The Blood Spell (Ravenspire, #4)(99)
“I’m at the jars.”
“All right, turn toward the middle of the room.” Her voice was thready. She tried taking a slower breath, forcing herself to hold it for a quick moment before exhaling. “I’m here. Watch out for the chests. Move slowly.”
She kept talking to him as he shuffled toward her, and then he was at her side, pressing a sheaf of alluminae into her hands. The long, graceful strands of flax were dry and soft. A thin cord tied the sheaf together in the middle. Blue swept her trembling fingers over the flax until she reached the small bundles of dried seedpods near the top of the sheaf. She squeezed the pods until they cracked open, releasing the pale glow of the alluminae seeds within. The seeds had a silvery-white sheen, like a candle made of starlight.
“This will give us hours of light,” she said, her voice already steadier as the darkness crept back, taking its nightmares with it.
She could do this. She could survive inside the root cellar long enough to find a way out of it. She had to.
Quickly, she divided the sheaf into seven equal sections. Laying one of the smaller sheaves on the chest behind her to illuminate the center of the room and lead them back to the ladder, she gave five sheaves to Lucian, keeping one for herself. “Set one at each corner of the room so we can see the entire space and keep one for yourself so you can move around safely.”
He did as she asked, and she slowly climbed to her feet, clutching her sheaf to her chest. Her knees shook, and her stomach pitched as the walls tried to close in on her. She forced herself to breathe evenly. To ignore the frantic cadence of her heartbeat.
Kellan, Nessa, and the queen needed her to think. To plan. She couldn’t do that if she let her fear overwhelm her. Glancing at the shelves on the wall to her left, she mumbled the names and scientific properties of each item as she slowly shuffled toward it, her body still shaking like a leaf trapped in a windstorm.
“Bolla root: dried, not minced. Good for strengthening potions, protection from illness or harm, and longevity. Edible. Doesn’t bond with syphur weed, korash acid, or mink’s foot herb.” She crept closer. “Huckleberry: dried and ground. Good for luck, protection, restful sleep, and dissolving bad potions. Doesn’t bond with syphur weed, hembane, or chorra wood.”
This was good. She could think about the ingredients on her shelves. Concentrate on how to combine them, on what to produce. She could fill her thoughts with these and nothing else, and she could survive being in the root cellar a little longer.
“Did you say something?” Lucian asked, his voice calmer now that there was light in all four corners of the room.
“Just looking at what I have on the shelves. Deciding what to use to get us out of here.” And what to use to stop Dinah and the wraith before they hurt the royal family.
Panic tightened Blue’s throat again, and she beat it back. She would destroy the wraith. She had to. She couldn’t lose anyone else she loved.
As the soft light of the alluminae filled the room, Blue paced its length, cataloging her inventory, discarding options nearly as fast as she thought of them.
An ordinary protection spell wouldn’t stop the wraith. The witch who’d become the wraith had fae in her blood, just like Blue. Spells that worked against the fae were far harder to produce, and Blue had little experience with them.
She paused before a shelf of carpa leaf, bergamot, and billy fern. Turning, she found Lucian balanced on a stack of wooden boxes as he reached for one of the old cauldrons that rested on a top shelf. “Careful,” she said softly, so as not to startle him into falling.
He grunted in reply as his fingers found the edge of the cauldron and worked it toward him. When he finally pulled it free in a shower of dust, he coughed and climbed back down, his prize in his hands. “I don’t know how you’re going to make a fire so you can do your spells properly, but now at least you’ll have a cauldron to use.”
“Thank you,” she said, giving him a small smile. “Lucian, how did Dinah catch you?”
He scowled. “I came here looking for you. Wanted to tell you that I’d heard about two other children gone missing. She invited me in. Said you were in the root cellar. Opened the door for me and said to be careful on the ladder as you were in the far end with your candle. Then she shoved me in and locked the door behind me. It’s lucky I didn’t fall and break my neck.”
Blue swallowed hard at that image, blinking away the memory of Mama so she could focus on the boy standing in front of her. “She recognized the ingredients for the spell Mama used on the lock in the Wilds. That means she’s studied either alchemy or witchery.”
“Nobody studies witchery unless they’ve got some fae in them.”
Blue nodded. It took a touch of fae in the blood to give one some magic. Which meant Dinah might have a bit of magic, just like Blue. Ordinary spells wouldn’t work as well on her, but the same spell she did for the wraith would work on Dinah. Unfortunately, Blue was fresh out of ideas for anything that could stop a monster like that. A protection spell wouldn’t be strong enough. A binding spell would require the monster’s blood, and even if Blue could get close enough to the wraith to get some of its blood, she wouldn’t have time to finish the potion before the wraith destroyed her.
That was the essential problem. Any spell used against the wraith would require Blue to get close enough to the creature to be its next victim. How had her mama done it? How had she come close enough to the monster to imprison it?