But what could I do? I was frozen in place, able to move only my eyes. My powers were nothing compared to hers. And I had no idea what she would do with me, Patrick, and Baldbeak once she turned her attention back to us. Would we be discarded as no longer useful? Or twisted and controlled, forced to join her?
“Wait,” I said.
Mother paused. “What is it, Netta? I am very busy.”
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the magic.”
She snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I felt Patrick and Baldbeak watching me in confusion. “You said I was born from it. I want to speak to it.”
Bone magic watched me from behind my mother’s face. I felt its interest as I would feel the sudden attention from a predator’s eyes gleaming in the forest. The skeletons that had been forming around her turned their sightless eyes to me.
“I’ll be your wielder,” I told the magic. “Your vessel, as intended.”
To my mother I said, “I challenge you.”
She snorted. “Ridiculous. What do you know of bone magic? I have studied it all my life and my father before me. I have read every book on the subject—cast every spell.”
“And I am its daughter,” I said, “just as much as I am yours. I have a greater claim to it.”
She scoffed at this. But I was not speaking to her. I was speaking to that other immense consciousness that I knew was listening.
“A fanciful notion,” she said. “Magic knows nothing of daughters or sons. It knows words. Rules. Rituals.”
“I know you believe that,” I said. “But I have come to believe that magic is a lot less rigid than you taught me. And I alsobelieve that there is much more to it than we know, despite all our spellbooks and scholarship.” I looked past her eyes, into what lay beyond them. “Take me instead,” I said. “Choose me. I won’t try to imprison you, I promise. Youknowme. Choose me.”
Whatever was behind Mother’s eyes surged forward, enveloping me. I was somewhere else again—not in the Tower this time, but in a place that had no up and down, no surfaces.
In this strange Otherness where I stood, I was aware of my Hair swirling around me—not as hair, of course, but as a bright flame of awareness. Many glowing threads were tangled in it—no, not tangled, but woven.
The pattern was ever-shifting, too complex for my eyes to understand in the same way I could never quite see rightly when Baldbeak lent me his sight. I was only human, after all, and this was magic—mymagic. Not stunted or stuck, as I had always believed, but alive and crackling with energy. There were bones in it, too, I felt, forming a long spine that moved beneath the thread and the flame.
The Hair and the bones and the threads were their own individual selves, but together made another, greater self, and that in turn was part of an incomprehensibly large and powerful Self that was all magic, everywhere.
It is difficult to explain, now that I am not standing in that impossibly bright place beyond time, but in the moment, I had a glimpse of how magic was in everything and everyone, and our determination to categorize it—to separate it into disciplines and order it to march in inky lines on the page, to imprison it between covers, to limit it to a collection of syllables on a human tongue—had gone against its most essential nature.
Thatwas the Plague—the warped, unhappy, limited form of magic we had forced into being when we tried to make it smaller and more palatable in order to control it better. It was a wonder it hadn’t rebelled sooner, and worse. It had alwaysyearned for me to see it fully, I understood now, just as I had always yearned for it.
“I am sorry,” I whispered to it. “I understand better now.”
A shift in its vast consciousness. It was listening.
“Mother doesn’t know,” I said. “She thinks she can control you. But I am made from you. I will help you to be free again, if you let me.”
I found I could move again, and I stretched out my hand, palm forward, and felt it flow through and around my fingers. Bone magic poured from Mother and into me in long, shining ribbons of light, gleaming like mother-of-pearl. I gasped as it filled me like strong wine. My skin felt tight to bursting with it.
Mother reached out as if to grab the insubstantial threads of magic, but they were unraveling too swiftly. The skeletons that had been forming around us, even those that were complete, collapsed like houses of cards.
“Netta,” she cried, sounding human again for a moment. “Help me.”
Magic filled me to the teeth. My Hair was a copper storm about my face. I felt as if even my eyelashes were alive and bristling with power. But through all that, I still felt a pang as Mother reached for me, pleading.
“I am sorry,” I whispered, and drew the last gossamer strands of bone magic into myself.
Mother fell, and as she fell, she separated for a moment into her disparate parts. Her hair, her skin, her bones frayed like a thick thread unwinding itself. The clatter of her teeth and fingernails as they hit the floor echoed in the wide room. The sound echoed through the catacombs, fading into silence as the last remnants of her power dissolved.
“Is it over?” said Patrick into the silence.
