“Then think fast.” The red eyes blink, then fade away.
Claudia’s soul crashes back into her body. Pain sets back in immediately, but so does her striking awareness. She’s alert again. She sits up, despite her wounds, and takes a deep breath.
It’s not over. It’s not over until she’s dead. Until then, she can at least try to figure out how this new magic works. What is it? What else did Odette write about this? She said it needs to have multiple meanings, but doesn’t it already?
Maybe she’s thinking too abstractly about the ambiguity. Multiple meanings could mean multiple ways of reading the poem, too.
She’s got to trysomething.
Think. Fuckingthink.Could this new magic send a message to someone? Could it lead someone to her? That’s the best course of action she can think of right now, assuming she can figure out how to cast whatever spell she writes.
What constellations should she use? Something to deliver information—that has to be Corvus, the crow. That’s obvious. But where should the message go?
Who can she trust? Who will listen? Who is the best finder she knows?
She smiles when the answer dawns on her.
Bishop.
If she can get a message to Bishop, then Bishop can bring someone to her. If she wants to survive, she needs someone who can stop the spell burning at her back.
Oh,Alistair. Of course. When Alistair finds her here, he can surely make some sort of potion or antidote to the poison. It will be just like when Bishop led him to Claudia that night she was attacked in her nightmare.
This is perfect. This really might work.
But she needs to hurry. She can feel herself running out of time as her soul hardens into rot. There must be mere minutes left.
What’s the right constellation to pair? One of the snakes, surely. Not Hydra—too big, too vicious to represent sweet Bishop. The answer must be Hydrus: the baby water snake.
Reaching back, she claws a scab off one of her wounds and dips her finger in fresh, syrupy blood. She closes her eyes and visualizes the two constellations intensely. Eleven stars in total. Her mind races to piece together an eleven-word poem.
Little Hydrus
Listen to me
Follow my voice
Set me free
She knows she’s missing something. There’s some trick to making them work, some special methodology that turns them into magic.
Malevimus’s words boom in her mind—she’s missing whatever celestial and linguistic magic already share. What is it? She rubs her temples.Focus.
The constellations aren’t just runic shapes—they also havetitles. They have given names, just like the gods. By that logic, their names could be like a form of a linguistic rune, right? Maybe? If she uses both the shape and the name of the constellation in the spell, that could be the key to merging the two magical mediums.
Dipping her thumb into the weeping wound on her back again, she writes on the wall:
Little Hydrus
Find a friend
Follow Corvus
To help me mend
It’s so simple. It’s almost silly.
But this time, when she reads it out loud, it glows. Not green, not red, but bright, blinding white. Claudia shuffles back to avoid the sparks. Her blood burns in her veins as the spell rips celestial magic from her body. It hurts almost as much as the spell on her back. She muffles her shrieks with her hand, careful not to alert Triche just in case he’s close by.
