As soon as I saw it, I finally remembered what Gareth had shared with me, on a long-ago sunny day when we lay together under one of Tintagel’s many weeping willows, clouds rushing above us through its drooping leaves. Caelia Blackmoore had wanted her bed preserved in her final resting place, Gareth had said, with rose petals sprinkled over it; so her spirit always had somewhere to return to where it could dream sweetly, even after death.
It was an oddly beautiful image, the idea of Caelia’s spirit settling down onto the bed, hands clasped over her chest, the ghostly skeins of her golden hair spreading over the pillow. There was something both haunting and morbidly romantic about it—just the kind of tantalizing tidbit to share with your secret Harlow girlfriend, whom you were about a month away from ditching.
Now it struck me more that the Blackmoore matriarch must have been a righteously self-indulgent hedonist who just really loved her bed, something I could understand on a deep level.
Unlike with the scrying mirror, there was no hint of presence here, no willful waft of Caelia herself. Just the all-encompassing silence of the crypt, along with the faint keen of the stubborn wind that wedged its way through the chinks—and the glow of the two blue roses that hovered just above the pillow, their thorns curved and petals perfectly formed.
So, Rowan hadn’t been here yet, that was something—though I had no way of knowing how many of the other tokens Gareth had gathered up by now. For all I knew, he could be ahead of me; at the lake already, maybe even back at Castle Camelot with all the tokens in hand.
I reached for one of the roses, its light filtering into my palm, the thought of the scant time I had left trickling through my head like sand through an hourglass.
Then I closed my eyes and thought myself to Lady’s Lake.
30
And the Victor Is . . .
Just like Talia had said of me, Lady’s Lake was beautiful by moonlight.
The full moon swam in the black silk of its surface, along with blurred reflections of the ice-chip stars, twinkling like sprite lights sunk below the depths. There was a hovering sense of such enormity, of a wild, vast magic, that it stripped your breath away from your lungs. This hallowed sky, and its watery twin; this jewel of a lake upon a hilltop, and the shining town down at its base, where all the magic eventually ended up like a cascade.
As above, so below. Just like all of us witches had learned since we were small.
I could see the hazy spill of blue somewhere under the water a few yards off the bank, about three or four feet down. But I’d still have to swim out to it, and then dive deep into the lake—which, by now, was bound to be blisteringly cold. Rowan had swum it once already, for the first challenge, but it would have been a little warmer then; and Rowan probably also had at least one solid exothermic spell up his sleeve.
Unlike myself.
I stripped off my duster cardigan and tugged off my boots, shedding all the items that would weigh me down once I got wet. My teeth began to chatter as soon as my bare feet touched the chilly stalks of grass. I walked over to the edge and knelt, bending down to dip my fingers in the water; it seeped into my skin in moments, and then dug down into the bone, coiling in my joints like arthritis in liquid form.
I yanked my hand back out, cursing under my breath. What the hell was I supposed to do now? It wasn’t like I had time to portal to the nearest sport supply store to get myself geared up in a wet suit.
I rocked back onto my heels with my arms around my knees, seething at being foiled by something so maddeningly basic. If Gareth or Rowan appeared, I was screwed; this hurdle wouldn’t hold either of them back for more than a minute at most. This was why Harlows didn’t compete in the first place; like an overgrown Goldilocks, we were so magically feeble we couldn’t even handle temperature extremes.
Except when it came to drinks, I thought, an unlikely idea taking slow shape in my head. Even as a child, I’d always been able to cool or heat my beverages to the perfect temperature. Obviously I couldn’t extend that to the gallons upon gallons of water a lake would hold, but what if, instead . . .
Standing up, I summoned the Temperate Charm, the one and only little cantrip at which the Harlows truly excelled.
As magic built in my hands, warm and crackling, I ran them slowly over my body, from the soles of my feet up to the crown of my head. Bespelling myself, so that wherever the water touched me, it would turn to a pleasantly warm bathing temperature. Then, without giving myself too much time to doubt, analyze, or overthink what I was about to do, I took a running jump into the lake, scrunching my eyes shut just before my feet struck the star-speckled black of the water’s face. Bracing myself for a paralyzing gush of ice against my skin, cold pressing into my ears and nose.