Today, he would prove himself. His final test.
He studied the crude cut of the spellstone, searching for a hint to the enchantment enclosed within. But it was impossible to tell such a thing by looking at it.
This vault stored his family’s hoard of high magick. It was more precious to them than anything because it secured their dominance over Ilvernath. It was what backed every one of his grandmother’s demands of Ilvernath’s mayor: the ban on selling A Tradition of Tragedy in town, the Lowes’ freedom from paying taxes despite their vast fortune, the legal impunity whenever Marianne carried out a threat.
His family’s motto, Blood before all, was engraved on the doors.
Blood—of course. This test was a question, and blood was his answer.
Alistair examined the spellstones lining each of his knuckles. He disregarded the simple ones he’d slipped on when getting dressed, meant for concentration or finding specific words in written text or making his coffee taste better—all common magick. He carried nothing on him that would cut. He didn’t wear curserings in his own home. But he couldn’t go back and face his grandmother empty-handed, especially not after his photograph from the Magpie had been published in the Ilvernath Eclipse and circulated to tabloids everywhere. Even a week later, Marianne’s fury lingered in the estate’s corridors, noxious and icy. Because Alistair and Hendry had left their home, gone somewhere they could’ve been hurt, could’ve made the family vulnerable.
Alistair’s gaze settled on the ring on his fourth finger. He had an unpleasant idea.
It would be crude. It was difficult to make a spell do something it wasn’t designed for.
But it could work.
He took off his black sweater so as not to harm it, shivering from the coldness of the cavern. Then he focused on the skin a few centimeters above his elbow, and with all the nervous focus he could muster, he cast the Page Turner.
He clenched his teeth.
Nothing happened.
“Shit.” Alistair couldn’t fail, not a week before the tournament. It wasn’t that he was afraid of Hendry being named champion; it was that he knew his grandmother resented Alistair for being the family’s best option.
I always knew you were weak, she often told Alistair. Afraid of the very stories meant to make you stronger.
He summoned a combination of other spells—Focus Helper, Espresso Shot, and Distractions-Be-Gone. They were all cheap, trendy sorts he’d ordered from local spellmakers in town to help him study.
With his energy and attention at a buzz-like high, Alistair summoned the Page Turner again. He screamed out in pain as a single layer of skin peeled open down his bare stomach in a long, thin line. He’d been aiming for his arm, not his abdomen—but it couldn’t be helped. And even though the pain of it burned, he did not bleed.
It wasn’t enough.
He screamed louder the second time, and the third. The top layers of skin had peeled back like translucent slips of paper, opening one by one like a fleshy book. By the fourth casting, when the charge in his Page Turner stone ran out, a small stream of blood burst through, dribbling down from his sternum and past his navel.
He bit his lip and, with two fingers, carefully collected the blood and smeared it on the vault’s spellstone. The vault’s mechanisms clicked one by one. Alistair, hand clutching his stomach to hold his flaps of shredded skin together, slipped inside.
The vault was filled with rows and rows of metal shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling. Each of them contained hundreds of glass flasks meant for storing raw magick, and the magick inside them—specks of light like the dust of stars—glowed a vicious scarlet. The volume was astounding, representing centuries of accumulated high magick.
Funny, he’d imagined it would be grander.
If Alistair lost the tournament, it didn’t matter how much power his family locked in this vault. The tournament’s curse prevented anyone but the winner’s family from even sensing high magick; the Lowes would walk inside and see nothing but empty flasks. The use of Ilvernath’s high magick would pass to the next champion’s family for twenty years, until the tournament began anew. The Lowes could use it all up beforehand, of course, but they were the Lowes. They fully expected to win again.
Alistair grabbed the first flask he saw from the shelf, picked his sweater up off the floor, and slipped it back on as he made the steep climb up the stairs.
Just as he’d feared, his grandmother loomed at the top of the stairs like a monster from one of his family’s bedtime stories. She narrowed her cold gray eyes, the same shade as Alistair’s, as she inspected the flask of raw high magick in one hand and the way he clutched his stomach with the other.