33 - Iona #4
“You truly are mad!” Iona brings a hand to her stinging cheek. “We would have sensed… We would have known if this were true.”
“Like you did with Elise?” Ksenia asks.
Iona frowns and looks away, reeling against the absurdity of her ravings.
“It’s not possible,” Samaira agrees. “What you are implying… it could never be. Maleficians cannot form covens.”
“None have thought it possible,” Ksenia agrees.
“Maleficians are far too volatile, too destructive. They would only turn on each other, cannibalizing on their magic until one remained. Or so we’ve always believed.
This is unlike any instance of maleficium ever recorded.
The sheer power they’ve cultivated for all those years, siphoning magic from sacred sites on every continent without restriction, it is beyond imagining… ”
Iona paces the floor, her hands trembling. “But the other covens would have noticed. Someone would have seen… something. Someone must have…”
“When Katrin lived, the other covens were kept blissfully content, gorging themselves on magic while others were deprived. Why would they disrupt an arrangement that exclusively benefited them?” Ksenia asks. “An arrangement you perpetuated at Xiomara’s behest.”
“This is an outrageous claim to bring to me without tangible proof,” Iona insists, “I have months of evidence to the contrary. Marina, Moira, Xiomara, every one of them put their lives in the gravest danger to protect those who the Crone abducted. How am I meant to believe you at all, in anything, when I know you were sneaking letters to Ariadne’s mother during your mockery of a friendship?
For all we know, you’re in league with them and this is all just a distraction to keep me from Ariadne.
It was not long ago that she and I thought you were a malefician. ”
Ksenia grimaces. “Fools, the both of you. I would never defile myself with dark magic.”
“So you say.” Iona crosses her arms.
Samaira puts a comforting hand on her shoulder and frowns. “Ksenia, you’d better have proof of this.”
“Strong, undeniable proof,” Iona agrees.
Ksenia returns to her papers and books with renewed vigor, and out of impatience, Iona shifts through the papers, too.
“What is it you’re searching for?” Iona asks.
“This!” Ksenia says triumphantly when she spots an old book with a cracked spine and a familiar cover.
It is the conjuration book Iona had skimmed through when she’d gone to the library with Ariadne and Xiomara the night before the summer solstice. Ksenia slams it upon her desk and beckons them closer.
“It wasn’t easy sneaking into their library, but I managed somehow, with invisibility potions and a bit of luck,” Ksenia says, rubbing her eyes. “I searched every tome for any indication of their plans, any notes in the margins…”
She opens to a page she’d marked and points at an ancient illustration of a coven cloaked in black, their arms raised upwards towards the black sky. Between them lies a screaming child upon a burning pyre.
“A sacrifice?” Iona asks.
Ksenia shakes her head. “A birth.”
When Iona looks closer, there are thin tendrils of magic emanating from each of the witches and into the baby.
“The conjuration of a child,” Ksenia says.
“Ariadne once told me of this sort of magic,” Iona says with a small smile. “That one day we might… That it is possible to use magic to create life.”
“Yes, she once mentioned this spell to me, too, when we were children, and I always found it quite odd for her to speak of it as if it were commonplace,” Ksenia says.
“Why?” Iona asks.
“Why?” she scoffs incredulously. “Creating a soul from nothing? What could possibly be complicated about that sort of magic?”
Iona shrinks at her cutting sarcasm. “I… I suppose I thought it would be like conjuring a bird or a kitten.”
“We are much more complex. A ritual like this is very rare and takes an astronomical amount of power to perform successfully. Most cannot even attempt it,” Ksenia says.
“And yet Ariadne spoke of it with such a casual air, as if it were only a trifle. I tried telling her how complicated the ritual could be, but she insisted it was not so rare as I claimed, that her mother told her otherwise in their lessons. She’d dragged me to her library to prove it, showed me this very illustration, and insisted that I was merely uneducated. ”
Iona sighs. “I’m still confused.”
“As am I,” Samaira says.
Ksenia grunts with frustration, then lifts another book and places it on top of the conjuration one. The title reads Possession and Death Magic. She turns it to a page that lists ingredients for a spell that calls a soul back from the other side.
“But this is an unnatural spell,” Samaira says, and though she seems to know the answer, still she asks, “You found this grimoire in the Villa Mitriora’s library?”
“I could not understand why they would want Ariadne as their leader, to be Hecate’s voice here on Earth, when they harbor such brazen disdain for her.
They kept her apart from society, treated her differently from her cousins, for what possible reason?
They did not expect her to be here for long.
” Ksenia gestures to the grimoire. “What has the crone been stealing from her victims?”
Iona drags a trembling finger down the page. “A heart, a liver, lungs, a stomach, and a uterus.”
Ksenia brings back the conjuration grimoire and points to the page beside the illustration of the birthing ritual. “This can only be performed during the Spring equinox, taking an entire day to complete, and only manifesting on-”
“Ariadne’s birthday…” Tears well in Iona’s eyes as she looks to Samaira, her only lifeline in this awful exchange, but she, too, is at a loss for words. Iona swallows hard, then whispers, “Do you mean to say… that they intend to bring a soul back-”
“Into a new body, cultivated with care,” Ksenia says, “and missing only one final attribute, until recently.”
Iona’s hand lifts to her neck, grasping for stones that are no longer there.
“Well? What are you doing just standing there?” Ksenia grips Iona’s shoulders and shakes her, staring with wide, bloodshot eyes. “Don’t you see! We must find Ariadne, before it’s too late!”