After dinner, we go out into the garden for observance. The beginnings of the long midsummer sunset have bled through the sky in streaks of crimson. We walk to the altar, careful to step around the sigil on the lawn, and kneel down on the flower-stippled grass. Clover reaches to the candles on the shelf beneath the icon. She touches her fingers to the wick of each one, and they flare alight with her magic. I fold my own hands closed.
Tell them.
I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of smoke and wax and honey. This is the first observance since we’ve come to Lakesedge. The last, we were in Greymere on tithe day, when everything changed. I press my shaking hands against my knees. The smoke, the candlelight, the altar … It’s all so familiar. These are the candles that Mother lit to burn Arien’s hands. This is the scent that drifted over me as I knelt on the shards of glass.
A sound escapes me, anxious, wordless. Clover gives me a concerned look.
“I—It’s just—” I blink hard. “I just—”
Arien stares at the candles fixedly, twisting his hands in the ends of his sleeves. Since we came here, I’ve seen him light candles at the kitchen altar and dip his fingers into the dish of salt, just like we did back in the cottage. But now, as we kneel in the candlelight, his face is set into a hard, determined expression. He reaches out and runs his blackened fingers through the bank of flames in a swift, abrupt motion.
“She wanted to raze me, like I was the blighted field.” He bites his lip. “Like I was ruined. Like I needed to be mended.”
I take his hand. His skin is still hot from the flames. “Well, you’re not. And you don’t.”
“I know.” He looks at the candles. “It’s not the same, Leta. It’s not.”
Florence comes across the lawn. She kneels down and puts her arm around Arien. “No one will hurt you here. Either of you.”
I put my forehead against Arien’s shoulder and take a slow breath. “I know it’s not the same.”
I can hear the rustle of leaves in the jacaranda tree. The far-off sound of Rowan in the woodshed, the steady rhythm of his ax biting into kindling wood. This isn’t the Greymere altar, with Arien trying to hide his uncontrolled magic. This isn’t the kitchen at our cottage, with Mother afraid and Arien hurt.
I place my hands against the ground, then work my fingers through the grass until I feel the sun-warmed earth below. Leaves and petals and dirt. We all begin to chant the summer litany. Our voices weave together like the strands of shadows that Arien has spent the past weeks trying so desperately to control.
As I fall into the rhythm of the song, I close my eyes and surrender to this moment of sound and voice and light. Even after everything—the cottage, Mother, the endless nights of fear and shadows and only dreams—this moment, this observance, is still so beautiful to me.
I can feel the hum and glow of the Lady’s light woven through the world, woven through me.
I feel her magic.
I feel my magic.
Faint and small and so long buried. But there.
I think longingly of the Lord Under’s offer. If I let him, he would help me. I could mend the Corruption all on my own. I could keep everyone safe. I could make sure that no one I love would ever be hurt again.
But what would it cost? Rowan had to give up his entire family. I can’t begin to imagine what the Lord Under would demand from me in exchange for the terrible, wonderful power he offered me.
Bargaining with him isn’t my only choice. I still have the magic that has inexplicably slept inside me all this time. It isn’t enough to use alone. But I helped Rowan when he paid the tithe. I helped Arien control his magic when he cast the spell. I still did something.
I take a breath. The air is full of song. The earth is full of light. I feel the heat in my hands and let it unspool. The Lord Under has a claim on this power. What will he do to me, to Arien, if I refuse his help and use these bare traces of magic instead?
At the altar, the bank of candles glows. In the ground, a second light reflects. Gold and warm and mine. I let the magic come from my hands. I let it gleam through the earth.
Everyone’s voices fall to silence. Arien stares at me wordlessly as Clover takes my hand and holds it gently between her own. Tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. The candles at the altar shift and blur.
“I can help you,” I tell them. “I can help with the ritual.”
Silence stretches as I search for how to explain what I’ve done. There’s so much I’ve kept hidden that I can only think to go back to the very start of it. Before the dark water in my room, before the voice that asked my name.
“When our parents died of winter fever, the lord burned our house. He meant to burn everything the sickness had touched. I thought he would burn me, because I’d been in the house with the fever.” I look at Arien. “I thought he would burn you.”
Arien doesn’t remember, I know. He was too small. But when I close my eyes, I’m back there again. Arien and me, lost in the mess and chaos of the epidemic that swept through our village. The lord with a cloth tied across his mouth and a torch in his hand.
Clover touches her fingers against my shoulder. “What did you do?”
“I took Arien and I ran away. We followed the road out of the village. We’d never been so far from home before. The farthest I’d walked was from our cottage to the village altar. When I turned back and looked behind us, I could see the light from the fires. I could smell the smoke.”
It returns to me now. The ash in the air, how the flames painted the night sky in a wash of sickly orange. The weight of Arien in my arms—I’d had to carry him because he was too small to walk. I tried to put him on my back, tied up in my shawl, the way our mother had done.
“You must have been in Farrowfell,” Florence says solemnly. “I remember hearing about that, how everyone died and they burned the village. You went into the woods, didn’t you?”
I nod. Summer heat fills the twilight air, but I shiver, chilled by memories of an endless road beneath the winter moonlight. Of nowhere to go but deeper into the trees.
“It was so cold.” I glance toward Arien. “And you were so heavy. I walked and walked, and the woods went on, and we were lost.”
His expression darkens. “Then what happened?”
“The Lord Under.” I look down at my hands. “He came for me.”
Florence touches her fingertips to her heart and draws them slowly across her chest. She shakes her head. Her eyes are fixed on the altar.
“I didn’t know the name for him then. He was just a figure who appeared through the mist. All I wanted was for Arien and me to be back in our cottage, by the fireplace. I wanted my mother’s honey tea. I wanted my patchwork quilt. I wanted to be home again. But our cottage was gone. Our family was gone.” I take a breath and rub my hand across my face. “And so, I asked him to spare me. I asked him to show us the way out of the woods. He was silent for a long time. Then he asked, ‘What would you give, to make it so?’”
Clover’s eyes, behind her glasses, are bright. She looks at me with a shocked, protective fury. “What did you give to him?”
I hold out my shaking, earth-gritted hands to show them my upturned palms. “I gave him my magic.”
Arien sucks in a breath. “But you don’t—You said you didn’t—”
“I didn’t even know that I was an alchemist. I thought I had nothing.” I had my cloak, and my shawl, and my boots. The meager sum of my small, untidy life. “But then the Lord Under told me to hold out my hands. When I did, he touched me, and the magic woke up.”
At the memory, heat pools in my palms. I can feel how it once was, rather than the remnants I now have. When the Lord Under stroked my hands, the magic was sunlight under my skin.
“He took my hand, and together we walked through the forest. After a long time we came out onto a road. The Lord Under laid Arien down at the edge of the trees. And then—”
“You were alive,” Arien says. “And your magic was gone. Except—it’s not.”
“It was gone. I don’t understand how, or why, it’s still here. My magic belongs to him. What if using it again means I’m still indebted?”
“Well.” Florence looks at the altar thoughtfully, where the icon is illuminated by candlelight. She runs her fingers over her heart again. “Your bargain had clear terms. You didn’t deceive him; you gave your magic. But that power comes from the Lady. It’s woven through everything. Maybe it was so woven through you that he couldn’t take it all.”
“That makes sense,” Clover says. “We’re all made by the Lady, and her magic is part of us, even people without the ability to use that power for alchemy. The Lord Under had to leave these traces behind, because otherwise you wouldn’t even be alive.” She touches her fingertips to my palm. A lopsided smile crosses her face. “I want to see.”
She strokes across my heartline, the same way that Rowan did, but no light sparks.
“I don’t really know how to control it,” I say.
“What did you do before?”
“It just happened with Arien when he was casting the spell.” I fold my hand closed. “And Rowan, when he touched me.”
Clover arches a brow. “Was that before or after you wore his clothes?”
“It was a cloak. I borrowed it.” Heat creeps over my face. “It’s not like I undressed him.”
Clover hums, thoughtful, and looks behind us at the row of jars still on the lawn from when she and Arien practiced earlier. She gets up and walks over to the edge of the sigil.
“Come over here. You too, Arien.” She beckons to us. “Show me what you did.”
Arien and I kneel down in front of the line of jars. He looks at me, then takes hold of the jar as the shadows gather at his palms.
I put my hands over his, then close my eyes and think of how it felt, that last time. It’s harder now that I’m trying to call on my magic with purpose. When the power finally rises through me, it’s just a brief flash of warmth, like I’ve passed beneath a shaded tree to an open clearing, then gone back into the dark again.
Clover puts her hand on my arm. Her eyes shimmer as she sends magic over our twined fingers, adding her own power to the spell. Arien tenses. I can feel the poison inside the glass, inside the water. Feel how it could be mended. Almost. Almost. I take a deep breath and try to draw out my magic. Try not to think how easy this would all be if I had the power the Lord Under offered.
The strands of Arien’s magic draw tight for a moment before he falters. I sit back with a frustrated hiss as the shadows dissolve. Clover picks up one of the jars and squints at it. The water isn’t clear, but it has changed; it’s no longer inky black, but the gray of softened charcoal.
“It’s not the same as your magic,” I ask her, “is it?”
“No. I don’t know what it was like before, but now your power is like … a leftover.” She makes an apologetic face, then scrunches up her nose as she thinks. “Wait. I have an idea.”
She jumps to her feet and runs back into the house. Lamplight flashes in the window of her stillroom; then she comes back with her basket full of the notebooks and pens she and Arien use at their lessons.
Clover opens one of the books to a blank page, and quickly sketches a sigil onto the paper. It’s not like any of the symbols I’ve seen Arien draw, or any of the marks on his arms. It’s small and curved, like the petals of a half-closed flower.
“When you touched Arien, it was like you made his power more concentrated. This is a channeling spell. It will help you focus more.” She blows on the ink, to make it dry, then passes me the pen. “Practice on the paper first.”
I lean over and set the pen awkwardly against the paper. I’ve practiced my letters, and I can write my name, barely. The pen feels unfamiliar in my hand. The ink spills out, turning what should be a neat line into a dark smear.
“Can you?” I try to give the pen back to Clover, but she shakes her head.
“You’ll need to draw it, otherwise the spell won’t work.”
“Start with the smallest symbol, at the center,” Arien says encouragingly. “Then work your way outward.”
I pick up the book and try again. The second sigil I draw is even worse, a blur of unsteady lines marred by blotches of ink. I sigh and grip my fingers tightly around the pen.
There’s a rustle from the garden, and I look up to see Rowan standing at the far edge of the lawn. I can tell by his expression that he must have heard my confession.
He comes over and sits down beside me. “You’re going to snap the pen if you keep clutching it like that.” He reaches for my hand. “Hold it more gently. Like this.”
I loosen my grip as he curls his fingers around mine. “Like this?”
“That’s right.”
He puts his arm around me. Together, we press the pen back against the paper. He guides my hand, and while my lines are still smeared and clumsy, it’s much more careful than I could do alone. We fill the page with sigils, each one neater than the last. As he helps me, I start to learn the rhythm of the spell, the sharp angles of the innermost symbol, the curved arc of the outer lines.
Finally, I’m done, with my last effort almost passably neat.
“There.” Rowan rests his chin against my shoulder. “You did it.”
I lean against him for a moment. My eyes close as a peculiar feeling stirs in my chest. Then Clover snorts back a laugh, which she turns to a cough when Arien elbows her. I move away from Rowan quickly and busy myself in tidying the pile of notebooks.
“Anyway…” Rowan gestures to the pen and makes a sketching motion with his fingers. “I’m sure you can manage from here.”
“If our inscription lessons in the Maylands had a teacher like you, I’d have learned much faster,” Clover says. Arien elbows her again. “What? I was just admiring his technique!”
“Excuse me.” Rowan gets to his feet and walks past the altar into the darkness of the garden.
“Don’t you want to watch Violeta cast her very first spell?” Clover calls after him. When he doesn’t respond, she frowns at me in pretend seriousness. “Do you think he’s worried it will be bad luck if he sees you before the ritual?”
“This isn’t a handfasting.”
“At least you’ve just practiced your inking, if you want to write him a proposal.”
Arien rolls his eyes. “If you’re both finished, maybe Leta can try drawing the spell on her skin?”
I pick up the book and stare hard at the page until the sigils are an indistinct blur. Then I push back my sleeve to bare my wrist. I draw the sigil, still feeling the ghost of Rowan’s hand against my own.
When I’m finished, I look down at the new mark. Once I’ve done this, I can’t go back. The sigil will be marked on me forever. If this works, then I’ll have committed Arien—and myself—to facing the Corruption at the next ritual. But if I refuse to help and the ritual fails, then Rowan will pay. First with his blood, and then with his life.
There is no other choice.
Arien reaches for the jar, and we take hold of it together. “First, close your eyes. Then you just … listen.” He glances shyly at Clover. “Is that right?”
She smiles and places her hands over mine. “Yes. That’s perfect.”
“It’s always there for me,” Arien goes on. “But you might need to reach further. Feel it inside your chest, then picture it at your hands, and on your skin, making the shape of the spell.”
An ache fills me as he proudly explains how to call on the power. It’s such a reversal of those nights in the cottage when he was so uncertain and afraid. He’s had to hide it for so long, but this magic has always been part of him.
“Okay.” I close my eyes. “Teach me how to cast the spell.”