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—”