Heart of the Rebellion

by E. E. Holmes

  I was already shaking my head. “If I don’t have art supplies, I’ll invent them, and I think we can all agree that my creativity in that regard is both impressive and dangerous.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right,” Milo mumbled.

  “I don’t think we’ve got any choice,” I said grimly. “I think you’re going to have to start tying me to the bed.”

  Hannah looked horrified. “Jess, there must be another—”

  “Hannah, I just imitated a circus high wire performer in my sleep!” I cried. “I think a little bit of rope is the least of my problems!”

  Hannah didn’t reply, but her face fell into resigned lines of misery.

  “When is Fiona going to be back?” Milo asked, with a tinge of desperation in his voice.

  “She told me the whole process would take five days,” I told him.

  I needed Fiona now more than ever. The compulsion to produce the drawings was getting worse by the day, and the Seer in me no longer seemed satisfied just to record the drawings on paper. It seemed bound and determined to bring this newest prophecy not just to the page, but to the eyes and attention of the entire castle.

  And I could not let that happen. Not yet. Not until I understood what it meant.

  No one at the castle except for Hannah, Milo, and Fiona knew that I was a Seer, and we had hidden the knowledge for good reason. Since the first Seers had recorded their predictions, they had been met with intense mistrust, scrutiny, and even outright attack. It was natural, I knew, to be afraid of the unknown, but somehow it seemed that a glimpse into the future—a glimpse without context or guarantees—inspired a kind of fear that wreaked havoc and destroyed lives. And I could not afford to let Durupinen fear cloud this prophecy. It was too important. There was too much at stake.

  I would not risk him. I could not risk him.

  There was another person who knew I was a Seer. Finn Carey had once been my Caomhnóir, the guardian who protected our clan’s Gateway. Fiercely adversarial at first, our relationship had crossed a forbidden line when we had fallen in love with each other. But last year, our relationship had been discovered, and Finn had been sent away to the remote Isle of Skye, to guard the príosún there, and I had been left to pick up the shattered remains of my life without him.

  But then, just a few weeks ago, I had seen Finn for a brief and heart-wrenching few minutes, during which he revealed to me that something strange was happening at the príosún. The Caomhnóir there were not following orders—disappearing from shifts, meeting secretly, and even their superiors seemed to be covering for their bizarre behavior. Finn had begged me to pass along this information to the Caomhnóir of Fairhaven, but a Necromancer plot had resulted in the murder of the one ally who might have been able to relay that message.

  And now I was drawing that príosún over and over again, an army of men and spirits swarming its battlements…

  “We’re going to have to find a new place to hide these,” Hannah said, rising and crossing the room to open the closet door. A small mountain of scrolls lay piled inside. Soon there would be no more room for any more of them amongst the clothes and suitcases. “Unless you think… I mean, I know you don’t want to destroy them, and I understand why, but…”

  “No,” I said sharply. “No. We can’t burn them. What if one of them has a clue? What if I’m missing something?”

  “But they’re all the same,” Hannah said gently. “You’ve examined them a hundred—”

  Something in my expression silenced her. She closed the closet door again.

  “I just need Fiona to come back,” I said, more to convince myself than anyone else. “She’ll know what to do next.”

  “You also need to get some sleep,” Milo said. “The kind that doesn’t include feats of death-defying skill.”

  I sighed, feeling all my defiance drain away, leaving nothing but the empty suck of exhaustion in its absence.

  “I know.”

  “But how can we go back to sleep without solving this problem?” Hannah said, twisting her fingers together in a characteristic nervous gesture. “How do we know she won’t just do it all over again?”

  “You’re forgetting something rather important,” Milo told her.

  “What? What am I forgetting?”

  “Ghosts don’t need beauty sleep, sweetness. We are perpetually fabulous,” he said. “And that means, I’m on the night shift, okay? We don’t need to resort to clapping Jess in irons like an old-timey criminal. It’s just going to be part of my job description from now on to watch her while she sleeps.”

  “Well, that sounds fascinating and not at all stalker-ish,” I grumbled.

  “I’d much rather watch you drool and snore for a few hours than scrape you off the pavement,” Milo snapped. “I’m the Spirit Guide. This is my guidance. Heed my wisdom.”

  I gave him a grudging smile. “Thanks, Milo.”

  “No problem,” he replied, then pointed imperiously in the direction of my bed. “Now both of you go back to dreamland so I can test out my creepy new hobby.”

  I laid back down in my bed, but I didn’t think sleep would find me so easily now. Sleep and fear are uneasy bedfellows. My thoughts drifted, as they always did when they were untethered by distraction, to Finn.

  “I’m trying, Finn,” I whispered into the darkness. “I’m trying to figure this out. I’m going to get you out of there.”

  I imagined the words like balloons, floating up into the air and carried on the breeze to him—ignoring the sounds of the storm that was now whipping that breeze into a gale and lashing the rain against the windows.

  Storms pass, I told myself. Storms pass, and so will this.

  2

  Interpretations

  DESPITE THE FEAR, despite the aching in my muscles from clinging like a mountaineer to the side of the castle, despite Milo’s eyes boring into the back of my head as he watched me, sleep claimed me at last. I had hoped it would be dreamless, so that I might reclaim half a decent night’s sleep, but of course, I wasn’t that lucky. Instead, my exhausted brain chose to replay, in its entirety, my last meeting with Fiona. It was amazing how my mind clung so tightly to the details, replayed them so vividly, since at the time, I was so panicked that I barely knew what was happening even as I lived it.

  It played like a movie on the insides of my eyelids. Fiona closed the door behind me and began shuffling around the room, turning on lamps and lighting misshapen stumps of candles. I stood and watched her, violently shaking from head to foot, the first drawing of the prophecy still draped around my shoulders like a cape on the world’s most dysfunctional superhero.

  Emotionally Crippled Sleep-Artist Girl, to the rescue!

  When she had created enough light to see by, Fiona beckoned me over to her desk, which she cleared with a single, violent sweep of her hand. Papers, molds, paint cans, and containers of drawing implements flew across the room and disappeared into the general art-detritus that carpeted the stone floors. Then she reached out a hand for the drawing, snapping at me impatiently when I didn’t move quickly enough.

  I stumbled forward, pulling the thing from my shoulders and handing it to her. She took hold of it carefully, delicately pinching the corners between the very tips of her fingers and draping it over the surface of her desk, smoothing out wrinkles and picking bits of lint from its surface. She gazed down at it for a long moment, entranced, and then she looked up at me.

  “Tell me how you—Jess!”

  She started forward, reaching me just before I hit the ground. I hadn’t even realized I was falling before she caught me. I had the strange sensation that I was under water, or else floating in space.

  “Jess! Are you all right?” Fiona cried. Her face, as it looked down at me, was alive with fear.

  “I… I don’t know.” I blinked. Her face swam out of focus and back again. “I suddenly feel so… am I crying?”

  To my great surprise, my face was wet with tears, and my breath was hitching and catching over sobs that
seemed to be issuing from me of their own accord.

  “Yes, you’re crying. You’re in shock, no doubt,” Fiona muttered. She threw my arm around her shoulder and swung me up from the ground with a grunt. Then she carried me across the room and deposited me on her bed.

  “Don’t move. Stay right there. Take some nice deep breaths. I’m going to make you a cuppa.” She threw several heavy blankets over me and scurried off across the room to a table near the window, where she kept a hot plate and a kettle.

  I couldn’t have gotten up if I’d wanted to. I lay there under her quilts, shuddering with sobs that seemed to be attacking me from the outside rather than welling up from inside of me. I tried to catch my breath, but it felt like a new sob was always waiting to force its way out every time I tried to expand my lungs. I clenched my teeth, feeling as though I might just shake apart.

  Fiona returned to my side, a chipped mug of tea in one hand and a warm, wet tea towel in the other. Kicking off her slippers, she clambered onto the bed behind me and sat with her back against the wall. She eased me up into a seated position in front of her and laid me back against her, my head against her shoulder, my back against her chest. Then she wrapped her legs around my hips, tucking all the blankets tightly around me, like a cocoon.

  “Now, you just lay your head back. That’s right,” Fiona said, in as gentle a tone as I’d ever heard her muster. “Watch that arm now.”

  “I… I don’t think my arm’s broken anymore,” I told her.

  “What? But… the cast…”

  “I know it sounds insane, but I can feel it in there. The drawing… it did something to my arm. It feels normal. It’s the only thing that feels normal.” My voice rose to a hysterical pitch.

  Fiona pressed the warm towel to my forehead. “No more talk of arms for the moment. Take a sip of this, now, just nice and slowly. That’s right, easy does it.”

  I slurped from the cup as she held it up to my lips. The hot tea trickled down my chin and onto my shirt, now drenched and cold with sweat. Then I leaned back against her chest. She smelled like paint and Castile soap. I tried to match the rhythm of her breathing. Long inhale, slow exhale. I began to count the beats of her heart against my shoulder blade. Gradually, my own breaths grew quieter. The tears that traced each other’s tracks down my face began to slow, and then dried up altogether. The dizziness dissipated, and with it, the feeling that the walls were closing in around me. Every few seconds, Fiona pressed the tea cup to my lips again, and I would gratefully take another sip.

  “There now,” Fiona said quietly, when the last of the tea had disappeared from the cup. “I’m sorry. I was so caught up in your drawing that I neglected to notice that you were about to fall apart right in front of me. A mentor should be more on top of things like that, but we all know I’m utter shite at the mentor thing.”

  “Y-you’re not sh-shite.” I forced the words through my chattering teeth, which still sounded like a cartoon skeleton even though my whole body felt warm now.

  “A compliment if ever I’ve heard one,” Fiona said dryly. “Now, tell me what happened, if you think you can manage it.”

  I took a long, slow breath, and noted with relief that my lungs had decided to start accepting oxygen again. “I was visiting with Flavia—you know, the Traveler who—”

  “I know who she is,” Fiona interrupted. “Go on.”

  “Mrs. Mistlemoore and the Scribes think that they’ve been able to lift the Castings on her. She said there are hopeful signs that the effects are reversing—or at least, improving. Anyway, I sat down beside her, and it seemed like she was asleep. Much calmer and more relaxed than she was before, but not conscious. And then I started talking to her—you know, just to let her know that I was there and that everything was going to be okay. And then I reached down and took her hand and she… she woke up,” I finished lamely, at a complete loss to describe what it was she had actually done.

  “Woke up how?” Fiona asked in a tone that suggested she knew just how inadequate my words had been. “Opened her eyes? Talked to you?”

  “Yeah, but… it was terrifying. She grabbed my hand so tightly she bruised it.” I showed Fiona the bruises on my hand, as well as the puncture marks from Flavia’s fingernails. “And she pulled me toward her with such force—there’s no way she had that kind of strength in her, not after everything her body has been through. And then her eyes opened and…” I shuddered.

  “Do her eyes still look the same as before?” Fiona asked.

  “No,” I replied. “The silvery color is definitely going away, but they aren’t back to normal yet.”

  “Did she speak?”

  “No. She didn’t need to.”

  Fiona scowled. “How do you mean, then?”

  “When she stared at me—when I looked into her eyes—it was like I was… falling.”

  “Falling?” Fiona prompted sharply.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “That’s the only way I can describe the sensation. And then everything went dark, and when I came to…” I gestured helplessly to the drawing now draped over her desk.

  “Where were you when you came to?” Fiona asked. We had moved on from encouragement to interrogation now, but I didn’t mind. As the shock wore off, it felt good to get the details out, like sucking poison from a wound.

  “I was sitting right there, in the same chair that I’d been sitting in before I blacked out,” I told her. “But there was an inkwell and some feathers on the table next to us. I obviously must have just grabbed them and started drawing.”

  Fiona’s brows were pulled so slightly together that it looked as though a single, fuzzy brown caterpillar had nestled into the furrow above her eyes.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said, after a long pause.

  Fiona snorted. “One thing?”

  I ignored her and went on. “Every drawing I’ve made in the past has fallen into one of two categories. Either they were spirit-induced, or a prophecy. Either a spirit showed up and used me to express their own message, or my Seer gift brought the message to me. But this… what was this?”

  Fiona didn’t answer. She seemed to be absorbing my words.

  I went on. “Flavia is alive. Her spirit is contained inside her body. So, it can’t possibly be a spirit-induced drawing, can it? She’s not a ghost.”

  Still Fiona did not speak. She was scratching at her cheek, eyes focused out in the middle distance. When she finally replied, her words were very measured—very cautious.

  “I can’t say that the normal rules apply in the case of someone like Flavia. She has… an awareness now. When that Necromancer spawn twisted her Spirit Sight, her spirit became aware of its natural state—that is to say, it likely saw itself as separate from the body and behaved as such until her Spirit Sight was restored.”

  I nodded. This tallied with what Mrs. Mistlemoore had explained to us, about Flavia being forced to stare at her own soul, to acknowledge it as a separate entity from her body that would long for escape once it had become cognizant of its state.

  “So… do you think it’s possible that, when she grabbed onto me, she used me as a Muse, just like any other ghost?”

  “I… don’t think so. At least, I don’t think it’s that simple. I think she tried to, certainly, but I think what she did instead was trigger your gift.”

  “Which one?” I asked dryly, to which Fiona gave me a grudging half-smile.

  “Fair question. You’re just so bloody talented, aren’t you?” she said. “Flavia tried to use you as a Muse, but whatever it was she was trying to tell you triggered your Seer gift. Perhaps she wanted to warn you about Charlie. Perhaps she overheard something he said. Either way, her message was like a match, and your Seer gift… well, it was waiting right there like a stack of dry bloody kindling, wasn’t it? Just waiting to be lit and burned to all hell.”

  I looked over at the drawing. “To all hell is right,” I murmured. “Have… have you had a look at that drawing yet?”

>   Fiona grimaced. “A quick one. Enough to know it bodes no bloody good. Shall we…?” She gestured over to it, giving me a sweeping look as though trying to assess if I could join her without passing out again.

  “Yeah. I think we’d better,” I said, dredging up some determination from somewhere deep inside me and steeling myself with it.

  “Can you sit up a bit, d’you reckon? My bloody foot has gone numb,” Fiona said.

  “What? Oh, yeah. Sorry about that,” I said, shifting myself into a slightly more elevated position so that Fiona could slide her leg out from under me.

  Fiona sat herself on the edge of the bed beside me, massaging her toes for a minute. Then she stood up, helped me to my feet, and walked me carefully across the room. My legs were a little wobbly, but the dizziness had passed, and I did not stumble. I dragged the quilt with me, clutching it around my shoulders and wrapping myself back in it as I collapsed into Fiona’s desk chair, which tipped precariously. One of the wheels had long since fallen off and she had never bothered to replace it, choosing instead to nearly concuss herself every time she sat down.

  Fiona approached the drawing warily, as though it might jump up and attack her if she startled it. It made me even more nervous than before, to see the awe on her face.

  “You recognize that location?” I asked her after a minute or so, when I couldn’t take the silence any more.

  “Yeah, I sure do. Just visited the place, didn’t I?” Fiona said under her breath. She looked up at me. “Do you recognize it?”

  I nodded. “I do. It’s the Skye Príosún, isn’t it? I’ve never been there, but… but I knew what it was as soon as I saw it.”

  She placed a tentative fingertip on the fabric and traced the curve of one of the ink lines. “This triskele over the top… it looks out of place. The angles of the strokes…”

  “I didn’t draw the triskele. It was already there,” I explained. “The Scribes drew it on the partition while they were trying to cure Flavia with a Casting.”

  “Ah, well, that explains that, then,” Flavia said. “Could have told me that from the off.”