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“So? What are we looking for?” she demanded.
“Where’s your dark arts section?” Zale joked. Nova narrowed her eyes at him, and his grin slipped off his face. “What? You’re telling me you don’t have one?”
Nova rolled her eyes but slid off the table again and walked over to the far corner of the room, where an ornately carved glass-fronted cabinet stood against the wall. A skeleton key dangled from a hook beside it. Nova swiped it off the wall, and carefully unlocked the cabinet.
“Here it is—all the magic we’re not supposed to learn,” she said, and even she couldn’t keep the note of awe out of her voice. We all stood silently for a moment, contemplating the rows of spines.
“So I guess we just… pick one and start looking?” Eva suggested, a slight tremor in her voice.
We all nodded grimly and got to work. Nova took the first four books off the top shelf and handed one to each of us. Eva abandoned hers quickly for another, because the first one was in antiquated French. Zale turned through the pages of his with the very tips of his fingers, as though worried it might infect him if he touched it too much. Eva settled onto the bench and started going through two books at once, while I sat down on the floor in front of the cabinet and started looking through the one she’d handed to me.
A variety of sigils and crude animal shapes had been burned into the leather of the cover as though with a branding iron. Inside, the pages were handwritten and barely legible, being water-stained and smudged. The words I could read were in very old English, and the person who had written them either didn’t care or didn’t know how to spell properly. I struggled through the first few sentences before realizing it was some sort of introduction. I flipped ahead and was grateful to find a listing of the spells included within the pages. I read through the descriptions with a creeping feeling.
“A charme to summon the dead”
“A potion to inflikt grav fever on thy enemy”
“A hex for terible dreems to plague sleepers”
It was all fascinating and, loathe as I was to put it down, I closed the book. There were a great many awful spells in those pages, but nothing that sounded like what I’d experienced on the beach. I carefully replaced the book on its shelf and reached for another.
The minutes ticked by, punctuated occasionally by a noise of disgust when someone came across a truly gruesome piece of magic. At first, I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around the idea that any of these spells could actually do what they claimed to do; but the others treated it all with such horror, that I soon felt that doubt slipping away. Instead, I began to wonder why anyone would keep such books in the first place. If you didn’t mean to actually use them, why not destroy them, so that no one could ever work such terrible magic again?
“I think I found something!” Zale shouted suddenly. Nova whirled around and shushed him, and he continued in a whisper as we all gathered around him. “Sorry. Look at this: ‘A magick spell to raise a living effigy.’ Isn’t an effigy basically a likeness of someone?”
“Yeah, that sounds right,” Eva said, nodding. “What else does it say?”
“It’s mad complicated,” Zale said, poring over the page. “It requires a full moon and a crazy list of ingredients, including an object that belongs to the person you are making the effigy of.”
“Wait, so that means that the boy I saw… he’s a real person?” I gasped.
“Or was,” Zale pointed out. “It doesn’t say anything about the person having to still be alive.”
“That’s a really big assumption to make,” Nova said, her voice a little higher than usual. “We don’t know that someone used this exact spell.”
But no one replied. We were all too engrossed in Zale’s discovery.
“What did you say he looked like, Wren? The little kid?” Eva asked eagerly.
“No more than five or six, unless he was really small for his age. Skinny and very blonde. That’s all I could see from the top of the cliff, and by the time I got to the beach he had turned from me, and was mostly submerged,” I said. “I never got a good look at his face.”
“It… it says you can use “sande, mud, or clay” to construct the effigy, and you mold the form around the object. Then you complete the rest of this ritual; and the effigy comes to life,” Zale announced, still bent over the page.
“This has to be it! You said he was made of sand!” Eva said.
I sat back on my heels, my heart pounding. “But none of this makes sense,” I said. “Why would someone want to lure me down to the beach? And how did they know that I’d be the one to see it, and not someone else?”
“I think this spell answers that, too,” Zale said. “There are further instructions to ‘haunt thine enemy with the living effigy.’ If I’m reading this correctly, you can literally target someone, if you have something of theirs as well; ‘A lock of hair or else an objekt of deerest posession.’”
My throat had gone dry. Everyone was staring at me now.
“Did… did you give anyone a lock of hair recently?” Eva asked, with a nervous laugh.
“Yeah, because she’s a lovestruck heroine in a Jane Austen novel,” Nova snapped. “Of course she hasn’t.”
I shook my head.
“Have you lost anything since you got here?” Zale asked, undeterred.
