“Please tell me this was a curse and not the Sword,” she said. If it was the Sword, no magick would heal it.
Alistair coughed. “A curse. Class … eight, at least.”
Isobel hadn’t even realized Elionor was capable of casting a class eight curse. Maybe all those cheap ploys Elionor had made for media attention really had paid off. Must’ve been nice.
Isobel riffled through her pockets and dumped out every spellstone she had. She’d brought them in case she got her powers back before they returned to the Cave.
“H-here. Some of these have to be healing spells.” She shoved a tourmaline into his hand, wishing she could sense the magick inside it. “I think this one—”
“Don’t worry about me. Just use the blood.”
She was nearly certain it’d been the sacrifice that had ruined the Reaper’s Embrace. But a blood sacrifice could mean a hundred things—it didn’t have to mean this. It didn’t have to mean a gift given by someone with little left to give, someone who Isobel wanted and cared about far more than she should. And being wrong was a deadly risk.
Maybe Alistair was right. Maybe this was Isobel’s only chance.
But she didn’t care. There had to be a way to save herself that didn’t doom him. “We can worry about my powers later.” She shoved more spellstones into his hands. “You need to heal yourself—”
“I can’t.” He let them fall from his grasp. “I can’t…”
Isobel didn’t know whether to believe him. It was true that casting required perfect concentration, but Alistair was gifted at casting—a prodigy, even. She suspected that he was only being stubborn, that he was trying to save her.
“Hurry.” Alistair lifted open one eye, but cringed as though it hurt to do so. “They’re still looking for you.”
For her. Not him. That meant they thought Alistair was already gone.
She pressed her hands to his wound, desperately wishing she knew more about first aid, but he pushed her away.
“A class ten curse requires a great sacrifice,” he said seriously. He coughed again, and a bit of blood dribbled onto his chin.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that you didn’t get to the Mirror in time. Otherwise … you wouldn’t be here.”
“That isn’t true. And I swear, if you don’t fucking heal yourself this very moment, I’ll … I’ll…” But when Isobel tried to give him the spellstones for a third time, she noticed his hand had gone slack. He’d lost consciousness.
“No, no,” she said frantically. Without her ability to heal him, he was going to die.
Isobel felt reality the same way she felt her father’s hand squeezing her shoulder. She’d answered countless interview questions about what she expected the tournament to be like, yet for almost a year, the idea of it all felt distant. Even the past two weeks seemed shrouded in the hazy fog of a dream.
Now, it was real. The cold of the night. Her knees pressed into the pebbles and damp earth. Her senses on alert for the smallest movement in the trees, the faintest rustle of bramble or leaves. The smell of autumn and blood and her own sweat. The crimson cast of everything, like her own terror superimposed on the world.
Frantically, she reached into her duffel bag and grabbed her spellboard.
“Are you happy now, you terrible excuse for a rival?” she choked, tears blurring her vision. “You better hope this kills me because otherwise, I will heal you and then torture you in ways even your twisted mind can’t imagine.”
Isobel rushed through her work. She sliced off another lock of her hair, laid out the dried chrysanthemum and other ingredients across the septogram, the single white quartz at the center. Her hands trembled with each movement, remembering the disaster that had occurred the first time she’d attempted this. The phantom taste of blood lingered in her mouth.
Swallowing her urge to be sick, she dipped two fingers in Alistair’s wound and smeared it across the board.
She squeezed her eyes shut, partially to focus, partially to avoid looking at Alistair. She couldn’t hear him breathing. The longer she waited, the more she began to sense the presence of raw magick around her. The magick tucked within the bushes tickled the hairs at the back of her neck.
After waiting long enough, she finally leaned down and gave the bloody spellboard a kiss.
A burning sensation coursed through her eyes, and she stifled a scream and squeezed them even tighter. It felt like her retinas were being scorched away.