by E. E. Holmes
I punched her in the arm as she cackled at me. A sharp rap on the wagon door silenced us both. The door opened before either of us could cross the room to answer it. It was Anca.
“Ileana sent me to fetch you. She wants to know if you’ve come to a decision,” Anca said.
I reached into my bunk for my bag and shouldered it. “Wow, before breakfast, huh? And I’m assuming we’ll be escorted right out of the caravan if she doesn’t like my answer?”
Anca frowned down at her feet. “Caomhnóir will be standing by, yes. I’ve already sent Annabelle to the tent.”
“Very hospitable,” Savvy said.
“Well, let’s get this over with, then,” I said.
“Where was your Caomhnóir going?” Anca asked as we stepped down onto the grass.
“Probably somewhere to go cool off,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll find him sulking behind one of these wagons.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Anca said over her shoulder as she led the way. “He asked Dragos the way to the nearest road. You really don’t know where he was heading? I assumed you’d sent him somewhere.”
“I’m not in the habit of sending him places,” I said. “He’s not a messenger boy. You saw him leave the camp? Did your people actually allow him to do that?”
“Yes. They determined he was free to go, since he isn’t the one the Necromancers are after. He had his things with him.”
I stopped walking and looked back at the wagon we’d just spent the night in; Finn’s rucksack was indeed missing from beside the door. I traded a nervous glance with Savvy. Anca, realizing we were no longer behind her, turned to look at us.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “Well, I think so. Finn and I had an argument about Walking. He stormed out.”
“I see,” Anca said. She looked unconcerned. “Should we send someone after him?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I’m sure he’ll be back. He was just upset.”
“Very well, then. Follow me, please. We shouldn’t keep Ileana waiting.”
And as we walked, the absence of Finn beside me began to feel like the presence of something painful and gnawing.
§
“Well, then, Muse. You’ve reached your decision?”
Ileana was perched again on her carved wooden chair, drumming her fingers on the arms.
“Yes, I have.”
“And?”
“I’m going to try to learn how to become a Walker.”
Ileana let out a breath in a low whoosh that I didn’t even realize she was holding. Anca bowed her head, her eyes closed. Even the stone-faced Caomhnóir betrayed expressions of surprise and relief.
“You have made a wise and brave choice,” Ileana said.
“It might be brave, but I’m not so sure about wise,” I said. “But I am making it anyway, on two conditions.”
The raven cawed as though raising its own objections to the idea of conditions.
Ileana frowned. “Conditions?”
“Yes,” I said, being careful to keep my voice as respectful as I could. “I realize that you are not planning to engage in battle with the Necromancers, but if I’m going to risk myself becoming a Walker, you’ll need to take a few risks yourselves. We need to know where my sister is, and we need you to help find her.”
Ileana’s dark heavy brows had risen so high that they nearly disappeared into her hair. “We are taking plenty of risks as it is. We have agreed to shelter you and teach you all we know about Walking. You will have our full protection while you are here. This is not enough for you?”
“No,” I said flatly. “Walking will be pointless if my sister is missing. I can’t cross through our Gateway if I don’t know where she is. I also refuse to accept the prophecy as a foregone conclusion. She may not reverse the Gateway if we can find and rescue her first.”
“I already told you, I will not—”
“I’m not asking any of you to help us rescue her,” I said. “Even though we could obviously use all the help we can get. But we have no resources to look for her, and no idea where to start. I think you have both of those things.”
Ileana ran a finger over her mouth, her expression shrewd. “What is your other condition?”
“Irina has to be the one to teach me how to Walk.”
Ileana could no longer feign composure. Her mouth fell open and her complexion went pale beneath its ruddiness.
“How do you know about Irina?” she asked. She then answered her own question by shooting a baleful look at Anca, who dropped her eyes to the canvas floor of the tent.
“Does it really matter? It’s enough that I know,” I said. “I get why you wanted to hide her from me; I’ve seen the state she’s in. But honestly, she is the best resource I have. I want her there as a guide when I try to do this.”
Ileana shrugged. “Very well. I can’t imagine that there is much help to be had from the likes of Irina; you’ve seen what she is. But I leave that up to you. If you want her there, we will find a way to bring her to you. But we cannot guarantee that she will be as useful as you hope, and if she grows impossible to control, she will need to go back, for her safety as much as everyone else’s.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “What about the first condition?”
Ileana hesitated, then spit into her hand and held it out to me. “We shake on it, and then I release my own Trackers to begin the search. Again, I can promise nothing but an honest attempt.”
“Neither can I,” I said grimly, taking her hand and shaking it.
“We begin then!” Ileana cried, jumping up from her chair with great energy and causing her bird to squawk with surprise. “Anca, convene the Council in the meeting circle. We must devise the best plan for removing Irina safely from her bonds. Then alert the Scribes. They will need to prepare all our scrolls and books related to Walking, so that we may decide how best to proceed with Jessica’s training.”
Anca shuffled out of the tent at once. Ileana approached me and clapped a bony old hand on my shoulder. Every movement she made created a tinkling, jingling sound, like she was a human wind chime.
“By the bonfire at the center of camp, you will find food. Help yourselves and eat up. You will need your strength, I don’t doubt, for what lies ahead of you.”
“Thank you. And those Trackers?”
“I will send them at once.”
“Thank you, High Priestess,” Annabelle said
Savvy and Milo echoed her in a mumble, and we all turned and exited the tent. The morning air still had a cold snap in it as we approached the bonfire, where a long trestle table stood loaded with bowls of fruit, roasted vegetables, loaves of rustic bread, tureens of soup, and a number of ambiguous hunks of cured meats that could have belonged to any of a number of animals. It was like stumbling onto some sort of ancient bacchanalian feast in the middle of the 21st century, one of the strangest and most anachronistic moments of my life; just yesterday my breakfast had consisted of Pop-Tarts and breakfast cereal out of a mug with Prince William’s face on it, and now I was sitting on a fallen log like a forest nymph, eating from a rough wooden bowl.
Savvy looked down at her food and sighed. “Who do you think I’d have to screw to get a cigarette around here?”
“Aren’t you starving?” I asked her, dunking my bread into a bowl of hearty brown stew and wolfing it down almost without chewing. It might have just been how hungry I was, but at that moment it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
“Mate, I haven’t had a fag since yesterday round about midday. I nearly tackled that old gypsy bird for the tobacco in her pipe,” Savvy said with a note of desperation. Her knee, beneath her plate, was jiggling up and down rapidly.
“Plenty of the Travelers smoke,” Annabelle said. “It’s part of the culture. They’ll roll their own, of course, but I’m sure if you just ask around…”
“Brilliant. It was either that or a shag, and I don’t much fancy a romp in the wagon with any of thes
e gypsy blokes. Back in a mo’,” Savvy said. She jumped up and disappeared around the corner of the nearest wagon, where a group of Caomhnóir were gathered, talking and laughing raucously.
I looked over at Milo, who was staring into the fire, his thoughts far from the campsite.
“She’ll be okay,” I said.
“That’s what I keep telling myself, but I can’t stand the not knowing,” Milo said. Any living person would have been uncomfortably warm so close to the flames, which were leaping and sparking in the misty early morning air.
“I know.”
“I just… I haven’t been this disconnected from her since I met her. I feel sort of…”
“Lost?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s like Finn said, they aren’t going to hurt her, not really. They need her at her strongest.”
“Speaking of our burly bouncer,” Milo said, tearing his eyes from the fire and changing the subject. “Where’s he run off to?”
“I don’t know. He was really angry about my decision to try this whole Walking thing. Anca said she saw him leave the camp with his backpack.”
Milo frowned. “He’s just blowing off steam. I’m sure he wouldn’t actually leave us here. He takes his job too seriously.”
“No kidding,” I said. “That’s why we fought. I think I made it too hard of a job to stick with.”
§
It was two long days before Ileana and the Council deemed everything ready for my first attempt at Walking. Having to wait those two days were just about the worst thing for my resolve. It gave me way too much time to consider all of the varied and terrifying ways it could all go wrong, and I began to have a hard time remembering all of the reasons I had agreed to do it in the first place. When I wasn’t dwelling on my own worries about Walking, I was obsessing over what might be happening to Hannah, or where Finn had gone. The Traveler Trackers had not yet managed to figure out where Hannah was, though Anca assured me they were following several very promising leads, and that she was confident that we would have news of her soon. None of the Travelers seemed concerned about Finn’s disappearance at first, though after the second day they reluctantly agreed to send someone to look for him as well. They did this more out of concern for themselves than they did for him; it finally occurred to Dragos that if Finn had run into the Necromancers, they might torture enough information out of him for them to find the encampment, the borders of which had been reinforced with every protection the Travelers could muster. Savvy’s reassurances that Finn would be back any time grew less and less confident, and Milo started to shush her any time she mentioned him. As my anger at Finn cooled, it was replaced by miserable guilt, even though I kept telling myself, over and over again, in a smaller and smaller voice, that I’d done nothing wrong.
11
Preparations
BY THE TIME THE SUN rose on the morning that I would Walk for the first (and possibly last) time, my nerves had contracted all of my organs into tiny pulsing lumps. I started my morning by forcing down a few bites of breakfast, which immediately came up again behind the nearest clump of bushes.
“Are you okay? You look like death warmed over, mate,” Savvy said when she caught sight of me stumbling back out of the foliage.
“I’m swell,” I said. “Just anticipating the possibility of my imminent death.”
Savvy slapped me on the shoulder with a resounding smack. “Buck up, you’ll be alright. Anca told me they’re setting everything up to keep you safe. If it looks like it’s not going to work, they’ll get you back into that beautiful bod.” She winked, and I knew she was doing her damnedest to cheer me up. She’d vented her own nerves by chain smoking hand-rolled Traveler cigarettes all morning. She was patting her pockets for another when Dragos appeared behind her.
“I am to take you to Irina’s clearing. We are ready for you.”
With a Herculean effort, I swallowed back another urge to vomit and stood up on shaky legs.
“We’ll be right there with you,” Annabelle said, standing up as well.
“No, you will not,” Dragos said. “No one else will be permitted inside the clearing, for their own safety. You will stay here in the camp.”
“Like hell we will!” Savvy nearly shouted, jumping to her feet, the glowing butt of her last cigarette falling from her lips. “We’re not letting her do this on her own!”
“We’ll get as close as we safely can, and that’s where we’ll wait,” Annabelle said, stepping swiftly between Savvy and Dragos before she could take a swing at him. “But we are coming with you as far as we are allowed.”
Dragos looked for a moment like he might argue, but decided, after another long look at Savvy’s expression that it wasn’t worth the effort. “Suit yourself,” he grumbled, and stalked off toward the woods.
Milo, Savvy, and Annabelle walked with me through the woods. I could feel their anxious glances boring into me so often that I half wished they had stayed behind; they were somehow making me more nervous than I already was, and yet I seriously doubted if I could have kept my legs moving forward without the swish of their steady footsteps beside me. I felt like I was being led to the gallows or something, holding out for an eleventh hour pardon.
It seemed to take far less time to reach the clearing than it had a few nights before, perhaps because I was fighting the impulse to run in the other direction. Sooner than I would have thought possible, the light shafts widened and the spaces between the trees grew larger until they gave way altogether to the small circular space; a space, I now realized, that was by its very nature ideal for a casting circle with ready-made borders. And that was exactly what the Travelers had turned it into.
If I hadn’t already been familiar with the basic runes, candles, and other trappings of Durupinen ceremony, I’d have thought we’d stumbled into a horror movie scenario. The entire perimeter of the circle was on fire. Twelve women in flowing and ragged gypsy attire were sitting as though made of stone spread around just inside the licking flames, rocking and muttering under their breath. Dozens of ropes hung in the tree branches, and from them dangled huge renderings of runes, some woven from rough, plant-like fibers, others painted onto fabric, still others cobbled together from large, gnarled sticks or carved right into the bark of the trees.
In the middle of the circle, a bizarre webbed dome had been created from ropes and netting, enclosing an area about twenty or thirty yards wide and twenty feet tall. More runes had been scrawled onto its outer surfaces with broad strokes of black paint. Within its confines, a dark shape could just be discerned, in the grass. It wasn’t moving.
“What the actual fuck?” Savvy whispered.
“Welcome, Muse,” came Ileana’s voice
I spotted her in the far side of the clearing. Having no idea what would come out of my mouth if I dared open it, I just nodded at her. She beckoned me forward and I followed the crook of her finger as though hypnotized to propel myself toward her. Annabelle, Savvy, and Milo remained behind, unsure if they were allowed any further. I didn’t want them to follow me; nothing that was about to happen would be made any better by having them close enough to witness every detail.
I shuffled over to Ileana, my eyes darting repeatedly to the cage-like structure I was skirting. I knew who the dark shape was, though I was almost afraid to look carefully enough to confirm the knowledge. Ileana was puffing her pipe, but not in the imperious manner she had when I first met her. Now she sucked on it like she needed it to keep herself composed, and I realized that she was nearly as nervous as I was. She understood as well as I did how much rested on the experiment we were about to embark on.
“Thank you for coming,” she said quietly, and with rather less authority than I was expecting. It was almost as though she had expected me to change my mind and not turn up at all.
“I’d say you’re welcome, but…” I shrugged, my voice dry and hoarse.
“We’ve done all we can to ensure your safety,” Ileana said, waving in grand gest
ure to the structure behind us.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There is no real name for it,” Ileana said, frowning at it as though hoping a name would present itself somewhere amidst the tangles of rope. “We’ve been experimenting with a combination of castings, and this is the result. I can’t guarantee that it will protect you, and I can’t guarantee that it will hold Irina. We must hope for the best.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me how it’s supposed to work… in theory.”
“If Irina is to instruct you how to Walk, she must be able to do it herself, but that is very dangerous for her. Irina’s spirit is very strong; much stronger than her body’s ability to contain it. After so much time outside of its proper confines, it longs for freedom. When she releases it, it will attempt escape, never to return.”
“Yeah, I saw a bit of that the other night.”
“The confines of this structure are meant to prevent that. Her soul, when free, should be trapped inside, free to roam within the boundaries of the structure, but trapped just the same.”
I looked again at the web. As I focused on it, I could feel the energy rolling off of it in dizzying waves. Whatever they had built, however experimental, it was powerful.
“Great,” I said, almost as a question. “And how is it supposed to protect me?”
“Much in the same capacity. Once your spirit leaves your body, if you do manage to separate the two, there is a very good chance it will want to escape. Again, this structure should prevent that. The other Durupinen will be standing by with castings designed to, uh… encourage your spirit to return to your body. Even if things go badly, we should be able to put you back together again.”
“Great,” I said, so faintly that I almost couldn’t hear my own voice. “What can I expect if it does go well? How will I know if I can really Walk without endangering myself?”
“You will continue to feel the pull from your physical body; it will act as a sort of spiritual root for you. Though you roam, you will know where you belong, and you will feel the pull of your living form more powerfully than the pull of the Gateway. At least,” and here Ileana threw a cursory look over her shoulder at a cluster of three Durupinen who were bent diligently over a little heap of books and scrolls spread across a folding table, “that’s what the stories tell us. We have records of several firsthand accounts of what the experience is meant to be like, as well as what we can glean from Irina’s gibberish.”