Big little spells, p.7
Big Little Spells, page 7
“Diviners are the rarest witches around,” he points out, sounding lazy again. Which means he’s anything but, especially when he shrugs. “Rarer still to be born of two Praeceptors, no matter the bloodline or pedigree. What makes you think some spell dim exile—”
“I don’t appreciate that term, you know,” Emerson interrupts, and I want to groan. I want to get this over with, not argue over a term I don’t love myself. When it’s an ugly fact of life here, thanks to the Joywood and their spells to supposedly preserve the peace. “It’s pejorative at best.”
“You’re not required for this, little Warrior. You can be sent home at any time.”
Still, he’s looking at me even as he speaks to Emerson.
“You will not send me away from my sister,” Emerson retorts, sounding as threatening to him as he did to her. Her hands shake a little, but she curls them into fists. Because Emerson will always fight for me, no matter the opponent.
It occurs to me that she doesn’t know I did the same for her.
No one knows, except Nicholas.
And really, does he even count as a person?
He definitely hears that, because the curve in his mouth deepens. I have to fight back a shiver.
“A true Diviner’s simplest and most basic act is that of scrying,” he intones, as if he’s decided to start lecturing us despite claiming he wouldn’t.
With a wave of his arm and a few muttered words, we’re suddenly inside. In a grand library so big it would make Belle weep. There are shelves packed with books straight up toward the domed ceiling. There is art everywhere, thick rugs tossed across a marble floor, and, oddly enough, what looks like a weasel in a Habitrail. It bares its teeth at us.
As I try to get my bearings without bursting into song about my provincial life or questioning Nicholas’s choice of pet, a table appears before us. It’s a high table, more like a counter. On top of it are all the typical tools for water scrying. Some fancy bowl, crystals—obsidian and quartz—and a wand. It looks older than Nicholas.
The wood of the wand is clearly ancient, but it gleams. The stone at its far end looks vaguely familiar, but for all my work with crystals I don’t recognize it offhand. I have the immediate sense that it fits this house like a glove, even though there’s no ornate carving all over it. Not like this library we’re in that features scrollwork and carving everywhere, much of it ancient signs and runes. The wand is simple in comparison. Straightforward.
And I decidedly do not want to touch it.
Nicholas does something dramatic with his hand, reaching up and then out, swiftly. A window slams open, making Emerson and me jump, and then we both frown at the knee-jerk response.
I assume the point was to make us jump. His expression is far too bland.
A ribbon of water floats in through the window, shimmering as it twists and turns. It curls into a tighter circle in the air above the bowl before Nicholas snaps and it splashes down into the receptacle.
Like he made an invisible pitcher and poured it out.
“Ask the river for its wisdom,” Nicholas suggests to me.
Not the way a teacher might assign a student a test. But the way some half-drunk, Revolutionary War–era fool might demand a duel. Except Nicholas is neither half-drunk nor a fool.
No matter how much I wish he was.
“Is this going to be on the real test?” Emerson demands, peering at the setup on the high table before us. She is probably taking mental notes just in case. I actually see her mouthing words, no doubt a spell to convert everything she sees into her teacher’s-pet-type notes without her having to physically write them down.
Nicholas sighs. “You know, I could turn you into the buzzing gnat you are determined to be. It would take the smallest spell.”
Emerson smiles as if that’s a compliment. “I would think anyone who’s been around as long as you, Nicholas, would know the squeaky wheel, or gnat, gets the grease.”
“In my experience gnats are crushed by the nearest boot.”
She shrugs. “I don’t crush easily.”
He makes a noise that is both dismissal and approval. Because somehow Emerson has managed to earn the immortal’s approval, no matter how he dresses it up in irritation. Doesn’t that just figure? All she has to do is show up.
Meanwhile, he’s taunting me with the river. And requiring a demonstration when he is actually the only person alive, besides me, who knows exactly what I can do.
I remind myself that it’s not my sister’s fault that he’s an immortal dick.
Emerson looks at me over the table. She smiles encouragingly. She doesn’t give me a thumbs-up, but I feel one emanating off her just the same.
Emerson believes in me. Emerson believes in everyone she loves.
I believe that what I would like to do is drown Nicholas Frost in the bowl he’s so thoughtfully laid out for me.
Many have tried, comes his laconic voice inside me. Most recently, and notably, in Salem. Behold their success.
I look down at the table instead of at him. I know how to water scry. I’m not worried about the results, exactly. Or rather, I’m not worried that I won’t get any results, because I know I will. I’m more worried about what those results might mean.
His eyes are so blue it should hurt. “You’ll need to rid yourself of your hinderances.”
“No, I won’t.” He calls them hinderances, and I once believed that age-old witch adage myself. But when the ruling coven throws you out on your ass and you’re a messy, self-taught Diviner who’s been given absolutely no help, you learn to control what you have in all the human ways there are.
Meditation. Breath. Crystals.
Marring my flesh to dull the things that would otherwise overwhelm me, with piercings everywhere. The flashy septum piercing is for show, I grant you, but I keep the extra hoop helixes high on my ears to fend off stray spells, the daiths on both sides to center me, the bar on the top of my left ear to divert negative energy. I keep the metal circles in my nose and bellybutton, the stud in my eyebrow, the bar in one nipple, all to keep me solid and safe.
And I keep my most favorite one just for me.
If you know, you know.
I also plan to keep the tattoos that have taught me the control I need. The control that is the only reason I’ve survived long enough to come back here—after spectacularly losing control the night I left.
If I fail yet another test in this town, what do I care? The only test that matters is my own. I’ve been passing that one daily for a decade.
Pity that all this sentimental self-actualization will be interrupted when the Joywood strike you down and kill you, interrupts that immortal voice in my head.
I take a deep breath and work on blocking him again. The Joywood aren’t here. This is between me and an obnoxious old witch who has no real power over me. What’s a curse or a hex or a little toad-turning when I’ve survived exile?
I can do this. I do it all the time without trying. It happens to me whether I like it or not. In my sleep. In the grocery store. Seeing the future is never a problem—it’s the stopping all those futures coming at me like a faucet of fate that I struggle with.
Sadly, he knows that too. He knows way too much.
But that’s neither here nor there right now. This is a test, and no doubt something the Joywood will ask of me too.
I breathe, I center myself...this time, with all the forbidden witch words I grew up with. I let that hot ball of power within pulse in all the ways I’ve tried to avoid for a decade.
Much like outside holding Emerson’s hand to drop the glamour, it’s peace. It’s homecoming. It’s me.
I reach out and take the wand. It’s been cleansed. Whoever it really belongs to, Nicholas or someone else, there’s no hint of them or their magic. Even for a Diviner. It’s light and feels just right.
I look at the bowl of water. Water from the confluence.
Ask the river for its wisdom, Nicholas orders me.
I can do that.
On a long, slow exhale, I touch the crystal tip of the wand—a precious opal, I realize, for amplification and hope—to the water in the bowl. I focus on the ripples. I focus on the water. I let the heat inside of me expand as the water moves and dances.
“Wisdom of the water, show me your light,” I say, infusing the simple words with everything I feel inside me.
The power sings up my arm, all good—but it’s hot.
Scalding.
Instead of me reaching out to ask for the power, it reaches inside of me and burns. There are flashes of images I can’t make out. Blurry and fuzzy. Just like last night when I tried to see what the future held for Emerson. But this time with pain.
A lot of pain.
A sharp, burning, terrible pain that I can’t control. It’s racing through me, like it’s the blood in my veins, and this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t right. Something else lances into my hand, so hot and painful I can’t keep my grip on the wand and it falls to the marble floor with a clatter.
I like to think I don’t make a noise, don’t yelp at the pain—but Emerson is immediately at my side, so maybe I do.
“I’m all right,” I assure her, inspecting my hand. It feels like it’s burned, charred in fact, but it looks normal. I try to shake it off, even though that makes it hurt worse. “Things have just been a little wonky since last night. It isn’t in me. It’s something without.”
“Wonky,” Nicholas repeats in his cultured voice, as though the word is foreign. And absurd. But he studies me in a way that is more...considering than it was before.
Before I failed so epically.
And it’s a good thing I’m not my sister, because I view failure as an opportunity.
“Fractured,” I explain. “And no, it isn’t my piercings or my tattoos.”
Emerson is frowning at me. With worry, maybe, but something else too. Like maybe, for the first time, she’s entertaining the thought we might actually lose this whole impossible fight.
It’s not really a surprise that I’m turning out to be the weak link.
Which isn’t to say her thinking it doesn’t hurt almost as much as my not-really-charred hand.
“Try again.” Nicholas sounds bored, but why would he tell me to try again if he’s truly bored? It’s that and that alone—the idea that I’ve somehow interested the greatest Praeceptor of all time, according to what I assume is his own, immortal propaganda—that actually prompts me to try again.
Once he turned his back on me, but he isn’t sending me home today. Not yet. If I can prove to him...
These are old, disordered thoughts, I tell myself sternly. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone but yourself.
“Try again,” Nicholas says again, over some excuse Emerson is trying to make for me.
At the same time I say, “I’m going to try again.” Like it’s my idea.
Emerson clearly isn’t happy about it, but when I pull out of her grasp, she lets me. She takes one small step back, which for her is pretty much the same as leaving me here.
I pick up the wand and frown as I study it. Maybe there’s something wrong with it. Maybe Nicholas poisoned it to play some kind of trick on me, or the Joywood have imbued it with some sort of anti-Wilde hellfire.
If I hadn’t had my own fractured vision last night, I’m sure I’d believe either one of those options. Happily. But I had that vision all on my own. Something is going on here, and it isn’t in the wand. I’m pretty sure it’s in me.
I focus not just on the water, not just on the answers I seek, but on controlling that blistering pain. And whatever it is that’s fighting against me, cutting off my access to the visions that usually come so easily that I spent years learning how to keep them from swamping me completely.
I touch the wand to the water again. I focus. I chant the same words, simple but bright with power. “Wisdom of the water, show me your light.”
The pain is instant. Just as sharp, just as hot.
I make myself repeat the words through the punch of agony, and the visions come—but they are even more fractured. So garbled I can’t even make out details—no colors or people or messages, only flashes of light and pain.
So much pain it makes me think I might collapse. Or throw up. Or both.
I grit my teeth, hold the wand tighter, and let my gaze meet Nicholas’s across the bowl.
His blue eyes are so dark they’re almost black. And I think, I need that. That deep blackness. That textured dark. If I can touch it, harness it, use it, these visions will come together.
There are answers here. Somewhere in him, in us. Ones I didn’t expect to find. Ones I didn’t know could exist. I can feel them on the other side of that static. I only need to get there.
There is a flicker of something in Nicholas’s expression. I’m not stupid enough to think it’s concern, I just know it has some of the same markings as concern. Whatever that means on a soulless asshole.
“Stop,” he grits out at me.
But I can do this. I know I can do this. I’m so close to something...something big. Like Emerson diving into the river.
Witchling, he says in my head. A warning, but also...almost as if that term that sounds so condescending is actually an endearment of some kind.
But I don’t want his warning, and his endearment is clearly a foolish fantasy I’ve made up. I bear down. I reach for that space on the other side of all this static.
Crack.
There’s a flash of blinding light. Everything involved in the test is gone—the table, the bowl, even the wand I had a death grip on. All gone. The library is smoky, and Emerson looks terrified while Nicholas looks thunderously angry—which makes me think he wasn’t the one to make it all disappear.
I want to say something snide about that. Who knew the immortal witch could be played in his own house?
But I can’t get the words out of my mouth, or even in the right order in my head. I have the terrible realization that the cracking sound I heard came from inside of me. And all the me is leaking out, so fast it’s like some kind of riptide and I’m an empty shell—
Well, shit, I think again, or maybe I manage to say it, but then the world goes dark.
And not in a good way.
8
WHEN I OPEN MY EYES, I know immediately I’m not at Frost House any longer. The ceiling is a little too simple. No scrollwork. No dramatic domes with frescoed ceilings like a witch’s personal Sistine Chapel. Everything here is too...warm. Homey. I look around.
I’m lying in a cozy living room with a healthy fire flickering in the hearth. I know at once that I’m in a farmhouse. It’s the exposed beams, maybe. All the furniture is oversize, comfortable-looking, and simple.
Emerson is sitting at my feet. I realize I’m lying on a couch. And Jacob is standing at my head.
I want to sit up immediately, but my body still feels... untethered. Yet much too heavy.
Emerson squeezes my ankle. “Don’t try to do anything too suddenly. Ease back in. You fainted. I brought you to Jacob’s so he could heal you.”
“I don’t faint,” I reply at once. It’s a knee-jerk response, sure, but I’m not the type to faint. I’m not all fluttery and fragile, thank you. I scowl at my sister, sure there must be another explanation.
Jacob laughs. “You Wilde women are very adamant about that, and yet...” He glances at Emerson, some secret smile on his face.
I also look at my sister, who is frowning back at Jacob. “You fainted? You?”
“I killed some adlets,” Emerson replies with a tiny little sniff. “A lot of adlets, actually, because it turns out they’re real. Exhaustion overtook me. I’m sure the same thing happened to you.”
I’m not at all sure of that. Something happened inside of me when I looked into the water. When it looked into me. And I have no idea what. I look around the room, this time not to determine where I am, but because—
“He isn’t here.”
My gaze flicks to Emerson. Of course Nicholas Frost isn’t here. I never thought he would be. Honestly. I can’t even imagine him sitting in a comfortable armchair in Jacob North’s farmhouse. Whatever happened back there in his ridiculous hidden palace on the hill was nothing.
I might have failed his test, but I don’t care about that.
“You just sort of crumpled, and he had things to say, but I wasn’t about to listen. I brought you to Jacob.” Emerson is stubborn. Everyone who’s ever met her knows this. But the bottom line is that if Nicholas really disapproved of her leaving, he wouldn’t have let her go.
What could he have had to say?
“So what’s wrong with me?” I ask of Jacob, because I’m sure something must be wrong if I fainted like some corseted drama queen. Besides, scrying magic is supposed to feel good. Maybe a little intense, depending. It’s not supposed to burn.
“That is the question,” Jacob replies, looking at me intently, like he’s looking into me. “I’ve never seen exactly what I saw when Emerson brought you here.”
I want to ask if there’s a better, more established Healer around here. Not someone I went to high school with, because everything in me feels fragile and edgy. But I restrain myself. Partly because I don’t want to be mean to the guy who’s engaged to my sister, even if it’s still a secret. That’s no way to start off as in-laws. But also because he’s always seemed steadier and more controlled than the rest of us, even when he was eighteen. I know without having to ask that if the issue was him not knowing enough Healer stuff, he would have found me a Healer who did. The North family is full of them.
“All the things that happened with Emerson over the past month are things I’ve never seen before,” he tells me, and I don’t love how that sits in me. Making me feel bad that I not only wasn’t here, but I also tried my best to stay away. Even after Emerson asked me to help. But I try to concentrate on what Jacob is telling me instead of my favorite hair shirt. “Things Georgie couldn’t even find in all the books. A mind-wiped witch unknowingly fighting her own obliviscor shouldn’t be possible. If it’s happened before, there’s no record of it.”
