Chapter 14
With Seb back in the snuggery, spinning as much of his chaotic magic everywhere like he was raising some kind of storm, and August and Iris taking the most gravely ill of the teacup dragons into their gentle care, Portia rushed back to her study.
Jade clung to her, little coos and murmurs escaping her as she was jostled back and forth by Portia’s haste.
Noah stayed behind. She’d have it all out with him later but there wasn’t time for it now.
Not with everything so precarious. She didn’t know why he might have lied about what happened in the caves, what he was hiding, or why he had taken the map but as long as he was here, it was enough. She would deal with him later.
Her head was still pounding, the headache awful, and her stomach was twisted in on itself, anxiety and nausea doing their worst, but that had never stopped her before.
Too much magic did that sometimes. Everyone knew that.
Of course, so did a concussion from running heedless into the wall of a cave for example.
No, she knew what she had seen, what had happened. Magic never worked the same way as the mundane world. It was metaphysical and sometimes that made weird things happen. And she would explain it all to them later on. She’d drag each of them down there and show them if she had to.
But right now, she had other priorities. They all did. Winning a stupid argument about magic would be utterly pointless if they lost the entire flight of teacup dragons.
She flung open Art’s book and turned all her will upon it. The pages fluttered wildly, obeying her at once until it settled open on the page with the moonflower painting in its centre. Portia read through the ingredients and instructions again, ready to set to work at once.
She paused, remembering her promise to have Noah look over it in case there was anything she was missing. She needed someone to do it because if Art had hidden some kind of invisible instruction here again she could do more harm than good.
‘Portia?’ Ophelia murmured. ‘Are you sure you should be—’
‘Come here and help me,’ she snapped. If Fi told her she ought to be in bed right now she really would bite her head off. This was as pleasant as she could be for the moment. There was far too much at stake.
‘I can’t help with magic, you know that,’ her sister protested.
‘That’s exactly why I need you right now. Look at this page. Make sure Art isn’t hiding anything from me.’
‘Hiding anything?’ Ophelia joined her, staring at the page. ‘Why would he—?’
‘He did with the balm recipe. I don’t know why.
Who knows why Uncle Art did anything? He’s like Seb that way.
A whim maybe. Or a test. Or just to stop anyone from stealing his ideas.
Iris said he never managed to make this work.
I can’t afford to mess it up, can I? Read it out. Especially any margin notes.’
Ophelia obeyed, her voice careful and precise, but this time it appeared there was nothing out of place or missing, no extra additions. Or at least not until they reached the end. Ophelia brushed her fingers against the painting.
‘Our mother painted this,’ she murmured, and the sorrow infecting her voice made Portia shiver.
‘She was… she was really talented, wasn’t she?’
‘She didn’t have magic.’
‘You don’t need magic to be talented,’ Portia told her. ‘Her paintings… I could never do anything like that.’ Ophelia had inherited that talent, but all she saw was the lack of magic.
Her sister was frowning slightly.
‘I don’t see anything out of place. I’m sorry.’
Portia rubbed her finger against the bottom of the painting, above the section where Art had written the recipe. As she did so, something appeared, the words bleeding out of the paper.
‘What’s that?’ Portia asked. Art’s writing, she realised, scrawled in a hurry which made it even worse than usual. Another hidden message. She couldn’t make head nor tale of it.
Luckily Ophelia was there.
‘He wrote notes like this in the books in the library as well. He really was a menace.’
‘What does it say?’
Ophelia squinted at it. ‘It’s a poem, I think?
‘Throw all you have into your spell.
Only the strongest will succeed.
You heard the song, touched the thread,
now the time has come to lead.’
Portia let out a gasp. ‘How could he know that?’
‘Know what?’
‘That I touched the thread. I told you. Down in the cave. This message, it’s meant for me.
Specifically, for me. Like he knew I’d be here to read it.
That we’d… What is going on, Fi?’ She didn’t like the confusion and concern she could hear in her own voice.
She didn’t like that a note in a book that must have been made years ago seemed to know what had happened to her in the cavern.
And the instruction seemed directed right at her. She couldn’t deny that.
‘It’s Art’s book,’ Ophelia murmured. ‘We always knew that it was magic. Like the emporium. That’s why Seb doesn’t like letting the book out of his sight. He’s placing great trust in you. Perhaps it has a mind of its own as well.’
Perhaps? There didn’t seem to be any perhaps about it.
‘What’s the last bit?’
Ophelia peered closer. ‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’
Portia sighed. ‘Like the rest of it does? Tell me, Fi.’
‘Find a perfect moment.
Listen to the song.
The stronger the emotion
the less it will go wrong.’
Fi was right. It didn’t make any sense at all.
Portia turned the page, but the map had vanished. Just like her copy of it. When she turned back, the note was gone as well.
She let out a growl of frustration. ‘Not now, Uncle Art.’
There wasn’t time for this. Not for any of it. But when this was all over she was going to have a very serious discussion with Seb about this book and what else it might contain. Had he been hiding it from her? All the magic, all the secrets it could hold…
She pulled in a breath and let it out slowly, carefully composing herself. Throw all you have into this. She could do that. She had to.
Portia kept Jade with her as she worked. She distilled the moonflowers exactly as instructed, added the other ingredients, each one carefully measured and prepared. She whispered constantly to Jade, telling her what she was doing, that it was going to help, that it had to work.
Because it had to.
Cross referencing with her own, and Milo’s notes, Portia sketched out the sigils she had designed, and fixed her mind entirely on her intentions – to heal, to restore, to bring back balance with the thaumaturgical threads within the land and those who needed its touch.
Ophelia came and went, keeping her up to date on the teacup dragons as morning came.
August’s boyfriend Weir continued to play music to them which seemed to be helping.
He sang in a rich baritone, the songs permeating the castle like ghosts.
She only hoped that when her brother inevitably messed this relationship up, it wasn’t a disaster.
He was kind. The dragons loved him. Music and magic often went hand in hand, could strengthen the simplest spell and…
Portia stared at the incantation she had planned to read out. She had heard music. The threads had responded to her voice. She had heard the song, like the one her father used to sing and…
Listen to the song…
Was it as simple as that?
Instead of an incantation, a song?
She kindled the witchfire beneath the flask. If she was wrong about this, or if Milo had made a mistake about the vibrations affecting the outcome…
Music was just another kind of vibration, wasn’t it?
There wasn’t time to test it further. There wasn’t time to gather more ingredients. The moonflowers were from Starling Island and once upon a time, the island had been famous for the quality of its magical ingredients. It was the reason Art’s emporium had been so renowned.
There was a well of magic here. She had seen it herself, even if no one else had. And right here, right now… she needed it to work. For Jade’s sake. She needed to reach out to the magic of the island itself.
Portia lifted her voice in song and to her amazement, Jade joined in, the little teacup dragon singing along with her, harmonising beautifully.
She closed her eyes to listen and once she did that it was like falling into the light again.
The island stirred around her, the rocks beneath her, the trees on the hillside, the waves on the shore and the wind that whirled around the very top of the castle.
It was all a song, all interlinked, and right at the heart of it, right at the heart of her, she sensed those glowing threads of magic, as pure and as powerful as they had seemed to her when she almost lost herself in them.
She felt the change, that alchemical transformation.
It shivered through her and wound itself around her song.
It stole her breath, and yet the song kept going.
It threaded its way through the castle corridors, rose up through the snuggery.
Another voice joined in. Seb. It sounded like Seb.
It had to be. Singing to the dragons as he sank effortlessly into the magic with her.
He probably didn’t even realise what he was doing.
And not just Seb. Fi was there too, humming along as she busied herself in the kitchen.
So was August, sitting with Weir as he played his lute.
The bard’s magic was as potent as her brother’s.
Perhaps they weren’t aware of what they were doing but it didn’t matter.
The spell was rising, powerful, spiralling upwards. Music was the key.
The teacup dragons stirred, their wings spreading and Portia felt Iris as well, her great-aunt an anchoring point, the one thing they could all rely upon. Always.
The dragons took flight in the snuggery once more, the magical energy filling them, singing as they looped and dived like a whirl of colour in the morning light.
Portia drew in a single, shuddering breath as she came back to herself, just for a moment, focused on the flask containing the elixir, and released everything into it.