Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(38)
After work the previous day, I’d portaled back up to the lake with the wild idea that maybe, just maybe, I could break what I’d taken to calling the Goddess Spell by simply chucking the coin back into the water. It seemed fairly self-evident that the octagrammed coin was a talisman, an emblematic representation of the mysterious casting itself. My thinking had been, if I just returned it to its source—rejected it by a symbolic act—possibly that would be enough to break the spell. In any case, it would be worth a try.
So, under the emerald-tinged aurora borealis sky, wisped by drifting plumes of black cloud that looked like something conjured up by an Avramov, I’d thrown the coin into the lake over . . . and over . . . and over.
It always reappeared somewhere on my person seconds after having struck the lake’s smooth surface, skipped three times like a stone, and then seemingly slipped under. Once in each of my pants and parka pockets, once tucked into my bra, and once—shockingly—in my mouth, hot like an ember on my tongue. Like something between a magician’s trick and a caution.
O WOULDST THOU CEASE SCREWING WITH ME, NINA, MY NINA, I imagined the luminous statue under the lake belling in my head, those bright golden eyes narrowing with disapproval. ALL IS AS I WILLED IT, AND WHO ARE YOU TO OBJECT?
I’d tried changing my intentions with each throw, intoned different mantras, even attempted keeping my mind carefully and completely blank. Nothing made the slightest bit of difference.
The coin was clearly sticking with me to the bitter end of whatever this even was.
Goddess-willed or no, the entire experience had severely pissed me off. I hadn’t asked to be saddled with this extra power, along with the accompanying danger of triggering another cataclysmic event like the one that had happened at Castle Camelot. Not having attended oracle or priestess school—or whatever degree of education was required to divine an underwater goddess’s intent—I couldn’t understand why such a radiant and seemingly benevolent being would be playing with me like this. Toying with me. Treating me, frankly, like the same kind of entertaining plaything on a string that Sydney had sometimes used me as.
But I did know that whatever was happening to me was happening without my consent, and that wasn’t something I could tolerate. So now, Gareth and I were taking another, more aggressive tack.
We stood in a vast, windowless, completely empty room at the Tintagel estate, the ceiling so high it almost disappeared above us, the stone floor and walls bare and featureless. This was the Cell: not a prison, despite its foreboding name, but the massively warded haven where Blackmoores learned to wield the more destructive spells in our elementalists’ arsenal. The Cell was its own enclosure, a freestanding structure like a barracks set a healthy distance away from the manor proper. Just for an extra bit of buffer should anything go awry—not that it ever had, in the nearly three centuries we’d been using it as a teaching arena.
Every surface in the room was threaded through with hugely powerful wards; if I narrowed my eyes and brought my focus to bear on them, I could see them glimmering, like a complex web of golden wire or metallic filaments. A crisscrossing matrix of potent spells that would ensure that nothing dangerous could escape this space, and that no harm would come to those within it. The idea was, Gareth would fling destructive castings at the coin—out of the three of us, my brother had always excelled in elemental demolition—to try to physically, literally break the spell by destroying its talisman.
It wasn’t the safest—and certainly not the smartest—idea either of us had ever had. But this was the most secure place to try that kind of gamble.
“It’s still risky, I agree,” I said to Gareth, making a conscious effort to soften my tone when I saw him flinch. Sometimes I forgot how sensitive he could be, when I sounded even remotely like our mother. “Because, yes, theoretically just my being here might render anything you cast way more explosive. But the wards should be able to take it; diffuse and bleed off even that added burst of energy. I mean, that’s the entire point of them.”
These wards were centuries old, designed by Caelia Blackmoore herself for this purpose; Lyonesse and Igraine personally tended to them on a weekly basis so the youngest generation of Blackmoores could freely practice here.
“And you definitely want to do this?” he pressed. “Aggressively fuck with something a goddess gave you? I mean, shit, you know I’m all about those power moves. But this . . . this is next level, Nina. Just want us both to be clear on that.”
I gave a helpless, angry shrug, flinging up my hands. “Honestly, brother, at this point I can’t do nothing—and this is all I can think to try. If you’re still game, that is.”
Gareth nodded, squaring his shoulders and twisting his neck to each side. “For you, of course I am. Let’s do this. Take one, your basic smash.”
He took a bracing stance and lifted his hands, murmuring an incantation under his breath. I could feel the kinetic energy building around us as raw magic rushed toward him, gathering in vast, thickening folds. Funneling toward the spot right above where the coin glimmered—somehow saucily, as if it were always winking just at me—on one of the flagstones.
The air above it darkened, grew in density and substance; the faceted outline of a massive boulder appearing in the air like some huge architectural sketch, its rough lines slowly taking on depth and texture.
Until suddenly, with a massive, thunderous crack, a gigantic hunk of stone hung suspended in the air, slowly rotating.