“Bernadette abused the practice, and the hold Sarah had over her was already toxic,” Xiomara went on. “It festered into something twisted. That is not scrying as it is meant to be practiced.”
The knot of tension in my stomach loosened up. I felt my shoulders drop and let out a sigh.
“Promise?”
“I do.”
“Okay, fine.”
I stood on the other side of the birdbath. Anowl hooted in a tree nearby. The wind whipped my hair around my face, and I brushed it impatiently away.
“The key to scrying,” Xiomara said, “is to have no expectation. You must allow yourself to be open to whatever images present themselves to you.”
“But we do have expectations,” I said, frowning. “We’re trying to get a message from Asteria.”
“Yes, but a message will only come through if we put that aside,” Xiomara explained. “Think of a person trying to cross a crowded room. If the path is junked up with obstacles, there is less of a chance that the person will come close enough for a message to come through. We must clear it all away, Wren, like we did in your first lesson.”
I thought back to that day. I had imagined my mind as an empty stage with a single spotlight shining down on it, waiting for someone to step into the light. I looked down at the smooth, unruffled surface of the birdbath, and tried to think of it the same way—a blank slate, an empty stage.
“Now we light a candle,” Xiomara said, and started digging around in the pockets of her house dress. After a bit of grumbling, she produced a lighter and the stub of a white candle. “White is preferable. Purple will also work in a pinch.” She lit it and balanced it carefully on the lip of the birdbath, casting her own face in an eerie glow that made her look much older than she was.
“This must always be done in the dark,” Xiomara said. “The candle should be the only source of light. We are far enough from the streetlight on this side of the house, and there’s no moon to speak of. Conditions are favorable for a connection. Let’s see if we can make one.”
She placed her hands on either side of the birdbath’s wide stone bowl. I did the same from the other side, pressing my palms firmly against the smooth, aged stone to hide the fact that my hands were shaking. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Xiomara. I didn’t trust myself.
“What do we do now?” I whispered.
“Close your eyes and clear your mind, just as we have done before. When you feel that you have cleansed and freed your mental space, openyour eyes again and simply look. You don’t need to search—keep your gaze relaxed, try not to force anything.”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll see what the spirit world has to say to us, if anything at all,” Xiomara said.
“But if… if we’re just looking for any message at all, inviting any contact… doesn’t that mean that any spirit could try to speak to us?” I asked. My voice cracked, betraying my fear.
“Perhaps. But that is the risk we take when we open ourselves in this manner. Do you wish to stop?”
I stared at her, indecisive. Yes, part of me did want to stop. I was scared. But greater than my fear was my curiosity. I wasn’t content to grope around in the dark, allowing my mother and my aunts to look for answers that I felt belonged to me. I couldn’t be a coward.
“No.”
“Very well then. Let us clear our minds. We are empty vessels waiting to be filled. Let us see what we can see.”
For the first few moments of concentrating, all I could think about was the way my heart was absolutely thundering in my chest. But as the seconds passed and I deepened my breathing, my heart settled into a more relaxed rhythm. I began to hear the sounds around me, rather than my own blood pumping in my ears. I tried to reduce myself to my breathing, to the in and out, the ebb and flow, like the waves undulating in the ocean nearby. I started matching my breaths to the ocean, feeling like I was lulling myself into a kind of trance. Deciding I was relaxed enough, I leaned forward over the birdbath and opened my eyes.
I was looking into the sky, as though the birdbath was a mirror or a window right into the stars. The reflection was so clear that I gasped, and then closed my mouth so that I wouldn’t startle Xiomara into thinking I’d seen something spirit induced. I focused on the patch of sky, counting the stars, examining the color, trying to decide if it was truly black or if there was a hint of navy blue.
Suddenly, something large and dark flashed across the reflection. I gasped again, louder this time, so startled that I reeled back from thebirdbath, lost my grip on it, and fell backwards, landing hard on my backside. The breath huffed out of me, and my eyes squeezed shut. I waited for Xiomara’s sarcastic remark about my clumsiness.
It didn’t come. In fact, there was only silence—actual, complete silence. A silence that pressed on me like a physical presence. The sound of the ocean, the feel of the breeze, the quiet shushing of plants as they moved in the wind, all of it was gone.
I opened my eyes. I was alone. Xiomara was gone. Shadowkeep was gone. The garden was gone. The sky was gone. There was only me, sitting on nothingness, and the birdbath. It was as though the rest of the world had been stripped away.
“Xiomara?” My voice shook violently, echoing in the emptiness. There was no answer, no sign that Xiomara, wherever she had gone, could hear me calling to her. Shakily, I got to my feet, a process made all the more unnerving by the fact that I couldn’t actually perceive what I was pushing against with my hands, or standing on with my feet. It didn’t feel like anything, and yet it seemed solid beneath me—I was anchored to it, not floating away.
I stepped forward toward the only thing that seemed to have traveled with me into this void, which was the birdbath. I looked down into it. I saw the stars in an inky sky, the same stars I’d been staring at before—the stars which, I confirmed with a wary glance, were no longer winking down at me.
I tilted my head, and realized I could see more than just the stars. There were branches of trees swaying gently in the breeze and, if I lowered myself close enough to the basin, I could just make out the edge of Shadowkeep’s porch roof. Inside the birdbath was the place I’d just been.
