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She sat, bent over the desk piled high with open books and a set of notes. The candles were lit and had waned to almost nothing.
As I came down the stairs, she looked up, dark circles pooling heavily beneath her eyes.
“Have you slept?” I asked.
“A little,” she said. “But I think I have found a spell for the mist.”
“Show me,” I said, approaching the table.
She turned the book toward me and tapped on a page that was beautifully illustrated. Whoever had taken the time to write these spells had also been an artist.
“This spell is for containment,” I said. “Should we not look to banish?”
“If we banish it, we risk sending the mist to another plane. If we contain it, at least we know where it is.”
“We need a vessel for containment,” I said.
“I think one of us should be the vessel,” Ana said.
I had never heard her be so sure about anything before.
“Ana—” I began, uncertain.
“You said you were preparing for war. Is the mist not a weapon?”
It was true that it was a weapon, but was it one we wanted to use? I had seen the horror it had created in my villages. Then again, the horror of war was no different, and I would bring it about to many people.
“Which of us will carry it?” I asked.
“You are queen,” she said without question. “You should carry it.”
I knew why she did not wish to contain such power. She did not want to be used as a weapon, but I did.
“It would be a waste,” I said. “I cannot call upon power.”
I had not even been able to shift since the night I was turned.
“Youcan,” Ana said. “You will. You channeled power into your body once. You can do it again.”
I sighed, but I could not deny the excitement that rose in my veins at her words.
“What do we need to cast the spell?”
“We need a water source to use as a conduit, and we must cast under the light of the first full moon,” she said. “We will also need a third witch.”
As Ana spoke, I began to recall some rituals for spells. A really gifted witch might be able to cast this containment spell, but we were learning, and it was best we followed the rules as closely as possible.
“A third witch,” I repeated, and my thoughts turned to Violeta, who was the descendant of Evanora, another witch of High Coven. Her greatest skill had been binding magic. I wondered if the gift had passed to my lady’s maid. If so and she was willing to help with this spell, then perhaps we would have a better chance at binding Ravena’s magic. “I have someone in mind.”
To my knowledge, Violeta did not practice magic, but I knew Evanora’s death haunted her, and it was that kind of trauma that silenced witches in this age. Perhaps she was too afraid to try.
“Whoever you choose, she must be ready by the full moon, which is in two days,” said Ana.
Two days.
That did not give us a lot of time to prepare or even teach but we had to try.
I thought of what had happened earlier, how that woman had screamed as she begged someone to save her dying husband, how she had tried to clean the blood from his face—as if somehow that might help bring him back to life. I hated that he had died, hated more that he had been brought back to life, and I dreaded that we still did not know the consequences of Solaris’s actions.
