“Oh, you’ve decided to start listening in modern magical history?” Sigrid said drily. “Bully for you. Anyway, Alice started researching a legend from Orkney, near the northernmost bit of Scotland, about an all-knowing and reclusive sorcerer. Supposedly he lives on a mystical island called Hether Blether, which disappears most of the year. If any witch sets foot on the island, they can claim it, along with all the sorcerer’s wisdom.
“Omnipotence might come with some answers to the magical scarcity problem, or at least that’s what Alice thought. And she wasn’t alone. She got a group of eight other witches together, and they formed an expedition to go north in search of Hether Blether and its sorcerer. But something happened.”
Thomas leaned forward, listening. Sigrid’s cheeks flushed with the thrill of telling the story that had entranced her as a child.
“They ferried to Eynhallow, an abandoned island off the Orkney coast. According to legend, if you want to find Hether Blether, you launch from there. That was the last time anyone saw them alive.” She paused. “Weeks later, investigators found Alice and two others among monastic ruins on Eynhallow, laid out in an occult formation and covered in black markings. They hadn’t been killed; they died of exposure.”
Thomas’s eyes widened.
“Another three were found on the shore. They had internal wounds, but no soft tissue damage. It was almost like they’d been taken under the sea, crushed”—Sigrid pressed her hands together in the air—“and washed up on the sand.”
Thomas’s smile was gone, but his eyes glistened. Sigrid had his full attention. As she went on with the story, her vision darkened at the corners. A mist clouded her eyes. Thomas was so focused on her story he was imagining it in his—and now her—mind.
“The final three weren’t found for ages,” Sigrid continued. “Investigators thought maybe their boat had been taken up by tides, or that they’d gotten lost in the Orkney fog and were dashed on the rocks of another island.”
Thomas envisioned a steely grey haze over choppy whitecapped waves. Sigrid had read every account of Alice Gray and the Hether Blether expedition in her father’s expansive library, and she’d pictured Eynhallow’s shore much as Thomas did now: dreary with mist, a dark shadow hinting at a rowboat through the menacing fog.
She went on: “Eventually, they found the wreckage, at the bottom of the North Atlantic.”
Thomas’s vision shifted, dreamlike, under the waves into a murky netherworld. Sigrid’s skin bristled with goose bumps as Thomas imagined the brackish dim. His ocean floor held dark dunes of sand interrupted by crags thrusting upward like carnivore teeth. The boat lay on its side, nestled between two bloody-knuckled outcrops.
“A hole had been drilled into it,” Sigrid said, her voice eerily distant. “From beneath.”
Thomas imagined a hole on the boat’s damaged bottom, pristine and circular.
“The final three witches were found nearby.”
They appeared, vivid as Thomas’s smile had been to Sigrid just moments ago: skin grey and bloated, wispy hair floating up from lifeless heads. Their feet were buried in the ocean bed’s ashy sand, bodies twisting in the current like tangled seaweed.
“So much worse.” Sigrid pushed back against the pull of Thomas’s vision. “They’d been there for ages.”
Under her influence, the witches’ skin lifted away, peeling off their necks and arms. Their faces came into sharper focus, eyes open to reveal milky-white irises. Vaguely, Sigrid registered Thomas grabbing her hand.
“They’d been branded, too,” Sigrid said, pressing into Thomas’s perspective and projecting pentagrams of warped scar tissue on the witches’ chests. “Before they died.”
Thomas squeezed tighter and tighter, folding the bones of her hand in his fist like a bundle of sticks. “Sigrid,” he said, voice strained.
Just as quickly as it had appeared, the vision was gone, replaced by the dim light of the clubroom. What remained was a splitting headache.
“What was that?” Thomas said, releasing her hand. “You were changing images in my head . . .” He exhaled like he’d been holding a breath for days. “Have you always been able to do that?”
“I’m not sure.” Sigrid clutched her throbbing head. She thought of all the times Thomas had foisted visions on her in the last three years. “Doesn’t feel quite right, does it?”
Thomas adjusted his shoulders as though shaking something off. “Do you think Alice found him? The sorcerer?” Thomas asked.
“If she didn’t,” she said, “then what the bloody hell killed her?”
Thomas looked away. “So what happened to the next team?”
“What?”
“The ones who tried it next. What came of them?”
“Thomas, everyone in the Hether Blether expedition died. Horribly. People weren’t exactly lining up to repeat their mistake.”
“Mistake?” Thomas said, stunned. “They knew exactly what they were doing—trying to save magic. Being brave is a risk, not a mistake. They wanted to be extraordinary. To embrace all that they were capable of. To be legend.”
Descriptions of Alice Gray’s body filled Sigrid’s mind. Her skin sucked tight around her bones, scarred with symbols no expert had been able to interpret. “Why be extraordinary if that’s the cost?”
Thomas grabbed her wrist. “Because of the cost of doing nothing.” He met her gaze with a challenge. “People die either way. If you act, at least their blood isn’t on your hands.”
Sigrid shook off his grip and stood. “Alice might have owed the world some magic. I don’t think she owed us her life.”
“Sigrid!” Annabel swept into the room. “Time to get your head out of those books, Sig, ol’ girl.”
“You’ve no idea,” Sigrid agreed. She grabbed her bag and turned her back on Thomas. “I need a break from him.”
“Who?” Annabel threw an arm around Sigrid and steered her toward the billiards table in the other corner. A group of scraggly boys were getting ready to start a game. They twisted chalk on their cues and watched the girls approach. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Annabel said. “We’re going to watch these wankers play pool, bet on the one with the cutest arse, and by the end of the night we won’t care about who’s won, or applications, or London, or any damn thing.”
Sigrid looked back and saw Thomas stuffing his satchel with books. She could see the disappointment in his eyes.
Sigrid was easily seduced into Annabel’s world of casual fun. When Annabel was around, it seemed so simple to knock off and enjoy things. To ignore the part of her brain that buzzed with anxious thoughts, focusing instead on a drink, a flirt, the possibility of comfort and peace. In time she could learn to mimic the easy cadence of Annabel’s crowd, Sigrid told herself. She could be happy.
The billiards table was crowded with Pendle Hill’s finest. They stood close, jostling and throwing insults, alive with laughter. Sigrid wondered when, exactly, they’d all grown so comfortable with one another. Annabel leaned against the wall, talking to a student whose name Sigrid couldn’t recall. Blake, maybe, or Blair, or Blaine. They were talking about positions, of course.
“I’m after one with Manchester United,” BlakeBlairBlaine said.
“Wow!” Annabel said. “That’s on.”
“Wait—what?” Sigrid said, sharp. “You’re a witch. You know that, right?”
“Right?” he said. “What of it?”