“What if it could?” said George.
Jack, marginally more prone to forethought than his sister, listened hardest to the explanation that followed. Their uncle already knew that the twins had a knack for simultaneous spellwork. He’d asked them, on previous visits, to demonstrate how they could wield their individual magics towards a single end, until it was almost as if a single pair of hands were doing the cradling and a single will directing it.
Almost.
They were doing this on the grounds of Cheetham Hall because, like most magicians with blood-oath binding them to a particular place, the Alstons found magic easiest there. The Hall stirred uneasily when George used a spell to split the finger-skin of each twin in turn, adding a clause against clotting so that their blood flowed to mingle in a small copper bowl. But there was no threat. The twins gave their blood willingly to the spell—and Alston blood spilled in ritual in this place was normal, natural.
Elsie flicked her fingers and a light grew, tinted the blue of robins’ eggs, just above the bowl, which George had set on the ground a yard from her white toes. Jack’s light was the colour of apricots. It brushed against his sister’s as if to tease.
“Now,” said John. “Try to make it one light. One spell. Think of the lights as being your magic, and see how closely you can mingle them. From what I can determine, you must make an oath on it.”
The oath that bound Elsie and Jack to this land had been made on their behalf, by their parents. Neither of them had ever tethered their magic with words. They obligingly echoed their uncle: “As our blood is the same, so let our power be one and the same.”
The two lights wavered, then began to merge, to occupy the same space above the bowl of blood.
Elsie made a face. “Jack, your magic tickles. It’s all bristly.”
“Yours tastes like bad milk.”
They bumped shoulders, briefly much younger and sillier children; their first instinct, as always, to make a game of it. Their magic thickened and darkened and began to take up more space. Soon it was a glowing mist nearly the height and arm span of a man, its colours mingling as if stirred with a spoon.
“Is it working?” John asked sharply.
“I don’t know,” said Jack. “Elsie?”
The light, as if in answer, pulsed. And then pulsed again. The orange-pink and the blue set up a rhythm, one shade threatening to swamp the other entirely—and then the other, at the last moment, becoming overwhelming in turn, like a war of tides on the shore. Like a heartbeat.
And it was a heartbeat. The Hall felt the moment when Jack and Elsie’s own pulses fell into harmony, two young hearts contracting as one. Colour drained from the mist until only the glow remained, near-white, bright as a star.
John’s face lit up with hunger. “At last.”
“Is it…?” said George.
The twins, hands outstretched, were still engaged in making faces at each other. The light put out an occasional tendril to wrap around Elsie’s bare forearm or Jack’s shirtsleeve, but otherwise it seemed to have reached an equilibrium.
“They haven’t the maturity to tell,” said John. He cradled a new sharpness, which he applied to the side of his own finger, and knelt awkwardly, one stiff knee at a time. He shook off George’s hand when his son offered assistance. The bowl of blood was inky in the dying daylight, reflecting Jack and Elsie’s spell with a deep scarlet undertone.
John’s blood made new ripples when it dripped into the bowl.
He reached out, moved through a cradle, and spoke, harsh and fast—“By the echo of my blood in the blood of these magicians, I call this power to me, to me, to me—”
And pulled.
The magic writhed at once. Bolts of miniature lightning flashed through the mist; all four magicians flinched their eyes shut. John still had his hands out, fingers clawed with desperation, unmoving even when the smell of burned flesh spilled into the air and every nail on his hands split down the middle with a black line and a curl of smoke. He made a guttural sound and bent at the waist.
“Father—” said George, but he was drowned out when Elsie screamed.
A red hue now curled awfully up from the bowl of blood and saturated the light of the twins’ magic. The cloud of it shook and boiled and shook some more.
Cheetham Hall recoiled. Its own wordless horror grabbed at the roots of its trees and the stone of its walls. Blood they had given, oaths of commingling they had given, but its heirs had not consented to this. Not this agonising, violating drag on their magic, as if by lips clamped greedily on the end of a tobacco pipe.
With a sudden wrench the magic tore itself in half and vanished back into the skins of the magicians who made it. Still red. Still raw, and wrong, and shredding them from the inside.
Jack toppled from the branch to the ground. His back arched and he let out a cry of pain.
Elsie lifted her head at the sound. She too slipped down from the branch and grasped for her brother’s wrist. Now she pulled, and the twisted sharp-edged magic came at her call. All of it. It fled through the contact and scraped itself wholly into the vast potential that was Elsie Alston, the strongest magician that England had seen in centuries.
The Hall threw Danger! unspoken, the warning crashing through the land and reverberating between its walls. But the master and mistress were nowhere where they might feel it. The only people whose blood sang to this soil were right here. One gasping, bereft and dizzy with his gift ripped away from his control; the other burning, eyes bright coals of pain as she said, “Help me.”
She wasn’t speaking to her relatives. She spoke to the Hall, and it answered her.
It didn’t want to; it knew the harm she was doing to herself. But her will was inexorable. Between them, the girl and the land built a fence at her skin, to keep the awful roil of magic from escaping and doing any further damage to Jack.
George swore fervently under his breath. “Father,” he said. “What now?”
John teetered, on his feet now, staring down at the twins. The bowl had tipped sideways in Jack’s initial writhing. Fresher blood flowed from Elsie’s nose, thickened her cough, and brightened her lips as she tried to take hold of the soil for strength. Her eyes had lost focus. Still, the blue of them burned for another few seconds before she crumpled in a dead faint.
Danger! shrieked Cheetham Hall, and Jack gave a jerk.
“No,” John mumbled. “No, no. We were so close. It was going to work—it should have worked—”
“We can’t leave them like this,” said George. And, after a moment, calmly, “You’re more practiced with secret-binds than I am, sir.”
Jack, now shaking his sister’s shoulder and rasping her name, tried to strike out when George took hold of his arms. But he was still weak and dizzy, and George was strong enough to pin him even with no magic at all. John built the bind precisely, drenched in power, even with his spell-burned fingers.