by E. E. Holmes
“We know, we know, we’re sorry, okay? You can yell at us later again, if it will make you feel better. Just tell us what you’re going to say in your tirade!” I said impatiently.
“I’ll tell them that they can just go straight to Finvarra and tell her to nominate someone else, because I’ve forbidden you to accept the nomination, and that you’ve agreed not to. Then I’ll threaten that, if Finvarra does nominate our clan, all three of us will get on a plane home and refuse to stay for the rest of the Airechtas, rules be damned,” Karen said. “That ought to raise enough eyebrows to send Marion’s little spies running to spill what they’ve heard. That should at least keep her from causing too much trouble beforehand.”
“And afterward?” Hannah asked.
Karen laughed. “There’s nothing we can do about that. It will be a free-for-all once you accept. We’ll just have to stay on our toes and fight back as best we can. She’s lost a lot of credibility in recent years, and that will work in our favor, but she will surely still be a force to contend with.”
“But that’s in less than two days. Why bother? What damage can she do in two more days that she hasn’t wrought already?” I asked, but then stopped short as I processed the incredulous looks on Karen and Hannah’s faces. “Never mind,” I said swiftly. “Monumentally stupid question.”
4
Guidance
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, I awoke. It wasn’t the kind of waking that happens gradually—the slow, sleepy rousing of early morning. Nor was it the sudden, heart-pounding waking that followed a nightmare. Instead, it was a strange, instantaneous waking, as though someone had flicked a switch. I was instantly, completely awake, all trace of sleepiness gone, my eyes wide and expectant. I was not surprised that I had woken. I knew exactly what time I would see on the clock when I turned my head, because I had wakened at this exact same time, in this exact same manner, every night since Eleanora had Crossed. And each time it happened, I had the distinct feeling that someone had just spoken my name. I never heard it, but it was as though I could still feel the echo of it in the air around me.
I looked around the room. Karen had sufficiently recovered from the revelation that Hannah was running for the Council seat, and after one last cup of hot cocoa, had headed off to her own room. Hannah was sound asleep, hands tucked under her cheek and a small smile on her lips, like the proverbial child with sugarplums dancing in her head. Milo was nowhere to be found, but that wasn’t surprising—he typically spent his nights with other ghosts, rather than boring himself to death for hours on end watching the non-floaters snore and drool.
By the soft glow of the Christmas lights, I reached under my pillow and extracted a small, battered old diary from the pillowcase, where I had stashed it every night since the Shattering had ended. I flipped through the pages, picking random words out in Eleanora’s elegant script. The depth of the connection I felt to her was something I couldn’t even satisfactorily explain to myself. All I knew was that I could not shake the feeling that, though she had already slipped through the Aether to what lay beyond it, there was a strand of substance—be it memory or empathy, or something less identifiable—that still stretched between us, and not even the closing of the Gateway could sever it. I was a girl who saw ghosts, but this was the first time that I felt truly, inexorably haunted.
I flipped to the back of the diary, where I had folded up the sketch I’d done of Eleanora. I pulled it out and unfolded it, so that I could examine, for what felt like the millionth time, that lovely, tortured face.
At the time I’d drawn it, I thought it was a typical, spirit-induced drawing. It was the most logical conclusion to come to; I was a Muse, and so spirits often reached out to me and used my artistic abilities to communicate. I had found and Crossed many spirits this way over the past few years, and it was a skill that I was constantly honing and mastering, with Fiona’s expert—if reluctant—help. But in the last moments before Eleanora had Crossed, we’d had an exchange that I couldn’t get out of my mind.
“It’s much more my fault than yours,” I’d told her. “You tried to reach out to me, but I didn’t know what it meant. I only wish I could have discovered who you were before the Shattering happened. I could have prevented all of this.”
“Reached out to you? What do you mean?” she had asked in confusion.
“The sketches. The psychic drawings I did of you—the ones that I showed you to help you remember who you were.”
“What about the drawings? I didn’t have anything to do with them.”
“Of course, you did,” I’d insisted. “You had to have reached out to me those nights while I was sleeping. How else could I have drawn them?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Eleanora had replied. “I never saw the drawings, or you, until the moment you showed them to me. How could I have? I was still trapped in the príosún, unable to communicate.”
Unable to communicate.
The more I ran over it in my head, the less sense it made. There could be no spirit drawing without spirit communication. There could be no Muse without a ghostly artist using her to create the art.
How, then, had these drawings come to be? Had I really produced them on my own, and if so, what did that mean? It was a question I could not fathom the answer to, not without help. And I knew who I had to ask for that help.
And she was just about the least helpful person I could think of.
“Jess? You okay?”
Startled, I looked up. Hannah’s eyes were open, her head propped up on her hand.
“Hey. Yeah, I’m fine. Just can’t sleep.”
“I didn’t know you still had that,” Hannah said, pointing to the book.
“Yeah. No one really knew what to do with it when the Shattering was over, so I just sort of . . . kept it.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure.”
Hannah furrowed her brow in an expression that I loved. It made her look like a small child faced with a reality of life she had never encountered before, but wouldn’t accept—like an adult had just told her that she couldn’t actually fly. “I think,” she said slowly, considering each word as she let it fall, “that we did everything we could for her. We made sure that everyone knew her story. After all, that was why she left the diary in the first place. And we made sure that the entire Council read it. And then every Durupinen at the Airechtas was told about her, too. And of course, we Crossed her, which is what she wanted more than anything else. Do you think there was something else we could have done?”
“Short of inventing a time machine and going back in time to save her? No, there’s nothing else,” I said with a sigh, staring into those deep, dark eyes I now knew so well. “And logically, I know by now that’s usually the case. We’re sort of doomed to a life of helping people when it’s too late to help them, you know?”
“Yeah,” Hannah said sadly. “Yeah, I know.”
“And the thing is, I’ve made my peace with that, mostly. I don’t usually spend a lot of time dwelling over stuff we can’t change. I can’t let myself go there, or this whole Durupinen thing would just become too much to handle. But this,” and I tapped the cover of the book, “this feels . . . different.”
Hannah slipped off her bed, padded across the room, and curled up next to me. “Of course, it does,” she said. “Eleanora’s story could have been ours. It was like watching versions of us from another life, facing a fate that we barely escaped ourselves.”
“Exactly,” I said, swallowing back a lump in my throat. “And in a weird way, I feel responsible, because we’re the ones her Council was afraid of. We are the ones they saw when they looked at Eleanora. I’ve only ever felt this guilty about a spirit once before, and that was Pierce.”
“That was not your fault,” Hannah said firmly.
“If he’d never met me, he would still be alive,” I said.
“You don’t know that. He could have walked off a sidewalk and been hit by a bus the next day. You ca
n’t torture yourself like that, Jess. There are too many intersecting paths and choices and coincidences in life to justify shouldering that kind of blame.”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to argue. She understood my silence, though.
“I blame myself for Milo. Every single day,” Hannah said.
I turned to look at her, horrified. “Hannah, come on! That was his choice to make. You did absolutely everything you could to prevent him from making it!”
Hannah shrugged. “It was because of me that he knew spirits exist. Maybe if he hadn’t been sure of that fact, he might have been too scared to go through with it.”
“Milo would be the first person to tell you it wasn’t your fault,” I said.
“And Pierce would be the first person to tell you the same thing, I expect,” she replied. “So why don’t we both agree to do our best to let it go?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You are too small to be this wise. Seriously, it’s like being twins with a fortune cookie.”
She allowed herself a tiny smile. “That’s why people listen to me: the element of surprise.”
I laughed, and felt a little of the suffocating weight lift from my chest. “Fine. I’ll try.”
“Me, too.”
We lay in silence for a long time. A drowsiness began to steal over me, so that the Christmas lights about our heads began to wink in and out of focus.
“There is one more thing that we are doing for Eleanora,” I said, stifling a yawn with the back of my hand.
“Mmmm?” Hannah asked, her voice muffled with sleepiness.
“The Airechtas. The open seat,” I reminded her.
“Oh yes, that’s right. Yes, I guess, in a way, it is for her,” Hannah muttered.
Yes, I told Eleanora’s image, before folding it up inside the book once more. We are doing what we can to make it right. And in the morning, I would go and see the one person who could help me understand why Eleanora and I connected in the first place.
§
“What fresh hell is this?”
“Hi, Fiona,” I said, as cheerfully as I dared. “Have a good Christmas?”
An inch-wide strip of Fiona’s face appeared through the crack in the door. “It was magical. Now, sod off.” She tried to shut the door again, but I wedged my toe between the door and the jamb.
“Have you got a few minutes? I need your help with something,” I said.
“No, I do not have a few minutes,” she grumbled. The eye I could see squinting out at me was bloodshot and watery. “It’s Boxing Day, and as is time-honored tradition, I intend to be hungover and snoring until well past noon. So, unless you’ve arrived to deliver two paracetamol and a greasy parcel of fish and chips, you can bugger off.”
“Fiona, please. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t really important,” I said.
Fiona squinted at me still harder, and something in my expression gave her pause. “This is Muse-related, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She was silent for so long I thought maybe she’d fallen back to sleep standing up. Then she said, “I reserve the right, at any time, to boot you out in any manner I choose.”
“So, the usual arrangement, then,” I said dryly. “Look, I’ll throw the chair at myself if this isn’t worth your time, okay?”
Issuing a stream of unintelligible muttering, Fiona unfastened the deadbolt, flung the door wide, and shuffled back toward the chaise lounge in the corner of her studio. By the time I’d closed the door behind me, she had already flung herself facedown back onto it, so that her next words were muffled in pillows.
“Sit. Speak. Quietly.”
I used a damp rag to wipe down the potter’s bench that stood opposite the chaise, and then sat down on it. My heart was pounding unaccountably hard. I swallowed and began in a low voice. “Do you remember those two sketches of Eleanora Larkin that I brought to you a few days ago? The ones we used to identify her?”
“Jessica, I’m hungover, not brain dead. Of course, I remember them.”
“Eleanora told me something about them right before she Crossed that I thought was kind of . . . weird.”
“Weird in what way?” Fiona asked, face still buried in pillows.
“Well, I mentioned them to Eleanora because I wanted to apologize to her for not discovering her identity sooner. And she told me . . . well, she told me she never reached out to me to create those drawings.”
Fiona was silent for a few seconds, then she lifted her face and turned to rest her cheek on the chaise so that she could look at me. “What are you on about?”
“Eleanora said she never communicated with me. She never made contact. The first time she even knew about the drawings was when I showed them to her when she was still Shattered into Shards.”
Fiona shrugged. “That’s not possible. She was still confused. Must have been the aftermath of the Shattering.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. She told me that she couldn’t communicate with anyone outside of the príosún. She was under too many Castings as part of her imprisonment.”
Fiona sat up, rubbed her eyes, and slapped her cheeks forcefully. Then she looked at me again, as though seeing me in her studio for the first time. “She claimed that your sketches were unsolicited spirit drawings?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling relieved just to know that she was paying attention now. “We didn’t have time to discuss it further, because Keira interrupted us a moment later to invite Eleanora to Cross. But she was adamant that she had nothing to do with the creation of those sketches.”
Fiona took a last, longing look at her pillows. “Dogs!” she cursed under her breath, then sighed, holding out a hand. “You’ve got them with you, I suppose? Let’s have them.”
I handed them over at once. Fiona snatched them from me and brought them over to her desk, tripping over an errant broken bit of pottery as she went. She cleared the heap of clutter with a violent sweep of her arm, sending paint, paper, brushes, and jars of pencils skittering away across the floor. She reached up beyond her paint-spattered bandana into her tangled nest of hair and extracted a pair of bifocals, which she jammed onto her nose and then used to examine the sketches again. I watched the entire violent display with not a trace of surprise; Fiona generally displayed a complete disregard for all items—and people—that had the audacity to exist where she didn’t want them to be.
“These are all of them, yeah? The only sketches you’ve done of her before or since?” Fiona shot at me after an intense minute of staring at the papers.
“Yes.”
“And you completed both of them before the Shattering occurred?”
“Yes. One each night for the two nights before the Shattering happened.”
“And you were asleep at the time, or in a psychic trance?”
“I told you all of this when I—”
“TELL ME AGAIN!” Fiona roared, slamming her hand on the desk and then wincing at the sound.
“Asleep both times,” I said flatly.
“And did you wake up while you were still drawing? That is, did the completion of the drawing wake you?”
I had to think about this for a moment. “I still had the pencil in my hand each time. The first time I was definitely still sitting up. So yes, I think I woke up right away when I had finished.”
“Do you ever remember having dreams that included Eleanora?” Fiona asked. “Either on the nights you completed these drawings or before?”
“Dreams? No,” I said. “I just woke up from what felt like normal, dreamless sleep, and these drawings were there. I’ve had dreams about her since she Crossed, though.”
“I’m not concerned about that,” Fiona said dismissively, waving her hand. “I’d be surprised if half the castle wasn’t dreaming about her after what she put us through.”
“What Lucida put us through,” I corrected her quietly, but Fiona wasn’t listening to me. She had pulled her bandana down over her eyes and pressed her hands over
it so she could think. She looked like she was about to play a game of blind man’s bluff.
“It doesn’t add up. Dogs! I cannot think under these conditions,” she muttered to herself, then slapped her cheeks again and raised her head, bandana still covering her eyes as she looked in my direction. “Right. I’m going to need you to find out some information for me,” Fiona said. “I need to know what kinds of Castings were being used on Eleanora and for how long. I need to know the details of how she was contained at the príosún.”
“Who can I talk to who would have access to that kind of information?” I asked.
“You’re a Tracker now. Ask one of your Tracker mates,” Fiona said.
“I don’t have any Tracker mates,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Catriona is the only other Tracker I know so far, and she’s not up to researching anything. She’s still recovering from being a Host.”
“Hell’s bells, Jessica, do you need me to hold your hand through this simple task or what? Just find another Tracker!” Fiona shouted.
“Okay, okay!” I cried. “I’ll figure it out!”
“Too right you will, because I can’t help you until you do. And there’s one other thing.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, suppressing a childish urge to flip her off to her face while she couldn’t see me.
“You need to talk to Lucida and find out about her interactions with Eleanora in the days leading up to the Shattering. There’s a chance she could have lifted one or more of the Castings and enabled Eleanora to reach out to you, even if Eleanora was unaware that she was doing so.”
My mouth had gone dry. My tongue felt like sandpaper in my mouth as I tried to swallow. “Talk to Lucida?” I repeated.
Fiona reached up and tugged the bandana back up into her hair so that she could survey me with her beady eyes. She squinted, looking shrewd. “You think you can handle that? I’m not saying you should be able to.”