“I know some people out this way who know a thing or two about water,” I continue. “And about secrets. Well, I wouldn’t quite call them people. Spirits, perhaps? That’s not quite right, either. More like immortal, female beings…”
Caleb steps forward then, drawing his sword. The other two look at him with uncertainty before placing their hands on the hilts of their own.
“Put it away, lover.” I sigh. That he continues to believe he’s in control of this situation is beginning to grate.
“You never said anything about dragging anyone—anything—else into this. You don’t have the authority.”
This—the idea that Blackwell is somehow in charge of me—does more than grate. It ignites. I take a fast, strong step toward the witch hunters. It’s the kind of step I take when I don’t hold back my speed or my strength. The kind of step I temper for those I enjoy; the kind I unleash for those I do not.
I cross the dozen feet or so between us in an intake of breath. The ginger and the dark one, they scatter, seeking retreat behind Caleb, who wields his sword as if he means to use it. As if he believes it would matter against me. He is a fool and it will be the end of him one day.
“I take orders from no one. Got that?” I step forward until I am before his blade. I place my palm against the tip, drive it in until it smarts, until blood wells forth, black and sluggish. I do not flinch. “Not you, not your breeder. I do what I want.”
“You do take orders,” the blond replies. His sword is steady; brave and foolhardy. “Else you wouldn’t be here. If you didn’t take orders, you would have snapped Blackwell’s neck when you had the chance. You would have snapped our necks.”
“Caleb—” the ginger starts.
“But no. You’re here, with us, doing our bidding, doing his.” The blond smirks; I squeeze my fists so hard the bones pop. “So, as with everything else, you do what we tell you. You go where we tell you to.”
I spread my hands. “Where to, then?”
“To the waterways,” the blond replies. “Where these friends of yours are. So they can tell you where this sword is, so you can find it, so we’re done with this and I never have to debase myself with your presence again.”
When I bend down to pick up my bag, I smile.
* * *
I’ll credit them this: The wolves refuse to enter the marsh at night. They demand to sleep in the woods that surround it, in full view and in safe distance of the water. They rotate shifts so that two of them are awake at all times, one to guard me, the other to guard the perimeter.
But at first light of another day, they’re awake, eating and drinking what little rations they have left before arming themselves to the hilt with the weapons they’ve brought: knives, swords, bows—the dark one even has a shield. I can’t look at them too long. I can’t watch the grim determination on their faces, the looks that belie the belief that all of this matters, that it will at all make a difference. If I do, I will laugh. And if I laugh, it will give this all away.
Fortunately, I’m distracted. Dangerously so. I continue to pluck at the healer’s head, shuffling through his thoughts as if they were sheaves of parchment in a cabinet, pulling out to examine the ones I find interesting. He’s allowing me to do this, at Fifer’s request, but to say it’s begrudging would be a gross understatement. Usually people don’t know I’m listening to them. But if I’m inside someone who possesses the kind of magic that gives them heightened intuition, such as a healer or a seer, they can feel it. I’ve been told it comes on like a headache, sharp and unrelenting. At any rate, he knows because every now and again a rich fuck you or go to hell will jump out at me like a diable en boîte, sudden and vicious.
But he doesn’t tell me to stop, so I go on. Fifer wants to help me, to lure me from my foes—her words—and back to safety. It’s this word, safety, that occupies my thoughts. Does she mean safe in Harrow? Or does she mean safe with her?
I haven’t learned this yet, but here’s what I have:
Fifer likes the color green, the color of her eyes. She likes the color red, the color of her hair. But she despises the two together—Yuletide is an aesthetic nightmare—as is her own reflection. It is why she wears only black, in the hope of offsetting it. She likes music but hates dancing; she likes animals but is, inexplicably, frightened of rabbits. As for the healer’s feelings toward her, he worries about and cares for her as if she were his sibling but that’s where it ends. It makes me soften toward him, but only a little.
What I have not learned: why this matters to me. Since Hels there have been girls—hundreds, thousands by this point—there have been boys. All of them nameless, faceless: easily caught and more easily discarded. Their lives never made a difference in mine. I cannot understand why hers does.
The witch hunters look at me expectantly; I lead them into the forest. The warm morning sun slims, then fades as we sink deeper through the trees. Shards of light pierce the boughs, but soon enough even they are gone and we are in the dim.
It is quiet. Nothing but the soft thud of footsteps, a trio of rattling breaths, the hunters working hard to control their fear, a display both for themselves and for one another. I don’t feel fear, not often; not since sitting before Blackwell and feeling that whisper telling me something is wrong. This time I ignore the whisper and the warning, because wrong is precisely what I seek.
The ground beneath us grows gradually soft. Watery. Boots sink farther, footsteps slow. The sound of squelching adds to the rapid breaths, the muttered curses, the clanking of weapons against one another as balance is thrown off, concentration is divided, focus diverted. If they had been watching me close—they weren’t watching me close—they’d know not to let their feet touch the water.
I can almost hear the nymphs laughing.
Perched atop a narrow rock, I look over my shoulder. Take in the wolves, the caution in their wide-eyed faces. “We’re almost there,” I say. “Another half mile or so before I can call to them.” A half mile before we’re so deep into the marshes that the witch hunters lose all sense of direction, before they’re surrounded by water and by magic, before the nymphs will drag them under and they’ll never again meet light of day.
I wave them forward, wait for them to catch up.
I don’t expect what comes next.
The blond throws up his sword again, this time aiming at my eye, as if he thinks he can kill me that way. I grasp the blade to stop it from hitting me, and I do, but what I can’t stop is the salt. The ginger and the dark one throwing handfuls of it with expert aim, expert timing, right at my face, my eyes, my ears, my mouth. The impact of it singes my skin, a drizzle of fire.
Salt is of the earth, an absorber of magic. The elemental magic, when confronted with me, knows what I am. It knows me, and it tries to turn me back into what I was, back into what I should be.
Of the earth as well.
I’d be impressed by their knowledge if I weren’t in agony.
“Fuck.” I slap my palms against each ear. “Fuuuu—” I stop short, because that’s when I lose my balance, slip off the slick boulder, slide into the water.
“I know what you’re doing.” The blond, he’s on top of me then. In my face, teeth bared in fury. “Did you not think we knew what you were doing? Did you not think we know exactly what nymphs are, and what they do?” Another press of salt. “We know. And now we’ll watch them do it to you.” He grinds his hand around my throat and presses my face under the water.
I feel it almost immediately: the power of the nymphs, the call of them. Their song, light and lovely and luring, meant to keep me pinned beneath the water until they can breach the surface, swathed in cloth and charm and beauty to enchant me, and then entrap me and then kill me.
I try to leap out of the water. But I’m slow, each movement made sluggish by the salt and by the magic that swirls beneath me. I stumble onto a thatch of mossy mud, slip, tumble right back down again. I’m on my back, staring at the blond above me, his blade now buried an
inch inside my chest. The other two stand on either side of me, pressing salt into my skin, my hair, my mouth, and all I can do is lie there and allow them to do it.
Chapter 7
Fifer
“I don’t like this.”
John looks up. We’re in my cottage once again, me hovering over the map, him hovering over an old, ratty book, cracked leather cover open to a spill of yellowed parchment. I’ve been watching Schuyler’s movements for the better part of the morning, until John appeared with the intent of prying me away. But I was prepared for that: All I had to do was set out a selection of alchemical texts from Nicholas’s library and John was distracted by them the moment he walked through the door. He settled into the chair beside the fireplace with a stack of them and hasn’t moved since.
“Yes, well, there’s not a lot to like about any of this,” John replies, and there’s an edge to his voice. When I look over at him, he’s no longer reading but reclining in the chair with his fingertips pressed against closed eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Him,” John mutters. “He’s pawing around in my head and it hurts like hell.” A pause. “I hate headaches.”
I suspect what he really hates is the idea of having his thoughts violated, and by someone he doesn’t like, and he’s doing it all for me.
“Thank you,” I say, quietly so as not to make his headache worse. “I know this isn’t easy for you. And I appreciate it.”
John opens his eyes and nods, but then lets it drop. “So what is it you don’t like? Can you elaborate?”
“The foes,” I reply. “Whoever Schuyler is with. Their lights are flashing brighter, but his are beginning to fade.”
John rises from his chair and comes to stand beside me at the table. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “At first I thought it was because the spell was running out of energy. It uses a lot, you know, so I kept feeding it. Mixing in new salt.” I wave him over to the map. “I’ve gone through nearly thirty-five hundred grains this morning, but it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. At least not to Schuyler.”
“Hmm.” John looks at the map, leaning toward the light and watching it closely. Frowns. Then: “What if that’s not what it means?”
“What if that’s not what what means?”
“The light fading. What if it’s not indicative of the strength of the spell but of the location of the subject?”
He pauses again, frowns again. He’s thinking, I know, but I wish he’d do it faster.
I tap my foot. “Well?”
“You said you grounded the spell in water.” John touches the edge of the map. “I assume you did so because you wanted to connect the subject—Schuyler—to his location, and you chose water as your element because it supersedes earth and would allow you to track him if he decided to leave the country.” He moves his finger off the coast and into the water, the channel between Anglia and Gaul.
I nod.
“It’s good thinking,” he goes on. “I would have done the same, else you’d lose him. But what if you’re losing him anyway?”
I tap my fingernails against the table surface, impatient. “Can you be a little clearer?”
“Schuyler. He’s a revenant. Of the earth.”
“I’m aware.”
“What happens if an earth element makes contact with water? I realize when you cast the spell you assumed he’d travel along it, in a ship, not in it—”
“Schuyler doesn’t swim. He hates the water.”
“—but what happens if he did anyway? He’s traveling along the marshes; it’s possible he’s walking through it.…” John glances at me then. “If that’s the case, the signal you assigned to him would be overrun. Water supersedes earth. The red would disappear and you’d lose him, which I think is what’s happening here.”
I study the red light on the map as it flickers to pink, then back to red, over and over again.
“Schuyler knows better than to touch that water.” I say this more to myself than to John.
He goes quiet again. Thinking again. “I don’t know the ins and outs of these types of spells,” he says finally. “I was just taking into consideration the hierarchical perspective of the elements. And, of course, the Hermetic Order of directional correspondences and Empedocles’s cosmogenic theory—”
“Shhh.” I hold my hand up against his rambling. I need to think. To figure out how to see for myself if John’s theory is true, because if it is, then I need to figure out another way to find out what’s happening to Schuyler. Even as I stand there, thinking, the flickering grows faster, fainter. I’m losing him.
“Not to mention the Alchemist’s Ether,” he continues. “You know, the Quintessence of Matter? The combination of the four elements by way of sulfur, salt, and mercury—”
“Can you shut up, John, please?”
“Would you listen?” He snatches my arm. Whirls me around to face him. “Sulfur. It’s part of the three-dimensional ether system. You can combine it with any of the four elements to create a new set. Sulfur represents quality, or soul. I know Schuyler’s a revenant, but he’s managed to rebuild some of his; I can tell by the color of his eyes. Using the Quintessence of Matter, you can create a new ether structure—”
“By attaching the sulfur to the water, and track him that way.” I close my eyes for a second, huffing out a sigh of relief and annoyance. “Why didn’t you just tell me this in the first place?”
John frowns. “I did.”
My irritation rises, the way it does when he gets vague and erudite and annoying. I push past him, back to the cabinet to get my supplies. Rummage through the shelf lined with stoppered bottles before finding the one I’m looking for: a small, clear one filled with yellowish powder and marked by an S on the label. I unstopper it, the rotten egg smell of the sulfur burning my nose, and carry it back to the table.
“Combine it with the water?” I hold it up.
John moves in beside me; he’s already holding two goblets filled from the pump outside. “Yes. A gram should do it. But don’t just dump it. Mix it into a smaller goblet first, then pour it in. If it’s already mixed, it’ll bind better and activate the spell faster.”
I scowl at him—why must he know absolutely everything?—then do as he says, stirring it quickly with my finger before pouring it into the larger goblet. Then I get an idea of my own. I snatch a fat atlas from the nearby shelf, flip through it until I find the region of Norwich in eastern Anglia. I land on the page that gives me a closer view of where Schuyler is now: the Salthouse Marshes, thin lines of blue that thread their way to the coast.
I glance at John. “Good thinking” is all he says.
I set up the new spell the way I did the first one. Incense, candles, salt scattered all over the waterways, a goblet of plain water now filled with soul-detecting sulfur directly in the center. I murmur the same words I did before:
Inveniam et illum.
At once, the page lights up. A cluster of green lights—foe—shining bright and menacing, appearing an inch or so from the edge of the start of the marshes. And between them, an amber glow now instead of red—that’s the sulfur—is Schuyler.
“They’re about a mile or so in,” John murmurs. “They couldn’t start fighting while they were on solid ground?”
I don’t reply, too busy watching the lights as they swirl together, dark yellow and green coming together in a blue glare, at once maddening and mesmerizing. Then, at once, the amber disappears. Blinking out completely until there’s nothing left on the map but green.
John and I exchange a rapid glance.
He pushes away from the table then, moving to the chair where he sat before, to his bag slung across the back. Fishes through it and plucks out a tiny, black glass bottle. He rushes back to the table, fumbles with the top, and taps a bit of the colorless grain into the sulfur-filled goblet.
“What is that?” I ask. “It smells like cinnamon.”
“Don’
t smell it,” he replies. “It’s mercury salt, and it’s rather poisonous. It should really be actual mercury, but I don’t carry that, and even if I did I don’t have a way to extract it—”
“John.”
“Alchemist’s Ether. Remember? Salt detects soul, and mercury detects spirit. If there’s something in those waterways, nymphs or spooks or anything that could cause Schuyler harm, then we can see it.”
“Oh.”
He snatches a spoon from my cabinet, stirs the mercury-filled water, then flicks it over the atlas. The marshes, the surrounding lake, it gleams white, so bright it glows off the page as if it were lit from within. It must be nymphs. Dozens, perhaps more. Schuyler is powerful, yes, but even he can’t hold off that many water creatures.
John jerks his head up, looks at me. I hesitate a second—half a second—before I fumble through the folds of my cloak, into the neck of my tunic until I find the chain hanging there, the one I wear to keep Schuyler from knowing too much about me because I want to keep it all to myself, because I’m afraid if he knows who I really am he’ll decide I’m not worth the trouble. Because I’m afraid if I let him in, I’ll never let him go. But then I stop thinking and I stop being afraid—at least for myself—and I reach up, rip the necklace off, and toss it onto the floor. I can’t leave this to John to do, and I no longer want to.
Schuyler. I think his name, as loud as I can. Get up. Kill them. Run.
Chapter 8
Schuyler
The force of Fifer’s thoughts hit so hard I reel back, falling back beneath the water as if I’ve been slapped. I dig into them, greedy as a starved child sopping into porridge. Her thoughts, her feelings, her likes, her dislikes, the things she wishes people knew, the things she wishes they didn’t. I ravage them.
She hates the cold. She doesn’t like her freckles. She thinks she’s smarter than almost everyone else, save for John and Nicholas. She loves being a witch. She hates being a witch. She misses her mother. She hates her mother. She’s terrified of rabbits because that wretched woman she called her mother left her on a doorstep in the woods in the middle of the night with nothing but a small sack of fruit to eat, which she didn’t but the rabbits did. Distrusts her female friends but wishes she had just one she could confide her secrets in.
The Chase Page 5