Celeste's Arc

Chapter 23 of 23

Slate slept on Celeste's chest, his wound closed clean. The warm basin held them both. But Celeste's bundle lay open on the stone shelf beside the font, and the sea glass inside still hummed. She heard it under the drip of the crystals, a thin buzz like a wasp behind glass. The pale stones had come from the wraith's broken spell. Even destroyed, they carried something. Celeste had no safe way to hold them, and every hour they sat loose, the buzz grew louder. "They should not stay open," Celeste whispered. "They feel wrong." Slate did not lift his head. "Then close them," he murmured. "Quietly. I am resting." Nyrimia slid to the shelf. She was the mermaid who had killed the wraith on the beach, and Celeste trusted her hands more than her own now. Her webbed fingers opened the bundle's cloth. She gathered each stone slowly, the way you lift something that might sting. "These remember the spell that made them," she said. "Loose, they call to it. Sealed, they sleep." She drew out a glass jar from a niche in the cave wall. Into it she dropped the sea glass, green and blue and clear. Then she pressed a ring of small barnacles around the neck and worked a cork down tight. She held her hands flat over the jar and hummed low. The water on the cave floor rippled toward her fingers. A thin skin of it climbed the glass and hardened, and the humming inside the jar went silent. Celeste felt the change in her chest. The buzz was gone. "You quieted it," she said. "For now." Nyrimia carried the jar to a low crystal spire near the pool. Its wet surface caught the turquoise light in bright layers. She set the jar on a stone ledge partway up the spire, safe above the water. "It will hold. But you must hear the warning that comes with it." Celeste sat up in the font. Slate stirred and cracked one green eye. Nyrimia lifted the purple shell horn from beside the pool. She turned it in her hands and did not raise it to her lips. "This island keeps a curse," she said. "The violet light in the tunnel is part of it. So was the wraith. So is this glass. They are all one thing, split into pieces." She looked at Celeste with tired chartreuse eyes. "You want to cross between this world and yours. The way runs through that light. But the curse takes a price from every child who tries. The last one never came out." The cave went quiet but for the dripping crystals. Celeste looked at the sealed jar on the spire, then at the horn in the mermaid's hands. "Tell me the price," she said. Nyrimia's grip tightened on the horn. "When you are strong enough to hear it," she said. "Sleep first. Tomorrow I show you the tunnel."