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.