Page 76

The chalk circle on the floor is half scuffed from his working. I kneel at the edge and redraw it, my hand knowing the shape before my eyes do. This is my grandmother’s shape, not the one the Mortis teaches, three overlapping rings and a sigil at each cardinal that I have never drawn on anything bigger than paper. My grimoire is full of them, practicing.

The chalk is loud on the flagstone as I draw and dust rises. I set the copper basin with Morena in it at the center of the circle. Then I set the grimoire open at the north point. I pick up the small knife and slide the blade along the pad of my thumb and let the blood come, and I walk the perimeter of the circle one way and then the other and I let my blood fall onto the chalk until the chalk goes dark with it in the pattern my grandmother made me memorize at ten years old on a kitchen floor. You will never need this one day, she had said, and you will know it anyway.

My grandmother was a wise woman who didn’t live beyond my sixteenth birthday. She was also a seer and a powerful witch. Had she seen this? Did she know I would give my heart to Baz one day and I would find him dead?

I don’t have time to think about it.

I need Baz inside the circle.

I’d underestimated how heavy he is, and how death makes someone stop being a person and become a body instead, a heavy weight to be dealt with. I get my hands under his shoulders and I pull, using all my strength, of which I have very little. I wince at the sound and sight of his heels dragging across the flagstone, his coat sliding off the chair above him and crumpling, and I get him inside the circle and lay him on his back with his head toward the grimoire and his feet toward the door, and I close his eyes with the flat of my hand because I cannot do this with him looking at the ceiling.

He opens them again and I can’t help but jump.

Right. Coins are traditionally placed on the eyes to keep them closed. I don’t have any coins, so I guess I have to deal with him with his eyes open and unseeing.

I kneel at his right side and take his hand. His hand is cold and for some reason mine is even colder. I wonder if the death magic is already finding me.

The grimoire is open to the page my grandmother marked for me when I was fifteen and told me to not ever use it. She did not say why, she rarely explained herself. She said I would know when I needed it, and I would know whether to use it, and that would be my test. I rest my free hand on the open page and I begin to say the words.

The words are not the old language, nor are they the Mortis language of invocation. They are the island tongue my grandmother was raised in and taught me only enough of to carry this one spell. The syllables are flat and sharp at the back of the throat, more of a command than a prayer, and I speak them low at first and then louder. The room seems strange with my voice echoing in it, alone. Normally the stone swallows sound but here the sound seems to float above me.

One of the candles flickers, then gutters out.

I keep speaking.

A current starts to move in the air. Not a breeze or a draft, but something with a weight to it, like wind that howls down a mountainside or rises up off the crest of a wave. My hair lifts off my neck, and I keep speaking.

Suddenly the air fills with the smell of ozone and something burning and the hair on my arms and neck stands up and there’s a palpable charge in the air. A thin seam of yellow-green light splits out of the chalk under my knees and runs the circle, climbing the air at the sigils and standing there like fence posts of light.

Goodness. Something is working. I just hope it’s the right thing.

The light crackles like lightning, and I remember the fireflies during the Trial Night. Then a much older memory, another one of my grandmother when she used to show me that chartreuse color at the ends of her fingers when she was teaching me, and here it is around me, wild and arcing.

The wind rises. My hair is blown back now, properly back, as if I am standing at the prow of a ship on open water.

The grimoire lifts off the stone.

It hangs a hand’s width above the circle and the pages flutter open further. From inside the pages the first raven comes, oil-black, impossibly solid for a thing that just came out of a book, and then another, and then another, and I lose count because they are coming out in a steady stream now, wheeling up into the room, filling it with the sound of beating wings, chartreuse lighting them from underneath.

My face is wet. I don’t know when I started crying.

The ravens find their circle around me and begin to spiral, tight and counterclockwise, and the chartreuse at the sigils brightens while the wind presses on me from every direction. I keep speaking the words because stopping is not an option, and somewhere inside me I feel the loosening.

I get to my feet.

My eyes roll back in my head.

I see only black.

I am leaving.

The last thing I feel in my body is my hand still around his and my knees still on the stone. Then I am peeled out of myself with the pop of a cork and I am in the air above the circle looking down at both our bodies, mine standing above his with my hair still blowing, my eyes gone white, my mouth still shaping the words; his flat on his back with his throat open and the chartreuse electricity moving over him like a tide. The ravens blur past me and I am flying away with them.

The Shallows take me first.

I know the Shallows. I was here at the Trial, standing with Emilita Vidalgo in the long grey quiet. It looks the same, but different. The Mortis around me is here too, I can see the tower above me, the ramps winding down below, the shape of the cloister far off, the way I’d see them through smoked glass, and nothing moves. The ravens fly through it and I realize we are not stopping here.

I follow them and go.