If there was one thing Echo had learned about magic in her seventeen years of existence, it was that ritual was of the utmost importance.
What made magic work wasn’t the specific accoutrements each individual spell called for – it wasn’t the cloying incense or the softly glowing candles or the particular arrangement of herbs and flowers around an altar. Each and every item served its purpose, but that purpose wasn’t the mechanism of the magical event. Magic was powered by will. That was the most fundamental tenet of spell work. One had to believe that they possessed not only the ability to perform a spell but also the strength, energy, and focus. Doubt was the surest way to self-sabotage, and a lack of concentration was just as deadly to a spell’s success as a lack of confidence. The supplies themselves worked no magic – they were there to serve the needs of the caster. In this case, Echo.
It was all an elaborate process to get one’s head in the game. In the zone, Echo thought. This spell was more complex than what she was used to. Anything that reached across distance required a great deal of power and therefore a great deal of focus. She lit a bundle of sage with one of the candles that cast a warm, buttery glow on the cabin’s walls. The scent reminded her of the healing chambers at the Nest. Sage was said to keep away negativity, and it was used as an all-purpose cleanser for rituals. It was sort of like the Windex of magic. The smell brought back memories: her first trip to the healer, cradling a broken arm, the Ala a warm, comforting presence at her back as magic stitched together the splintered bone quicker than her human body would accomplish on its own. Visiting Ivy during her apprenticeship. The smell had clung to Ivy for weeks as the senior healers had kept the apprentices busy with quotidian injuries too minor for their attention: burns, fractures, headaches, upset stomachs. The Avicen were a hardy lot; they rarely fell ill, but they weren’t indestructible. They got hurt as easily as anyone else, a fact Echo could not afford to forget. All those fragile lives cradled in her hands, as delicate as spun sugar, and as easily crushed.
The scented smoke filled the small room, and Echo set the sage aside in a small metal bowl, where it would continue to burn on its own. She drew in a deep breath, then another, letting the sage work its unique magic, relaxing her, opening up her mind.
One by one, the voices in her head fell silent. As she had grown used to their presence, the sound of the previous vessels had faded into the background, like chatter heard between radio stations. The white noise had filled the gaps she hadn’t known were there. Now the quiet was unnerving – Echo thought she would feel relieved for the voices to be gone, at least for a little while, but her mind felt curiously empty, as if the presence of the vessels had left her irreparably changed. Without the soft murmur of those voices, she didn’t feel quite whole. And that was more unnerving than she cared to admit.
Echo poured water into the silver bowl pilfered from Perrin’s shop. The spell in the book she had consulted called for water taken directly from the source – clean, unsullied by pollution – but since they didn’t have enough shadow dust to gallivant about the globe, a bottle of Poland Spring would have to do. It had spring in the name; as far as Echo was concerned, that meant it pretty much came from Mother Nature herself.
She was vaguely aware of the presence of other people in the room. Dorian had not even needed to insist on being there. The fact that he would be was a given, and Echo was grateful, even if his smoldering unease was hard to ignore. The spell warned that the images the caster would see might be incoherent or disjointed. The firebird gave her a little extra – a lot extra – power to push the spell harder and further, but Echo was no Seer. It took a very particular skill to make sense of magical visions, a skill Echo had never needed to develop. Dorian might recognize things Echo would not if Caius was being held someplace familiar.
Jasper sat beside Dorian, his perfect stillness in stark contrast to Dorian’s restlessness. Another given: that Jasper would not leave Dorian’s side when he was quite so fragile. Not that either of them would ever admit that out loud. Maybe not even to each other. Not in so many words, anyway. Their relationship still did not entirely make sense to Echo, but that was not the mystery she was preparing to solve.
Echo paused, her hands hovering over the implements gathered on her makeshift altar. She had read the spell a dozen times to memorize it and then a dozen more just to be sure, but still … It was so quiet in her head. It would be nice to have another voice ground her.
“Tell me again what I’m supposed to do,” Echo said. “I didn’t forget, I just …”
Dorian seemed to understand exactly what she needed. He spoke softly so as not to disturb the quiet atmosphere of the room primed and ready for magic. “You’re going to say the chant. Then you’re going to take the vial” – he indicated the small glass bottle beside Echo’s right hand with a nod – “and you’re going to pour it into the bowl. Then you repeat the chant. Focus on Caius. Think of him and only him. Clear your mind of anything else. The blood should start to form shapes if the spell is working. And then …” He trailed off, his words laced through with fear and longing.
Echo finished the sentence for him: “And then we wait.”
What remained unspoken: the possibility that Echo would see nothing, that the blood would swirl in the water, imbued with no magic, take no form. The spell only worked on the living, after all, and if Caius was …
No.
It didn’t bear considering.
Echo reached for the glass vial containing Caius’s blood. Silver vines adorned with miniature flowers wrapped around it. The flowers were so perfectly carved that Echo was sure it had to have been done by magic. No hands could craft something so delicate so immaculately. A deep emerald-green wax sealed the stopper. A crest had been pressed into the wax – Caius’s heraldry. Echo had seen it on the tunics of the guards at Wyvern’s Keep and on the locket Caius had gifted to Rose a century ago. Now it hung from Echo’s neck, tucked beneath her shirt. She hadn’t taken it off since Caius was kidnapped. Not even to shower. It remained, a weight around her neck, a pressure against her heart, and it would remain there until she found him. It was not a matter of if, only of when. She refused to accept anything else.
“Jasper,” Echo said. “The incantation.”
A book slid into her line of sight, open to a page covered in painfully small script. It would have been illegible to anyone who hadn’t spent years deciphering the Ala’s atrocious handwriting.
The words were in Avicet, but they rolled off Echo’s tongue with practiced ease. Months ago, pronouncing the incomprehensible phonemes of the language would have been impossible, but now she spoke it as fluently as if it were her first language. Even though it wasn’t her mother tongue, it was Rose’s. And what Rose knew, Echo knew. She clutched the vial tightly and let her mind retreat, allowing Rose’s consciousness to pierce her waking brain further than she ever had before.
When she reached the part of the spell that called for a piece of the missing, she broke the wax with the tip of her dagger. The stopper slid free with an audible pop. Echo tipped the contents of the vial into the silver bowl. Blood spread through the clear water like scarlet clouds.
Echo watched the water stain crimson and repeated the words of the Avicet chant. The blood didn’t settle. It swirled and eddied in the bowl as if it had a life of its own, dancing with the rhythm of Echo’s voice. There was a sound of other voices whispering, feminine voices. Not Dorian or Jasper. Echo almost looked up from the silver bowl, but her connection to the magic was only just building. If she looked away now, it would snap, like a too-thin rope trying to keep a boulder from rolling downhill. The voices joined hers in a susurration of ghostly chanting. As they rose and fell with the intonation of her voice, Echo realized what they were: the vessels, lending whatever traces of magical strength they had to her. The thought warmed her and did what the vessels wanted: it made her stronger.
With the added force of the vessels’ chanting, Echo let her own words fly from her lips on autopilot. In order for the spell to work, she had to focus on the object of her desire.
Caius.
Desire was the most critical impetus behind all magic. It was the most basic form of willpower. A desire strong enough could move mountains, heal wounds, inflict pain; could summon fire and ice and wind and all the forces of nature. Desire could turn a human girl into a being of flame and fury until all there was left in her wake was ash and smoke.
She thought of Caius, flitting from one memory to the other, refusing to fall into any single one lest that throw the spell off course. It wasn’t enough to simply remember with perfect clarity the line of his jaw or the sound of his laugh or the wrinkle that formed between his brows when he was mad. Her vision of Caius needed to encompass the totality of him, not merely be a snapshot of his existence.
She started from the beginning: the first time she had ever seen him, his face bathed in moonlight and shadow. They had stood on the opposite sides of a war begun long before either of them had been born. She had gone to steal something from a museum and he had followed her there. He, a prince in disguise. She, a thief with a penchant for trouble. They had fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, though neither one had known it at the time. She had needed him to show her to her destiny, just as he had needed her to help him find his own.
They had not remained locked in those two identities for long. Echo had become an ally – however reluctant – and Caius had fallen from his throne. Both of them had been set adrift, unmoored from the truths they had taken as absolute.
She remembered the way his hands felt wrapped around her wrists the first time she kissed him. His thumbs had rubbed circles into her skin, tracing the lines of her veins. His lips had been warm, and softer than she had expected. The kiss had been slow. So painfully slow. And brief.
Not like this, he had said.
She hadn’t understood it then, but she did now.
Caius hadn’t been ready. Neither had she. Echo hadn’t possessed the foresight to know it then, but he had seen it in her. He had known. And he had pushed her away. Despite how badly starved he was for touch, for even the most basic expressions of affection, he had pushed her away. He had denied himself for her benefit. But he had let her take her comfort from him. Had allowed her to fall asleep safe in the circle of his arms on the forest floor, the two of them entwined together against an uncertain future.
And then she had stumbled into the Oracle’s lair and learned the truth of Caius’s identity, and then into the room in which the Oracle had said Echo would find the firebird. In it, she had found only herself.
From memory, she conjured the sight of Caius in battle, his face speckled with the blood of the foes he had slain. He was most himself in the middle of a fight. He didn’t relish it the way Tanith did, but it was as if the part of him he held tightly on a leash was unchained and let free. He fought like a dancer, all lithe grace and sinuous muscle.
Echo remembered the way he had kissed her after that. Soft and tentative, an exploratory gesture.
She indulged in the sense memory of his hand in hers as they walked down a crowded London street. A perfect moment, and one easily shattered but never lost.
She called forth the smell of his skin during a time she had sought solace in his embrace. Woodsmoke and apples and something indefinable and otherworldly. Something magical. A scent uniquely his own.
The blood in the bowl began to boil violently.
Echo’s focus sharpened. She grabbed at memories of Caius as they flew by, a child snatching butterflies out of the air.
The huff of a quiet chuckle when he was trying not to laugh.
The little groan of ecstasy when he bit into something sinfully delicious.
The dance of his fingers over a blade as he tended to it with a whetstone and an oiled rag.
The crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he looked at her.
The low timbre of his voice when he spoke to her of myths and legends and stories passed down from generation to generation. Tales of dragons arcing through the sky on majestic wings. Of gods and nightmares and dreams of peace.
She thought of all the things that made him – as a person, not a prince – all the secret hopes and fears he had shared with her on sleepless nights. Of the way he said her name when there was no one else around.
A ruby glow began to emanate from the silver bowl as the clouds in its contents shrank and expanded and took shape.
A figure kneeling at another’s feet. Head bowed, either in pain or supplication. Another shift of the blood in the water, another image, this one clearer than the last.
An unconscious man shackled with heavy manacles, his head lolling on his shoulders. One of his legs was bent at an unnatural angle. Someone stood over him, a healer perhaps, maybe even a mage, holding his hands out to the man’s many wounds, closing them. Setting the broken bone.
Another figure, this one clad in shining armor, opening the wounds anew. Delighting in the spill of Caius’s blood. A curling black wisp snaked across the surface of the blood. In the blink of an eye, it was gone.
The image writhed into nonsense and then began to solidify. Echo could see the shape of Caius’s body, trussed up in chains in a cavernous room.
He was in pain. He was suffering and there was nothing Echo could do about it. The tether of magic tying her to the vision in the bowl wavered as anger and hopelessness warred for her attention.
A hand gripped her shoulder, a solid, comforting weight. Though Echo kept her gaze locked on the silver bowl, she felt herself buttressed by the strength in that hand.
“We need to expand the spell to see where he is,” Dorian said. “It’ll require more power. Take from me what you need.”
Jasper cut in, his voice low and worried. “Dorian, I don’t think —”
“There’s no other way,” Dorian said.
The act of sharing magic was not one to be undertaken lightly, especially when there was an imbalance of power between participants. Echo was human, but she contained a force that made Dorian’s magic pale in comparison. It would be so easy to take his magic now that it was being so kindly offered, and to keep taking it. She could drink him dry. The firebird roiled inside her, aching to tap into that well of magic right in front of it like a starving woman falling upon a sumptuous feast.
But Echo was not ruled by her beast and its urges. She could – she would – fight it.
Echo placed her hand above Dorian’s. The moment her skin touched his, power flared up between them, raw and vibrant. The firebird burned brightly inside her, but Dorian’s magic had another feel to it altogether. His was gently rolling waves and the deepest fathoms of the sea. His was the coursing river and the drizzling rain. The beast inside Echo rolled around in all that magic, luxuriating in its warmth. She took only what she needed and not one drop more.
Echo repeated the final phrase of the chant, the one that focused on the location of that which was lost. The image in the blood grew smaller as the range of the spell widened beyond the room with its shadows and chains and captive prince.
The blood congealed into shapes: winged statues and soaring columns and an altar set onto a dais. It was a church or a temple or some other place of worship. The ceiling had caved in in places, and beams of light fell on the frieze behind the altar. It depicted a dragon standing atop a heap of bones and swords and flags. One clawed foot crushed a skull; another bent a sword in its grip.
“I know where he is,” Dorian said, breathless, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. His hand squeezed Echo’s shoulder once before severing their connection. Echo felt it snap like a rubber band, a sharp discomfort, and then nothing but the memory of sensation.
Her elation was powerful enough to disrupt the spell. She lost the rhythm of her chanting and suddenly the bowl was just a bowl and the blood was just blood, diluted in water.
A wave of dizziness hit her when the magic dissipated. She would mostly likely suffer for it later. A headache, probably. Maybe even some nausea. But right now she couldn’t be bothered by the limitations of her aching human body.
“Where is he?” Echo said. “What was that place?”
“It’s an old ruin,” Dorian said. His eye was still on the scrying bowl, reluctant to let go of the image of his prince, wounded and chained but alive. “It was a Drakharin temple, centuries out of use. Caius and I went there once a few years after I entered his service. It’s rumored to be haunted. Young men go there to prove how unafraid they are and come back uniformly terrified.”
“Oh, this’ll be fun,” Jasper said. Echo had nearly forgotten he was there.
Ghosts didn’t frighten her. She lived with them, every day, in the confines of her head. A haunted ruin was nothing in the face of her desire to find Caius and break him free of those chains. “Do you remember how to get there?”
“Of course.” Dorian sounded offended she’d even felt the need to ask.
“Then we leave at dawn,” Echo said. “Bring weapons. I have a feeling we’re going to need them.”