Greythorne (Bloodleaf 2)

“The blood and the bell!”

He tried to lean away, but she didn’t wait for him to remove it, grabbing the small vial that was hanging from his neck. She traced a pattern in the air above her sister’s head and around her body, leaving trails of silver-blue light in its wake. From below, in the real world, and above, in the Gray, the knot of energy from the convergence of the ley lines amplified the spell, surrounding Rosetta in a cage of light. Then Galantha began to feed the silvery tether energy into it.

“What are you doing?” Mathuin asked, anguished. “Galantha . . .”

“A warden must ensure balance,” she said. “This way, balance will remain.” Then she lifted the bell in both of their hands and rang it.

The peal rippled across both planes, and the netting of silver and light that was cradling Rosetta tightened around her, crisscrossing her subtle body, embedding into her subtle skin, until it disappeared, leaving behind only a silver-white scar on the inside of her arm. It was an intricate, circular pattern. An exact copy of Galantha’s spell knot.

“The Eighth Age,” Galantha whispered, “the age of the Mother, has begun.”

Mathuin reached across Rosetta to touch Galantha’s chin. They were smiling at each other. She had done it.

And the comet’s tail disappeared from the sky. The portal upon which they lay began to close.

In sheer desperation, Galantha stretched her hands against the retracting portal, pushing her sister and Mathuin across the border with all the power she had left. “Vade!” Go.

She was only whispering now, but her voice was deep and cavernous, as if echoing across the dimensions and back again. “Ad Cunas,” she chanted. “Ad domum tuam.” Back to the Cradle. Back to your home.

This, her final spell, burst from her body, blasting Rosetta in one direction and Mathuin in the other in an explosion of blue-white light.

I closed my eyes at the rush of power. When I opened them again, the portal was gone. Mathuin, still wearing the bell, had been launched into the chaos of the Gray. Rosetta’s subtle body and her soul had been pinned together and pushed into the material world. She was breathing, shallowly, next to her own corpse.

Galantha’s body had been destroyed in the schism between two incongruent realities when the portal closed; there was nothing left of it besides a sprinkling of blood and some drifting dust. Her ghost smiled down upon Rosetta’s two selves, one alive and irrevocably altered and one a dead shell. An owl of shimmering silver was already forming from her released quicksilver. It swooped and swirled in the air, and she followed it, fading into the distance.

I hoped that whatever waited in the After, beyond the in-between world of the Gray, was sweet and quiet. Galantha deserved to find peace.

The bloodleaf had taken root in Rosetta’s blood, but it was Galantha’s blood—the last traces of her left in this world—that caused the petals of the bloodleaf flower to unfurl.

Ten-year-old Begonia approached the edge of the clearing, eyes widening as she took in the sight. She dropped her basket, and a wealth of wild mushrooms spilled out by her feet as a white bloodleaf petal, lifted into the air by a lazy breeze, drifted down into her hands.

She would collect three petals that day. One, she would use on my father. One, I’d use on Simon, and the other . . . she’d use on me.

While the quicksilver girl slept on her mattress of bloodleaf, her little sister dragged the identical, red-haired corpse to the family plot in the trees behind the homestead.

She cried as she dug a shallow grave for one Rosetta, and when she was done, she wiped her eyes, squared her shoulders, and went off to wake the other.

* * *

I had to get back to Greythorne. That was where Galantha had sent Mathuin, however unwittingly. It had to be. That was his cradle. That was his home.

I tried to focus, imagining myself upon the Greythorne cobble.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the statue of a little girl holding a doll.

Onal.

A few turns later, I came to the snowy owl, wings and talons open.

Next was the fox, looking expectantly over her shoulder.

The last turn brought me face-to-face with Urso, blood dripping from his hands.

But they weren’t Urso’s hands. They were mine.

I was standing before a man on his knees. “Why, Aurelia?” Kellan asked, pleading with his soft brown eyes.

“Bound by blood, by blood undone,” I replied.