by E. E. Holmes
“You,” Catriona said, throwing the word at me like a dart. “All concerned she was, wondering if you’d gotten back and if I’d talked to you at all, and if you’d perhaps come to me or the Council with any sort of information.”
I said nothing. It was no use playing dumb at this point. I was absolute shit at lying anyway.
“Now, why is it that Lucida knew you were at the príosún in the first place, and why would she think that you’d have information that I needed to know?” Catriona asked, glaring at me with narrowed eyes.
“Why didn’t you ask her?” I countered.
“Oh, you can be sure I did ask her. Repeatedly. She refused to explain what she was talking about and asked me to get in touch when I’d spoken to you. And then, when I attempted to track you down, your sister told me that you were locked away in your room with a terrible illness, not to be disturbed.”
“Yeah, I… wasn’t well,” I hedged. It wasn’t entirely a lie.
“How convenient,” Catriona sneered. “Well, now that you seem to have recovered yourself, perhaps you could take a moment to explain to me what the bloody hell is going on?”
I took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I can’t.”
“Come again?” The words barely managed to escape the prison of Catriona’s tightly clenched teeth.
“I can’t tell you. Not right now.”
Catriona closed her eyes and pinched the top of her nose, trying to regain her composure. “Jessica, may I please remind you that I am your superior and that your autonomy within the ranks of the Trackers only extends so far.”
“Fine, then. I quit,” I replied.
Catriona’s eyes flew open. “You what?!”
“I quit,” I repeated, quite calmly. “I don’t necessarily want to, but if your intention is to use my job to bully something out of me, you leave me no choice.”
“I’m not giving you an ultimatum here, Jessica. I’m just tired of being kept in the dark,” Catriona said, and beneath the edge of anger in her voice, something else was detectable—something fragile and afraid. The call from Lucida had clearly left her shaken.
“I’m not trying to keep you or anyone else in the dark,” I said. “I’m just… I’m trying to figure something out, and I can’t share it until I understand exactly what it is I’m dealing with.”
“Does this… has this got anything to do with what’s happening in the central courtyard right now?” Catriona asked, all anger vanished, eyes wide and vulnerable.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what’s happening to Savannah?”
“Not exactly. But I might have found a way to find out.”
“And why haven’t you brought this information to the Council? Why not let them share the burden of this… this knowledge, or whatever it is? We’ve been in near-constant session since it started, trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Because the information wasn’t given to them. It was given to me.”
“By whom?”
“Even if I could tell you that, you would never believe me.”
Catriona pressed her lips together. I could see her frustration building again. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t march you into the Grand Council Room right now and demand you explain yourself to the High Priestess.”
“I haven’t got one,” I said. “Except that if I’m thrown in a cell for contempt of the Council, this crisis will never get solved, and that’s a promise.” I sighed. “Cat, I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but there’s a method to all of this madness, and I’m trying to follow it. If I can get this right… if I manage not to royally fuck up just this one thing, then everything that’s been happening lately—with the príosún, with the Necromancers, with Savvy and the Geatgrima—it just might finally make sense. But it’s a… a very delicate thing, and I need you to trust me just this one last time. I know you don’t owe it to me, but I’m asking you to anyway.”
Catriona stared blankly at me. It was hard to tell if she had processed a single word I’d just said. Then, without warning, it was as though someone had flicked a switch and she was right back into Tracker mode.
“What do you need from the Trackers? Anything? Resources? Transportation? Protection?”
I stammered for a moment at the sudden about-face but recovered myself. “I… no, nothing right now. Just… just time. And your patience.”
“I’m rather limited on both, I’m afraid,” Catriona said, crossing her arms and looking truculent.
“I understand that,” I said. “Just give me what you can.”
Catriona nodded once, brusquely, and then her expression faltered, shivered with a repressed sob. “What the hell has Lucida gotten herself tangled up with this time?”
“Believe it or not, Cat, this one isn’t Lucida’s fault at all. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I wouldn’t be on the right track if she hadn’t helped me, so we should be thanking her this time, not cursing her.”
The corner of Catriona’s mouth twitched before falling back into a thin line of misery. “First time for everything isn’t there?” she muttered, shaking her head. She pointed a stern finger in my face. “The next time I come to you for answers I won’t be leaving without them. Count on that.” Then she turned and walked away, golden hair swinging behind her like the pendulum of a clock.
I felt a squirm of guilt in the pit of my stomach as I made my way to the library. I was glad that I hadn’t lied to Catriona, but I still felt ashamed that I hadn’t been able to confide the full truth to her. But it just wasn’t an option. Fairhaven was full of Durupinen who defined themselves by the gift of the Gateway in their blood. It was the aspect of themselves that they revered and protected above everything else. It was the only answer they would ever consider giving to the question, “Who are you?” I couldn’t imagine any of them willingly helping me to destroy that identity, even if they could bring themselves to believe what Agnes had told me. For many on the Council, I was still one half of the troublemaking pair who brought the Durupinen world to the brink of destruction.
Now that I thought about it, this was all pretty on-brand for me. At least I was consistent.
I found Flavia just where I expected her to be, in her tiny office off the main reading room in the library. She was half-buried, as was her custom, in a teetering pile of scrolls and books, but she looked up and smiled when she heard me come in.
“Jess, there you are! How are you feeling? Did you sleep all right?” she asked, standing up and pulling a giant musty book off the only other chair so that I could sit down.
“Not well at first. But after I visited Savvy, I slept like a rock. I thought I’d be a restless mess, but I woke up feeling really clear-headed, for a change.”
“You visited Savvy?” Flavia asked, raising her eyebrows. “I didn’t think they were allowing anyone in the courtyard?”
I winked. “I’ve got friends in high places. Well, one friend, really, but he’s kind of a big deal.”
Flavia’s expression cleared. “Ah, I see. And how… how was she?”
I sighed. “The same. I just needed to see her—to tell her that I hadn’t forgotten her, and that everything would be okay.”
“Of course, you did. I’m sure she would have done the same for you.”
I took a large swallow of my coffee to help choke down the lump in my throat. “How about you? Did you sleep at all?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
“Hardly more than ten minutes at a stretch,” Flavia said with a wan smile. Her eyes were deeply shadowed behind her thick glasses. “I tossed and turned all night. The stress of the day was part of it, of course, but something else kept nagging at me—something that was tugging on the edges of my memory that I just couldn’t quite get a hold of. Finally, around four o’clock, it came to me, and there was no hope for sleep after that. I got dressed and I’ve been here since.”
“Well, what was it?” I asked eagerly.
“There was a
moment when you were telling us about what Agnes said about the Geatgrimas, when I had the feeling of déjà vu, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. For several years before I met you, I had worked on a research project with the other Traveler Scribes. We were trying to gather documentation of anomalous events surrounding the Geatgrimas. Like most of our research back then, it all had to do with the Prophecy; in this case, we were hoping to get a better understanding of what might happen if the Necromancers succeeded in reversing the Gateways. We thought that by studying the behavior of the Geatgrimas themselves, we might glean enough information to make some predictions of what we might face, should the Prophecy come to pass. The Geatgrimas, despite their symbolic importance to our culture, have always been rather shrouded in mystery—now I fear we may know why. Anyway, I remembered reading about something to do with a Geatgrima and a Durupinen who was drawn to it, but I couldn’t remember the details. When it finally came to me early this morning, I came down to see if your library here had documentation of it, and I found it.”
She extracted a book from the stack, laid it open on the desktop between us, and flipped through the delicate pages to the place she had marked with a length of silk ribbon. We bent over it from opposite sides of the desk, so that our heads nearly came together.
“Just over a hundred years ago over in America, a young Durupinen girl disappeared from her family’s home in the middle of the night. She was a Key, highly sensitive to spirits since birth, and from a powerful and prominent family, so naturally, the leadership was alerted. Amidst fears that the Necromancers might somehow be involved, additional Caomhnóir and even some Trackers were brought in to aid in the search. The girl was found just before dawn trying to break into the cellar of the manor house on a nearby plantation. She seemed to be in some kind of trance, and it was not until the sun rose that she was able to be roused from it. When she came to, she had no memory of leaving her bed or how she had arrived at the plantation. A thorough investigation of the property revealed the remains of a Geatgrima deep in the basement.”
I gasped. “That sounds an awful lot like what happened to Savvy, doesn’t it?”
“Too right, it does,” Flavia agreed with a solemn nod of her head. “And it doesn’t end there. The next night, the girl attempted to escape again. And again the next night. Every night for a week she went to bed, rose with the moon as though sleepwalking, and tried desperately to return to the site of the Geatgrima until the sun rose. No sense could be made of her behavior. No Castings had been placed upon her, and no spirit could be found to be exacting any undue influence over her. The Geatgrima itself was examined, and nothing at all remarkable could be discovered about it. It was, by all accounts, simply an unremarkable pile of rubble, though marking, as all Geatgrimas did, a certain proximity to the Aether. At a complete loss, the girl’s parents decided to put as much distance between the girl and the Geatgrima as they could. They packed their bags and the Trackers relocated them to a clan property in New England, hundreds of miles away. It did no good at all.”
“You mean she still tried to return to it?” I whispered. “Even from so far away?”
Flavia nodded. “The very first night in their new home, the girl escaped again. It was the dead of winter, and there was a fierce snowstorm. By the time they found her, several miles south, she had frozen to death.”
“She died?” I murmured, horrified. “She died trying to get back to that Geatgrima?”
“She did,” Flavia said, closing the book with a terrible finality. “But with her, it seemed, the mysterious influence of that Geatgrima also died. No other Durupinen was ever drawn to the place, and so the incident was soon forgotten. The Tracker report on the events seemed to cast aspersions on the girl’s mental well-being, indicating that her own sanity—or lack thereof—was to blame.”
But I was barely listening, for a realization had just hit me with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. “Flavia,” I interrupted, jumping up from my chair and causing her to push back from her desk in alarm. “This Geatgrima, the one the little girl kept trying to visit—where was it located?”
“Oh! Um… well, there’s a map in the file,” Flavia said, digging around in her mounds of papers until she found a scroll, which she hastily unrolled and smoothed open on top of the book. “Yes, here it is, just a few miles outside of New Orleans, Louisiana.”
A feeling not unlike fireworks erupted in the pit of my stomach. “I knew it,” I whispered, then looked up into Flavia’s bewildered face. “Flavia, I’ve been there. That plantation is the one Jeremiah Campbell bought and turned into his spiritual retreat, The Whispering Seraph. And you remember who his “angel” was, don’t you, who was guiding his hand?”
Flavia clapped a hand over her mouth, and it was several seconds before she managed to squeak, “Irina!”
“Bingo,” I replied. “She was drawn there as well, remember? From hundreds of miles away, she wound up there, of all places. She used Campbell to secure the location and then to start rebuilding the Geatgrima itself. She told me she wanted to take it back for the spirits to Cross freely whenever they chose, without the Durupinen in control.” Irina’s words echoed distantly in the back of my head, and I repeated them aloud for perhaps the first time, somehow recalling them perfectly, even after all this time, “She spoke of the other spirits at the plantation. ‘What of the others?’ she had demanded. ‘All of the others forced to wait their turn! All of the spirits left to the mercy of the Durupinen! The Durupinen, who dictate when the spirits are allowed to Cross! Why should they have this power over us? I will create a Gate free of the tyranny of Gatekeepers! Have you ever heard of anything so beautiful?’”
Flavia’s eyes were bright with welling tears. “My God,” she whispered.
“And I thought she was mad, just like everyone else,” I said, shaking my head in disgust. “I chalked her plan up to Walker-induced insanity. No Geatgrima could work without the Durupinen to open it, I told her, and when she scoffed, I was sure it was her madness talking. And then again, during the Rifting, there she was, toiling to rebuild the shattered remains of a Geatgrima, demanding I help her before it was too late.” I gave a bitter laugh.
“So that’s two instances in which a Durupinen in close proximity to that Geatgrima was drawn to it in an unnatural way,” Flavia said, her eyes gazing off into the middle distance, lost in thought. “Each time, the Geatgrima exerted some kind of pull over them. Who’s to say, if that little girl hadn’t died, that she wouldn’t have found a way down into that basement and begun rebuilding the thing stone by stone as well. We’ll never know.”
“But this just proves that there’s a precedent for this,” I said, and it was hard to keep the excitement out of my voice. “It’s further proof that Geatgrimas aren’t just monuments to Durupinen strongholds. They have a power all their own, power that Durupinen are helpless to overcome. Savvy isn’t the first Durupinen to be targeted, and if Agnes’ warning is right, she won’t be the last. Sentinels, she said. Plural.”
Flavia pulled off her glasses, gave her eyes a vigorous rub, and stood up, a renewed fire in her voice. “Right. Well, if we’re going to convince anyone this is true, we’re going to need more than two examples. I’m going to keep digging into every account of the Geatgrimas I can find. With any luck, I can build a case that will back up everything that Agnes told you so that when you meet resistance, which you undoubtedly will, we can combat it with facts. And of course, I intend to dive as far back into our written history as possible. If there’s any written reference to the Geatgrimas’ true purpose, however obscure, I intend to find it.”
I smiled at her. “You’re, like… a research superhero.”
Flavia gave a little bow. “At your service. If I manage to find anything today, I’ll bring it along when we all meet after Finn’s shift. What are you going to do until then?”
“Well, I need to go see Fiona,” I told her. “I promised to be here to help her adjust to her new situation with her eye
sight, and then I abandoned her for almost a week.”
Flavia gave me a sympathetic smile. “You might need another coffee before you do that.”
“Undoubtedly,” I replied, and downed the rest of my cup in a single swallow.
5
Control
I KNOCKED ON Fiona’s tower door and pushed it open before she could tell me to go away.
“Fiona? Are you here? It’s Jess!” I called into the darkness. Fiona hadn’t bothered to draw the drapes or turn on any lights, so the place was as dark as a tomb which, I supposed, would really only bother you if you could see.
“Well, well. So, you’re still alive, are you?” came the snappish reply out of the gloom.
I took the greeting in stride. I probably deserved it, after all. “That depends,” I said. “How well can you aim a paint can with that bandage thing on your face?”
Fiona cackled. Also, no paint can flew through the air at my head. Two good signs.
“Where’ve you been, then?” Fiona asked.
“At the príosún, remember? I told you before I left,” I said, keeping my tone light.
“What kind of prat do you take me for, lass?” Fiona barked. “I mean since you’ve been back. Your sister said you were ill.”
“I guess you have your answer, then,” I said.
“Your sister’s a worse liar than you are,” Fiona countered.
“All right then, I wasn’t ill. I was… working on something.”
Fiona stepped into a dim patch of light that had snuck in around the edges of a curtain. Her hair was a bit disheveled, but otherwise, it seemed that she had managed to take care of herself. She was dressed, and the remains of her lunch sat on a plate by the sink. The room, as far as I could tell, was nearly as I had left it a few days before. The tapestry of Agnes Isherwood still dominated the west wall, and all the tools we had been using to restore her image were still laid out neatly on a small rolling cart. The only major difference was the corner where Fiona kept her potter’s wheel. She had evidently been spending a good deal of time at it; the surrounding walls were spattered with fresh clay, and several partially formed sculptures stood nearby, alongside half a dozen pots she had thrown.