by E. E. Holmes
“How do I know if my assignment is random? I don’t think I’ve got any sort of extra special abilities going on.”
“I’d expect yours isn’t random at all. You draw, don’t you?”
I stopped walking. “Yes. How did you know that? Why does everyone here already know everything about me?”
“Calm down, now,” Mackie said. “I was giving a tour yesterday, and I noticed you out on the grounds with a sketchpad.”
“Oh. Right, sorry,” I said. “I’m still just…adjusting to the way things are done around here.”
“I know,” Mackie said, clapping me on the shoulder so that I stumbled a little. “It’s like being tossed into the den of the vipers around here. They make it their business to know your business. But no worries, you’ll get used to it.”
I said nothing. I had a feeling I was rapidly reaching the limit of stuff one person could possibly get used to.
“I mentioned the drawing because Fiona is our artist in residence. She cares for all of the artwork here and produces her own as well. They probably matched you two up because of your art background.”
I perked up at this. An artist? Maybe I would actually get a transferable life skill out of all of this. “Does this mean I might get to talk about art with her?”
“I don’t know her well, but I think you’ll find it hard to talk about anything but art, actually,” Mackie said, a hitch in her voice like a laugh.
We set off along a corridor I’d never entered before. It was hung with a series of tapestries, each depicting a different woman wearing a long, robe-like gown and surrounded with celestial bodies and a number of creatures, some of them mythical.
“Gallery of High Priestesses,” Mackie explained with a flick of her hand. “The royals do paintings, we do tapestries. Creepy, aren’t they? Celeste will bore you to tears with all their names and accomplishments in class, so I won’t bother now, but this one might interest you.”
She stopped in front of a tapestry whose dark-haired occupant stared haughtily down her long, straight nose at us. Something about her features gave me a touch of déjà vu. At her feet I could just make out a name stitched in gold thread: Agnes Isherwood of the Clan Sassanaigh —1486-1543.
It took a moment for the clan name to register. “She’s from my family,” I said in mild surprise. “She was a High Priestess?”
“That’s right. Your history’s always been here, even if you never knew it. And I’ll tell you something else: you’ll not find any of Peyton’s great-great-great-grandmothers knocking about on one of these. Tell her to put that in her pipe and smoke it.”
Mackie punched me genially on the arm and continued down the hallway at a brisk pace. I stared for another moment—transfixed by the face on the tapestry, at once foreign to me and yet uncannily familiar—before setting off after her.
“So can you explain what you started to say before, about the Caomhnóir?” I asked. I nearly had to jog to keep up with her—her legs were about a foot longer than mine.
“They’re chosen because of their abilities, just like we are, and their lines go back as far as ours do. Some of the Durupinen families even produced Caomhnóir in the male line. It used to be a real mark of status to have both male and female offspring with the gift.”
“What abilities do they have?” I asked.
“They can sense spirits, just as we can, but they have the ability to repel them, rather than attract them. They can keep them away, which is a very useful skill when ghosts are constantly trying to make contact with you.”
“No kidding. I wish I had it,” I said.
“Me too,” Mackie said. “It would have helped me avoid some awkward situations as a kid, I can tell you. Anyway, the Caomhnóir use their abilities to protect the Durupinen from spirit hostility. Some of them are really powerful at it.”
“But if they’re supposed to be working with us so much, why are they so…”
“Rude?”
“Yeah.”
“It goes back to what Siobhán was saying about forbidden relationships. Our powers aren’t supposed to be combined—it would be really dangerous, or so they tell us, so we’re not supposed to fraternize much. But Caomhnóir culture takes it a step further. They’re taught from childhood that Durupinen are these manipulative temptresses that will try to lure them into relationships.”
“Excuse me?” I laughed.
“Yeah, I know,” Mackie said, shaking her head. “It’s supposed to be a mark of their strength and manhood if they can resist us, so most of them will barely speak to us or look us in the eye.”
“I…I don’t even…wow.”
“So I think your question was, why was Finn Carey so rude to you. And the answer is, he’s the quintessential Caomhnóir,” Mackie said. “He wants as little to do with the Apprentices as possible, and when he is forced to interact, he does it with an attitude.”
“Otherwise I might seduce him with my evil feminine wiles?” I asked, still laughing.
“Not if I get him with mine first,” Mackie said.
We turned a final corner and the hallway ended abruptly in front of us in a gently-rounded wall of stone.
“Okay, here it is, the East Tower.” She pointed at an ached entryway in the wall, opening on a tightly spiraling set of stairs. “Up those steps, as far as you can go, and make sure you knock at the top. Fiona’s a bit protective of her space.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”
“I’ll see you at lunch, if Celeste hasn’t found another stupid job for me to do,” Mackie said, straightening her armband and pasting on a forced smile. “Bye, then. Good luck.”
By the time I reached the landing at the top of the tower, I was gasping for air and the muscles in my legs were seizing up. I hadn’t realized getting to my classes would require quite so much cardio; I’d never played an organized sport in my life, but I thought I’d better take up some form of exercise or I’d have to start every mentoring session as a sweaty disaster. I took a minute to catch my breath, and then knocked on the door.
No one answered.
I tried again, a bit more forcefully.
I heard something metal crash to the floor and a voice cry, “What? What, what, what, damn it! I’m trying to get some bloody work done in here!”
The door flew open and a woman stood before me, leaning on the door frame, her expression livid and barely six inches from my own face. I took an involuntary step back.
“What do you want?”
“I…I’m here for my mentor meeting. I’m Jess Ballard.”
“Mentor meeting?” Her eyebrows drew together into a single severe line over narrowed brown eyes that were so dark they were nearly black.
“Yes. Aren’t you Fiona?”
I held out the paper with all of the mentor information on it, and she snatched it out of my hand, glaring at it through the bifocals she had perched on the end of her nose. Her hands, face, and clothes were smeared in a chalky white substance that might have been plaster.
“Dogs!” she said, and stalked back into the room. I hovered in the doorway, unsure if “dogs” meant I was supposed to follow her. She turned and sighed dramatically. “Well, come in if you must. Don’t touch anything.”
I followed her into the room, which wasn’t really an office at all, but a huge cavernous artist’s loft. The rafters that criss-crossed over our heads were hung with canvases and empty old frames stripped of their innards, like animal carcasses. The floor was obscured under a jumbled carpet of tarps. A steady drip, drip, dripping sound pattered onto the paint-spattered fabric where a row of paintbrushes were drooping and weeping as they dried. All around the space, paintings and sculptures were piled and stacked on mismatched furniture. A potter’s wheel sat in one corner, next to what had once been a suit of armor, but it had been dissected, welded, and reassembled into something that would have looked at home in a Picasso painting. A massive metal structure of scaffolding encased the entire left wall
, caging in the largest and most faded tapestry I’d ever seen. The very topmost section of it was being restored, and the image of a sun was slowly rising from the dull antiquity in shining new thread.
It was like stumbling into the forgotten lair of da Vinci. It was fantastic.
“Sit down,” Fiona said, gesturing vaguely toward the windows, where a desk and several chairs lay buried under the artistic carnage.
Gingerly, I shifted a canvas and a dried palette of oils off of a rickety wooden chair and sat on it, testing to make sure it would take my weight before settling onto the threadbare seat.
Fiona took her time scrubbing her hands in a large metal sink in the corner, and finally came to sit cross-legged on her desk, facing me. “So,” she said, still picking plaster out from under her fingernails. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“I have no idea,” I said, feeling slightly annoyed. “You’re the mentor.”
“I told them not to send me any more randomly assigned Apprentices. I don’t have the time for it. But they never listen to me. What did you say your name was again?”
“Jess Ballard.”
“Hmm. One of Lizzy’s girls?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “You knew my mom?”
Fiona ignored my question completely, but instead grabbed a small wire waste basket off of the floor and dumped its contents all over her desk. She picked through the refuse until she found a somewhat crumpled piece of paper, which she smoothed out on her knee and started reading. Her eyebrows disappeared up into the tendrils of hair escaping her bandana, and when she looked at me again, it was with the first glimmers of interest.
“I should actually read the stuff they send me more often,” she said. She waved the paper at me. “You weren’t randomly assigned at all. This letter says you’re a Muse. Is that true?”
“I’m a what?”
“A Muse,” said Fiona impatiently. “Christ on a bike, don’t they tell you girls anything before they drag you in here? It means that you channel spirits through some form of art. They use you as a tool to tell their stories in an artistic medium. We haven’t had a legitimate one for years, other than me.”
I opened my mouth to say no, but stopped myself. My memory raced back to a day last winter, sitting in a crowded lecture hall, looking at a chair draped in black cloth and trying to sense what was hidden beneath it.
“Well, there was this one time I was communicating with a spirit and I drew her without having ever seen her before,” I said. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Just the once?”
“Yes.” Fiona’s face fell. “That’s not much to go on, just one lousy sketch. I don’t suppose you still have it, do you?”
“Yeah, I do. I’ve got it with me, actually,” I realized, and extricated my sketchbook from my bag. I’d taken it with me that morning, hoping to find a few more minutes between classes to sketch in the gardens. I wasn’t overly eager to show this woman anything I’d drawn, given her attitude, but I flipped back until I found the picture of Lydia Tenningsbrook and handed it to Fiona.
Her face, so skeptical at first, fell into deep concentration as she gazed at the little girl’s smiling face. Her head began to nod slowly. “How did you produce this? Were you trying to picture her when you drew this? Did you have a vision, or see her in your mind’s eye?”
“No, I wasn’t even looking at the paper. I was focusing on listening to her, and when I looked down, I had drawn this without even realizing it. It would have taken me half an hour to do a sketch like that normally, but I looked down after maybe a minute of communication, and there it was. My hand was all cramped up. It was like…it was like someone else borrowed my hand to draw it.”
She started leafing through the other pages without asking, continuing to nod. As she pulled back the final page, she revealed the first likeness of Evan I had ever drawn. I snatched the sketchbook out of her hands and flipped it closed, shoving it back into the depths of my bag.
“That one was…private.” Fiona seemed not at all offended or put-off by this. She began to fire questions at me like projectiles. “Was that last one a ghost as well?”
“Yes.” But I wasn’t going to talk about Evan now, not to someone I barely knew.
“How long have you been drawing?”
“As long as I can remember. We lost the security deposit on one of our apartments when I was five because I drew a mural on my bedroom walls in Sharpie.”
Fiona might have smirked, but it was hard to tell in the half-light between the windows. “What mediums do you prefer?”
“Usually just pencil. Sometimes charcoal.”
“Do you have experience with anything else? Oils? Acrylics? Watercolors?”
“Not really. A little bit with pastels.”
“What about sculpture?”
“Not even a little.”
Fiona frowned and scratched her chin, depositing a new smudge of plaster. “Any formal training? Art classes or lessons?”
“Just a couple of art classes in junior high,” I said. “I moved schools so often I didn’t usually have time for electives. It’s always been more of a hobby for me.”
She made a sound halfway between a groan and a hiss, then jumped down from the desk and started prowling like a caged animal. “You know what they do. They dig around and send me the most pathetic excuses for Muses they can unearth. You wouldn’t believe what passes for psychic drawing around here. One spirit-induced doodle, a bloody stick-figure, and they just can’t wait to ship them up to me. And I tear my hair out trying to coax a repeat performance out of them, these Apprentices who’ve never picked up a brush or a sketchpad in their lives, and what’s the result? Hours of wasted time, that’s what. And look at this! Look at all of this!” She gestured wildly around the space. “Do I look like I’ve got time to waste? All these bloody paintings and tapestries to restore and I’m left with barely a moment to work on my own pieces.”
She glared at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. I opened my mouth, but could not formulate a single coherent thing to say. I snapped it shut again and shook my head.
“And forget about real art. Forget about actually sending me someone who can make art, for the love of all that’s holy! I don’t know what they think I do up here all day but they sure as hell don’t think it’s art.”
She kicked a defenseless paint can across the room, its amber-colored contents soaring through the air in a graceful arc and then splattering itself gruesomely across the nearest tarp.
“That,” she shouted, jabbing a finger toward my bag, “was possibly the first real psychic drawing I’ve seen from an Apprentice in years, and certainly the first I’ve seen from anyone who can actually draw worth a damn.”
I blinked. I was getting ready to be dismissed at best, to have a paint can hurled at my head at worst. Did this mean she thought I had potential?
“What’s your name again?” she shot at me.
“Jess.”
“Well, Jess,” Fiona flung herself into the chair across from me and folded her arms. “Congratulations on being the first Apprentice I haven’t chucked out of here on the first day.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
“Do you want to do something real with that?” She cocked her head at my sketchbook. “I mean, do you want to develop your skills? Create something?”
I hesitated. Yes, I wanted to improve as an artist, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it with this woman. I was about seventy percent sure that she was nuts. I looked around the room, playing for time, and my eyes fell on a partially completed painting on an easel behind her. One of the towers of Fairhaven Hall leapt from the canvas. On its balcony, a woman gazed out over the twilit grounds. A breeze had caught her hair and pulled it over her shoulder, and it twisted out into the night, as though hoping to catch itself on an early evening star. It was breathtaking. If, in the midst of all this uncertainty and hostility, there was a chance I could learn to create something that beautifu
l … “Yes.” The answer escaped me without my consciously deciding to give it, but I felt no urge to take it back.
Fiona gave a grim nod, as though we’d both just agreed to something mutually unpleasant. “If we’re going to do this —I mean, actually do this, I need to lay a few things out for you. First, you need to understand that I’m not promising I can actually do anything with you. You’re raw. And I have no idea if you’ll improve with training, so it all may be for nothing. I can already see there’s a good deal I’ll have to unteach you, but you’ve got a good eye, I’ll give you that. And if I see you aren’t improving, I’m not going to keep wasting my time.”
“Okay.”
“Now as far as the psychic drawing, I can’t say for sure if you’re a Muse or not. One isolated incident doesn’t mean you’ve been gifted like that, so we’ll have to experiment and go from there. It’s not unusual for an Apprentice to have very varied forms of spirit communication before the gift settles into its regular patterns, and we may find that a spirit never uses you in such a capacity again. You have to be prepared for that, and if that’s the case, I’ll be shipping you off to another mentor, because I don’t have time to hold your hand and bond with you and talk about your feelings, or whatever other rubbish a mentor is supposed to do.”
“Okay,” I said again. What else could I say? She wasn’t really giving me a choice. “Alright then,” Fiona said. “Dogs, I’ve got my work cut out for me. We begin then.”
I spent the next hour in an interrogation scene from a detective film noir, minus the cloud of smoke and saxophone-heavy soundtrack. Fiona wanted to know every detail about every bit of art I’d ever done, but grew increasingly snappish with each question she asked. She grew impatient if I had to consider my answer, and bored if I gave what she considered to be an irrelevant piece of information. She yelled at me no less than ten times about things I had no control over, like which great paintings I’d seen or when I’d first started sketching. She actually threw a chair when I said I didn’t know how to mix paints, and rounded off the whole bizarre encounter by slumping into her chair, banging her forehead repeatedly on the desktop, and pointing wordlessly at the exit, by which I could only assume she was dismissing me. As I high-tailed it for the door, she shouted after me, “Next Monday, same time. Bring your sketchbook.”