by E. E. Holmes
“What if it doesn’t, Jess?” Hannah asked. The question floated through my head, quivering with fear.
“I don’t know.”
“We’re coming,” Milo said at once. “We’re coming with you.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “The Necromancers are going to target anywhere they think I might be, and the safest and best protected place by far is Fairhaven. You have to stay there. The Caomhnóir will keep you safe. Everyone traveling with me is in terrible danger. I’m carrying enough guilt on that score without adding the two of you to that list.”
“Jess, we can’t let you go on your own,” Hannah argued.
“I’m not on my own,” I cut in. “I’ve got Finn. I’ve got Cat, who is probably the savviest and fiercest Tracker the Durupinen have. I’ve got Lucida, which, oddly enough, is somewhat comforting, given her skill set. And I’ve got Ileana, who hates me, it’s true, but carries with her the authority of her High Priestesshood, which has to count for something in the eyes of the International High Council.”
“Jess, we can’t just sit here and do nothing while you—” Milo began.
“I’m not asking you to do nothing. Do everything you can to convince Celeste to come to Havre de Gardiennes and tell the International High Council everything. If she does that, I’ll have the full might of the Northern Clans in my corner, too.”
“Jess, I don’t like this at all,” Hannah said, and her fear sang like a chorus inside my skull.
“I don’t like it either,” I admitted. “But we’re out of options. This is the only way forward if we’re going to help Savvy and the others. We can’t wait around for the Necromancers to get the upper hand. The entire spirit world is counting on us.”
“So, as usual, no pressure,” Milo snorted.
“Correct. It’s all totally chill and low-key,” I confirmed.
“Well, I’m not waiting around,” Hannah said. “I’m going to Celeste’s office right now. I’ll sit outside it all day if I have to. I’ll let you know if I make any progress convincing her to come to Havre de Gardiennes.”
“Thanks, you two,” I said. “This will all be over soon.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hannah said, and pulled out of the connection.
“Take care of her, Milo,” I said, before Milo had a chance to slip out after her.
“I always do, sweetness,” he replied, and I felt his energy cut out as the door to the connection slammed shut between us. My head felt strangely empty without it. It was almost enough to make me take back what I said about them coming to meet us at Havre de Gardiennes—almost, but not quite. There was precious little I could do to protect anyone from the fallout from this nightmare of a situation, but damn it, I could do this. I could do the unselfish thing for once and choose their safety over my own desire to have them by my side as I faced this uncertainty.
“Jess! We’ve got to go!” Finn called. “We haven’t a moment to lose here. Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling my brain probe longingly at the closed connection, aching for it to open again. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
I arrived in the alleyway outside of the Milkweed Teahouse to find our group split between the two vehicles; Lucida, Catriona, and Ileana sat in Catriona’s running car, all three faces staring out the windshield, all three expressions tense and anxious. Finn and Annabelle waited for me in Finn’s vehicle, the passenger side door open to receive me. Finn was scanning the surrounding area so quickly and constantly, he would have looked comical but for the deadly serious look on his face. I broke into a jog and hopped into the car, closing the door behind me.
“All still clear,” Finn said, though I could tell from his tone that he didn’t trust his own assessment of the situation. “I’ve been able to use a Durupinen connection to book the Chunnel tickets and arrange the transfers once we arrive in Paris. There will be a Caomhnóir vehicle waiting for us at the station that we can take down to Auvergne.”
“How long will it take us to get there?” I asked.
“About five and a half hours,” Finn said through clenched teeth, and it couldn’t be clearer that the length of the trip out on the open road had him on edge. “And then another hour or so on foot through the lower foothills of the mountains to Havre de Gardiennes. That’s the portion of the journey that worries me most.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They won’t just let us walk in the front doors. We’ll need to send a formal request for an audience with the High Priestess, and they won’t admit us even within the grounds of the fortress until the request has been approved, if indeed it is approved. And while we wait, which could be for hours, we will be completely exposed, utterly vulnerable.”
“Do you expect the borders of the fortress grounds to be crawling with Necromancers?” Annabelle asked, eyebrows raised. “Surely the Caomhnóir that guard Havre de Gardiennes will have the security of the area well in hand.”
“Let us hope so,” Finn said. “There is one thing of which I am completely sure, however; the Caomhnóir of Havre de Gardiennes will not sacrifice even a modicum of the fortress’ security to keep the likes of us safe. While we await word from the High Priestess, we fend for ourselves.”
“That sounds kind of counter-intuitive,” I said, frowning. “When have you ever known a Caomhnóir to leave a Durupinen in peril for any reason, even if she was not his direct charge?”
“Havre de Gardiennes is different,” Finn insisted. “There is no greater duty than protecting the High Priestess and her inner circle. Every decision they make will be with that objective in mind. Every outsider is a potential threat, even other Durupinen. No one will take our trustworthiness for granted. We will be treated, if not with hostility, then at the very least with a healthy dose of suspicion.”
“Do you know anything at all about the High Priestess herself?” I asked. In all the time since Agnes had charged me with delivering her message, I had not until this very moment thought of the High Priestess as a living, breathing individual. In my head, when I’d pictured the eventuality of meeting with her, she was nothing more than a looming, faceless figure upon a throne, an eventuality cloaked in doubt. I was far too worried about how I would reach the moment of meeting her to wonder what the actual meeting might be like. But now that I’d delivered my message to both Ileana and Lira, my curiosity about the woman herself had finally been piqued.
“Simone de Chastenay,” Finn said, and the name fell from his tongue with a certain reverence. “She has been the High Priestess of the International High Council for nearly fifty years.”
“Fifty years!” I cried. “So, she’s either really old, or she became High Priestess when she was really young.”
“The former, I believe,” Finn said. “I don’t know a great deal about her, other than the fact that her reign has been marked with an almost medieval adherence to tradition and ceremony. She revived a number of antiquated practices throughout the Durupinen world including, for example, the Sanctity Line.”
I groaned. The Sanctity Line was, quite literally, a physical divide in spaces occupied by both Durupinen and Caomhnóir, which dictated that the sexes not interact in any physical way, even in so innocuous a manner as sitting in desks beside each other. It had been one of the very first things I noticed when I began my training as an Apprentice Durupinen, for it had adorned the floor of every classroom, and little had chafed my feminist sensibilities quite so directly as that ludicrous marking upon the ground.
“So, she’s not exactly progressive, is that what you’re getting at?” I asked innocently. “Like, should we maybe not make out in front of her?”
Annabelle snorted with nervous laughter from the back seat, but Finn was too highly strung to crack a smile, so I quickly dispensed with the wisecracks and put my serious face back on. “Anything else?”
“She’s allowed a great deal of autonomy in local matters over the years, but this was primarily because she had seen to it that the reigning High Priestes
ses were nearly as traditional and strict as she was. From what I can gather from the members of the Council, she relishes the opportunity to put her foot down and quash insubordination. She is not meant to weigh in on expressly regional matters, but when she does, her opinion is never ignored. The other High Priestesses have a long and storied history of trying to avoid her involvement, which I imagine is why Celeste is doing just that as we speak. Simone’s clan is extraordinarily wealthy, though I do not know how much of that wealth is a direct result of her position and how much is simply old money. She has royal blood—and I mean non-Durupinen royalty. I do not expect we will find her either accommodating or easily persuaded.”
“Awesome,” I replied dryly. Sarcasm was always the perfect disguise for blind terror, right?
The entire ride to London, I waited for Hannah to pop back into the connection with word of Celeste’s reaction to the news that we’d been lying to her by omission for the last few days, but the connection stayed frustratingly closed. Not even Milo popped in to distract me, which left me with altogether too much time on my hands to worry about what was going to happen when we reached Havre de Gardiennes. The only person who seemed even more nervous than me was Lucida, who actually jumped out of the car at the first gas station we stopped at and violently vomited all over the pavement.
“Is she all right?” I asked Catriona as she fiddled with the gas pump.
Catriona glanced over at Lucida, who was now wiping her mouth with a shaking hand and walking unsteadily back to the car. “She’s a piece of raw meat on legs walking into the lion’s den. Of course, she’s not all right.”
“What do you—?”
“Oh, come off it, Jess. She’s a traitor. A jolly good percentage of the Northern Clans would have gladly seen her hanged and thrown confetti at the scaffold for what she did six years ago. Havre de Gardiennes is full of the most powerful Durupinen in the world, women who would have dearly loved to tie the noose themselves. She’s terrified.”
“Why didn’t they?” I asked, the thought occurring to me for the first time. “Why didn’t they execute her for what she did? Surely there can’t be any greater crime?”
“The Durupinen do not employ the death penalty under any circumstances,” Catriona said, raising her eyebrows and looking at me in apparent surprise. “Surely you know that?”
I shrugged. “I never thought to ask,” I said, a bit defensively.
Catriona shook her head solemnly. “If centuries of guiding the passage from the land of the living to the land of the dead has taught us one thing, it is that it is never up to us to decide what moment is appropriate to end a person’s life. That decision is and has always been the universe’s mandate to make and carry out, not our own. It is the reason the Caomhnóir do not carry firearms, and the reason our príosúns are full of dangerous traitors, criminals, and enemies who will never be released.”
“But now Lucida is out,” I said.
“Yes. And I doubt very much that the International High Council will care much for her presence within their walls, particularly when she arrives without guards or shackles or invitation.”
I looked back at Lucida’s figure in the car, her forehead pressed to the glass of the window, her eyes closed, her expression pained. “She doesn’t have to come,” I said. “She knows that.”
“She knows no such bloody thing,” Catriona said stiffly, looking indignant as she snapped the gas cap shut. “Lucida’s had precious little opportunity for redemption, and for all she swears she doesn’t regret what she did, I know her better than that. I know she’d rather die than miss the opportunity to tip the scales just a fraction in her direction.”
I shrugged. “It’s her choice. I just hope she knows what she’s doing.”
Catriona raised a single eyebrow at me. “Do any of us, really? Each one of us is throwing ourselves on a mercy we’re not sure will be there to catch us.”
“Touché.”
The rest of the ride to London was uneventful, unless you counted Finn intentionally taking three wrong exits to “lose” people who weren’t actually following us and jerking his head back to look in the rearview mirror so many times that he cricked his neck. By the time we had arrived at St. Pancras Station to board the Eurostar, Finn’s anxiety was ratcheted up so high that he was even giving the conductor who took our tickets a sideways look, as though sure the man would peel off his entire face like a villain in a spy movie to reveal Charlie Parker hiding beneath the skin of a decidedly plump middle-aged gentleman. It was with a definite sense of relief that we all settled into our seats, and once Finn had done a sweep of the train car to determine it was safe, he settled into a seat at the far end, where he could keep an eye on both doors, and finally seemed to relax just a bit.
Under any other circumstances, I would have found my first journey to Paris to be exciting—after all, what could be more fascinating for an art history major and museum nerd than to arrive in one of the most storied and artistically rich cities in the modern world? The thought of the Mona Lisa smiling away cryptically in the Louvre alone should have left me breathless with anticipation. But these were not such circumstances. There would be no time for ambling strolls through cultural landmarks or sipping coffee in charming outdoor cafes. There would be no stereotypical tourist selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower. The ride through the Chunnel was a blur. I jerked in and out of an uneasy, nightmare-filled doze, each time staring around half-panicked for several seconds before remembering where I was going and why I was going there. Beside me, Anabelle looked as though she’d forgotten how to close her eyes altogether, instead gazing out of the window with a blank stare. Ileana, for all her bluster about Travelers keeping up with modern customs of travel, looked vaguely horrified to find herself speeding along under the English Channel, her expression making it clear that she’d rather be almost anywhere than where she was. Lucida had fallen into a deep sleep with her forehead pressed to the cool glass, still looking ill. And Catriona, much like Finn, had chosen to distract herself by gazing suspiciously at every passenger with whom we shared the train car and imagining each of them to be a Necromancer lying in wait to ambush us the moment one of us rose to use the bathroom. In fact, the one time I tried to do just that, she found an excuse to follow me, lingering around outside the door until I had finished and ignoring my demands for an explanation as to why I wasn’t allowed to pee by myself.
When we pulled at last into the great vaulted interior of the Gare du Nord station in the heart of Paris, I felt my anxiety kick into high gear once again.
“Stick closely together and follow me,” Finn said tersely as we all stood up and joined the queue to exit the train. “Don’t speak to anyone, even if they approach you. The less attention we draw to ourselves, the better.” He threw a frustrated, regretful look at Ileana, the lone member of our party who looked much more like a lost carnival performer than a run-of-the-mill tourist. She was not paying him the slightest attention.
A sleek, black SUV was waiting for us, parked in the shadow of the Gare du Nord’s gothic exterior. The late afternoon sun sparkled off the arches of the stone and glass façade of the building. The car had attracted a certain amount of attention from nearby pedestrians, who likely thought the vehicle belonged to a celebrity or another wealthy and important person; their heads turned curiously as they walked by. A stony-faced man with aviator sunglasses sat in the driver’s seat. As soon as Finn approached and knocked upon the glass, the man stepped out of the car, shut the driver’s side door and, without so much as a glance at us, slipped into a waiting taxi and sped away. Finn pulled the door open again and gestured for the rest of us to enter the car, and we all hurriedly obliged his silent request.
Our car slipped the outer limits of the city just as the sun was slipping through the cradled fingers of the horizon. The buildings and neighborhoods gave way gradually to open fields and lush green hills, and the rosy glow of sunset deepened to a velvety violet twilight, punctuated here and there with t
he faint glimmer of an early star. The moon that rose to preside over the French countryside was huge and round, a cherub-cheeked orb that leeched the color from the landscape as it illuminated our way like a great spotlight into the foothills of the Auvergne mountains.
We did not approach through the national park, which would have been the traditional route for tourists, but instead slipped unseen into the green rolling hills by a little-used road hardly wide enough to be called a road at all. After a few miles, we reached a barrier and a sign which read, when translated into English, “Road washed out. High flooding. Seek alternate route.”
“Shit,” I said, once my spotty recollection of high school French made sense of the sign. “We’ll have to go back. We can’t get through this way.”
Finn, however, merely chuckled and rode around the barrier.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“That sign is not for us,” he replied, steering the car back onto the road on the far side of the barrier and resuming our drive.
“What do you mean, it’s not for us?” I asked. “Is this one of those James Bond cars that converts into a boat or something?” Not that I would have been all that surprised, given my experience with the breadth of Durupinen resources.
“I mean that barrier has been placed there to stop random tourists and hikers from stumbling upon Havre de Gardiennes. We’ll come across several other such deterrents along our way, I expect.”
“But surely the French authorities know the castle is there,” I replied. “You can’t actually hide a castle, not in this day and age.”
“Of course, you can’t,” Finn said. “Just as with Fairhaven, the true nature of the castle has been concealed, and a great deal of money has been spent to ensure it remains a secret. And as for those persistent enough in their recklessness to venture beyond the barriers and roadblocks, they are turned away before they can get even a passing look at the place. The Caomhnóir who patrol the forests surrounding the base of the mountain wear the garb of mountain rescue and park rangers, not traditional Guardian attire. Trespassers are escorted away, by force, if necessary, to ensure that Havre de Gardiennes remains in seclusion from the outside world.”