by E. E. Holmes
“And what would possess you to keep a journey of this nature from your High Priestess?” Simone asked.
“Because the message I have been tasked with delivering is not for her ears. It is for yours,” I replied.
Simone gave a look of mild surprise, which I was sure must be artifice, as Marguerite had surely told her that I had come with a message. “A message for me? From whom? Who would presume to task you with a message for me who would not come before me themselves?”
“The message is from Agnes Isherwood,” I said. “And I should imagine that the reason she could not deliver it herself is abundantly clear.”
Simone’s lovely face went very still, and for a moment she appeared to be carved of the very same marble that surrounded her. Then she gave me a small, tight smile and said, “Very well, Jessica Ballard. What is this message?”
I took a deep breath. This was it.
“The Sentinels have begun their watch.”
The effect was chilling. The very air in the room seemed to stop circulating, the fire to stop crackling. Even Marguerite, still sunk into a perpetual half-bow, seemed to cease to exist. In that moment, there was only Simone and me and the great, devastating truth that hung in the space between us.
Simone’s lips barely moved when at last she managed to whisper. “Tell me how you know this.”
And it all came spilling out. “I found a message hidden in an ancient tapestry of Agnes Isherwood at Fairhaven. It had been woven right into the fabric itself. You would never believe me if I told you how it got there, so suffice it to say that it was left for me, and I found it. I realized that the message was a catalog number, of the kind used at Skye Príosún. I followed it back to the Catacombs Archive there, where a hidden panel within a drawer revealed both a sketch of my likeness, and the instructions I needed to go Rifting.”
“Rifting?” Simone said, the sharpness of her tone causing her sister to shrink back in alarm, lest that sharpness be directed at her. “You refer to the antiquated Traveler practice of communing with the spirit world?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, nodding. “I had done it once before, when I was staying in the Traveler camp. And while I was at Skye Príosún, I learned that the Travelers were deeply connected to the mystery through the existence of the Tansy Hag.”
A spasm of something shot across Simone’s flawless features—was it fear? “The Tansy Hag?”
“Yes,” I said, intrigued that she had not even balked at the mention of so obscure a name. “She has been imprisoned there for centuries. It was Lucida Worthington who convinced me I must go to see her. It was the mark of the Tansy Hag that a Necromancer had broken into her cell to carve into the flesh on her back. An ancient mark, so obscure, so relegated to Durupinen fairy tales, that even the most knowledgeable of Scribes was ignorant of its existence. It was the Tansy Hag who explained to me what I must do in order to understand the clues left behind for me by Agnes Isherwood. She told me that I must Rift, and that when I did, I must look for and go through a second door.”
“I do not follow,” Simone said, holding up a hand meant to slow the progress of my story.
It felt strange to be explaining an aspect of Durupinen culture to the most powerful Durupinen in the world, but I did my best. “When one enters the Rift, there is always a door, and that door is always ajar. That door exists so that the Rifter can exit the Rift at any point she chooses. But the Tansy Hag told me that there would be a second door—a deeper door, and that I was to go through it if I wanted to understand the clues that Agnes had left behind for me. And so, when I arrived back at Fairhaven, a Traveler friend helped me prepare the herbs and artwork, and I Rifted.”
“And did you find this… this second door of which the Tansy Hag spoke?” Simone asked, rather breathlessly. For all her imperial aloofness, I could tell that she was hanging on my every word. Her hands were tense upon the arms of her throne. Marguerite looked enraptured as well, though whether she truly felt that way or whether she was simply emulating her sister, was impossible to tell.
“I did,” I replied. “Agnes Isherwood had created it, hundreds of years ago, so that she might warn us all of the danger that was to come, and she was waiting for me on the other side of it. She told me to deliver her message to three people: the High Priestess of the Traveler Clans, the Keeper of the Elementals, and the High Priestess of the International High Council. She told me it was the only way to save the Gateways.”
“And did she illuminate you further on what she meant by ‘save the Gateways?’” Simone asked.
“She… she did,” I replied, hesitating now. How much did the High Priestess know? What did Agnes’ words mean to her? “She told me that hundreds of years ago, during her time, the Gateways were contained not within the bloodlines of the Durupinen, but within the Geatgrimas themselves. They were the true Gateways: actual physical landmarks located around the world. When the Necromancers waged a great battle to gain control over the Gateways, the Durupinen worried that they would not be able to hold them, and so they… they created a Casting that would remove the Gateways from the Geatgrimas and conceal them within the bloodlines of the Durupinen themselves.”
Simone’s face was completely unreadable as she listened to what Agnes had explained to me. I could discern nothing of her reaction. Marguerite, however, had risen up out of her groveling posture and was staring back and forth between her sister and myself as though she could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Simone, that’s… that can’t possibly be true, what the girl says. Tell her she is mistaken, sister.”
But Simone did not contradict me. She simply continued to gaze at me, appraising me. As her silence stretched on, I blurted out the rest of my story.
“Agnes also told me that she feared they had made the Geatgrimas unstable, and that one day, they would collapse altogether. She told me that I must deliver her message before it was too late, but she… the Rift sort of chucked me out before I could ask her what her message meant.”
“And have you delivered it to all three of the intended recipients, as you promised?” Simone asked me.
“Yes,” I told her. “Ileana Lovell, the High Priestess of the Traveler Clans is here with me. She wanted to accompany me on the rest of the journey because she thought it might be dangerous, which has turned out to be an accurate prediction. I went to see Lira Blackwell as well, the Keeper of the Elementals who lives in the Dering Woods. She was… less than happy to hear the message.”
Simone gave a grim smile. “And if you have delivered the message as you say, then each of these women ought to have given something to you—a relic hidden away for the very moment when they heard the words that you spoke to them.”
“Yes,” I said, my pulse quickening now. I reached down and pulled the two chains from around my neck, holding the keys aloft in the space between us. For a moment we all just stood there watching them swing gently on the ends of their chains, glinting as they reflected the firelight.
Simone leaned forward and held out a hand. I dropped the two keys into her palm. As I did so, my finger brushed against her skin, which was icy cold.
“I never thought the day would come when I would see these keys for myself,” Simone said with a sort of sigh. “I’m not sure I even believed they existed. Or perhaps I merely hoped that they did not.” She rose from her throne in a fluid, graceful movement and beckoned me forward. “Come with me, Jessica Ballard. I have something I must show you.”
19
Alliances
SIMONE SWEPT DOWN off her pedestal and strode gracefully across the room. Marguerite roused herself from her shock in time to scurry along behind her sister, gathering up the frothy lace edges of the train in her hands, like a perpetual bridesmaid. The girl in the fireplace sunk down so low as her mistress passed that her nose brushed the soot in the hearth. I followed behind Marguerite, who continuously stole frightened glances at me as we followed Simone through another set of doors, and then another.
Simone
’s chambers seemed to go on forever. From the chamber where we had our meeting, we passed through a chamber that seemed to serve as a kind of office, with a white marble desk, a collection of porcelain ink bottles and fluffy white quills. Beyond this chamber was a private library, where all of the books had been bound in ivory or pale gold-gilded leather and shelved from floor to ceiling. A single white chaise lounge stood in the center of the room upon a round white fur rug with a white marble-topped table just beside it. A book lay open upon the table, waiting patiently to be taken up again. Beyond the library was a room full of nothing but maps and globes, hung on the walls, reposing on shelves, and spread out upon great drafting tables. The largest globe I had ever seen hung suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room and turned very slowly on a heavy golden chain that ran through its center. As we passed through, I heard a fluttering of restless wings, and looked up to see hundreds of pure white doves nested in the rafters above our heads. The next room looked like a kind of museum showroom, with case after glass case of spectacular jewelry, crowns, swords, and armor on display. Though we did not pause long enough to examine the treasures closely, I spotted several triskeles worked into the metal and inlaid in precious gems.
It was in this room that we turned and entered a second, less imposing door on the lefthand wall. It led to a second chamber much like the one we had just left, only the relics on display were much less spectacular and showy. The cases in this room contained not fabulous jewels, but old books, scrolls, and documents, all carefully preserved under glass, protected from prying hands and the destructive effects of air and dust. Within this room, along the wall, there were several rows of black metal safes, each with a numbered combination lock upon it. It was along this wall that Simone stopped at last. Marguerite, panting from the pace of our excursion, smoothed her sister’s train carefully out on the floor around her and then quickly backed away into the nearest corner in an attempt to make herself disappear as much as possible. Simone spared not a glance for her, but kept her eyes fixed most firmly upon mine.
“You stand, Jessica Ballard, amongst the most treasured relics of the Durupinen world,” Simone said, flicking a hand casually up in the air to reference the many priceless items around us. “Many of them have never been seen by any Durupinen who was not a High Priestess herself—or the shadow of one,” she added, with a smirk toward her sister. “Every one of these relics has its own special place in the history of our sisterhood, except for one, whose moment it was said, was still to come.”
Simone turned to the smallest of the safes and turned the dial once, twice, three times, and then with a click and a whooshing of air, the door swung open. She pulled from its depths a bundle of faded purple velvet, which she cradled carefully in her hands for a moment before unfolding it to reveal a third iron key.
Marguerite muttered a soft oath in French as Simone held it up on its fine golden chain and then, pulling the other two from the pocket of her gown, let all three of them dangle in front of us, clinking lightly together, like wind chimes.
“The Three Keys of the Reckoning,” she whispered. “Together again for the very first time, perhaps, since they were forged.”
“The… the three keys of the what, now?” I asked faintly.
“The Reckoning. I gather Agnes did not go so far in her explanations to you as to explain the Reckoning.”
“She… I… no, she didn’t have the chance,” I whispered. For some reason, the sight of the three keys dangling back and forth made me feel dizzy, as though they were hypnotizing me. Then I realized I’d nearly stopped breathing and took a deep breath.
“Everything Agnes told you about the history of the Gateways is true,” Simone said, in a tone that seemed to suggest that it cost her something quite precious to admit it. “The Durupinen have always been tied to the spirit world. We were shepherdesses once, guiding and coaxing the spirits in our charge to the Geatgrimas, where they could Cross of their own free will. Our ability to see and sense them was innate in our blood; the Gateways themselves were not.”
Marguerite was making a soft animal sound in the corner—it might have been stifled sobbing. But Simone ignored it, all her attention now on the keys in her hands.
“We acted for the right reasons. We sought only to protect, not to empower or enrich ourselves. When the Casting was performed that made us the Gatekeepers, a counter-Casting was also created, a counter-Casting that would reverse the process and return the Gateways to their rightful places in the world once again. One could not exist without the other, they were the light and the darkness, the yin and the yang, the two sides of the scale that would hold the two worlds in balance. And only in the timely performing of the counter-Casting could the delicate trust that existed between the Durupinen and the spirit world remain intact. That moment when the counter-Casting was to be performed became known as the Reckoning.”
“But it wasn’t performed,” I said. “It was all but forgotten.”
“For a long time, our foremothers did not believe it safe to attempt to return the Gateways to the Geatgrimas. For many centuries after we internalized the gift, they feared the Geatgrimas would fall into Necromancer hands. And so, we built ourselves up as powerfully as we dared. We grew our armies, nurtured our prestige, and consolidated our power and influence around the world. We became, over time, a force to be reckoned with, and when the Necromancers next dared to try their strength, they were all but wiped from the face of the earth. The Geatgrimas were safe.”
“But the Gateways were not returned to them,” I said.
“No, they were not,” Simone replied. “Becoming the mistresses of so much power took its toll on us. We became drunk with it. Why, we asked ourselves, should we not hold on to the Gateways a little while longer? Where could they possibly be safer than within the blood of the most powerful organization on the earth? Who could better protect them, better defend them? And if we used them to our benefit, was that not our right? Our privilege? If we siphoned off a bit of energy here or there to sustain us in our fight, had we not earned it, after everything we had sacrificed for the spirit world?”
I suppressed a shiver, for at last my overwrought brain understood why the woman now standing before me looked so utterly unworldly, so unnaturally flawless. It was a result of Leeching, the practice of using the energy of a Crossing spirit and taking it into oneself, to make oneself appear younger, more beautiful, or even to heal a wound or illness. The practice had been rampant in the upper levels of the Northern Clans when I’d first arrived at Fairhaven, and it wasn’t banned until the reversal of the Gateways revealed many weakened spirits trapped in the Aether, lacking the energy they needed to Cross fully because it had been sucked from them, like blood from a vampire’s victims. But here at Havre de Gardiennes, it seemed Leeching was still very much practiced, and nowhere more so than by the woman in front of me, an unchanged vision of youthful perfection for the more than fifty years of her reign.
Simone smiled cryptically, as though she knew exactly the realization that had come over me. “We buried the truth about the origins of the Gateways, at first to protect them, but as the years went by, we buried them deeper to protect ourselves. Now only a very small, tightly controlled number of us even know that our gift was not ours at all—a number you and your companions have now joined.” Vaguely in my peripheral vision, I saw that Marguerite had sunk to her knees, brought to them, no doubt, by the weight of the knowledge that she had only just, at that very moment, discovered.
“And now the scales we meant to keep in balance have tipped so far that we are very nearly too late to right them again. And now, our last defense, our failsafe, the Sentinels have risen.” She looked at me, tilting her head to the side like an inquisitive child. “Do you know, I wonder, what the Sentinels are?”
“I… have some idea,” I said. “There is a second part of the story that I haven’t told you yet, about the Geatgrima at Fairhaven. You see—”
But Simone waved a hand dism
issively at me. “A Durupinen has entered into a connection with the Geatgrima there.”
My jaw dropped. “Yes. How did you—”
“It is happening everywhere. Celeste may not have chosen to come to me at first, but others have, from other clans all over the world. At nearly every Geatgrima around the globe, a Sentinel has now risen. In fact, I believe one of the only Geatgrimas in the world that still stands without a Sentinel is the one at the heart of Havre de Gardiennes.”
I stood transfixed for a moment at the mental image of women like Savvy trapped all over the world, pinpoints of light on a globe spinning terribly out of control, the points of light blurring, connecting, and finally…
“What’s happening to them? What are the Sentinels, really?”
“We had to make sure that we had a way to keep the Geatgrimas open if ever the day came that they grew so unstable that they were in danger of collapse. And so the Casting that created our gift also created the Sentinels. When the time came, when the Geatgrimas were at imminent risk of closing forever and taking the Gateways with them, the Sentinels would be called to use their gifts, to keep the Geatgrimas stable until we could complete the counter-Casting to return the Gateways to their rightful place.”
“So, what you’re saying is that Savvy—that’s my friend at Fairhaven—and the other Sentinels are using their Gateways to keep the Geatgrimas open?”
“Yes,” Simone replied. “Their Gateways are circulating like lifeblood between themselves and the Geatgrimas, feeding the Geatgrimas, keeping them alive, in a sense.”
“And so, what will happen to them—the Sentinels—when the counter-Casting is performed?” I asked, tears springing into my eyes. “Will… will Savvy and the others be all right?”
“The counter-Casting was designed to protect the Sentinels,” Simone said. “If it were to be performed, the Sentinels would survive.”
“Oh, thank God,” I gasped, dropping my face into my hands and taking several long, cleansing breaths to calm myself. She’ll be all right, I kept telling myself. She’ll be all right.