I draw a shaky breath, giving one final look around. I swear I felt him there…
“Clara?” Vaduin has come to a stop at the apex of the tunnel’s curve. A distant light illuminates his figure.
“I’m fine. Sorry.” I quickly nod and continue, writing off the sensation to my racing thoughts about preserving his memories.
As I round the corner, the tunnel finally gives way to another chamber carved into the mountainside. Like a smaller version of the main cavern of the Stone Citadel, this room is somewhat circular, with a domed ceiling. A third of the circle has been sheared off, exposed to the mountain air. We can see thin wisps of clouds dancing around distant peaks.
More sculptures of knights circle the walls, each holding a deck of cards with solemn reverence. At their feet is a shallow channel of water that I know is anything but—it possesses the same glow as the pool that surrounds the statue of the World. At the center of the space is a perfectly smooth, flat, rectangular slab of pale slate, as though waiting for an offering.
“The altar of the vessel,” I surmise based on what they’ve told me, slowly approaching, drawn to the empty slate. My hand hovers above its surface for a second before making contact. It’s warmer than Iwould’ve expected, given the temperature at this altitude. As if it’s been sitting in the sun for hours, even though dawn has just broken.
“Are you all ready?” I ask. Really I’m asking myself ifI’mready.
Nods from everyone. No one seems to want to speak, as if too nervous about breaking the somber and serious atmosphere. Vaduin steps forward and hands me a blank card. It doesn’t feel different from a normal scrap of paper, but I know it is.
He returns to his place with the rest of them and I place the blank card in the center of the altar. Next, I carefully remove the stopper on a small jar I brought that contains the slightest amount of iridescent powder. It is every glittering fragment I could split from the powders I took from the workshop of the Fool, and the crystallized fragments from the scrap of the reversed card Gregor gave me.
It should be enough. I have just one attempt to make the vessel.
They regard me skeptically as I cross from the slate and dip a brush into the water that collects at the feet of the statues. I brought a binder for the pigment, but my instinct tells me this is better. My suspicions are confirmed by how the liquid collects on the brush; just like at the statue of the World. I mix this with the powder, and the moment I do, magic charges the air. The skin on my arm holding the brush feels too tight. It’s so much it’s nearly painful. Sucking in a breath, I brace myself, tightening every muscle as I finish carefully mixing.
Satisfied, I return to the altar. But it’s not slate and a blank card that I see.
It’s our kitchen table, the tablecloth pulled off. A blank scrap of paper has been placed in the center of countless drawings upon drawings. Mother stands on the opposite side. My eyes drift up toward the open air. I can almost see her there, the same ghost that followed me here, yet different—a radiant outline of the woman I knew transposed with how I imagine her to be after all these years.
We are all a line painted upon a card that captures something greater,she tells me, like she told me back then.The world itself is magic. We are its stewards and its children; we are both the art and the artist.
I move my brush from one corner of the altar to the opposite,looping and swirling. I lift and lower, breaking up the lines and cutting new ones. The liquid sinks into the slate, shining in the brightening sunlight. Not quite gold. Not quite silver. A sort of shimmering platinum iridescence that feels more magical than anything I’ve made before.
Power surges within me, and the lines I paint begin to hover in the air. I can feel whatever force this is guiding my movements. My eyes flutter closed, but my brush continues to move. I paint with Mother’s hand on mine, by her teachings…by the glimpse of the World I saw in Kaelis’s vision that gave me the final pieces I needed to ink this vessel.
When I open my eyes again, I see how the lines that I’ve painted across the altar all coalesce on the blank card I placed in its center. The statues glow with a hazy light, and the water at their feet gives off blue motes like fireflies. The air crackles and hums as the card rises off the stone and into the air. The lines of ink that were drawn beyond the card’s edges and onto the stone of the altar, now multicolored and shining, cling to it, lifting from the stone table and hovering, like a magical net that barely contains its power. Something ancient and fearsome.
And then…a whisper.
It doesn’t come from the people around me, nor from any one direction. It’s not something I hear, but I feel it within me. It is as if a thousand people speak all at once.
The World only truly ever answers to fate, not mortal hands. Beware the Fool who would try to contain it.
The words vibrate in the marrow of my bones. I hear them in my mother’s voice. Yet I also somehow recognize the rest of the unseen speakers. As if I can blink and see all at once every Worldkeeper who carried the knowledge of the vessel before me. A continuous line—an unbroken brushstroke throughout time immemorial.
Reaching out, my fingers close around the suspended card. The ink, which has now turned into hovering threads of magic, shatters into a thousand crystalline shards—almost identical to the powder that was used to ink them. But these glowing fragments fade before they hitthe ground. The card thrums underneath my fingertips as though it has a pulse.
At its center is a blank circle—a void waiting to be filled. A vessel. In a way, it reminds me of the first Wheel of Fortune card I ever inked. As if fate has been guiding my hand to this moment. Willing a change. Waiting on the World.
Waiting for me.
A shudder rips through me that I fight to hide. I hold my head high even as the magic draining from me leaves violent shakes in its wake. My grip tightens on the card; much like the golden Majors, it now feels like it’s made of a thin sheet of metal.
I did it.
I inked the vessel. The golden cards are at my whim. My sister is healing, and soon her golden card will be in hand. And now, in my palm, I carry the vessel that will harbor the power to change the world.
I thought I would feel powerful.
But I have never been more terrified.
Chapter 57
