magic and power she so desperately desired.”
“You did. And then, when you realized the implications of your own actions, you betrayed her.”
Her words shock me, and I instinctively pull back from her touch. She doesn’t let me get far, reaching for me again. “And yet, I’m still here. I’ve seen the worst of you, and I’ve chosen to stay.”
With her free hand, she lifts a page of the grimoire. “You think there’s anything in here that could convince me of something you haven’t already shown me? I’ve seen all parts of you, Tei. And I still trust you. No amount of slander from a witch long dead will change my mind, even if she was my ancestor.”
A knot tightens my throat so tightly I can hardly come up with air to breathe, let alone construct a sentence. Instead, I reach for her, pushing the grimoire to the side, and pull her to me by the nape, crushing our lips together. The taste of her is apricot marmalade and olive oil and despite having fed just days ago, and definitely still feeling sated, I could no doubt sink my teeth into her neck once more and nearly lose control again.
Esme is the one to pull away this time, pushing her palms against my chest. “The grimoire.”
“To hell with the grimoire,” I protest against her lips.
She chuckles. “Don’t you want to know how Isabel gathered pieces of your soul?”
I sigh. Damn her, but I do. I also really, really want to kiss her.
“Fine. You may continue.”
She straightens again and pulls the grimoire into her lap. “She talks about how she found the bones of this spell from a Romanian grimoire; in theory, the easiest way to get a shard of a soul is for the owner to give it up freely, but even without a willing partecipant, souls are like kaleidoscopes. They’re fragile things made up of millions of fractals — the moments you’ve lived. People leave them behind all the time, when they share themselves with others.” Esme looks down at the grimoire, reading a few lines, and shudders. “Isabel just got into the habit of collecting them. As… insurance.”
Insurance.
Without permission and before I can stop it, my mind travels back to the times I told Isabel about my birth, my Mother, or my place as crown prince and what it meant to me. All information she’d filed away for later. No, not just filed away, literally made into physical shards of my soul.
As insurance. Should she need it, one day, to potentially cast a spell against me.
I fly off the bed and into the most distant corner of the room to put space between myself and that horrid grimoire. My body shakes, and I struggle to keep a hold on my glamour, as my skin ripples into its true inky tone and my limbs grow.
Small, soft and cool hands reach for my shoulders, then travel up my neck until they’re wrapped around me. Esme’s cheek presses against my back. The smell of bitter almonds fills my nostrils, and I want to turn around and wrap her in my arms, rock her and take her sadness away, but I’m still seething and not fully in control of myself.
“I know what she did wasn’t nice.”
