This is one of the black book cover series, a venture into the unknown and probable.
Three women knew one another in the years the records call the British occult revival. Moina Mathers (1865–1928), a painter who set her own gift aside to keep a magical order in her dead husband's name, and who could not bear the sight of younger women reaching freely. Dion Fortune, born Violet Firth (1890–1946), the younger initiate who published what Moina said she had no right to publish, and was cast out for it. And Netta Fornario, born Norah Emily Editha Fornario (1897–1929), who had the gift and none of the fear of it, and who went further into the deep water than anyone around her dared to follow.
The quarrel began with a book. It ended with a body.
In November 1929, Netta was found dead on the Isle of Iona, lying on a cross cut into the turf, her body marked with shallow scratches, the silver at her neck turned black. The certificate said exposure. Dion Fortune said otherwise. In print, she named Moina Mathers as the one who had reached across the dark and killed her, recognising the marks, she wrote, as the work of a hand she knew.
There is only one problem with the accusation, and it is the kind that does not go away. Moina Mathers had been dead for sixteen months before Netta died. The killer named in the book was already in her grave when the killing she was blamed for took place.
So what passed between these three? A curse can be cast. But where does it land, once it leaves the hand? Only on the one it was aimed at, or on everyone it passes, the one who cast it first of all? What if the spell struck its own sender, and folded her into an early grave? What if it reached on past her to a girl on an island who had no part in the quarrel, and reached on still, years after all of them were dead, to stain the sender's name as a killer by the hand of the very woman she had first wished harm? What if there was no guilty one among them, and no innocent one either, only an ill wish no one could call back, doing its harm in every direction at once, the one that led home included?
A century later, in a world worn thin enough that everything once guarded behind years of apprenticeship lies open and searchable to anyone, a dying woman named Violet reaches back through all three lives toward the source of a harm she has carried her whole life and cannot account for. She believes that if she can only find the first hand at the top of the current, she can finally set it down.
She reaches all the way back. And at the head of the current, where the first hand should be, she finds what? That is the question the book holds open to the last, and answers the way life does. This is not done by filling the empty place where the answer was supposed to be, but by removing it.
The Spell tells each of these lives from the inside, judging none of them, holding open to the end the question every page circles, whether any of it was ever real, or whether it is the last shape a dying mind made of its own dissolution, and whether that was ever the question that mattered.
