by E. E. Holmes
“I understand,” I said, hoping the lie would wipe just a tiny portion of the guilt and horror from her face.
“We had to find a way to preserve the Gateways. We could not let them fall, could not risk that they might close or be reversed. The results would have been devastating. Spirits, trapped forever upon the earth, unable ever to answer the call of the Aether. Spirits from the Aether, dragged back and tortured into revealing the world beyond. We could not let it happen. We could not betray the spirits we had sworn to protect.”
“Of course, you couldn’t,” I said softly, reaching out a tentative hand to brush away the tears that were now spilling down her face.
Agnes looked up at me, solemn now. “I advised against it. I pled before the Council, but I was only a Scribe at the time, and they were all too scared, too panicked to listen to me. I cannot say that I blame them. Who can worry about the shadowy possibility of a repercussion hundreds of years in the future in the face of imminent danger?”
I did not answer. I did not want to interrupt her. We were getting to it now, the secret at the heart of everything.
“You only know the Geatgrimas as symbolic representations of the Gateways—constructed at our seats of power as monuments to our gifts as the vessels of the Gateways themselves. Is that what you have been taught?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling my heart begin to race. “Our teachers told us that the Durupinen have opened the Gateways so frequently at Fairhaven that the fabric between the living world and the Aether is very thin there, and the Geatgrima marks the place.”
Agnes gave a bitter laugh. “The tale has been well-told, it seems. And no one doubts that the Geatgrima’s purpose is simply symbolic. Have you never wondered why its pull is so strong? Why its lure is so powerful?”
“I… I’ve noticed it,” I said. “But what reason would I have to doubt what the Durupinen at Fairhaven have told me?”
“Why, indeed,” Agnes said softly. “Follow me.”
Agnes stood up and walked over to her window. I followed her, and the two of us gazed down into the moon-bathed courtyard below. The familiar shape of the courtyard was marred by differences that jarred my senses. There were no flagstones, no benches, no flower beds around the outer edges, none of the details to which I had grown accustomed. There was only the Geatgrima, standing alone within a circle of grass, the castle walls around it charred and battered, as though Fairhaven had recently withstood a fierce battle.
“You see it there? If it looks like nothing more than an empty stone archway; that’s because it is one. But that was not true just a few years ago. The Geatgrimas are not monuments to our power. They are not symbolic markers of our strongholds. They are the Gateways themselves, stripped of their power and forced shut, in a desperate bid to protect the spirit world.”
I tore my eyes from the Geatgrima to stare at Agnes. “Stripped? By whom?” But I already knew the answer. It was filling my lungs, sour and choking and horrid.
“By the Durupinen,” Agnes said. “We have always been as one with the spirit world. We have always been able to connect with spirits, to see and to hear them. We have been Guardians of the Geatgrimas, protecting their locations, and guiding spirits to them, so that they might Cross of their own free will. But we were not meant to be the vessels of the Gateways. That was never our true purpose.”
“But… but our gift… the Gateway is in our blood,” I whispered.
“It is now,” Agnes murmured. “Because we put it there.”
My legs turned to water beneath me. Agnes caught me before I hit the floor, and we sank to the stones together. “I… I still don’t…”
“There are Geatgrimas all over the world. The Durupinen sisterhood has acted as protectors of each of those sites since the dawn of time. We kept them secret and guarded them with our very lives. But there came a time when the Necromancers rose to power. They were not content to allow the Gateways to remain under our protection. They sought to oust us, and to use the Gateways to unlock the secrets of life after death, and by so doing, achieve immortality for themselves. Their armies were powerful. They planned their siege for decades. When they finally carried it out, it became clear that our forces could not contend. They were poised to destroy the Gateways, unless we did something drastic to protect them. And so we did.”
“How?” I asked in a strangled whisper.
“We brought together the greatest minds of the Durupinen world and devised a Casting that would lock the Gateways and hide the means to open them with the Durupinen themselves. As long as the access to the Gateways remained hidden in our bloodlines, the Geatgrimas could no longer be targets. The spirit world would be safe.”
“But then… wouldn’t the Durupinen become the targets instead?” I asked. “How is that any safer?”
“Ah, but people can be hidden. They can be disguised. We formed the Caomhnóir Brotherhood to protect them. But the locations of the Geatgrimas were finite. They were fixed. Once they were known, there was no more protecting them,” Agnes said.
“Okay, that makes sense,” I said slowly. “It sounds like the Durupinen did the right thing, then. Right?”
Agnes shook her head. “The immediacy of a solution can sometimes blind us to the longevity of a solution. I was one of the Scribes tasked with helping us to understand how we might succeed in internalizing the Gateways. I am sorry to say that I succeeded.”
“Sorry? Why are you sorry?”
“I went to the International High Council with my findings. I told them that, while I thought it was possible to do as they wished, I had serious misgivings about going through with it. To remove power from its source was dangerous, I argued. It would make the Geatgrimas unstable. I could not predict how long they would hold up, but I was sure that, one day, they would collapse. My warnings were not heeded. The Council dismissed me, took what they needed from my findings, and created the Casting that would make us all the keepers of the Gateways.”
My mouth opened and closed uselessly; all ability to form coherent sentences had slipped away from me on the tide of this news. For the second time in my life, I was trying desperately not to drown in the thought that my entire life—everything I’d believed to be true about myself—was a lie.
“Jessica?”
“Huh?”
“Do you understand what I’ve just told you?”
“I… uh… yeah,” I stammered.
“Do you understand why I’ve brought you here?”
“I…”
“That moment I feared, when the Geatgrimas would fail at last—it has come, hasn’t it? In your time?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head and hoping that the whirring thoughts would settle. “I… my friend… she’s a Durupinen, but something’s happened to her. She was visiting the Geatgrima every night, like she was drawn to it, and now the Geatgrima seems to have her in some kind of trance. They’re… connected.”
Agnes nodded her head, her lips trembling. “Yes. It has begun.”
A strange feeling struck me, like the whole room in which we sat had suddenly tilted at an odd angle. Agnes felt it too. Her eyes grew wide.
“I fear our time is running short,” she said, speaking quickly now. “Listen carefully. There are only three who know the truth, and you must bring them together to reverse this madness, or it will be too late, for your friend and for all of us. They are the three keys.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“The High Priestess of the Traveler Clans. The Keeper of the Elementals. The High Priestess of the International High Council.”
My brain whirled as I committed this to memory. “But what do I tell them?”
“Tell them the Sentinels have begun their watch. They will understand,” Agnes said.
“The Sentinels have begun their watch,” I repeated. “But what does that mean?”
“They will know what it means.”
“But how do I explain to them that I know this? How am I supposed to convince
them to listen to me?” I asked.
“That will be up to you, Jessica. The words will come to you. Have faith.”
“Faith?!” I half-laughed. “What have I got left to have faith in?”
“Yourself,” Agnes said, placing a hand upon my cheek. “It’s all we ever have, in the end.”
The room lurched again. The door through which we had entered swung open. Agnes and I both stared at it. She turned back to me.
“One last question, Jessica,” she said, her voice urgent. “This is very important. How did you find the drawings?”
“What?”
“My sketches. The one of you and the artwork for your Rifting Casting?”
I frowned. “The call number that you left for me.”
“Call number?”
“Yeah, you know. The call number that led me to the…” My voice trailed away as I registered the blank look on her face. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
Agnes shook her head.
I stood up and staggered over to Agnes’ desk as the room gave another lurch. I plucked the quill from its inkwell and scrawled the call number on one of the scraps of parchment that littered the desk. “This number. You left it for me in your tapestry. That’s how I knew to look for the drawing in the catacomb archives at Skye.”
Agnes took the number from my hand, staring at it with wonder. “In a tapestry, you say?”
“Yes, in the tapestry they made of you when you became High Priestess,” I replied. “How can you not know what I’m… oh my God.” All the air went out of my lungs, and the next words came out in a gasp. “It hasn’t happened yet. You aren’t even High Priestess yet, are you? You… there is no tapestry.”
Agnes let loose a half-frightened, half-awed burst of laughter. “It is as I said. Our threads are woven in incomprehensible ways.”
The room pitched and lurched again, and this time I slid across the floor back toward the desk, which I had to cling to in order to keep myself upright. “What’s happening?”
“The door is closing,” Agnes said, and she staggered across the room to me. “We are out of time, my dear. You must go.”
Our eyes met, and I felt a strange sense of loss at the thought of leaving this woman who was both a part of me and yet distant enough to be little more than a dream. Even as I looked at her, she seemed to become less substantial, shimmering and fading at the edges.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I confided to her, this figment of family who had my eyes.
“That has never stopped a woman of our line from trying, and it will not stop you,” Agnes called, her voice already so far, so far away. “Godspeed, Jessica.”
I had no idea what to say. Goodbye felt wrong. Good luck felt trite and empty. What came out of my mouth instead was, “I can’t believe I’m talking to the woman whose prophecy set my entire life in motion.”
Agnes’ forehead wrinkled, her expression blank. “What prophecy?”
As I opened my mouth to answer, the room gave a final, jarring lurch. With a gasp, I tumbled away from Agnes, falling head over heels through the door into a whirling jumble of color and sound and sensation and then landing with a jolt at last in black silence.
2
The Waking
I SPRANG SUDDENLY BACK into consciousness, as if the Rift had actually hurled me back into my body with the speed of a freight train. I felt my brain connect with my senses with a painful snap, as my whole body was flung up off the floor, so that I was instantaneously kneeling on all fours, gasping for breath like I’d surfaced from deep-sea diving.
A cacophony of voices assaulted my ears.
“Jess!”
“Holy SHIT!”
“Oh my God, thank God, thank GOD!”
“Stay back, give her room!”
Flooded with sensory information, it took several seconds of processing the onslaught of light and colors and sounds before I could bring the real world back into focus. When I did, the first thing I saw was Finn’s face, stark white and shadowed with stubble and deep purple rings under his eyes, but lit with a euphoric smile.
“How are you feeling, love?” he whispered.
I assessed myself, and replied in a dry husk of a voice, “Thirsty.”
He let out a relieved bark of laughter, and as if by magic, a mug of cold water was thrust into my hand. I gulped it down greedily, feeling it spill down over my chin in icy rivulets.
“Take it easy,” another voice said, and Flavia’s face appeared beside Finn’s. “You must be very dehydrated. We were just deciding whether or not to steal an IV and fluids from the hospital ward.”
“An IV?” I croaked, gesturing for her to fill the cup again. “How long was I out?”
“Almost forty-eight hours,” Finn said, his voice cracking. “The longest forty-eight hours of my life, if truth be told.”
“Two days?” I gasped. “I’ve been Rifting for two days? But that’s impossible. It felt so quick—I barely had time to…” I tried to wrap my brain around what had happened in the Rift, but it was all jumbled, like confetti thrown into the air. The thoughts and memories were still floating and fluttering around, still settling.
“Jess, sweetness, do me a favor and test the connection out, would you?” Milo floated into view looking as frazzled and relieved as the others. “Hannah’s been losing her mind. She had to go to a Council meeting to maintain the appearance that nothing strange is going on, but I promised I’d let her know if there was any change. She’d be so relieved to hear your voice.”
“So, does… no one knows I’ve been unconscious for two days?” I asked.
“Nope,” Milo said. “We told people you and Flavia both came down with something at Skye. So, right now the official story is that you’re both in self-imposed quarantine puking your guts out.”
“Gross,” I said between sips of a fresh cup of water. “Couldn’t you come up with a slightly less disgusting cover story?”
“Not if we wanted to keep people far away from this room,” Milo insisted. “Anyway, stop complaining. It worked, didn’t it? Now please contact your sister before her head explodes.”
It took several attempts to feel my way into the connection—the falling confetti thoughts kept distracting me. As exhausted as I was, I felt jumpy, like there was something I was supposed to be doing at that exact moment that was very, very important.
“Hannah?”
“JESS?! IS THAT REALLY YOU? OH MY GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD!”
The intensity of her emotions actually made me cry out and clutch at my head in pain.
“Jess? Are you all right?” Finn cried out from beside me, gripping my arm.
“I will be as soon as my sister stops screeching like a banshee inside my skull,” I told him through gritted teeth. I turned my focus back to Hannah, who was now unleashing an unintelligible mixture of sobbing and yelling. “Hannah! It’s okay! Just calm down, I’m fine! Everything’s fine!”
“Don’t… you… ever… tell… me… to… calm… down… ever… again!” she gasped between sobs. “I thought you were gone! I thought you’d never wake up! I thought I lost my sister! Don’t you dare tell me to calm down!”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry, okay? But you have to calm down or I have to close the connection. Seriously, Hannah, my head!”
“Close it then, I’m coming up! I hate you for—well, no I love you, I’m sorry, I’m just… I can’t…” the rest of her thought was such a tangle of emotion that it sounded like radio static and then, abruptly, she cut out.
“Whoa,” I said aloud as my headspace became my own again. “Milo, you’d better go meet her. She is a hot mess right now. I’m not sure how she’s going to get up here without drawing attention to herself.”
“Shall… shall I do it?” Kiernan asked hesitantly. “I don’t mind going, honestly.”
“It’s okay, lover boy, I’ve got this one. I can be quicker,” Milo said, giving the mortified Kiernan a salacious wink and poppin
g out of existence at once.
“So, what happened in there, Jess?” Flavia asked. “The Casting ought to have worn off ages ago. Did something go wrong?”
“I… I’m not sure… it wasn’t wrong, exactly, there was just… I’m trying to remember…”
“After all of that, you don’t even remember what happened?” Finn asked, flabbergasted. “Are you saying we’ve all gone through this ordeal for nothing?”
“No, that’s not what I… it’s just all jumbled in my… in my head,” I said.
“It’s normal to feel disoriented and confused in the aftermath of Rifting, even when the Casting proceeds as expected. Just give it a little time, and it will start to come back to you,” Flavia assured me in a soothing voice. “How about I brew you a cuppa and we scrounge up something for you to eat? You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten something.”
“I… yeah, okay,” I said, though the thought of food was not appealing in the least. My stomach was roiling as though in anticipation of something I couldn’t remember.
As my eyes followed Flavia over to the bedside table, where she retrieved an electric kettle, I began to take in the rest of the room, which looked like more of a makeshift emergency shelter than my bedroom. Several air mattresses were set up on the floor. Blankets, pillows, and clothing were strewn everywhere. A stack of dirty dishes and glasses covered the desk. A fire crackled in the fireplace, from which several bunches of dried herbs hung ready for Castings.
Huh. Dried bunches of herbs. That stirred a shadow of a recollection, but I still couldn’t remember the details.
“When you didn’t wake up, Flavia began using some other Castings to try to rouse you,” Finn explained, gesturing toward the hearth, which was littered with books, a mortar and pestle, and the stripped stems and leaves of used plants. “There’s no Casting designed to rouse a person from Rifting, so she had to… experiment.”
“I was not inclined to do so,” Flavia said, and her voice had a sense of forced calm about it. “Until I saw this.” She reached out as she walked by me, took my hand, and flipped my arm over so that my forearm was visible. I gasped.