by E. E. Holmes
I caught Flavia’s eye. Her face was full of despair. It was over. It was already over.
“It would never have worked,” I called over the crowd, and they fell silent. “I tried to tell her as much. The Geatgrima, even if it had been restored physically, could not have been opened without a Durupinen Gateway.”
“But her intentions—” began Elder Oshina.
“Her intentions didn’t matter. They were illogical. If she had been of sound mind, thinking clearly and rationally, she should have realized that her plan would never work. I tried to reason with her but she was beyond reason.”
“Intentions always matter,” Elder Oshina said.
“Was there a question in there I’m supposed to answer, or were you just expressing an opinion?” I asked hotly.
She did not acknowledge my question, but continued on as though I hadn’t spoken. “What happened, when she refused to heed your warnings?”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. Catriona had prepared me for these questions, but they still made me nervous. “I . . . I decided to Cross her myself.”
Another shocked murmur. Another volley of whispering. I kept my face calm and impassive.
“You decided to Cross her?” Elder Oshina repeated.
“I did,” I said promptly. “I’m sure you all had a chance to read the statement that the Tracker Office sent over. I explained it all in my report.”
“Perhaps just one more time, for the record,” Elder Oshina said. Her tone was decidedly colder than it had been when she began questioning me.
“I assessed the risk of the situation. I did not know how far the other Trackers were from our location or how long it would take them to reach us. I could not guarantee that our Castings would hold Irina until help arrived. I knew that she was incredibly unstable, irrational, and presented a very clear danger to herself and anyone who came into contact with her. I thought the safest thing to do would be to Cross her.”
“Without consulting your superiors?” Oshina pushed.
“I’ve just told you. I could not contact my superiors. I was in a building full of potential victims of Irina’s vendetta. I had to make the call to protect everyone there.”
“Without consulting the Travelers, under whose jurisdiction Irina would surely fall?” Oshina asked, a note of incredulity in her voice.
“With all due respect, how would I have been able to do that? Not only was the situation extremely precarious and time sensitive, but I didn’t exactly have any of you on speed dial. You are notoriously difficult to contact, which I realize is by design, but it does not lend itself to this particular situation. Irina was dangerous and she was in great distress. I had moments to decide what to do. As a Tracker, I had to listen to my instincts and trust my own judgment.”
Ileana made a snorting noise through her nose, as though the idea of anyone trusting my judgment was absurd. I was bursting with so many things I wanted to say. What about her judgment, allowing a woman to be needlessly tortured for so many years? It was her fault that Irina became so desperate and that she had resorted to so many wild and violent measures to free herself. Wasn’t Ileana’s judgment far more questionable than my own?
Luckily, Elder Oshina went on before I had a chance to completely screw myself over by blurting out these observations.
“But you did not have the opportunity to Cross Irina?” she prompted.
“No,” I said. “The senior Trackers were much closer than we had anticipated. Catriona arrived and took charge of the situation before I could follow through on my decision. She oversaw Irina’s containment from that moment onward. I didn’t see Irina again until I arrived here at the camp to testify.”
“And when was it that you saw her?” Elder Oshina asked.
“Two nights ago, my first night here, a voice woke me from my sleep. The voice was singing. Finding myself unable to go back to sleep, I decided to follow it. The sound led me to the edge of Irina’s clearing, but the Caomhnóir protections around the perimeter prevented me from approaching her wagon. I witnessed her attack on Ruslo.”
“And what was your impression of that attack?” Elder Oshina asked.
“I was . . . horrified,” I said. “Those were the actions of a desperate and tortured woman.”
“So, you have now borne witness to two different attacks by Irina Faa; one on Mr. Jeremiah Campbell, and one on Ruslo Boswell,” Elder Oshina said slowly.
“Yes, that’s correct,” I said.
“Would it be fair to say that both of those attacks were calculated?”
“Yes.”
“Planned out carefully?”
“Yes.”
“The products of a sound mind?”
I shook my head. “No. I wouldn’t say that.”
“But you’ve just agreed that they were calculated and planned. How could a mad person think things through so meticulously?” Elder Oshina asked.
“I see what you’re trying to do,” I said. “I spent a lot of time with Irina when she was teaching me to Walk. She was utterly obsessed with Walking, and with procuring her freedom. It was a singular compulsion. Even as she was showing me how to Walk, she was searching for a way out of her enclosure. She even attempted to hijack my body, once I’d learned how to leave it. And it astonishes me that, even after the pain that you’ve seen her in, the relentless escape attempts, the wild attacks, that you could ever think she has control over her actions.”
Elder Oshina pressed her lips together into a tight line of displeasure. It was clear that I had said more than she had intended to let me say, and that I had crossed some kind of unspoken rule by offering my opinion so forcefully. I concentrated on keeping my face smooth and my expression polite as I waited to see if she had any further questions for me.
“Thank you very much, Durupinen Ballard. I have no further questions for you. High Priestess?” Oshina threw the invitation over her shoulder to Ileana who glared at me for a moment, puffing on her pipe, before waving a hand dismissively in my direction.
“Very well, then,” Elder Oshina said. “You are dismissed, Durupinen Ballard. We thank you for your testimony. You may leave the proceedings.”
I stood up, taken aback by the abruptness of my dismissal. “Uh, thank you. Is it . . . would it be okay for me to stay and hear the rest of the witnesses?”
“You are not a Traveler. These are not matters of your concern. You may leave the proceedings,” Ileana said, a note of finality in her voice now that the invitation to leave was not so much an invitation as an order.
There was nothing else I could do. I walked up the aisle through a sea of hostile glares, Finn and Annabelle close on my heels.
23
Devil in the Details
“WELL. That couldn’t have gone any worse,” I declared.
“That’s not true,” Finn said. “Things can always go worse.”
I stared over at him across the fire. We were sitting outside our wagon, waiting for the trial to end. “What is that supposed to mean? Are you writing fortune cookie fortunes in those books of yours instead of poetry?”
Finn grimaced, looking awkward. “I merely meant that you did your best.”
“It’s true, Jess,” Annabelle said. “In fact, given the attitudes of the Council, I’d say that was rather the best you could have hoped for.”
“How?”
“Well, you didn’t lose your temper and get yourself thrown out for screaming at the Traveler Council, so already you’re ahead of your usual pace for this kind of thing,” Finn said.
I glared at him, but didn’t contradict him, mostly because he was right.
“You stuck to the facts,” Annabelle said. “You gave them all the details, and you did it without feeding into the narrative that the Council was clearly trying to build.”
“And what narrative was that?” I asked.
“That Irina is the offender rather than the victim,” Annabelle said.
“I don’t even know why they’re bot
hering to have a trial,” I said bitterly. “It sounds to me as though they’ve already decided that they can’t forgive Irina’s actions.”
“No, forgiveness isn’t really in the Traveler repertoire,” Annabelle said, a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Nor is admitting when we’re wrong. And it would be no small thing for Ileana to admit she’s been wrong in handling Irina’s situation.”
“How so?” I asked.
“To admit that Irina isn’t at fault is to admit that the Council needlessly tortured and imprisoned her for decades. Ileana would have to admit to years’ worth of poor judgment, not just a single bad decision. It would throw her entire tenure as High Priestess into doubt,” Annabelle said.
“Better to take a hit to your reputation than cause anymore unnecessary suffering,” I said, but I knew Annabelle was right. Ileana was far too proud to take the fall for Irina; after all, who has farther to fall than the High Priestess?
We stewed in tense silence for nearly an hour before Flavia came walking up the path. Her expression made my heart leap into a panicked gallop.
“They haven’t convicted her already?” I asked, jumping to my feet.
But Flavia shook her head. “Ruslo and Andrei testified about their attacks, and I presented the petition. It . . . wasn’t very enthusiastically received,” she said delicately.
“Meaning what?” Annabelle asked.
“Meaning I’ll be surprised if they even look at it, except to make a note of the people who signed it,” Flavia said with a defeated sigh. “I’ve thought before that our court is more about pageantry and public shaming than it is about justice, and today they’ve proven me right.”
“So, now what do we do?” Finn asked. He stood as well, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he was hoping the answer would be to run laps around the encampment.
“The Council is in deliberation now. When they’ve rendered their verdict, they will send colored smoke up into the air from Ileana’s wagon. White smoke if she has been found innocent of treason. Red smoke if she has been found guilty.”
“How long will they deliberate for?” Finn asked.
“I’m surprised they need to deliberate at all,” I growled. “It couldn’t have been clearer to me that they’d already decided.”
“Don’t forget what I said about the pageantry,” Flavia said with a rueful smile. “They will want to make a show of it. Don’t expect any smoke for a few hours at least.”
I groaned, running my fingers through my hair in frustration. All of this waiting was going to drive me mad.
“Let’s not waste this time, then,” Annabelle said briskly. “We still have a prophecy to figure out.”
“Absolutely,” Flavia said. “Let’s head back to the Scribes’ wagon. We can watch for the smoke as easily there as anywhere.”
§
If I learned anything about myself in the three hours that followed, it was that I am utterly, irredeemably useless in that kind of a crisis.
Seriously, call someone else. I am not your girl. I am dead weight.
Not that I wasn’t trying. I did my best to help Annabelle and Flavia sift through the documents and books about prophecy and Rifting. I sat determinedly down at one of the boxcar tables and set to work at once, but it was as though my brain had temporarily lost the ability to absorb information. I looked down at sentences that danced in front of my eyes, the combinations of letters blurring into meaningless jumbles. Every few minutes, I had to jump to my feet and peer through the little red velvet curtains on the nearest window, so that I could scan the sky for a sign of red or white smoke from Ileana’s tent. This was a completely redundant exercise, of course, since Finn was standing right outside the wagon on high alert for the very same thing.
After the tenth time I did this, Annabelle slammed a book shut in frustration and glared at me.
“Do you need to go for a walk, Jess?” she asked me pointedly.
“I . . . no. Sorry. I’m just . . .”
“I know,” Annabelle said. She did not require the completion of the sentence to understand exactly what I meant. “I am, too. We all are. But couldn’t you just . . . stay still?”
“I make no promises,” I said, sinking back into my seat and staring helplessly again at the mountain of papers.
“I thought prophecies were relatively rare,” I said to Flavia, gesturing weakly to her own massive pile of scrolls. “Fiona told me they are fairly rare. How is there so much stuff to dig through?”
“But it’s precisely because true prophecies are rare that there has been so much documentation about them,” Flavia said, and even through the nerves I could hear an edge of nerdy excitement in her voice. “Any time a suspected prophecy is made, scholars jump on the opportunity for interpretation and application, even if the prophecy seems relatively unimportant.”
“That must be exhausting for the Seers who make them,” Annabelle pointed out.
“Yes, I imagine it must be,” Flavia said, frowning as though she had never considered that angle before.
“Fiona’s mother drove herself to the point of mental breakdown trying to wring meaning from her only piece of prophetic art,” I said quietly.
“Well, you still look impressively sane to me, but I’ll let you know if I see you slipping,” Annabelle said. Her tone was curt, but when I looked up, she was smirking down at her papers. The smirk faded as she lifted the topmost one, revealing my sketch of her underneath.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Jess, your attention to detail is impressive,” Annabelle said with a suddenly shaking voice.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well . . . these clothes you’ve drawn me in . . . I’ve just realized. I’m wearing them right now,” Annabelle said.
I jumped out of my seat and stood behind her chair. She pointed down at the picture, her massive collection of bracelets jangling. There was no mistaking it. I’d drawn her entire outfit in exact detail, from the stripes in her shirt to the hole in the elbow of her long wool cardigan.
All at once the walls of the wagon seemed to be closing in, forcing the breathable air from the room and from my lungs.
“Maybe we’ve been going about this wrong,” Flavia said. “Maybe it’s not about symbolism and interpretation. Maybe the devil is in the details, so to speak.”
I couldn’t answer her. I was trying not to pass out. I backed away from Annabelle as though my proximity to her would tear the image right from the page and bring it to life right there in the wagon.
Flavia hadn’t noticed my panic attack, though. She was digging furiously through a wooden box that she had pulled down from a nearby book shelf. After a few moments she found what she was looking for: a gold-handled magnifying glass.
Annabelle slid over at once to make room for her on the narrow bench, and the two of them bent low over the image, examining every inch of it for . . . what?
“What are you looking for?” I asked, a bit hysterically.
“Any other small clues that might help us,” Flavia said quietly, as though she might distract herself with the volume of her own voice.
“Why is it going to help to just . . . just further confirm the inevitability of this?” I cried, choking back tears. “I don’t want to know how it happens, I want to know how to stop it!”
Flavia looked up at me, and though her eyes were kind, her expression was rather stern. “Jess, those are not mutually exclusive things. To reveal one is to reveal the other.”
I stopped pacing, feeling, for a moment, like a child who had just been reprimanded by a school teacher. She was right, of course. My freak-out was helping no one, least of all Annabelle. I walked over behind them and looked down through the magnifying glass.
Flavia brought it to rest over the image of the dagger. “Jessica, is this the dagger you saw in your Rifting vision?” she asked slowly.
I peered down at it. “Yes. Well, it was the second one I saw. Bernadette had one that she stabbed herself with—it
was the same one that she used to attack Hannah and me during the Airechtas. Then, when Bernadette transformed into Annabelle, the dagger transformed, too. That’s what the dagger turned into,” I said, pointing at the drawing. “Just like that.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Flavia asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why, Flavia?” Annabelle asked. “Do you recognize it?”
“Yes,” Flavia said. “Everyone in this Traveler camp would recognize it. Each Caomhnóir is given one upon entering his training. They are identical. You cannot see it at this angle here, but each one is marked with the rune for guardianship on the bottom of the handle.”
I gasped. “And you’re sure . . .”
“Oh, yes,” Flavia said. “I’m quite sure. There are at least fifty of those daggers right here in this camp.”
Annabelle, Flavia, and I looked at each other, then back down at the drawing.
“Its . . . kind of odd, isn’t it?” Annabelle said softly.
“What’s odd?” I asked.
“Well, I seem to be dead, and I seem to have been holding that knife, but . . . where’s the blood?”
I looked down at the sketch again. She was right. There was no blood. No visible wound.
“You would think,” Annabelle said, “given your incredible attention to detail, that there would be some sign of injury, wouldn’t you?”
“I . . .”
“Jess! Jess, come out!”
Finn’s voice rang out sharply from outside. Flavia dropped the magnifying glass with a clatter and we all ran for the door.
Finn said nothing as I came to a stop beside him on the grass. He simply pointed to the sky above the trees, his expression stony.
A plume of red smoke billowed into the air, carrying our last hope for Irina into the night sky and scattering it carelessly up amongst the stars. We all stood silently for a few moments, knowing that Irina, alone in her clearing, would be able to see it, too, and to know what it meant.