Marion held out the spell book. The occultist’s book she stole from a dead scholar’s handbag, long ago. She dropped it with a thump on Astrid’s chest.
“It’s time.”
Astrid blinked slow, contemptuous blinks. “Time,” she said dismissively.
Marion curled her lip at her jailer, her fellow prisoner—she never could decide which—and dragged her onto the carpet by her saintly hair.
“It’s time,” she repeated.
“Flea-shit speck,” the occultist spat. The air around her was heating with a summery wobble but nothing had happened yet. She was slower than she used to be.
Marion kneeled to pick up the book from where it had slid. She was in reach now and the occultist slapped her hard, twice. Marion absorbed it, pressing the book into the hand that had struck her. “Open it.”
The book had a sick sense of humor, just like the woman who’d bound it in the skin of a charlatan clairvoyant. Marion used to believe it showed you the spells you needed to see, but of course it was only ever showing what Astrid wanted to give you.
She remembered clutching it in trembling hands right after she’d arrived here. Her last source of hope, and she’d felt so brilliant to have held on to it through her tumble. Fireworks popped in her temples as she opened it, seeking some cure for her imprisonment. Smearing fingers over her swollen eyes, she’d leaned close to the page.
To purify lanced boils, it said.
When Marion looked up the occultist had been watching her with the merry feline hatred of the meanest girl at school. She’d opened the book a dozen times since then, and found one mocking spell after another.
But Astrid hadn’t opened it. And Marion would bet her unnatural life she knew what kind of spell Astrid most wanted to see.
“You come to me with orders and with talk of time,” said the occultist, as sneering and sure as the queen of a fallen country. “Remember that I rule this place, and you are bound to me.”
Alone among her attributes, the occultist’s thrilling, razorbacked voice still held the power to magnetize Marion’s spine, to make her draw in small and tight and afraid.
She shook it off. “You rule nothing and nowhere. You’re a queen of smoke. Everyone who knew your name is dead, and no one else will ever learn it. No one is coming to release you. It’s over. Open the goddamned book.”
“Sheep scat. Eavesdropper. Rank slut!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Marion said, no stranger to Astrid’s rants. “But I’m right, too.”
“You are nothing.”
“I am what you made me.”
“No,” Astrid replied, decisive. “Here is the last thing I will tell you, the very last. You were always an apple without a core. Why else would you have stolen another worker’s book?”
“There’s nothing you can tell me about myself that I don’t know. After all this time. I know a few things about you, too.” Marion looked into the occultist’s faded eyes. “You’re tired, Astrid. We’re tired. Let’s make an end of this.”
The two weary witches considered each other. Astrid breathed in but didn’t speak. She sighed instead, her cruel and beautiful face settling into new furrows, as if passing time had finally found a gap in their eggshell world.
She took her book from Marion’s hands. Slowly she traced a sharpened fingernail over the book’s fearful binding, then inserted its point delicately among the pages. She opened it.
Their pale heads pressed close as they read the name of the spell.
To unravel your cage.
The occultist had nerve. No one could say she didn’t. After a pause just long enough to skim the spell, taking in its dimensions, Astrid began the incantation that would unwind their world.
As she incanted Marion closed her eyes against a vast melancholy. Inside the tender dark of her head she watched the walls come down and time drift in like salt, which gnaws you to nothing then eats the bones. She saw all the dimly, deeply recalled treasures of the occultist’s brief life fur over whitely, then shudder to dust.
Maybe Marion would unwind with them. Maybe she’d bob like a bottle, shoot like a star, evaporate or explode or hold on tight, too used to consciousness to give it up so easily. She didn’t open her eyes, even when Astrid clawed at her—with terror, in the end? With gratitude?—and when the clawing stopped she still would not open them.
Ivy, she said. Ivy. And a third time, Ivy.
Marion thought she’d seen too much to ever be scared again, but there was no terror so pure as what seized her when the grip of Astrid’s fingers broke apart with a sensation of pattering sand.