Lucien’s room stank of sickness—it clung to the velvet curtains and hung in the air like heat. The boy writhed on his bed like a hare caught in a trap. His red face twisted in agony as he clutched his stomach.
What have I done? Regret and guilt hit me like twin arrows in the stomach. I buckled over and frantically swallowed the bile rising in my throat. It was never supposed to be like this. The foxglove was supposed to make Lucien drowsy and give him a mild fever—noticeable enough symptoms to draw Sebastian’s concern and convince him to give me the book. This was something else.
“Lucien.” Sebastian’s coarse whisper rose faintly above the low treble of moaning. He dropped the slim blue book he’d retrieved on our way to the room on the foot of the bed and it fell open, revealing stubbornly blank pages. Sebastian fell to his knees beside his brother. He wrapped a hand around Lucien’s small wrist and rubbed the skin with his thumb. “Hush. It’s all right. I’m here.”
The break in Sebastian’s voice made me stumble over and put a hand on Lucien’s squirming leg. Sorrow etched its lines on Sebastian’s face as he watched his brother fight the invisible demons.
I gripped the leather edge of the book’s cover and flipped it open. We could help Lucien win the battle. He’d seen his mother write in this book. We just had to get it to show us what we were looking for. Dull brown splotches sprinkled the edges of the pages like dried raindrops. When we first opened the book, I’d thought the splotches were mold, but that wasn’t it—it was blood. Dried blood on each page.
“Sebastian,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Look.” I turned and flipped the book in my hand so he could see the gilt edges of the pages. “See these dark marks? I think they’re blood.”
I grabbed Sebastian’s hand without asking and he let out a little noise of surprise but didn’t pull away. Setting the book on my knees, I opened it to the blank title page.
“What are you doing?” Sebastian asked.
“Just wait. Hold the book. I want to try something.”
I passed it to him, and he balanced it open on his free hand. Then I took a pin from my hair.
“Are you going to stab me with that?” he asked.
“The book might like your blood better than mine. It did belong to your mother, after all.”
He pulled his hand away from me.
“Oh, come on, this could work!”
“I don’t like this,” Sebastian said.
I took hold of his finger. “You said your maman was good, right? In her heart? So, her book must have some good in it too.”
Lucien moaned and Sebastian looked desperately at his brother’s fevered face.
There was no mask now, no princely severity or cold distance. Sebastian sloughed off any pretense there had been and revealed the crumbling human beneath.
Seeing it made me want to collect the pieces of him and press them back together.
“We have to try,” I said. “It’s that or watch him suffer. I don’t want to do that, Sebastian.”
“Are you sure about that?” Sebastian tore his gaze away from his brother. “You were supposed to ease his suffering, but he’s worse than he ever was.”
Sebastian didn’t know how close to the truth he was—that I might have done this to Lucien. I’d made him so much worse. He’d never forgive me if he knew. But this seemed like more than just the foxglove.
“I’m trying as hard as I can! That’s why I want to use your mother’s book.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
He stared at me, daring me to tell him the worst thing he could hear. His flinty eyes shimmered with the tears pooling around their rims.
I backed away from him, but I couldn’t escape the thin warbling moans or the cloying sweet scent of fever and sweat-soaked linen.
When I selected victims for the beast, I rarely saw the effect—the after. We marked outsiders and vagrants and criminals. When their bodies, or whatever was left of their bodies, turned up in the woods, they were buried in the paupers’ yard without ceremony. I never heard their screams or watched the blood draining from their bodies. I never had to watch them defend themselves.
Now, Lucien’s pain burrowed into my bones with an ache I’d never be able to get rid of.
“Does it matter whether it’s magic or not if it saves Lucien?”
Sebastian scraped his lips between his teeth and sucked in a slow breath. “No, it doesn’t.”
“So give me your finger.”
He extended his index finger and I gripped it again. The pin wasn’t very sharp, so I pressed down hard until a little red bead formed. He flinched.
“Sorry,” I said. “Now smear it.”
“What, just there on the page?”
I wasn’t really sure how to feed a book blood, but it seemed like a good place to start. I prayed it would work—then realized Père Danil would call that blasphemy. I wondered if Sebastian’s mother had to do this every time she wanted to use her book.
“Press the blood into the page.”
Sebastian raised his eyebrows but brought his hand down on the blank paper, pressed it, and lifted it away. He left a smudge of red with the imprints of the whorls of his fingertip.
“Now what?”
A thrill of excitement went through me. I didn’t know what would happen or when. “We wait.”
Every muscle in my body clenched with anticipation. If nothing happened, I had no idea how to save Lucien from this mad fever. The only thing left to do would be to call the priest.
Please.
The words faded in like rivulets of water. Ink trickled over the page—pooling, curving, forming curling letters in soft sepia tones.
I almost dropped the book. I’d hoped it would happen, but as the book of spells filled its pages, shock numbed my elation. Sebastian stared at the pages and then at me, his mouth falling open.
The scroll of the letters formed into words on the first page of the book—Chansons pour la santé. Songs for health.
“I always thought she wasn’t one. Maman. Is this really a spell book?” Sebastian asked.
I answered him by flipping the page. A fine-lined illustration of a rose bloomed over a short inscription. It read, Élever votre voix et tant pis pour tout les autres. Pour vous faites la magique. Raise your voice and too bad for the others. For you make magic.
Sebastian reached out and traced the letters with his finger. “She wouldn’t have done that to your sister. She was kind, always protecting everyone.”
I couldn’t ignore the catch in his voice—even if I wanted to. I needed him whole now, present. He couldn’t help Lucien if his mind was in the past.
“I’m sure she was.” I nodded. “She was probably protecting you by keeping this from you. It’s dangerous to be what she was.”
“It was always so hard for her,” Sebastian said. “No one had ever seen someone like her when she came from the islands. By the time I was small, the people were more used to it, but they still gaped at me whenever we went into the village. Children even asked to touch my hair.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Apologizing for the town’s behavior seemed futile and inadequate. The villagers’ view extended only so far as the mountains bordering our valley. We knew what the priest and our own eyes told us, and so many were content to never ask for more. It wasn’t an excuse or even an explanation, though. It didn’t erase Sebastian’s pain.
“I’m sorry she had to endure that. And you too.”
His face was like stone, but he nodded.
“These are her words.” I smoothed my hand over the paper. “We can give them power now.”
Lucien twisted between us and gritted his teeth. His eyes moved beneath his lids.
“These are spells?” Sebastian asked.
“I think so.”
“So, which one do we use?”
The inky calligraphy slid down the page. I fingered the looping curl of an s where it trailed off the side. The thin paper felt as though it might crumble beneath my fingertips as I turned it over.
Little drawings decorated each page—figures of ladies, flowers, a fat spider in its web. Scrawled around the pictures were songs like half-formed recipes.
My eyes fell to a line drawing of a woman sitting slumped against the thick trunk of a tree. Her eyelashes formed crescent moons where they rested against her cheeks. A title inked thickly near the top said, Pour la santé. For health.
It seemed as good a spell to try as any. But I needed help. I had no magic in my veins to fuel the songs. The book had wanted Sebastian’s blood—maybe it wanted his voice too.
I gripped his hand. His palm was dry beneath my fingers and I wondered how, with his brother sick in bed and his dead mother’s spell book suddenly brought to life, Sebastian could be so calm. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe his nerves screamed inside his body and he was just better at hiding it than I was.
“Say it with me,” I said.
“I don’t know my mother’s secrets.”
“You’re her son. Her secrets run through your veins. Please, just do this.”
He scraped his teeth over his bottom lip again—drawing a little bead of blood. Lucien stirred and raised his own voice.
“Fine, I’ll try,” Sebastian said.
I took a deep breath and tried to wiggle my toes in my boots to shake out the tension in my legs. This was it—we’d see if the book was real and if Sebastian and I could make it work. If the spell drained the sickness from Lucien’s body, it might work for Ama too. Hope glowed in me like a solitary candle flame. It shone bright in the dark, but it’d burn out if we didn’t hurry.
I chose to ignore its fragility and hold the light in my gaze. This could be the solution to this madness, right here in my hands.
“This one, here, with the picture of the woman,” I said, and laid a finger under the first word of the song. We didn’t have a tune or even a rhythm, but we spoke together and the solidity of our voices seemed to soothe Lucien. He calmed bit by bit—his legs falling still and then his fingers and arms. Finally, his face settled into a smooth portrait of sleep.
I didn’t believe it would be that easy for a second.
“Don’t stop,” I whispered in a stolen breath between words of the song. Sebastian looked at me with a question in his eyes, but I only repeated the spell, keeping him in time with the strength of my gaze.
All at once, Lucien came alive. His eyes flew open and his muscles jerked. Sebastian slipped off the side of the bed and let the spell fall from his lips.
“Keep going!”
He mumbled a few words, but they died before they even reached my ears. I ripped my gaze from his flushed face and found my place in the book.
L’automne s’abandonne a l’hiver.
I filled my belly with a breath and pushed it out, swelling the words in my throat and releasing them, coating them over Lucien.
He wrenched and whimpered and stared at me with wide, red-rimmed eyes. Somewhere under the fever, a little boy was scared, and I wanted so very much to help him.
Les feuilles tombent avec la neige.
Sebastian’s eyes filled and tears fell silently down his face. They ran into his open mouth and dripped from his chin. Still, he did nothing. Still, he stayed silent.
The magic dimmed. It fell away like settling dust. The book needed Sebastian. Alone, I wasn’t enough. His mother’s magic wanted him.
“Come on!” I screamed at him. “Help me, Sebastian.”
He tore the book from my hands and wet spots bloomed on the page from where his tears rolled off his cheeks and chin. Sebastian found the thread of the song and joined his voice to mine again.
Nothing happened. Lucien didn’t sit up. He wasn’t suddenly cured of whatever was happening to him. He’d slipped back into sleep as we sang over him.
“The spell didn’t work.” Sebastian’s words fell like stones between us as he dropped the book to the floor.
Did it not work because we don’t hold enough magic within us? Because it’s the wrong song? Because Lucien could not be cured at all?
The questions swirled in my head, dizzying. Nausea curdled my belly. If Lucien couldn’t be cured, maybe Ama couldn’t be either.
I picked the leather-bound book off the floor and turned the pages randomly. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I had to find it. The musty scent of old paper clung to the inside of my nose. For the heart, For calm, For revenge, For quiet. Why had Sebastian’s mother written such vague titles? There was no Use this spell if you find yourself or someone close to you cursed as a beast.
Lucien’s groans filled the room again. Sebastian fell to his knees and gripped his brother’s left arm with both hands.
“It’s all right, Lucien, I’m here. Hush now, I’m here.”
Right at the very back of the book there was a little poem of sorts inscribed in a different hand from the scrolling script of the spells.
Laissez-faire les souhaits.
Let go of wishes.
Et laissez-faire les rêves.
Let go of dreams.
Pour la vie suffit.
For life is enough.
Life might have been enough for whoever wrote it, but just any kind of life wasn’t enough for me. Suffering, watching others in pain, wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more.