by E. E. Holmes
“Sorry, I was too busy trying not to lose consciousness,” I said, a bit waspishly.
“These men… many of them look like Caomhnóir. You see the boots? The staffs? And these vests… you see the way they wrap around the chest and under their arms? These are part of the Caomhnóir uniform at the príosúns.”
“Yes, my first thought was that some of them were Caomhnóir. But then… who are the others?”
I asked the question because I wanted her to give me a different answer than the one I knew to be true. Please, I begged her silently, please, tell me something… anything except the thing I already know you’re going to tell me. Just make something up.
Fiona looked up at me as though she knew exactly what I was thinking and would not stand for it. My face crumpled and she nodded. “We both know who they are. The question is, why are they out of their cells and standing shoulder to shoulder with Caomhnóir? And then there’s this fuckery,” she added, waving her hand over the hordes of spirits hovering in the air above the scene. “There are many spirits at the príosún, of course, but they’re all carefully contained within its walls. No spirit who isn’t a prisoner dares hang about the place. The Castings are too strong and too unpleasant for them to tolerate for long. I just can’t make heads or tails of it.”
I swallowed convulsively and felt the fear that was rising up my throat slip back down into my stomach, where it roiled like the sea in a storm. “Fiona, there’s… I haven’t been able to tell you this yet, but… there’s something going on with the Caomhnóir at the príosún.”
Fiona’s head snapped up. “And how would you know that, precisely?” she asked sharply.
“I… I saw Finn. He found me at Róisín Lightfoot’s wedding. No one knows,” I said quickly, for she looked as though she might revert to tradition and throw something at me. “Well, no one who’s going to betray us, anyway. It was only for a moment, in secret, while he was on break. We weren’t caught.”
Fiona lowered herself slowly onto a stool, her expression grim but resigned. “Let’s hear the worst of it then. What did he have to say?”
“He told me that the Caomhnóir at the príosún have been acting strangely. They are showing up late or skipping shifts. They aren’t where the duty logs say they are. And he even walked in on some of them having some kind of secret meeting when they were supposed to be asleep in their quarters.”
Fiona chewed a fingernail thoughtfully. “They are a rougher sort out there,” she hedged. “Unruly, like. Most of them couldn’t follow the code of conduct required to be a sworn clan Caomhnóir, one that protects the Gateway directly. Could be the whole operation is a bit looser than he’s used to at Fairhaven.”
“Yeah, Finn told me that, too. But what really disturbed him was that, when he went to report the behavior to his superiors, they blew him off. Just told him to forget about it, and not bother them with it anymore.”
Fiona raised her eyebrows. “Well, now, that is odd.”
“Exactly. And the superiors are the ones who have to verify and check all of the logs. So that meant that at least one of them had to be in on… whatever the hell is going on,” I said.
“That’s… not good,” Fiona muttered, beginning to pace.
“Gee, you think?” I shot back. “And there’s something else, too.”
“Out with it, then,” Fiona sighed. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“Well…” I stalled, twisting my fingers through the holes in the lace edging of the quilt. Once I told her—once I said it—there would be no going back. “Charlie Wright said something disturbing when we were tied up in that basement.”
“Just the one thing?” Fiona asked with a smirk.
I ignored the remark “He said that the Necromancers are rising again.”
Fiona rolled her eyes. “The Necromancers are always rising. This is why they are still around. They’re like a weed. We can prune them and tame them, but they’re damn near impossible to kill and they always rear their ugly little heads again the next season.”
“No, this was different,” I said, shaking my head, which was a mistake. It swam. “It wasn’t a generalization. He was being specific. He said, ‘We have allies now. Allies you have lost through your neglect and your arrogance and your ingratitude.’ Then he said, ‘Soon your defenses shall be ours. And so shall your gifts.’”
Fiona blinked. “What the bloody hell does that mean?”
“Well, the part about the gift is obvious. He thought he was about to steal my Spirit Sight. But the other bit… about the allies and the defenses… well, it’s got to mean the Caomhnóir at the príosún, doesn’t it? It’s the only thing that makes sense, especially in light of this.” I gestured desperately down to the drawing.
Fiona continued to stare at me, evidently too horrorstruck to formulate a coherent response.
“Fiona?” I asked after a solid minute’s silence. “What do you think?”
“A tempest in a teapot,” Fiona whispered.
“Sorry?”
Fiona shook her head. “What fools we are. What bloody, bloody fools.”
I frowned at her. “Do you think you could stop speaking fortune cookie and explain what the hell you’re talking about?”
Fiona jumped up suddenly from her stool, which toppled over behind her and rolled away across the floor. “That príosún houses the most dangerous of our criminals, both living and dead. It’s a fortress in the middle of nowhere, and so heavily guarded that it should be nigh impenetrable. But you don’t have to penetrate it if an alliance starts from within.”
“Alliance?” I repeated breathlessly. “With the Caomhnóir? But… why? Why in the world would the Caomhnóir want to join forces with the Necromancers?”
“We entrusted the neutralization of our most dangerous threats to Caomhnóir who we won’t even trust to guard us in person. We should have been sending our best—our most competent and most trustworthy. What could be more important than keeping our worst enemies locked away? But, no. We were selfish and shortsighted. We didn’t want to deal with the problems amongst our own Caomhnóir, so we sent them away where we could ignore them instead of addressing the issues. And now, we are reaping the dangerous harvest of what we have sown. Again.”
Her horror was infecting me, coursing through me as though riding the currents of blood in my veins.
“Well, we’ve got one advantage here,” Fiona said. “An advantage we don’t deserve, but we’ve got it and we’d better bloody well use it before it’s too late.”
“What advantage?” I asked.
“You.”
I blinked. “Me?”
“That’s right.” Fiona walked back to the desk and tapped her finger sharply on the drawing. “We’ve got you, and you’ve got this gift. It’s a curse, I know it,” she said quickly in response to the expression on my face. “I won’t insult you by calling it a gift, but we can’t pretend in this instance that it isn’t a blessing.”
“Blessing doesn’t sound a hell of a lot better than gift, Fiona,” I said through gritted teeth.
“What we call it doesn’t matter,” Fiona snapped. “What we do with it does. We’ve got a chance here. We’ve been forewarned. It’s a prophecy, and it’s one that we can act on and prevent, if we’re smart about it.”
Cold fear began stabbing at my insides. “Fiona, you promised. You promised we wouldn’t tell anyone about this. You promised me we wouldn’t need to tell the Council that I was a Seer.”
“I know.” Fiona said. “I know I said that.”
“So, what, you’re just… taking it back?”
Fiona didn’t answer.
“We can’t tell them!” I cried. “We can’t let the Council know about this! I wouldn’t have brought it to you if I thought you were going to turn around and hand it over to them!”
“No one is handing anything over to anyone,” Fiona said in a tone of forced calm. “Don’t get yourself all riled again, now.”
“Of course I’m
getting riled!” I cried, my voice rising with every word. “You promised me, Fiona!”
“Jessica, be reasonable. We have to warn them. We can’t let this come to pass,” Fiona said softly.
“We will warn them!” I said desperately. “We’ll… we’ll figure out a way.”
“How?” Fiona asked, her tone infuriatingly logical. “How can we warn them about something that hasn’t happened yet?”
“We… we could… I could tell them what Finn told me!” I gasped, clutching at straws.
“And how are you going to do that without getting both you and Finn in even more trouble than you’re already in?” Fiona asked. “The Caomhnóir leadership will rake him over the coals for contacting you, and the Council may very well do the same to you. You’ll be locked up in Skye Príosún before you can even warn anyone about what’s happening there, and then you’ll get caught up right in the middle of that mess!”
“And you think that’s worse than what might happen if they find out I’m a Seer?” I asked in an incredulous squeak. “You know better than anyone what they do to Seers!” I shouted, and though it didn’t seem possible that I had more tears to cry, they began spilling from my eyes. “Fiona, just think of your own mother, for God’s sake! Look what happened to her!”
“Look what happened to her indeed,” Fiona said quietly. “I realize you’re feeling a bit foggy from the events of the night, but if you can shake that off, you might remember where she’s currently locked up?”
For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Then, my heart dropped like a stone. “Oh, my God. Fiona, I forgot. I can’t believe I… and she’s still there? I thought you said they’d decided to release her?”
Fiona nodded, her lips pressed into the thinnest of lines. “Yeah, well, they don’t seem to be in any rush to do that. Not convinced she’s ‘safe,’ whatever the bloody hell that means. My sister has appealed to the Council to step in and we’ve put together a petition for her release.”
“Oh, God, Fiona, I am so sorry,” I said. “I’m such an asshole. Here I am trying to sweep this all under the rug and your mom is right in the line of fire.”
Fiona shook her head. “That’s not what’s happening here. I’m not blaming you, and I’m certainly not throwing you under the bus to save my own mother. God knows that príosún could explode around her and she likely wouldn’t notice. But we can’t let every prisoner become a victim if the príosún really is going to fall into Necromancer hands. We can’t sit on this information.”
“So, if we aren’t going to tell anyone I’m a Seer, and we aren’t going to tell them that Finn and I communicated, then how the hell are we going to be able to warn anyone about what’s happening?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice under control, but it rose hysterically with each word as the impossibility of the situation began to close in around me, trapping me in a little mental cage with my own panic.
Fiona began pacing again, kicking paint cans out of her path as she walked. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” she muttered. “That’s the question.”
I watched as she paced, the repetitive movement oddly soothing, like being hypnotized. Then an idea struck me.
“Could… could you just tell them that you spoke to Finn?”
Fiona stopped in her tracks and frowned at me. “Me? How in the world would I have spoken to Finn?”
“When you went to the príosún the first time, to see your mom!” I cried, feeling a glimmer of hope, sure the idea was a good one. “You came back and told me that you’d seen Finn there, and that he looked good. I know you didn’t speak to him, but no one else does!”
Fiona furrowed her brow. “Huh. Now that is an idea.”
“It makes sense,” I told her eagerly. “You could just tell them that you happened to see him, and he took the opportunity of seeing a Council member he trusted, and filled you in about what he had witnessed.”
“But why would I have kept that information quiet for weeks? If I really believed what he had told me, and that it was serious, why wouldn’t I have alerted the rest of the Council or the Fairhaven Caomhnóir at once?”
I opened my mouth, eager to give her the perfect excuse, but nothing came out. She was right. It would make no sense for her to have sat on that information for so long.
“Unless,” Fiona said, each word slow and measured, as though she were testing the validity of the idea even as she spoke it aloud. “Unless I waited until I came back this time.”
“Huh?” I asked.
“I’m headed back to the príosún. I’ve just told you, my sister and I have filed a petition. Someone’s got to deliver it by hand, or they won’t consider it. I volunteered,” Fiona said. She paused by her window and stared out into the darkness, as though she could actually see the Skye Príosún out there, looming on the horizon.
“You’re… you’re going back there?” I asked, my voice rising in a squeak. “When?”
“I’m meant to leave tomorrow afternoon,” Fiona said. “Maybe sooner, now that I’ve seen this.” She hitched her thumb over her shoulder to indicate the drawing.
“But you… you can’t go in there!” I gasped, feeling my panic start to mount again. “You can’t, now that you know what’s happening!”
She turned to look at me. “But we don’t know what’s happening. Not yet, anyway.”
“But what if something happens while you’re there? What if you get stuck there, or… or something bad happens to you?” I cried, my words tumbling out over each other.
Fiona raised an eyebrow at me. “And what if I walk out that door, trip on a paint can, fall down the tower stairs and break my neck? Jess, the first thing you need to learn about prophecies—and you’d better learn it right quick—is that we can’t understand if they’re meant to come about, or when, or in what manner. For all we know, my going to the príosún could reset this timeline.” She slammed her hand down upon the drawing. “One word from me, one decision from you, one syllable of one word uttered by any person involved, and this whole future could vanish from the realm of the possible.”
I stared at her, trying to let her words sink in.
Fiona went on, her voice calmer now that she was sure I was listening. “Some prophecies will assert themselves. Sometimes too many forces are driving toward the same inevitable conclusion, and sooner or later, they come to be, no matter what the universe throws at them. Others will fade at the slightest shifting of the wind, never to be seen again. Your job—our job—is to test this prophecy out. Find out what it’s made of, like, you see? Give it a shove, and see if it pushes back.”
“You’re saying we have to—what, piss the prophecy off?” I asked, shaking my head confusedly.
“If you like,” Fiona said, shrugging. “If this is meant to be, it will push back. You will draw it again, maybe many times. It will reassert itself, in whatever way it can conceive of. It may stay the same, if the course has not changed, or it may twist itself into something new. We will continue to test, to interpret, to decide what we are meant to do next.”
“How will we know?” I asked, trying and failing to keep the note of desperation out of my voice. “How will we know for sure what we’re meant to do next?”
“Ah, Jess,” Fiona said, and she shook her head pityingly at me. “We won’t ever know. There is no ‘for sure.’ We can only just do our best in the moment with what information we have. It’s like trying to find a destination with a map that only reveals one step of the path at a time.”
I swallowed something painful that tasted bitter. “So, this Seer stuff is pretty much just useless bullshit then, huh?” I asked.
“Complete and utter bullshit, yes,” Fiona agreed, nodding her head solemnly.
I took a deep breath. It was shaky, but I managed it. “Okay. So, if you go to the príosún—and I’m still not saying it’s a good idea,” I added quickly, giving her the kind of look my mother used to give me on the rare occasion she attempted to parent me, “what will you do when
you get there? You can’t let on that you know anything is happening, or they’ll never let you leave.”
“That’s true,” Fiona said. “I’ll have to tread very carefully, indeed. No questions. No letting on. I likely won’t be able to do much other than keep my eyes and ears open. But I’ll have been there, and that will be enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to give us a pretext to pass along the information from Finn,” Fiona snapped, clearly annoyed that I wasn’t keeping up. “If I pretend to have spoken to him, I can alert the Council and the Fairhaven Caomhnóir to the situation without you or Finn getting in trouble, and also without revealing you’re a Seer… at least, not yet.”
I felt a tight knot of anxiety in my chest begin to loosen. “You think that will work?” I asked.
“Yes,” Fiona said. “And if it doesn’t… well, we’re no worse off for having tried, are we?”
“I don’t know, Fiona,” I hedged, still hesitating. “I still don’t like the idea of you going there when we know something dangerous might be going on.”
“And I don’t like the idea of my half-mad mother inside those walls for the same reason,” Fiona barked. “I can look after myself, but her?” Fiona shook her head grimly. “I’m going to Skye Príosún tomorrow as planned, and I’m not leaving there without my mother. If the place is about to fall under siege from within, it’s more important than ever to get her out of there.”
“Let me come with you!” I said, desperately, thinking only of Finn. “I can help you!”
“You’re in no fit state to go anywhere,” Fiona said. “I imagine that arm of yours is going to be damn painful when the shock and the drugs wear off, and there’s not a nun’s chance in hell Mrs. Mistlemoore will discharge you so soon. And anyway, you need a special dispensation to visit Skye Príosún. You can’t just take a leisurely stroll up to the place, bang on the door, and expect someone to let you in for a bonny little tour. You need position, you need Council approval, and you need standing arrangements with the security, none of which you’ve got and none of which you’re going to get by tomorrow.”