Chapter 3
Chapter
“I told you,” Lucy said, raising her voice to be heard over the wind as we tried not to slip on the cobblestones, wet with the mist. “If you ever need money, I can help. I want to help. You don’t have to go to the slicks!”
“And I told you”—I stumbled, and she caught me by the elbow—“not to track me with magic like that. It’s unsettling.”
“All right, next time I hear about a huge landslide, I’ll keep it to myself.”
I scowled, and she grinned.
Lucy was a witch. Witches didn’t need reliquaries. Somehow, they were able to store and access power without an object to harness it, and those reserves ran much, much deeper than any reliquary could, and refilled far faster.
That meant Lucy had almost limitless magic. She once even managed to breathe underwater, though afterward she was stuck in bed for three days recovering.
But she could easily do things—like track me through town—that even the wealthiest, with their troves of reliqs, would be hard-pressed to manage.
Theomagicians and philosophers posed a range of explanations for the phenomenon of witchery. Why could some people—one in ten thousand, maybe fewer—use magic without a reliq?
In the old days, people thought witches used other people as their reliqs, draining their magic and life force at once. Vampyrism de l’ame, they’d called it. Vampyrism of the soul.
I shivered, watching Lucy’s honey-colored braid bounce across her back, thinking of all the witches who burned back then, before the Witch Queen split England from the Catholic Church.
Some people might cross to the other side of the street when a witch passed, but at least we didn’t tie them to stakes and light them aflame anymore.
The glow of the streetlamps reflected in the glassy pools we splashed through. We stopped at my shop, and I grabbed my tools, hooking my belt and swinging a canvas bag over my shoulder.
“I won’t be long,” I said, but Lucy shook her head.
“I’m coming with you.”
“What? But why?”
Lucy was a good friend, so she listened patiently when I recounted my fossil hunts or summarized some inane paper from an underqualified geomagician. But she didn’t care a whit about fossils beyond that. Her passions were far more political.
“Well. It is a landslide on Black Ven,” was all she said.
I nodded, throat tight. We locked up again, walking east, first over the promenade, then across the sand, until the lights and sounds of town faded.
I walked these beaches every day, my eye sweeping over the cliffs and surf. I knew when the tide was low, and when it would be high. I knew when stone had shifted. I knew where the gulls liked to roost, and where they hunted scuttling crabs. These were my lands.
Our footsteps slapped at damp sand and stone as we dodged the bubbling surf. The sound of the waves was rhythmic and urgent as they washed in and out and nipped our heels: hurry, hurry—hurry!
We came into the curve of the cliff and saw the landslide at the same moment.
Lucy swore softly.
The cliffs here were lime and shale, laid in a pattern of sheets that can look almost brick-like with their jutting, sharp edges.
This one had been sheared away, sliced like cake.
And the fallen stone had unrolled itself, unfurled down to the sea like a staircase of blue-gray stone, now slick with rain.
Waves crashed against it, thin white rivulets running down the steps.
The stone would be wet and treacherous to climb; with no time to settle, any section could slip farther to the sea or crumble away. My heart pinched with fear.
“Mary?” Lucy said, and I heard my own thoughts echoed in my friend’s questioning voice.
My father had died after a landslide like this, in this same place.
The ground, too loose, slid away faster than he could catch his balance, and Father had fallen. Whatever had broken in his spine had broken then.
I was there. I’d thrown aside the wicker basket—I remembered the shattering, rattling, of my shells and fossils breaking on stone as I ran to his side.
I remembered the sharp stubble of his jaw under my fingers as I begged him to hold on, just a minute more, both small hands pressed to his face. “Please,” I wept, kneeling on wet-slicked stone just like this. “Please, Father.”
My reliq, a small ammonite, warmed against my chest.
I hadn’t used magic in weeks; I’d been saving it up to use for my next turn scrubbing the chamber pot, and my reliq was full. I pressed all my magic into my father, willing him to heal, but it was too little.
It was always too little.
If we’d been richer, we could have bought reliqs for the physiomagicians to use. Mother and I sold what we could. Everything of value. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
Father lingered a week in agony. I remembered those days perhaps too well, the smell of sweat and unwashed bedding, and the sound of his rattled breath. Mother sitting in the chair by his bed and worrying her hands like yarn. I was nine years old, and my father was my world, and then he was gone.
“Mary,” Lucy said again. “Perhaps this was a bad idea. Maybe you should wait until tomorrow.”
I shook my head. Lucy nodded and pressed her lips together, accepting my decision.
My gaze roved over the newly exposed rock, searching.
Fossils could be found in a range of shades, from pale white to coppery brown to black.
The color was determined by the mineral composition of the surrounding stone and what had leached into the bone.
Even from here, I could tell I would find plenty of little fossils when we stepped close.
But because I knew these hills, these cliffs, these stones—I felt sure there would be something more. Not just ammonites or belemnites worth a few shillings, though I knew those were scattered all across these rocks. No. I wanted skeletons. The giants.
You are bound for great things, my girl, my father said.
I always felt him, here, on the beach, between rock and sea.
“I’m going to get closer,” I said. “Stay back. Where it’s safe.”
Lucy laughed, her eyes sparkling. “Did you really think that would work?”
We scrambled over the sliding gravel and stone, catching ourselves and each other when we started to slip.
We reached the sheared-off cliff with only a few stumbles, necks craning back to see the top. It was a curiously sacred thing to look at a piece of earth that hadn’t seen sunlight or air for millions of years.
I shivered, then chided myself. Don’t get excited. You’ve been lucky before, but it was only that.
Well. A little skill, too.
There were tiny, broken bits of fossil shell embedded in the layers of striation, both whole—body fossils, the bone or shell replaced with mineral—and imprints where something had dissolved over time.
I reached out, ran my palm across the brick-like rectangles protruding from the sloped wall. I kept my fingertips on the stone as I began to walk, my eyes scanning up and down, searching for anomalies.
The wind whipped, and my lips tasted like salt. Despite my best efforts to keep a cool, rational head, hope fluttered in my breast. I felt somehow sure that something special was waiting in these rocks, even as my mind struggled to stay rational. To think like a geomagician.
Black Ven was a Blue Lias geomagical formation of the Jura limestone type, part of the Secondary Series.
More ancient than chalk but younger than variegated sandstone, the Lias’s layers of clay shale and limestone—and the marine life entombed within—were formed by sediment settling to the ocean floor, layer upon a thousand layers, year over a thousand years.
“That one’s pretty, isn’t it?” Lucy said, and I turned to see her pointing at a nicely preserved bivalve shell in some fallen stone.
“Hmm.” I turned back to the cliff.
“Well, if I knew what you were searching for—”
“Lucy.” I thrust out a hand as I caught my breath. The hair at the back of my neck rose. “Look.”
She squinted as I pointed upward, about twenty feet overhead. Slender, brown, and fragile, it looked almost like a broken stick embedded in the rock.
“What is it?”
“Bone.” The smile stretched across my face. “Fossilized bone.”