I grabbed it and scrambled to my feet, but it was too late. Conrad had turned the corner and was blinking at me with round, saucer-shaped eyes. We regarded each other for a heavy minute before I slowly turned the remaining pieces—click, twist, click—and handed it back to him, a fully formed hare. He took it soundlessly.
“Well?” Lisette asked from the other side of the library. “Did you find it?”
I waited, heart pounding, for his response. With one word he could condemn me.
Finally, he said over his shoulder, “Yes, I’ve got it. I’m coming.”
I peered through a bookshelf as he bounded back to Lisette. She ruffled his hair. “You’d lose your mind if it weren’t locked up in that silly head of yours,” she said, smiling as they left together.
He didn’t look back.
* * *
That night, beneath the last waxing crescent before the first quarter, I snuck back to the castle grounds and over to the west side. If Conrad’s bedroom was in this wing, he’d have a decent view of these gardens from his window. I pulled the ribbon from my hair—blue, one of Kate’s hand-me-downs—and knotted it tightly around a branch of a rosebush. Then I dropped to my knees and dug a small hole in the dirt just below it, praying that he remembered our old game. Yellow for up, blue for down, red for north, green for south . . .
When the hole was big enough, I dropped the winged-horse charm in and covered it up. I hoped it was enough to convey my message:
I’m right here, little brother. I didn’t abandon you. Don’t be afraid.
18
As darkness fell the next day, Zan met me at my hut. He had a sack on his back and a lantern in hand; I came with nothing but a few scribbled notes and my fluttering heart. “I got what you asked for from Falada, and saw what you did for her,” he said. “She’s unrecognizable.”
“I needed to practice. Seemed like a good place to start.”
“Do you think you’re ready for this?”
“Not at all,” I replied. “But do I have another choice?”
“Not at all,” he echoed with a coy smile.
Tonight was the night. We were going to strengthen High Gate by installing Falada as a symbolic replacement for one of the Empyreans that had already been lost. Using the records of how the original rituals were done, I had pieced together a new spell that would bandage the hemorrhaging seal. I would have liked more time, but tonight was the tenth day of the month. The blood mage doing this would have to act now or not at all.
We hiked through the heavy woods along the old creek bed until we came to the foot of the wall. “There are some stairs over here somewhere,” he said, walking alongside the stone. “Nobody uses them. Here.”
Zan was right; there was a very narrow staircase, no more than two feet wide, that blended into the wall when viewed from the base. He started up them first, taking them one at a time.
I was beginning to feel the anxiety creep in. What if I was wrong? What if I couldn’t do what needed to be done after all? I wanted to hurry, to get on with it, but I was stuck behind Zan on the stairs, and he, strangely enough, appeared to be in no rush. “You seem to know a lot of hidden avenues,” I commented.
“I spend much of my time figuring out how to avoid human interaction. I explore a lot.”
“That’s hard to believe,” I said dryly. “You have such a way with people.”
At the top, the wall was six feet across, the flat width of the walk enclosed by battlements. There were wisps of ancient shades at the crenels, soldiers launching phantom arrows into a phantom army below. I tried not to step on any of the faint spirits littering the walk as we followed the wall north through the steepest ascent. We stopped often for Zan to complain that I was going too fast and that I might reopen the wound in my side—concerned, of course, because he wanted me to bleed only when necessary.
The far eastern stretch of the wall was built right into the mountainside, and the trees thinned as the wall climbed, built no longer on soil but on solid bedrock. The moon was showing through high clouds, incised down the center, a perfect half-cut of dark and light. A low rumble began to grow, and I felt a soft vibration in the stone beneath my feet.
“What’s that sound?” I asked.
“Take a look for yourself.” He leaned over the edge of the inside battlement and pointed down.
For a twenty-foot stretch, the wall lined up perfectly with the sheer cliff’s edge to create a dizzying height. Directly below us a torrent of water was roaring down the side of the rock and disappearing into the dark swath of woods at the base. The soft lights of the city twinkled beyond. The only thing that stood taller than us was the bleak and lonesome tower. I felt my heart quicken.
“Achlev knew that building the wall would keep out the rain, but he didn’t want to completely deprive us of fresh runoff. And the gates had to remain the only entrances, so . . . he bored into the rock itself. Holes large enough to let the water through but too small to compromise the sturdiness of the mountain or allow for human trespassers to get by. So, what do you think?”
We’d decided it was too dangerous to do such a big spell under High Gate itself, with so many people around, and I suggested that we use the portion of the wall least likely to have any witnesses. But now, looking down from the harrowing height, I wondered if I would have been better off braving an audience.
I gulped and nodded. “It will have to do.”
Zan shrugged off his pack and took out the ingredients for the spell: chalk. A bowl. A lantern. And last, a lock of Falada’s mane, silver-white again now that it had been excised from the rest of her and my spell of disguise.
Zan took up the chalk and began drawing the three-pointed knot—a triquetra, I now knew, courtesy of the complete Compendium—on the stone with a quick, confident hand. When he was done, I slipped off my shoes and stepped into the center barefoot, careful not to scuff his lines.
Taking a deep breath, I said, “I’ll need a knife.”
“I’ve got that taken care of.” Zan extracted what looked like a miniature dagger from his breastcoat pocket; from pommel to point, the knife was exactly the length of my hand. The inscriptions on the sheath were indecipherable, but I recognized another triquetra in the center of the patterns. He pulled back the sheath, and I was surprised to find that it was a glass blade, not a metal one.
“It’s luneocite,” Zan explained. “Ground into sand and heated like glass. Unlike glass, however”—he took the blade and struck it against the stone wall with a resonant ting!—“once cooled, luneocite can’t be broken.” He handed it back to me. “They used to be given to the Assembly’s triumvirate. This one belonged to Achlev himself. I thought that, if we’re going to reinforce his spells, it couldn’t hurt to use his knife to do it.”
“It’s sharp,” I said, touching my finger to the point. A pinprick of blood beaded up from the surface. “Very sharp.”
“It is,” he said, taking a handkerchief out to dab at my fingertip. “So be careful.”
“Careful?” I scoffed. “In a few minutes I’m going to draw a lot more blood than that.”
“Exactly.” He smirked. “We need your blood. Try not to waste it. Here. Let me.”
He took the knife and held it longways across my palm, the clear blade glinting in the spare moonlight, scattering bits of light across my skin like a constellation. “You’ve been doing this wrong,” he said. “You’re cutting too deep, too wide, and in places more likely to scar, or reopen. Do it like this instead.”
He made a quick flicking motion, to demonstrate, before giving the knife back to me. Looking up from behind his hair, he said, “I grew up watching Simon do it.” He paused. “It’s painful, what you do. I know it. Believe me when I say, I would never ask it of you if I didn’t think it was worth it. You’re saving lives, Emilie. My people’s lives.”
Our eyes met. “I understand,” I answered honestly. “I understand completely.” Then I made the cut, lightly and care
fully, just as Zan had shown me, feeling the pain and power grow as the blood welled up and drowned the light from the knife.
Zan gently removed the knife from my right hand and replaced it with the bowl, guiding my bleeding fist over it. When the first drop struck the metal, it reverberated inside me like the clang of a bell. At the second, the sound became a wail. At the third, it became a screaming pitch so high and so piercing that I thought my cells might burst from it. But through the knifing pain, Zan’s voice was clear and cool. “Last chance to back out. Are you certain you’re ready? That you’ve got this right?”
“I scoured those books. This is how Achlev did it. I’m certain of it.”
He nodded. “How’s it feel to save the world?”
Nervously, I said, “I’ll let you know. Read the incantation I gave you word for word, pausing so I can repeat each line.” Wilstine may not have needed incantations, but I didn’t want to take any chances. “At the end, light the blood and hair in the bowl.”
He lit a match and read the first line. “‘Divinum empyrea deducet me.’” Divine Empyrea, guide me.
“‘Divinum empyrea deducet me.’”
He hovered the match over the bowl. “‘Hic unionem terram caelum mare.’” Here at the union of land, sky, and sea.
“‘Hic unionem terram caelum mare.’” Heat was spreading from the bowl into my fingertips, where it morphed into pinpricks scouring the underside of my skin. Inside the bowl, the blood had begun to form a circle around the lock of Falada’s mane.
“Keep going,” Zan said. “‘Nos venimus ad te dedi te in similitudinem.’” We come to thee with an offer in thy likeness.
“‘Nos venimus ad te dedi te in similitudinem.’” The pinpricks were like sharp pieces of glass hurtling through my veins, around and around in my head, down my throat, in and out of the valves of my heart before screaming down my legs and out the bottoms of my feet, into the wall. And then, expansion. It was like I grew outside of my skin and bones and existed instead as a circle of light.
“‘Magnifico nomen tuum, et faciem tuam ad quaerendam.’” Thy name to extol and thy favor to seek.
I could barely form the words. I had little awareness left of myself. It was hard to know which parts I needed to move—I had no sense of mouth or lips or tongue with which to speak. Wind was whipping around the wall like a hurricane; I borrowed it. I bent the air to form the required sounds. Magnifico nomen tuum, et faciem tuam ad quaerendam. It wasn’t my voice but the melancholy whistle of the wind.
Zan dropped the match into the bowl, lighting the contents inside with a whoosh and a flash. In that instant I felt the power of the white-hot fire rise and join the wind, swirling into a burning column, carving a circle in the sky.
And then I saw them: the ley lines.
The world outside of Achlev was covered with dazzling streaks of white light. Right, left, back across . . . they wove like a net over the earth, everywhere except within Achlev’s Wall, around which they spun and spun . . . but even as I watched, the lines began to slowly dim; the wind began to wane.
“Don’t stop,” Zan commanded.
The blood in the bowl consumed Falada’s mane, turning the fire from gold to silver. I saw a vision of her, riding free across a great, misty moor. I felt her fierce pride, her exuberant joy, her wild passion. It was as if she knew that if she chose it, she could run fast enough to fly and join the goddess in the sky. She was Empyrean. She was magic. And she was going to give me everything I needed. Because she loved me. She trusted me. She didn’t use words, but I knew she was telling me that she wanted to help me, because Kellan would have wanted her to help me.
But then the fire sputtered. “Wait! Wait!” I begged. “I’m not done! Not yet!” I stepped out of the triquetra, chasing after the diminishing vision.
“What are you doing?” Zan asked as I dropped the bowl and spilled blood and ash in a line across the chalk drawing. “Wait, Emilie. Don’t!”
“I heal too fast,” I said in a daze, trying to hold on to the silver fire as it ebbed away. “The pain isn’t enough.”
All those other times I’d experimented with magic, it wasn’t pain I used to make it work. What had Simon said? Blood magic is rooted in emotion: the faster your heart beats, the faster your blood pumps. At home I never used magic without being terrified that the Tribunal would somehow find out. When I rescued my pregnant mother, I’d done so out of sheer desperation. When I’d burned my assailants in the streets of Achlev, it was to end their savage assault on my person. Out loud, I breathed, “Fear. I need to feel fear.”
I pushed Zan aside and ran for the battlement, clawing at the top of the merlon and hoisting myself upon it. Broken mortar crunched under my bare feet, and a few loose pieces of gravel tumbled into the yawning void below. I leaned out over the edge, remembering what it felt like to watch Kellan slip from my hands to his death, and my heart lurched into an angry, drumming rhythm. If I fell, I would die—but my life wasn’t the one I feared to lose. The only way I could be frightened enough to finish this was to put the lives tied to mine on the line. I lifted my hand one more time and let the blood fall directly onto the battlement stone.
It worked, but I knew it would not be for long. Frantically, I reached across the void to where Falada was waiting for me. She bent her head and put her beautiful white muzzle into my bleeding palm. “Thank you,” I told her, drawing the silver light of her spirit into my hands. I took only what I needed and held it inside, letting it circulate and expand. Then I stretched my awareness and again found the fissure in the wall, and I salved it with Falada’s silver spirit. Almost there! I thought, but the fire began to fade again. My body was stopping the flow of my blood, and with it my access to the magic inside the wall—I was clotting, binding, healing myself. I needed to be more scared. I leaned even farther out, standing on my toes . . .
“Emilie!” Zan said, catching my hand as I teetered there. “Emilie, don’t. It’s dangerous. Don’t!” He gave me an angry pull, and I tumbled from the edge into his waiting arms.
I was shuddering. I was covered in blood. But I’d failed. Failed.
“Are you all right?” His white collar was askew, his hair tangled, his eyes as dark as the black woods themselves. We stared at each other. And slowly, I lifted my bloodstained fingertips to his face, resting them softly against the line of his jaw. There was no sound.
“Not afraid of anything, are you?” Toris had asked me at the banquet in Syric. Everything, I’d thought. “Not anything,” I’d said.
Not afraid of anything, are you? I heard him ask again, an echo.
Yes, I answered.
Zan.
I’m afraid of Zan.
Everything slowed, stopped. We were alone in that fragile moment, suspended together in magic and light.
Then I closed my eyes and let go.
The last bit of power burst from me in a wave, rippling across the wall and filling the cracks like salve in a wound. When it was done, I collapsed into Zan’s arms. The magic was gone, leaving me empty and deflated and cold. And yet, as we held each other in breathless bewilderment, I was certain I’d never felt more alive.
19
I barely remembered getting home; the spell had sapped my strength completely. The only thing I could recall was the sound of Zan’s soft encouragement to put one foot in front of the other. “I can’t carry you,” he said, though the words were fuzzy in my memory. “Please, Emilie. Keep going. We have to do this together.”
The next morning I woke in my cot to a chorus of soft, syncopated taps that grew into a murmur. It was a familiar, comforting sound, and I drifted for a long while in the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, listening contentedly. Kate had done a goodly amount of work on my hut; the murky atmosphere and the smell of dust were gone, replaced by the scent of fresh garden flowers and rain-soaked pine.
It wasn’t until a second noise—a hard, harsh pounding—interrupted the first that I shook off the last dregs
of slumber. I sat up on my cot and saw that Zan was waking up too, rubbing his eyes as he pulled himself to his feet, papers scattering from his lap as he rose. It looked as if he’d fallen asleep while drawing by the hearth after helping me to bed. “What is that?” Zan asked in a creaky morning voice, dark circles under his eyes, soot stains on his fingers.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! I stumbled to the door and flung it open to find Nathaniel on the stoop, his clothes soaked through, rain slathering his hair onto his forehead.
Rain.
“Zan!” Nathaniel said breathlessly. “Zan! Is he here?”
“I’m here,” Zan said from behind me. “What’s the matt—” His eyes went wide and he pushed past me into the downpour, lifting his hands to catch the raindrops, his face a mixture of wonder and horror.
“You have to come with me now, right now,” Nathaniel said urgently. “It’s High Gate.”
“Stay here,” Zan ordered, slamming the door shut in my face. I stared, stunned, at the panel of wood for several long seconds before going for Kellan’s cloak. I would not be left behind, not if something had gone wrong with the gate.
The entire city was pouring out of their houses to gawk and marvel at the downpour, whispering and pointing in a singular direction. Soon the three horses appeared above the rooftops, but their pristine marble was now marred with scorch marks. In the alleyway I spied the corpse of a silver-white stallion, an Empyrean, but one I did not know. I gaped at it. I’d used Falada to undo one of the two completed sacrifices. The death of one horse should not have been enough to cause this.
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