Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza Series Book 4)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  Brynn shrugged. I could smell a surge of anxiety rolling off her from which I concluded she really wanted the horses and the people of the Wild Hunt to get along. “They like it if we do it the way they want. The non-magical way. Silver Horse explained it to me very nicely. Are things not going well with Black Horse?”

  Black Horse rested her chin on Yejun’s shoulder, then blew in his ear. He smiled reluctantly. “She’s gorgeous. But not really as good at explaining things as Jen is.”

  “Well, they’re horses,” said Jen, in that gentle way she had of pointing out the obvious.

  “It’ll be better tomorrow,” said Brynn confidently. “Once you’ve slept.”

  She was right. The next day the basics came easier, which meant in the afternoon we started on harder stuff: learning to not be a lump and to listen and to communicate all at the same time. Even with frequent breaks, we were all sore by mid-afternoon when we returned to working on the house.

  As we had an early dinner, Jen said, “If you insist on going to school tomorrow, you ought to head to bed early.”

  There’d be a later supper too, at least for me. I burned a lot of calories even on the quietest of days, and the last few hadn’t been that. But for the moment my appetite faded.

  “Why don’t you want me to go to school? You didn’t keep asking Amber if she was sure she wanted to go to college.” My father hadn’t let me go to school, either. I didn’t like seeing any parallel between Jen and him.

  “Amber needs to stay busy,” said Cat, and Amber gave him a sharp look.

  Jen’s lips thinned, and she looked down at her plate. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was being so obvious.”

  I felt guilty and confused, but I rushed on. “I just want to know why. High school is what kids my age do. Brynn is in high school. Yejun went to high school.”

  “I didn’t finish it, though,” he admitted. “You couldn’t pay me to go back. I’ll get the GED, thanks.”

  “Yeah, but you have….” I hesitated, trying to find the right word.

  “A handicap?” he said equably. “Yeah. Though it isn’t really worse at school than not. There’s just a lot of boring and assholes at school and not much fun. But hey, I can see why you’d want to go if you haven’t. It’s fun to try new things,” He gave me a little smile that made my heart beat faster.

  Jen sighed. “I wanted to be supportive. It’s hard starting new schools, especially when you’re a junior or a senior. I don’t have good memories of that myself.”

  “Way to poison the well, guys,” said Amber, slicing herself more pot roast. Just between Amber and me, we probably went through an ordinary family’s weekly protein budget in one day. “AT’s tough. She’ll be fine.”

  “Not all schools are awful,” added Brynn. She wanted to reassure me, but I could smell that she was worried. “My high school is awesome.”

  Jen bit her lip and then shook her head. “You ought to go to bed early. Get lots of rest.”

  “I’ll make you a lunch!” said Brynn, brightening.

  “I’d like that,” I admitted, and we exchanged smiles. I already had friends. Yay. How bad could school be?

  The next morning I walked to the bus stop while almost everybody else was still asleep, because high school starts at a ridiculous hour. Yejun was waiting at the stop, looking enough like a delinquent that the few other kids—all younger than me—were staying far away.

  “Hey,” he said, as I approached him. “Good luck today. I hope it’s like Brynn’s school.”

  “You don’t think it will be, though.” I wasn’t guessing; I could smell his doubt just like I’d smelled hers the night before.

  He shrugged. “Small town schools, man. You don’t hear good things. Doesn’t matter, though. You’ll be fine either way. And… while of course, like a good schoolgirl, you’ve got to get to bed early this week…. Want to catch a movie Friday night?”

  I looked at my reflection in his sunglasses. It was smiling. “Yeah,” I said. “That would be great. Let’s do that.”

  So that was a good start to the whole week. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

  It didn’t get bad, exactly. Not the way Jen was clearly afraid of, anyhow. I was starting school in the middle of the year, as a junior, in a small town where everybody had known each other their whole lives. The other kids mostly noticed me to ask questions I had to give really vague and deceptive answers on. My mom and I moved to town to stay with some friends. I’d been homeschooled before. Nope, no church. No, my mom didn’t have a job, but we were okay.

  I think some of them read something between the lines, because they would suddenly stop asking questions. Other kids—the younger ones who found me at lunchtime—just didn’t stop, though. Nobody really wanted to be my friend. On the bright side, nobody developed an instant loathing for me either, so that was good. But when Brynn went back home on Tuesday night, I missed her.

  And then it got worse, in the way I’d least wanted.

  On Thursday, even the kids who had noticed me had something else to talk about: one of the other juniors, a girl in my math class, had been hospitalized because she’d tried to kill herself. That was pretty bad, but what made it awful was hearing that if she’d succeeded, it would have been the fourth suicide that year.

  During math class, when everybody else was hugging each other and making cards to send to the hospital, I stared out the window. I wondered if any of the suicides had left ghosts around. I hadn’t seen anything, but I definitely hadn’t been looking. Thinking about it, I’d realized I’d been avoiding looking: seeing ghosts was one of the ways I was different, and I was trying to so hard not to be different.

  Guilt nagged at me. I opened my mind a little, paid attention to my nose, and looked around the room, then out the window. And there were ghosts. More ghosts than I expected to see at a high school and recent ghosts, too. One stood in the corner of the classroom, and two in the courtyard in front of the school—and that was just what I could see immediately.

  The ghost in the corner was a boy, looking sadly at an empty desk. I wanted to go talk to him, but I also didn’t want to look like a crazy person. So I didn’t. I just looked at him, hoping that he’d notice me and come whisper to me. It was a stupid hope. Ghosts didn’t work like that. When something changed around them it could take them days or months or years to notice. It’s why, every day, I had to explain to my mother where we lived now.

  When the bell rang, I left the classroom, ignoring the twinge of shame I felt as I passed the ghost. I couldn’t talk to them while everybody was around. It wasn’t happening. I was going to fit in. If they had a problem they needed my help with, they’d eventually notice me and say something.

  By the time I got home, I was worn out by wading through the other students’ stress as well as my own turmoil. I’d had to keep my head down and focused on my books in order to avoid seeing ghosts I refused to engage with. I went to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich for a snack. Heart, one of my dogs, followed me in from the porch. She sat down and looked at me with liquid brown eyes. I could feel her compassion across the bond that joined us.

  But it wasn’t compassion for me, I realized. Or even for the ghosts. She could smell the living kids at the school: their grief and their fear. Their fear.

  I’d been so caught up in the ghosts, my shame and my desire to fit in that I hadn’t paid attention to other details. I’d focused on the smell of the books and the ghosts and ignored the fear of the living people.

  It was too much. I left my unmade sandwich on the counter and went to the laptop Jen had bought me, to find out what was going in the way most immediately available to me.

  It didn’t take much eavesdropping on my fellow students’ social media accounts to realize that they knew their school was haunted. None of them could see the ghosts I saw, though. They knew it the traditional way ghost stories had been passed down: bad dreams, legends, and dark events. Something evil lingered at their school, and it was driving k
ids to suicide. It had been there for years: the story kids told each other and adults ignored.

  I couldn’t get more details from the poking around I did. They weren’t explaining it to outsiders, just talking among themselves: a ghost, a curse, and every day the risk that going to that high school would kill you.

  At last, I found somebody who knew the hospitalized victim and was saying something direct and public. Not a student, not somebody who believed in ghosts, but it didn’t take much social media arithmetic to figure out what he meant when he posted, “Please, kids, you don’t need to get suicidal over a guy.” Especially when his comments were filled with people from my school declaring, “She didn’t.”

  The front door opened and Jen, Cat, and Yejun came in. They worked on magic in the afternoons, way out in the far field. Today they were home earlier than I expected. Jen had an odd look on her face.

  “AT,” she began, and then stopped when she saw me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Did you know something was going on at my school? Is that why you moved here?” I demanded, standing up.

  Slowly she shook her head. “No. Did something happen? Is that what the horses meant?”

  “Something—a ghost, a monster, I don’t know—is making kids kill themselves. We have to deal with it. We have to stop it.”

  “The horses did say something was coming,” said Yejun, lowering his sunglasses to look at me over the edge.

  “They said it was coming,” I snarled. “This has been going on for years. So, you know, maybe there’s something else ‘coming.’ I don’t care. We have to fix it.”

  Jen blinked, then said carefully, “Earth Horse said the wind that brought you back also brought back the howl of the corrupted ghost. I just came to check with you. I can use the Horn. We can solve this.”

  I stared at her expectantly. Then Cat said quietly, “Manage your own monster, if you please, AT.” I switched my gaze to him, and then wilted as I processed what he said.

  “I’m sorry.” My vision clouded with a crimson burst of self-hatred, and Grim and Heart both whined behind me. I was part monster and I could never let myself forget that.

  “We all have our crosses to bear,” said Cat in that same even voice, and I remembered that of all of us, only he’d had to promise his horse that he would control himself.

  “I’ll get the Horn,” said Jen, with a briskness that hid her anxiety. She vanished elsewhere in the house.

  Yejun said, “It’ll be fun. We can see if it’ll really bring Amber and Brynn out to play. I bet it won’t. I bet they’ll have to Skype in.”

  The image of the other girls Skyping into a Wild Hunt was so incongruous that even though I was horrified by myself and the situation, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. Yejun quirked one side of his mouth in a return smile.

  Then Jen reappeared, holding the Horn. It curled in a glittering golden spiral. It was no longer infected with something evil, but it was still enormously powerful and twisted at right angles to the rest of Creation.

  “Let’s go outside,” Jen said. “I can feel something within the horn. The call, building. I think you identified this before the Horn did, AT. We’re ahead of the game.”

  “I wonder if we can learn what sets it off,” said Cat as we trooped out into the fading twilight. “It would be good to know, so we can exercise some control over the process.”

  The horses waited for us at the pasture fence, lined up precisely. Jen led us over to the fence, glanced at us solemnly, then put her mouth to the Horn and gave it voice.

  I felt the song of the Horn before I heard it, in a place so deep inside I didn’t know it existed. I’d thought my bond with the dogs came from my heart but this—it was like I was nothing but the song of the Horn, set free to wander the world. I was a shaped chain, and I was Cat and Jen and Brynn and Amber, I was Gold Horse and the other mounts.

  I was Yejun, too. Our thoughts mingled and I gasped. It wasn’t words or even sensation, just an overwhelming sense of him, drawing my focus in a way the others didn’t. I wanted—

  Within the coils of the song, Gold Horse moved between us, calling my dogs to join him. I blinked, trying to see the real world again. Gold Horse really was beside me, and over his back I could see Amber and Brynn becoming nearly real. As real as any of us right now. Their expressions of surprise faded as the power and the mission overwhelmed mundane concerns.

  Our bodies had been suffused with the magic of the horn. It radiated through us. We were the Wild Hunt and we did have a task before us. There was something to hunt. A mist settled around us as we mounted, dividing us from the world.

  I whistled to my dogs and they cast around until they found the scent the Horn taught them. Once they set off after it, we rode. Tree, earth, sky: none of it mattered when the mist dream of the Wild Hunt cloaked us. We were an elemental force and nothing could stop us.

  From the sky, and revealed by the roiling of the mist, the high school I attended looked different. The buildings were shadows on the land, cast by lines of a sick glimmering light that twisted together into a knot behind one of the old ‘temporary’ buildings.

  The dogs slowed, circling. This was definitely the place the Horn had identified. The ghosts I’d observed from my classroom, along with more than a dozen more, all looked up at us as we descended. They were bound along the lines of sickly light: trapped and damaged by whatever had led them to their deaths.

  That was against nature. It was a core law of Creation that souls couldn’t be tampered with, except as they permitted. We were the only exception to that law, and it took the touch of something beyond Creation to empower that.

  There were ways to slide around that metaphysical law, though: all the many ways people had always been convinced to work against their best interests. Faith, hatred, and love were only a handful of the possibilities.

  “Love,” whispered Jen, and I saw what she saw: the pair of ghosts entwined behind the temporary building at the heart of the knot.

  “Oh,” said Amber as she saw the trap that had caught so many students: the two original ghosts using the vulnerable as tools to help them in a grotesque reenactment of the maelstrom of emotions that had led to their deaths.

  “Tangled,” muttered Yejun, his free hand moving reflexively. The ghostly lovers had their own talents, obscure and unfamiliar to me.

  I saw the ghost of the boy in my classroom. He looked up at me, seeing me clearly, alone among all the ghosts. His mouth opened in a cry for help.

  I didn’t want to see more. I leaned forward, urging Gold Horse on. My dogs dashed ahead and the others followed me. We descended to where the violation originated, the noise of the Wild Hunt a cacophony of doom.

  And we cut the violation away, we cured the crime, we cauterized the wound. The two originating ghosts never even looked at us as we swept around them and tore them to pieces.

  Flames sprang up around each unraveling strand of the souls, and the Horn sang a hot, hungry song that called the fire into its bell. The sick light that bound the other ghosts flared to incandescence, then became cinders, ashes, nothing.

  Most of the ghosts fled away, some fading, some climbing the sky, some literally running from the school. The one who had seen me stayed, caught by other bonds private to his own life. He watched us, still terrified, until we flew into the sky again.

  The magic stayed with us until we returned to the farmhouse, and even once we’d landed and dismounted it was slow in ebbing away. It made me feel confident and unafraid. I’d had a problem and I’d solved it and it was wonderful.

  Idly I wondered what else I could do while I felt so good, so connected. I remembered touching Yejun’s mind before—

  Once again, Gold Horse inserted himself between us. I ran my hands over his neck, frowning, but he turned his head away from me, refusing to respond to my silent inquiry.

  Then Brynn said, „I… don’t know. Was that right?”

  It cracked right through my confidence.

 
“We’re supposed to deal with bad ghosts. They were bad. We dealt with them,” I said. “How could it be not right?”

  Brynn bit her thumbnail as she stared at the ground. “I just… wonder what made them bad. They were… hurting. I could feel it. What if there was another way we could have fixed it?”

  Cat said to Brynn gently, “Duty is sometimes harsh.”

  Jen gave Cat a sideways glance, and something passed between them. His brow furrowed.

  “I just keep thinking of your mother, AT,” said Brynn earnestly. “About how hard it is for her to understand when things have changed. But she can learn, you’ve said. If you make the effort. Maybe we could have helped those two ghosts change.”

  I stared at Brynn incredulously. Light shimmered around her frame. The final dregs of Horn magic were fading, taking her back to where she’d been called from.

  “We couldn’t have,” I told her. “They were beyond recovery. That’s what the Horn’s call means.”

  “I don’t know….” she repeated, and then she and Amber both vanished and we all came back to reality with a spirit-jarring thud.

  I knelt down and buried my face in Nod’s black fur. He licked my ear and panted, tired from all the running around.

  “Hey,” said Yejun softly behind me. “Back to normal life, yeah? School tomorrow, no ghosts, movie at eight? Uh.”

  I looked up to see Black Horse had shoved her head hard into his back. Suddenly I was sure: the horses didn’t want Yejun and me thinking about each other that way. The way that the two broken ghosts had thought about each other.

  Frustration boiled up in me, and I bounded to my feet and over to Gold Horse’s side. “Hey, let’s go for a ride, just you and me,” I said to the horse. “We have to talk.”

  Yes, said the horse and I flung myself onto his back. Almost as soon as I was up there, he started running, around the pasture fence and into the fields beyond.

  It was different than riding as part of the Hunt: earthbound and relying on bone and blood to move us. Different, but the reality of it was intoxicating. The contrast between the two worlds balanced against each other.