Chapter 40 Poison
POISON
The weaker the soul, the weaker the magic. The stronger the soul, the closer to godhood.
Hours, or maybe days later—Claudia can’t be sure—Triche has not returned for her.
Why would he? His work is done. The only thing separating him from godhood is the time it takes for Claudia to die.
She’s stubborn, though. Too stubborn to let the poison take her quickly. She’s forcing herself to fight the spell and stay alive if only to spite him.
It’s hard to take deep breaths. Her throat strains to open for the air.
The bruises from where the High Sage choked her are bone-deep.
Her back feels like it’s on fire. The blood has dried and the spell along her spine burns like venom.
Deep within her body, somewhere between her heart and her stomach, she can feel her soul hardening into stone.
She feels the hollow bite marks resonating with energy, like caverns echoing every little sound.
She wishes she’d studied harder, gotten smarter, given herself a fighting chance. But all this time, she’s been focusing on the wrong enemies, building an arsenal of weapons against the wrong threats.
There’s this strange, sharp tug at her heart.
It started as a pinch when she found out the truth about what really happened to Sidarphion.
Feeling empathy for the god who bit her soul is the last thing she expected, but now, captured and cursed by the same man, she understands how he feels. She knows why he did what he did.
If she were trapped in this place for one hundred years, she would do the same.
She would lie. She would kill.
This doesn’t mean she forgives him. It doesn’t change the fact that Sidarphion lied to her, tricked her, and fated her to murder the man she loves.
But her hatred wanes.
Maybe that’s a side effect of dying—all that fury and fire and murderousness starts to freeze and fall away like snow.
A rush of poison burns along her back, stinging her open wounds. She shrieks in pain. Her throaty cries echo through the room.
This is it. No one can save her. She doesn’t know how to stop the spell, all other celestial witches are dead, and no one else even knows where she is. She is truly, completely alone.
Stretched across the cool ground, she waits for tears to come, but they don’t.
She lies there in perfect silence, her consciousness moving like an ocean over her brain.
One big wave of awareness washes over her, dreamy and warm, and then it fades, slowly drifting back, back, back, into the dark.
Over and over. The waves grow weaker each time.
She’s fading. Dying. Poison crawls up her throat, lacing her tongue with disgusting bitterness.
She’s a complete and total failure. She lost her love, her mind, and herself.
But if she could go back and undo it all, she wouldn’t. If she had never bargained with the god of stars and nightmares, she never would have come to Cygnus, and she never would have met the love of her short little life: Cassius MacLeod.
At the thought of his name, she hears whispers of a sweet, familiar song. It crescendos through her mind, enveloping her consciousness in a soft velvet symphony. She knows this is a symptom of madness, but she doesn’t care. Let her be mad—it will make dying easier.
She smiles at the perfect slide of notes twinkling in her ear just right.
It’s sweet as candy on the side of the tongue.
Drooling, humming, she sits up and looks at the dark ceiling.
She welcomes a rush of cool air as the ceiling opens itself up to the sky.
The music is written up there in the stars, notated by clouds and night.
It’s a haunting, achingly lovely piece that sounds like the end of childhood, tastes like lemonade in summer.
Finally, she recognizes it: “Iphigenia’s Lament.
” Sound washes over her like a warm ocean wave.
She’s floating now, high above the school, and higher, higher, higher still.
Beyond the trees and clouds and stars. Beyond the night and the dark.
“Dolericym?”
But it’s not Dolericym who answers. She tastes his magic before she hears him—saccharine, sticky sweetness.
“Hello, Claudia,” a rich, familiar voice says. In a sea of black, a pair of red glowing eyes open.
“Malevimus,” she whispers.
“Right now, I need you to make a choice.” His voice blankets her, warming her wounds. “You can die for the High Sage or fight for Sidarphion.”
“You’re a god. You don’t need me.”
A hum reverberates through the black. “I have wanted to save Sidarphion for the last century, but he is trapped out of my dominion. None of the gods can reach him. His cage is warded in magic that even we cannot touch. You are our last hope to free the god of stars and nightmares, and right now, you have the chance to try.”
Her voice is thin as air when she says, “Why should I? He and Triche are both guilty.”
“In this case, there may be an absence of good, but isn’t there a lesser evil?”
She almost laughs. “I am not worthy of determining which is which. I am not good.”
“You confuse good with perfect. Goodness is an intention; perfection is an impossibility. Mistakes and failures do not erase your morality. They shape it and serve as a map to your truest self. You are good, Claudia, because you want to be. It has always been your aim to do the best you can. That is all goodness asks of you.”
“You’re wrong,” she protests. “I’m wrong. I deserve this punishment. You said yourself that punishment is a cure.”
“It is, and you have been punished enough,” he declares, his voice booming like thunder. “Now is the time for forgiveness.”
Her lip quivers. Through all her misdeeds—the lies she told, the bargain she made, the life she took—she has always wanted to be better. She still does. Even now, goodness calls to her like a siren song. It is all she wants to be. It is what she will choose.
Olivier’s very first lecture whispers in the back of Claudia’s mind: The loss of evil is equal to the acquisition of good. This is the job of a rhetorician—define, defend, and always find the good.
There is good to be salvaged here. There is a lesser evil to be spared. Sidarphion isn’t all bad—he’s desperate. Because all this time, Triche has been killing him.
He’s been dying, too. Just like Claudia. Just like Cassius.
Claudia stares into Malevimus’s red eyes.
“They have both done wrong,” she says, “but one was desperate, and one was wicked. There is a difference. Sidarphion should be saved.” Her eyes well.
“But I don’t know how.” Claudia can’t defeat the High Sage.
She already tried and failed. Her soul is slipping. Her life force is flickering out.
“Yes, you do. You know the new magic he has not yet mastered.”
Visions swirl over her mind. Odette’s diary. The poems, the constellations, the spells. “But I don’t know it. I don’t,” she cries. “I don’t understand it. I can’t use it. I can’t—”
“You can. Think, Claudia: Where do the disciplines intersect? What do they already share?”
“I don’t KNOW,” she yells. “I DON’T FUCKING KNOW! JUST TELL ME!”
“The potency of the magic wanes when you lack the desire to uncover the answer yourself.”
“I don’t lack desire. I lack time.”
“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 try something.
Think. Fucking think. 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 have titles.
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.
Minutes pass. How long will it take? Even if this works, even if Bishop and Alistair are already on the way, there’s no guarantee they’ll arrive in time. Her heartbeat slows. Her throat tightens. Her body feels like stone—stiff, heavy, and cold.
She shivers in the darkness, and something touches her hand. It slides against her fingers.
“Bishop,” she whispers. “Is that you?” Feeling along the floor, she finds him again and runs her hands along his body. She feels the rogue scale by his left eye where his shed always gets stuck.
“Bishop,” she cries in relief. “You found me. Where’s Alistair?”
Her snake crawls up her body and curls on her chest like he does when they’re falling asleep.
No one else is here.
Is this it? Did Bishop know it was already too late? Is he only here so that his mother doesn’t die alone?
Claudia’s eyes flutter closed for a second, but not before catching a glimpse of an angel.
No, not an angel—a woman. A blond girl with glowing violet eyes.
The woman whispers, “Pyxis, Reticulum.”
To Unlock and Open.
The cell door opens, and the woman kneels beside her. Their eyes meet. The recognition is instant.
Claudia knows her immediately, because who else could she be? There’s something in both of them that recognizes the other—two girls who fed parts of their souls to the same beast.
“Hello, Claudia Jolicoeur.”
Her throat is tight and raw when she forces herself to say, “Hello, Odette Dufort.”