“Can youundo it?—”
Questions and questions, one after the other, and Cook and I kept saying,no, no, yes, yes, but no—and then Seth said, “Everybody—shut up.”
Everybody shut up.
Silence in the room again.
“Let them talk,” Seth said. “Now, Ora, Cook—what do you know about seals?”
For me—not much, was the honest answer. I knew what all Spades learned in school. There were two kinds of seals—one a simple spell that required a lock and a key, both magical, and the other much stronger, made with blood, a person’s magic fused with their own life force—which made them nearly impossible to break from the outside. We knew that seals were one of the strongest forms of closure magic in the Clockrealm and that Spades had a natural affinity for them because Spades ruled endings. We sealed deals. Weclosed loops. We recognized when magic had been shut, locked, bound—the same way a Heart recognized when an emotion had been tampered with.
But knowing what a seal felt like and knowing how to undo one were two very different things.
“A seal is best opened by its maker,” I said, words I’d either learned from school or from one of Father’s late-night lessons about magic theory that I’d only half listened to.
“They’re all keyed to the person who cast it. Either their magic or their blood,” said Cook.
“So, Calren has to open it.” March.
“Calren can’t even tell what a doorisright now, let alone a magical seal!”
Levana wasn’t wrong. I looked at the Timekeeper on the floor—still on his side, still twitching, still murmuring under his breath. His hands were bloody, practically destroyed. Even though he sometimeslookedlike he knew what was happening, he didn’t. Not really. His mind was in splinters.
Whatever he’d used to make this lock, I doubted he could be convinced to remember or to undo it.
But.
“The seal responds to his magic,” I said slowly, the thought forming as I spoke it. “Possibly to his blood. His blood is everywhere here…” I turned, touched the stains on the surface of the wall. “It’s why we can feel it. Itdoesrespond to him. Right, Cook?”
Cook pressed his hands to the stone again. Closed his eyes. Nodded. “A blood seal, definitely. It’s like…a fingerprint.” It was terribly exciting not to be the only one who understood.
“So, it’s like…a lock?” Mimi asked, scratching her chin.
“Yes, exactly,” said Cook.
“A lock that knows its key,” I said. “It’s just waiting for the magic to…sort of,turnit in place. You know?”
Other than Cook, nobody seemed to quite picture it in their heads the way I was picturing it, but that was okay.
“Hecan’t really turn shit, though,” Seth muttered, nodding his head to the side toward the Timekeeper.
“Can’tyoudo it? You’re Spades,” Anika said.
“And we have Sparetime. You guys have plenty, right?” Erith.
Cook and I looked at one another, flinched.
“This type of magic requires years and years of practice and experience,” March said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with an emotion even if it was waiting for me to change it.”
“So what good is all this Sparetime they gave us?” Russ spat.
“We couldn’t do it alone,” I said, eyeing the Timekeeper on the ground, not really sure I wanted to say the next sentence.
Cook said it for me. “But what if we just…guidehim?”
“We’ve got Sparetime, you’re right. And we can’t use it—but he’s a Timekeeper. He should be able to.” Timekeeper magic worked a little different from ours. So we’d learned, though never the reason why. Only that they were able to access a much bigger source of magic, and they were just better at it in general—which had always struck me as odd. If that were the truth, then why were they considered asless? Why were we always taught to be wary of them?
“He destroyed his clocks—didn’t you see?” said Seth, pointing to the floor, to those clock chains he’d been inspecting earlier.
