Chapter 17 #2
It should have been a great success, and indeed, that brief expression of surprise felt euphoric.
He had not expected me to succeed, and I had!
But after the initial joy, I could not shake the feeling that his surprise had been tinged with a kind of horror, or something like it.
I could not understand this. And I felt let down at the cost, the death of an innocent creature for such a pointless spell.
Afterward, the terrible drawn feeling returned and kept me bedridden for a few days. I recognized that once again I’d gone beyond my borders, but there was nothing I could do about it because spring had only just come.
When I had recovered and felt sure there would be no more hard frosts.
I went out to circle the barren courtyard.
The trees clacked their bare branches in the wind, but it was a warm, blustery wind and thunder sounded far off across the mountains.
Perchta had helped me dig up tender shoots of vervain out of the forest so I could plant them nearby, and they were gently wrapped in a damp cloth in my skirt pocket.
Some part of me didn’t want to plant them—what could grow here?
I kicked the ground, and it coughed a puff of dust. With a heaviness I couldn’t explain, I kept walking.
On the side closest to the forest, I found a smaller stone gate that led into the dense trees.
There were no hawthorns here—nothing at all.
But when I turned, I saw a small door that led back into the chateau.
It felt … made for me. Uncanny. I chewed on my lip and pulled the plants out of my skirt.
They were so fragile. It felt wrong to put them here.
But I set them down and went to find a rock to dig up the ground.
MY SUCCESS WITH THE WINE ENDED UP FEELING LIKE A FAILURE.
Death never mentioned it again, and the next day he paused my other work and gave me sections to copy from a tome larger than the Bible.
Boring work. I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be a reward, because it felt punishing.
But I held my tongue. After a few weeks, he allowed me to return to actual magic, this time asking for me to create a sapphire. I went right back to failing.
“Anyone can put out the ingredients and draw the shapes,” Death said sternly.
It was not what I wanted to hear—on my knees on the stone floor, sweating, my chalk down to a nub and rubbing out imperfect lines.
“At some point you have to stop fussing with the arranging,” he said another day, as we drank our evening wine and I bemoaned my lack of progress.
The next day he had gone again, his stallion racing out of the courtyard in the early hours of the morning.
Alone in the chateau, I drew the circles and laid out the spell, while thinking of weaving a pattern I could light in flame.
Finally, I began to see what he meant—there was always a point at which I had to stop fussing with arranging and begin the work.
But I took my time at this tipping point, for it sent my stomach to my throat in fear.
This time, calmer without his gaze on me, I took a deep breath and let the work live.
The spell caught. On the floor of my blue room lay a sapphire of the deepest blue.
I picked it up and turned it over, thinking of Death watching me struggle.
For some reason I could not quite place, I hid the sapphire in the coals at the edge of the hearth, dusted off my hands, and went back to my transcriptions.
ONE NIGHT, I OPENED A SCROLL OUT OF THE PILE OF DEATH’S texts to find a drawing of red-robed creatures. They were drawn in dark strokes of black ink, brutal and crude, but precise. On their heads were what looked like bishop’s crowns, but drawn much too large and wrong—or …
I narrowed my gaze, pulling the closest candle a little closer to see the text.
Ask under the planet of the … call by their name. I leaned closer. I could barely make out the translation. The demon …
Suddenly, Death loomed over me and pulled the scroll away. “You’re going to light your hair on fire,” he said, rolling it up briskly.
I pushed my loosened and wild hair back away from the flames. “What was that? Conjuration of some kind?” I guessed.
“Conjuration is not worth your time. You must learn to channel your power instead,” Death said as he tucked it into his own stack of papers. “And use a source.”
“Aren’t I the source?” I could not take my eyes off the papers he’d taken. “My power?”
“If you were content to remain a little village witch with love potions and remedies for weeping staffs, then yes that would suffice. But if you have any wish of workings beyond that, you will need to find bigger channels to draw from. There are oceans of power out there—are you content to play in your piddling stream?”
He always made the magnificent sound within reach, the unfathomable, obtainable. I thought of the dark abyss and its roiling stars, and I wondered if that is what he meant by oceans. “What if I drown?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Then you went too far.”
I was taken aback by his casual attitude for my well-being.
But he quickly reassured me. “That is why I am here. To prevent such a thing. What you understood as magic or sorcery before this was only a kind of low magic. Village healers don’t need power to use their potions and balms and skills as a healer.
They are readily and cheaply available to anyone and mostly deployed by frauds and pretenders. ”
I had a vision of Valerie, standing over an injured man whose leg would not stop bleeding as she recited a verse over and over.
I could not place when it happened. And like all my memories of her, the edges were hazy.
But I felt certain, knowing what I knew now, that he was wrong in this. “They are not all frauds.”
“Of course not,” he said, clearing away the piles of papers on his desk. “There are a few people like you, most of whose talents languish in a world of peasants and peddlers.”
On one hand, I was flattered by his assessment of me.
On the other hand, I did not like to think of Valerie the way he described.
I remembered the skill of her hands and the wisdom in her eyes.
She had taken me often with her into the forest to look for roots and herbs, and I’d trailed behind, filling my hands and pockets with berries and rocks.
But then I had been a small child. Of course, she had seemed skilled and wise.
I wondered now how true my recollections were, though it felt a betrayal to think it.
“What I am trying to teach you is not the low magic of village witches and wise women, but that of the gods themselves,” Death said.
“I believe you can transcend the limitations of your birth.” He handed me a small piece of chalk and instructed me to draw the shapes I’d been copying from the book of Solomon onto the cleared surface of his desk.
As I focused on the lines, he explained.
“High magic is sometimes called theurgy. The magic of priests. Instead of uniting a sorcerer and the earth, it’s aim is to unite the sorcerer with the gods.
Their power is then channeled through a vessel, one strong enough to give shape and life to the spell.
Every shape and sigil that you draw is part of a structure.
Every object and ingredient you place within the shape gives it further structure, like building walls upon a foundation.
The entire ritual is what creates the place to draw on the divine. ”
“On the divine?” I asked, confused.
“Gods, yes. And other creatures,” he said with a meaningful look.
“The church tries to use this power to deny and cast out the supernatural. We use this power to subjugate it to our wishes. Priests are simply cowards about their own faith, their own power.” I sensed a trace of bitterness in the words.
He spoke of priests, but I kept thinking of the Mother Superior and her eagerness for miracles. It felt like he was describing the same things, but in a different language. “Can this happen in the church, even if it’s not intended to be magic?”
“Yes. Every spell is ultimately a means of henosis—the same goal of mass or prayer. It’s a primordial unity where we no longer exist in the bounds of this realm or this physicality, but in some vast landscape, where all the gods and their creatures move, and their power can be harnessed.”
I waited for him to tell me about that abyss, the remote white heat of far stars, but he did not elaborate further. Instead, he took out the ring of keys and selected a small, twisted black one, using it to open the cabinets lining the walls of his study.
I had seen him open these before, carefully, as if protecting the secrets inside.
Now he threw them open carelessly and I felt emboldened by this show of intimacy.
Inside the cupboard, there were orderly rows of jars and vials and a strange assortment of objects I had no name for—some of them I thought perhaps I did not want a name for.
“What kind of divinity am I supposed to reach?” I asked, twisting my fingers behind my back as he began hunting through the contents.
“The divinity of Moccus. He is perhaps an older god. Or a heavenly protector. I have not met him, but the older gods and creatures, they tend to hide. His name, however, is inscribed on a votive in Langres. It means pig or boar or perhaps even pigheaded.” He pulled a jar out of the cupboard.
It was filled with a viscous looking liquid in which a small, curled pig was suspended.
I backed up immediately, unable to hide the horror on my face.
“Do not be childish, Salomé,” he chided me. “Do you forget the work of Death?”
He held out the jar, and my stomach squirmed to even think of touching it. I could see the pale eyelashes and the curled body, and I did not want to think of how it had been acquired.