by E. E. Holmes
Annabelle threw me a glance that reflected my own question back to me. How could this old woman and this child possibly be sisters?
“Lira, I present to you Catriona Harrington and Lucida Worthington of the Clan Soillseach, Annabelle Rubinski, Dormant of the Traveler Clan Boswell, Caomhnóir Finn Carey of the Clan Gonachd, Jessica Ballard of the Clan Sassanaigh, and Ileana Lovell, High Priestess of the Traveler Clans. They come seeking your counsel, if you will give it.”
Lira leaned in and pressed her face against Margaret’s ear, whispering. Margaret spoke her sister’s words aloud, acting almost as interpreter. “You have come to see me before, High Priestess.”
Ileana stepped forward. “Yes. You were kind enough to assist us in our hour of need.”
Lira whispered again. “And did it work? The summoning of the Elemental you requested?”
Ileana shifted from foot to foot. “Yes. We were able to summon it. Many thanks for the knowledge you bestowed upon us.”
“And did it solve your problem with the Walker?” Margaret asked Lira’s question in her strangely high voice.
Ileana hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “No, we were not able to contain her by means of the Elemental. We had to resort to other… methods.”
I rounded on Ileana. “You tried to imprison Irina with an Elemental?” I asked in a voice that was practically a growl.
“Many years ago,” Ileana said, and even she, who never faltered in her air of superiority, sounded ashamed. “It was a practice used for centuries in Durupinen príosúns.”
“A practice that was abandoned because it was barbaric,” I snapped back.
“Do we think maybe we could save this argument for another time and try to focus on why we’re here?” Catriona muttered to me out of the corner of her mouth.
I turned to give her a piece of my mind as well, but Finn placed a hand on my arm and shook his head minutely. I contented myself with shooting a withering look at Catriona, and thereafter attempted to gain control of myself again with slow, deep breaths. I couldn’t lose it now, not when so much rested on getting my message to Lira. There would be time to drag Ileana over the coals later, and drag her I would.
Lira had turned her attention to me now. Her dark eyes glinted at me through the curtain of crow-black hair that still hung before her face. Though her stare frightened me with its intensity, I found it impossible to look away once caught in its beam.
“And this one. You are the reason, aren’t you? The reason the others are here.” Lira’s words came from Margaret’s mouth in that saccharine voice.
I tried to reply, but no sound would come out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yes. I am the one who really needs to see you. My… my friends offered to accompany me.”
“Friends?” It was Lira who whispered the word aloud, now, cocking her head so far to the side that her ear rested upon her shoulder. “What a strange word. What does it mean?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. “Uh… friends are people you like. People you do things for and who do things for you.”
Lira straightened her head and, leaning in toward her sister’s ear, whispered once more.
“I see. The Elementals are my friends, then,” Margaret said.
I swallowed spastically. “Sure,” I said weakly. “If… if you say so.” I couldn’t think of anything more horrifying than looking at a creature like an Elemental—a being created from and nourished by pure human fear—and calling it a friend. But of course, I wasn’t about to tell Lira that. I wasn’t going to say anything more to her than I absolutely had to.
“The Elementals have tasted of your fear before,” Lira said through her sister.
“Yes, at Fairhaven,” I replied, and then could not help asking, “How do you know that?”
Lira gave that same high musical giggle again and delivered her reply through her sister. “They are all connected, the Elementals. They crave you. Your twin as well. Once they develop a taste for your fear, they long for it again.”
“Bloody hell,” Lucida said under her breath. Her eyes were wide and horrified, but she did not seem able to look away from the bizarre spectacle of codependence that was Lira and Margaret Blackwell.
“What do you want of me, Jessica Ballard of Clan Sassanaigh, Harbinger of the Prophecy, True Northern Walker, Muse and Seer? Why do you seek me in the heart of this wood?”
I glanced at Finn, unnerved. How did she know so much about me, things I hadn’t even told the others standing alongside me? The longer I stayed in her presence, the more deeply I feared her, the more desperately I wanted to turn and flee. I swallowed all of this, though. Too much was at stake, and I’d come this far.
“I have a message for you. From Agnes Isherwood.”
“And what it this message from one who lived so long ago?” Lira asked in Margaret’s voice.
“The Sentinels have begun their watch.”
Lira froze, becoming at once like a porcelain doll her sister was holding rather than a living person. Margaret, sensing her sister’s tension, might suddenly have been carved of marble. For several long moments, no one spoke. No one moved. Everyone simply waited, breath held, to see how Lira would respond to the words I had uttered. I had never in all my life been enveloped in such an all-encompassing, all-consuming stillness. It felt unbreakable.
But break it did, when Lira swung suddenly down from her sister’s shoulder and landed with catlike agility upon the ground. Every one of us jumped in shock. Catriona actually screamed. Lira scrambled forward across the mossy carpet of the forest floor until she crouched right before me.
“You will come with me, Jessica Ballard. I have something to give you,” she whispered.
“I… all right,” I said, stepping forward. Finn, all defensive instincts heightened, stepped forward at the same moment.
“No!” Lira whispered, and though the word was quiet, its intensity was shocking. “She must come alone.”
Finn’s hands retracted into tight fists. “Why must she go alone?” he asked, his voice as taut as a bowstring.
“Only the Messenger can receive it. I must give it to her, and her alone. It is my sacred duty,” Lira hissed.
“Receive what?” Finn asked.
“Her and her alone,” Lira repeated.
“And where are you taking her, exactly?” Finn asked, still not backing down.
Lira did not speak, but pointed to the sagging little hovel in the tree roots. She wanted me to follow her into her home. I hesitated. When Ileana heard my message, she knew there was something—an object that she needed to retrieve. It hung around her neck now—the huge iron key, hidden for centuries inside the throne of the Traveler High Priestess. Wasn’t it likely that the Keeper, too, had something—some relic or sacred ancestral object—that only the hearing of Agnes’ message would compel her to reveal? For reassurance, I looked not to Finn, but to Ileana. She looked as pale and anxious as everyone else, but when I caught her eye, she nodded grimly, and that nod felt like the confirmation I needed.
“Very well, Lira,” I said, and I was shocked to hear that my voice was quite steady. “I’ll go with you. Please lead the way.”
“Jess—” Finn began, his voice full of trepidation. But I held up a hand, and he fell silent at once, dropping his eyes to the ground. He knew. He knew I had to follow her, however much we both hated the very thought.
I looked toward the others, giving them a nod, hoping to reassure them, anything to wipe the identical looks of horror from their faces. Even Abigail, who had displayed nothing but cheerful confidence since we’d entered the wood, shifted nervously from foot to foot, mouth opening and closing as though she both longed to interject and yet had no idea what to say. Seeing her look so unsure sapped the last of my confidence, and it was with my heart in my throat that I took the first steps toward Lira, shuffling uneasily forward until I stood right beside her.
Without warning, she reached out, snatched a handful of my jacket, and swung herself
in a single movement up onto my back. I could only stand there, absolutely paralyzed with shock, as her skeletally thin arm hooked around my neck, as her bare toes dug into my back, clawing for purchase. Everyone behind me shouted. I have no idea how Finn stopped himself from rushing forward and tackling Lira right off me, but somehow, he refrained. I stood motionless for a moment as the girl settled herself, swallowing my revulsion at the sensation of her breath against my ear, her matted hair against my cheek.
Margaret looked as though she might faint at the sight of her sister clinging to another human being in this way. Her expression was that of someone who had been utterly betrayed. She sank to her knees on the ground and watched, wordlessly, a marionette with her strings cut, as Lira and I set off in the direction of the hovel.
I moved my way carefully through the minefield of protruding tree roots, rotting stumps, and rusting bits of “shine” that had fallen to the ground. When we reached the door, to my intense relief, Lira swung off my back to the ground and pushed the door inward. All was rank, impenetrable darkness in the room beyond.
I stood in the doorway, unable to force myself to move forward until I had some inkling of what lay within. Then, from somewhere inside, a candle guttered to life, illuminating just enough of the interior to allow me to set foot inside. A single chamber lay within, hollowed out of the very earth and smoothed over with some kind of primitive plaster-like substance that was chipping away to dust. The floor was spread with a number of rotted blankets and roughly woven rugs. A black, round-bellied stove squatted in one corner, the plaster around it blackened with soot, its crooked pipe disappearing through the ceiling. A crate of dented metal plates and mugs stood beside it, along with baskets of dried berries, mushrooms, and what I was pretty sure was a skinned squirrel hanging by its tail. A squalid straw mattress and a nest of rotted wool blankets took up most of the space on the other side of the door. I could barely imagine spending a night in such a wretched place, let alone imagine someone living here for their entire life—and a child of all people. It was beyond comprehension. My insides still hollow and aching with fear, I ducked my head under the lintel, took several steps inside at a crouch, and knelt upon one of the fetid rugs nearest the door. I did not close it behind me.
Lira turned to face me, and I quickly pressed my hand to my mouth to stifle my cry of shock. With the candle held just below her chin, her features were at last illuminated properly, and what I saw at once fascinated and repulsed me. Lira was not a little girl at all. She was an old woman, her cheeks hollowed with age, her skin a relief map of deep wrinkles, veins, and age spots. Her wide eyes had a cloudy quality to them, like the eyes of an old dog, and her hair was actually a dark grey, not black, as the moonlight had painted it. Her mouth, as she opened it to speak contained not a single tooth.
“Do you know from whence the Elementals came?” she whispered in a voice dry and cracked as chalk.
I shook my head, my hand still clamped over my mouth, my voice still unable to penetrate the pall of my horror.
“Once the doors were always open, you see,” Lira said, her eyes on her candle, watching it dance with a childlike fascination. “Spirits Crossed freely. It was as it should be.”
“I know,” I said, finding my voice at last. “Agnes told me. The Gateways belonged to the Geatgrimas. But how did you know that? The Durupinen have always kept that a secret.”
“I did not learn it from the Durupinen,” Lira said, shaking her head. “I learned it from the Elementals. When I was young they came to me. I could wish for them to find me, and they would. I could summon them. And I could send them away. I was immune to their power. They could not hurt me, as they had hurt so many others. They were my companions. And they whispered to me. They told me things.”
“Why… why couldn’t they hurt you? Why didn’t they try to attack you, to feed on your fears, like they do everyone else?”
Lira tapped on her chest. “In here. They can’t get in. Like my mother before me. And her mother before her. They do our bidding but cannot harm us. This is how we came to be the Keepers.”
I nodded, pretending to understand.
“The Elementals are crimeborn,” Lira went on, and her voice became soft, almost musical. “Our crime, the crime of taking the Gateways into ourselves. It spawned them.”
“How?” I murmured.
“Tore at the fabrics between the worlds, we did. All the fear and uncertainty of death, trapped in the Aether. It crystalized. It swelled. The Elementals were born of it as the Geatgrimas sealed up forever, thrusting them forth into the world, the evidence of our crime.”
“We created them,” I said, understanding at last. “The sealing of the Geatgrimas created them.”
Lira nodded. “And once made, they had to be controlled. For years we held them trapped, used them as weapons born of our new power. But they grew stronger, more difficult to control. And so the Keepers were called upon to gather them.”
“Gather them? How?”
“We sing to them. They cannot resist the song. They come and they go as the song commands.”
I gasped. “You can Call them. You’re a Caller. A Caller of Elementals.”
Lira cocked her head to the side again. It was clear she didn’t know the term, but it didn’t matter.
“But there’s an Elemental at Fairhaven,” I told her. “Why wasn’t that one gathered?”
“A gift. A gift for the High Priestess,” Lira said.
“A gift? Who the hell wants a gift like that?” I exclaimed.
“Useful, it is,” Lira replied, almost indignantly, as though I had offended her. “Powerful.”
“Ah, I see,” I answered, my insides boiling. Having an Elemental must have been a forbidding thing, a way to scare your enemies and shore up your grasp on your territory. Sort of the Durupinen version of a weapon of war. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing our Council, drunk with their own power, in the heyday of Northern dominance, might have prized above all else, even if they later abandoned it.
“Now you come to me, Jessica Ballard, and speak the words no Keeper has ever heard before,” Lira said, and she shifted forward until she was uncomfortably close to me. I could not get away from her without backing right out the door again. “Words I have been warned of.”
“Warned? By who?” I asked.
“My mother. My grandmother. The Elementals themselves.”
“Did—did your mother or your grandmother tell you what to do, if you ever heard these words?” I prompted. All of this information about the Elementals was fascinating, but I wanted nothing more than to get out of this rotting corpse of a house as quickly as possible.
“Oh, yes,” Lira said. “I’m to give you this.”
And she crawled to the back of her hovel, where a thick and ancient expanse of tree trunk was visible beneath the thin spackling of plaster. With filthy, clawlike fingernails, Lira began to scratch and dig away at the plaster, pulling crumbling hunks of it away in her hands like a burrowing rodent until she reached a knothole sunken in the face of the trunk. Slowly, she reached her hand inside the hollowed out knot and pulled from its depths a key, identical to the one that now hung around Ileana’s neck. She held it up, transfixed for a moment at the way the light from the candle flinted off the metal, making it look as though it were alive with tiny golden sparks.
“A bit of shine for you, Jessica Ballard,” Lira whispered, holding it out into the space between us. But just as I gathered the courage to reach for it, she pulled it back again, clutching it protectively against her sunken chest. “What will you do with it?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said, feeling it was best to be honest. “I’ll bring it with me to the High Priestess of the International High Council. She is the last one to whom I’m supposed to deliver the message.”
“And then?”
“And then I’m going to save my friend, I hope. Restore the Gateways to the Geatgrimas, where they rightfully belong, before it’s too late.”
“And you are sure, are you, that you want to risk such a thing?” Lira hissed at me.
“I… I’m risking much more, I think, by doing nothing,” I said my sense of unease growing.
“And what if you are wrong?” Lira asked.
“I don’t think I am,” I said. “I…”
“Jess.”
I jumped, turning on the spot. The voice? Where had it come from? Not from Lira, who was sitting there staring at me, her mouth shut.
“Jessica.”
I forgot how to breathe. That voice. I knew that voice. That voice that sang to me. That comforted me. That drove me crazy and spoke more love to me than any other voice in my life. Where was it coming from? What was happening?
“Out here, Jessica.”
I turned, following the sound of the voice out of the hovel and around the back side of the clump of trees. A low mist hung around the clearing, curling around me, obscuring everything further than a few feet away. Then I heard it again.
“There you are, kiddo. Long time, no see.”
Everything stopped. My mother. The spirit of my mother stood there, cloaked in mist, a wide, joyous smile on her face.
15
Artifice
THAT FACE—the face I’d longed to see more than any other. How was it possible it was there, beaming at me?
“Mom?” I choked out.
Her smile grew wider. “Don’t be afraid, sweetie. It’s all right.”
“But… I don’t understand. You… you can’t be here. You Crossed. I saw you, in the Aether. What—what are you doing here?” I couldn’t tear my eyes from her, couldn’t bear to look away.
“When the Gateway was reversed, the Aether became unstable. Some of us were drawn out.”