Gathering the ingredients for the reversal tincture was, for the most part, simple. Allium and hyacinth, thyme leaves and chestnut, broom and baby’s breath.
Elderflower cordial. The blood of a moth. A ground-up cocoon.
And finally, the blood not of someone you hurt, but who loves your soul as it truly is.
At first I was concerned I would have to go home and somehow try to wound my own mother, until I realised – or rather hoped beyond all logic or reason – that the answer was simpler.
Lottie and I were in our dorm, preparing the botanicals on my desk, when I finally plucked up the courage to ask. Dacre had been arrested that morning, boarding a ferry to Amsterdam, and all the other members of the Chamber were being rounded up for questioning. We were due at the station the next day to give our statements – but first, we had a reversal ritual to perform.
‘I’m really sorry, but I need your blood again,’ I said matter- of-factly. I was wrapped up in a cashmere jumper, yet I still couldn’t stop myself from shivering – whether from the winter chill or the vulnerability of the situation, I did not know.
I was hoping she wouldn’t question it, that she was so used to giving it that she’d just pick up the blood sugar kit and prick her finger as usual, but I should’ve known that her infuriatingly efficient brain wouldn’t be so easily fooled.
She frowned, looking down at the notes on the ritual she’d made in blue fountain pen. ‘It says here you need “the blood of someone who loves your soul as it truly is”.’
My stomach churned with doubt. All she had said in the library was that she wanted to kiss me.
‘Erm, yes,’ I smiled awkwardly.
She looked at me in shock, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re such a narcissist.’
I bit my top lip with my bottom teeth. ‘I am, yes.’
‘Like, truly unbelievable.’
‘It’s not a big deal, all right? You’ve done it so many times before. Just a quick scratch and it’s done.’
She pressed her lips together into a flat line; not with anger, but with suppressed hysteria. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘Why not?’
Another explosion of laughter. ‘Someone wholoves your soul as it truly is.’
I folded my arms and looked down at the neat row of freshly washed alliums beside her investigation notebook. ‘Look, if you’re going to be a dick about it . . .’
‘Alice! You are essentially asking me if I love you! Incredibly flippantly, I might add!’
Sighing, I forced myself to look at her. Her bright eyes were crinkled with mirth, and the corners of my own mouth quirked treacherously upwards. ‘Would it help if I said it first?’
Her laughter stopped abruptly, and her cheeks turned pink. ‘Said what first?’
‘That I love you,’ I muttered irritably.
There was a long, agonising pause, in which acres of vulnerability sprawled out before me.
And then she rolled her eyes, grinned her dimpliest grin, and picked up the blood sugar kit.
As she squeezed a tiny droplet of blood into a glass vial, I smiled to myself.
*
Mordue wanted to go first. It had started with her all those years ago, and while she’d been relieved beyond words that she hadn’t murdered anyone, she still felt responsible for the ritual’s spread through Carvell.
Feathering offered her blood for the tincture; someone who loved Mordue’s soul as it truly was. I thought of Mordue’s hand on hers in the clubhouse, and of Lottie’s on mine as I slept, and of how such a small gesture betrayed so much.
Lottie and Hafsah looked around the clubhouse in wonder. It was a space unlike any other; moth cocoons pinned to vaulted ceilings, the overwhelming scents of rosemary and clove, the eerie self-portrait of Sister Maria with a ruby-crusted gash across her throat – which Lottie understandably stared at for a long while.
And yet despite the lack of light and the cold stone floors, there was a certain warmth to the room. The warmth of intimacy, perhaps. Of kinship, and of shared pain. Of knowing that despite everything, we were not monsters. We never had been.