I pause, unsure how to respond, and watch her turn back to the sea, the water crashing below us. She makes it sound so simple, but I’ve never felt free to own what’s mine. The magic. The money. The voice.
“I used to think it was you,” I tell her. “When I was young and I heard the voice inside me, I thought you were whispering to my heart.”
“The voice was always your own,” she says. “It was always a part of yourself you’d been taught not to trust, made of the pieces you carved away that were not docile, that were liberated. So, they took on their own life when given the chance.”
“Did you hear it too? A voice like mine?” I ask her.
Her eyes glitter with memory. “I heard a voice, but it belonged to another, a creature who thrashed inside my dreams, as powerful as she was pitiful.”
“The Fathom.” I stare at her, disbelieving but knowing she cannot lie. Not now, not like this. “Long before Arla or me, she called to you.”
The Fathom had mentioned asensitivitythat made connection easier, one it seemed I lacked, but which my grandmother and Arla must have had. Was it their affinity for water? Or their affinity for power? The desire to use their magic, the willingness to create something with it? Even todestroysomething with it?
“I was just beginning to stir with her whispers when I met your grandfather,” she recalls. “I came here following that voice. But he captivated me, young and brash as he was, a bull among men. And I could think of nothing and no one else. When I felt him slipping through my fingers, I made a bargain with the creature in my dreams—show me how to hold on to him, and I would set her free. It was an exchange of prisoners. And so she gave me the spell which would be my undoing. I cast my net into the sea and caught my prize in return, but he was no prize at all. I thought I could pick up where I’d left off, that once Ihadhim, I could return to what beckoned in the dark, fulfill my end of the deal. But he ensnared me as surely as I had him. You can’t own a life. It’s a lesson we both learned the hard way. I was trapped here, close but still too far. I could do nothing. And the knowing ate at me. The incessant wailing of a beast not of heaven or earth but trapped between. A cry that no one else could hear. I’d come out here in the night to escape it, but it only grew stronger by the water, in the dark.”
She turns to me again. “I thought maybe your mother would succeed where I had failed. But after what she’d seen and been through, what she’d come to believe, she would never have dared to save it even if she could hear it. She hated her power because of what I’d done with mine. The only time I saw her use it was the night he came for you.”
“The fire…” I whisper
She nods, grave. “I felt her in that searing heat and rage and joined her there. I thought we could undo all the damage that had been wrought, but I was wrong. Because it lived on in you.”
“But I found your spell,” I confess to her. “The candle in your room. The flowers, the snake. Why continue to work it if what you wanted was to be free?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t reworking it. I was trying to undo it. Many, many times over, I tried. I gathered the same items from the spell she’d given me and remade them over and over, butwith two extra letters—unbind. I thought if I could retrace my steps, untie what had been knotted, I could find a way to finish what I’d come here to start. But it failed again and again.”
Untying a knot isn’t always as simple as making one. But I need to understand both if I’m going to straighten this out. “So how did you do it? How did you bind a man with no heart?”
“Blood,” she says frankly. “I gave the night and the ocean a life that wasn’t mine to give. Such things are always bought this way. Only blood can bind, and only blood can unbind.”
No wonder the magic turned foul, the spell rotten. It was cast in another’s sacrifice. Such a thing can never end well.
“So why didn’t your death release us from the spell you cast?” My grandfather should have gotten better after she was gone, but he only became worse in her absence.
“To do the working,” she says now, “the blood must be taken. To undo it, the blood must be given.”
There are only four kinds of blood when it comes to magic,Arla had said. And then I hear the Fathom in my dream:Opposite forces cancel each other out.Magical blood and nonmagical blood. Blood given and blood taken.
Rudzitin’s spell to hold the Fathom needed bloodtaken. But it still wasn’t enough. Not to last forever. It needed magical blood as well.
But without Arla’s re-creation of his rite, sealed in the blood of our full circle, all I need to undo Rudzitin’s bind is the magical blood ofoneperson, my own freely given.
Aurelia is fading, streams of ghostly white drifting away on the wind like dandelion seeds. She won’t haunt these bluffs anymore, her story told, her debt passed down to me. “Wait! I still don’t understand. Why didn’t I die that night?”
Her hand reaches out to stroke my face, but it is just a breeze toying with my skin. “Because the Fathom brought you back, spit you out like a seed from the pulp. Someone must complete the bargain I struck.”
I watch her dissipate over the water, a chill penetrating my bones where moments ago it was warm. Her voice carries back to me, unencumbered. “Free the deep and it will wash our sins away…”
I pad down the long hall to the bedroom, dragging over a chair and clambering up to reach above the mantel and rip her portrait down. It comes away easily in my hands, the faintest trace left behind to mark where it once hung. Tucking it under an arm, I fight the winds all the way back to the cliff, where I inch closer to the edge than I’ve ever allowed myself before.
She said to let her go, to let them all go. And so I will.
With a great heave of my arms, I fling the painting out over the water and watch it drop, splintering across the rocks and sliding into the sea. I watch until the last shreds disappear beneath the waves, until I can be sure no piece will wash ashore and the sun begins to bleach the sky in the distance. And when I am certain her memory is laid to rest in the same fashion as her body was, only then do I go inside.
Mira and Levi are awake. They follow me as I enter and stalk toward the kitchen. I ate last night before bed, but the sleepless night has killed my appetite for breakfast, so I only make a hasty cup of coffee. Levi, however, nibbles a muffin, watching me. I must look as crazed as Aurelia was rumored to be, my hair matted, clothes wrinkled, eyes red with lack of sleep. But, like Cadence, I’m clearer than I’ve ever been. And I know now what I need to do.
I turn to Nina’s daughter. “Mira, I need you to do me a favor.”
She pours her own coffee, nods stiffly. “Sure. What is it?”
