Spirit Prophecy

by E. E. Holmes

  “You are here to serve the Durupinen. The word of the High Priestess is your highest law,” she said.

  “He is not here to serve anyone,” said a new voice. Every head in the room turned in surprise to Carrick, who had materialized from the shadows beside Finvarra as though parting smoke. He inclined his head respectfully to her. “We are protectors, not servants. Our oath is not one of indentured servitude, and we do not bend our skills and decisions to the will of the Durupinen. Our role is just as important and valued to the continuation of the Gateways as your own. This young man is doing his duty. You will not fault him for it.”

  Marion turned in exasperation to Finvarra, who was not looking at her, but tracing a finger thoughtfully around her mouth.

  “If you remain here, as you say, in fulfillment of your oath,” she began, her penetrating gaze blazing between Finn and me like a searchlight, “then I must conclude that you believe Jessica to be in some kind of danger if she is left here in the company of this Council without you. Am I correct in this assumption?”

  Finn did not speak at first, but caught my eye. I gave my head the tiniest shake I could manage, and he blinked. It was too much to hope that Finvarra hadn’t caught the exchange, but I could hope that she would not be able to interpret it.

  “High Priestess, look at her. She seemed to be in no danger last night when we parted company, and yet here she is, gravely injured. I don’t yet know how this came to pass, and I’m not sure that she does either, and until we do, I must assume that she could be in danger anywhere. I will stay with her until I understand the nature of this situation, and how she can be best protected from it. I would be remiss in my duties if I did not do so.”

  Carrick nodded sharply, looking at Finn for all the world as a proud father might look at his son. Finvarra seemed to be weighing his words very carefully on some internal scale before answering. Finally she said, “Very well. There is some wisdom to what you say. Though I can see that you would have remained regardless, do so now with my open invitation.”

  Finn clicked his heels together and bowed formally. “Thank you, High Priestess.”

  Marion seemed to melt back into her seat, though not without a last virulent look at Finn. Carrick stepped back and resumed his position just behind Finvarra.

  “Let us continue, then,” Finvarra said. “We are here, as you know, because of the most extraordinary drawing with which you’ve covered the entire entry hall. It is my understanding that you have produced psychic drawings before.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How long have you been able to do this?”

  “Since last year.”

  “And since that time you have been exploring this skill with Fiona, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Finvarra seemed to be waiting for me to elaborate, but when I did not oblige, she turned to the Council benches. “Fiona? Can you give us some details from your sessions about the nature of these drawings?”

  “Yes, Priestess,” Fiona said, rising to her feet. She was clutching my leather portfolio from our lessons under her arm, along with a bundle of scrolls. My heart sank. I must have left the portfolio in her office the day of Pierce’s Crossing; I’d been too distraught since then to even notice it was missing. Fiona’s eyes darted to me, and their expression, though brief, seemed to be asking my forgiveness. She walked carefully down the steps to a table that had been placed at the base of the benches. She set the scrolls to the side and lay my portfolio open upon the polished wooden surface. “Jessica came to us with an extensive collection of her own art and an untrained but considerable natural talent for drawing.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t help but feel a faint hint of pride at the compliment, which was the first one Fiona had ever paid me. I watched as she rifled through the stack of papers in the portfolio and slid one out.

  “This,” she said, holding it up for everyone to see, “is the first psychic drawing she ever produced. It was pulled merely from a physical object with an attached spirit, though the spirit was not present at the time.”

  I had to crane my neck to see it. It was the drawing of Lydia Tenningsbrook that I had unwittingly produced in my very first class with Pierce. The corners of my eyes began to burn, but I blinked the moisture away impatiently. I didn’t have time to go to pieces over Pierce now; I needed a clear head.

  “During her time with me, we have explored her ability, which from the start has been surprisingly sharp and accurate. She has connected with many spirits here at Fairhaven Hall, both in class and outside of it. The detail she has been able to provide through her drawings has been the most rich and specific I have seen in a very long time. However, the information she has sensed and drawn has always been relative to the past or the present. I have never witnessed anything of a prophetic nature.”

  My drawings floated amongst the Council, passed from member to member and examined over and over again. I wanted to leap from my seat and snatch them out of their hands. It was a violation. They had no right to touch them. They weren’t theirs; they weren’t even really mine. They belonged to the ghosts who had trusted me enough to depict them, to pour their hearts and lives into me and onto the pages. And right there on the floor of the council room, for the first time since I’d discovered who I was, I felt a surge of protectiveness, almost possessiveness, toward the ghosts that had forced their ways so unceremoniously into my life.

  “It was determined through our mentoring sessions,” Fiona continued, “that Jessica is a Muse, not a Prophetess, and we have proceeded accordingly with her training. But the drawings upstairs are, quite obviously, a different story.”

  Heads all around the room nodded gravely, and many turned to look at me. I knew I was not imagining the fear and hostility in many of the faces. I could not spare a single emotion for them. My entire being had frozen on the word Prophetess.

  Prophetess. The prophecy.

  They knew. They had to know.

  Finn looked down at me inquisitively, sensing my tension. Whatever it was he saw on my face put him on high alert. He placed a hand firmly on the back of my chair, so that I could feel the pressure of it against my shoulder.

  Fiona cleared my portfolio away and unrolled several of the scrolls very carefully. She laid them out on the table deliberately, like pieces of a puzzle. Then she stepped away from them and averted her eyes as though the resulting image made her feel ill.

  “As you requested, I’ve brought the records that exist of all of our prophetic art throughout our history. We have come to learn over time that they all relate to a single prophecy, like pieces of a puzzle that have revealed themselves over the centuries. When put together in this configuration, they create a single, continuous image.”

  All of the Council members were standing and craning their necks to see the scrolls on the table top. A few filtered down the aisle to get a closer look.

  Finvarra called out over their hushed conversations. “Mr. Carey, perhaps you could bring Jessica forward. I think that she needs to see this.”

  Keeping one hand against the back of the chair where I could still feel it, Finn stepped behind me and wheeled me forward. It took an unnaturally long time to reach the table, as though the room were some kind of optical illusion– the table never seemed to get any closer. Finally, Finn turned the chair around the side of the table and the image lay before me, pieced together from a dozen tattered and ancient rolls of parchment.

  I felt no shock, only a heavy weight of confirmation that dropped like a stone into my gut.

  Before me lay the very same image I had gouged onto the walls two floors below us. It bled its horror from scroll to scroll, a continuous scene of utter chaos and despair. And there, at the heart of it all, a tiny, long-haired figure in silhouette, arms raised in the center of the open Gateway.

  “This image,” Finvarra said, her voice very quiet, but carrying nevertheless over the stunned silence that had fallen, “depicts a prophecy that
was made nearly a millennium ago, about the fall of the Durupinen and the rise of the Necromancers. Marion, please bring the Book of Téigh Anonn.”

  Marion hoisted the enormous volume off of her bench and lay it open on Finvarra’s desktop. Finvarra opened it to the very back pages, which appeared to be blank. She held her right hand suspended over them and began to chant silently, her lips moving unnaturally fast. When she opened her eyes again, words had seeped up out of the pages and spread as though someone had spilled them upon the surface.

  And she read the words that would change everything.

  When Keeper and Protector shall unite

  And forth from this forbidden union shall be spawned

  Two as one from single womb, and Keepers both,

  Then shall the greatest of battles commence.

  For One shall be Caller with powers unmatched

  To reverse the Gates, and call forth the Hordes

  To bend to her will and that of our foes,

  And One will have to make the choice

  Twixt blood and calling, twixt kindred and kin

  For she will have the power of sacrifice to end it all

  And leave the world until the end of days

  To the Darkness or the Light.

  20

  IMPASSE

  “JESSICA.”

  I came back from the far side of the new landscape her words had painted.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you heard this prophecy before?”

  “No.”

  “You told Celeste that you do not remember making the drawing in the entry hall.”

  “No.”

  “Can you give us any understanding of how you came to make that drawing?”

  The wall rose up before me. There was no way around it, no way over it. The moment had come to tell them everything, and face the consequences, whatever they may be.

  “It was Mary.”

  Finvarra stared at me. “Who is Mary?”

  “She is one of the ghosts here. You all know her as the Silent Child.”

  Muttering began to ripple around the room in unsettled waves. I waited for them to die away.

  “She has been trying very hard to communicate with me since the very first day I came here.”

  Still Finvarra stared, bewildered.

  “I’ve never known the Silent Child to approach or attempt to speak to anyone,” she said.

  Again a ripple through the Council, this time of shaking heads. “She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t communicate with anyone at all. She’s been Caged for centuries.”

  “Caged?” Finvarra whispered.

  “Yes,” I said, a sick, hot anger rising inside me for the pain that Mary had been through. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that not one of you ever realized it? Never once stopped to wonder what kept her here, terrified to approach any of you?”

  Silence greeted my words. Here and there, a guilty squirm.

  “All of your preaching about our duty to the spirits, about our sacred calling. What bullshit!” I shouted, as impulse shot me up out of my chair.

  Finn placed a restraining hand on my shoulder, but the wave of nausea and dizziness landed me back in the seat before I’d even gained my footing. I shoved his hand away.

  “You expect us to give up our lives, everything we’ve ever known, to become one of you. Everything that’s ever been important to us — our relationships, our education, our plans for the future — we’re just supposed to hand it all over with a big fucking smile on our faces and if we doubt it for even a second, if we dare to question it, we’re treated like outcasts.

  “This calling destroyed my mother’s life. It destroyed my sister’s life. It nearly destroyed mine. But we came. We came here and we trusted you. We gave up everything because we really believed that you meant what you said — that it’s all for the spirits, for those that cannot help themselves, and maybe for a few of you, that’s still true. But for most of you — ” and I shot a poisonous look at Marion and a few other unnaturally beautiful faces, all frozen in shock at my outburst, “ —it’s all about what you can take for yourselves. You claim to want to help them, but all you do is suck them dry. You could have known everything you wanted to know about the prophecy ages ago, but why would you bother with a ghost like Mary? You don’t bother with them if you can’t see what’s in it for you. But she risked everything to help me. She endured terrible agony every time she tried to speak to me, to warn me about what was coming. It’s too bad no one was there to warn her.”

  “That’s enough,” Finvarra said, rising to her feet. Her expression was a nearly undecipherable collision of emotions. She was obviously angry with me, and her tone subdued me into a seething silence, but she seemed unable to decide how to proceed. I noted with satisfaction that what I had said had unnerved her, and she wasn’t contradicting me — in fact, when she next spoke, she did not even fully meet my eye.

  “What did Mary tell you? How did she speak to you if she has been Caged?”

  “We…I Uncaged her,” I said, changing tack midsentence. No reason to drag the whole crew down with me.

  Siobhán piped up for the first time. “That is an incredibly complex and dangerous casting! How did you learn to do such a thing? We certainly don’t teach it, and I don’t think anyone here has ever even performed one.”

  “The library. It was all in there, if you knew where to look,” I said.

  “What did Mary tell you?” Finvarra repeated.

  “She didn’t want to talk to me at first, until she could be sure that there were no others around. But finally last night, I followed her down to the dungeons and she told me the truth about how she died. She was murdered by the Durupinen because of that prophecy.” I pointed a shaking finger at the Book of Téigh Anonn, where the words had once again hidden themselves in the pages.

  Shock wiped every face blank except for Finvarra’s, which crumpled instead into a mournful expression. She brought one hand over her eyes and held it there for some time. When she lowered it again, her eyes were oddly bright.

  “The prophecy speaks, as I’m sure you’ve realized, of an illicit relationship between a Durupinen and a Caomhnóir. This relationship would result in twin girls, who would both be blessed with the gift. These two girls would hold the fate of the Durupinen in their hands, with potentially cataclysmic consequences. There were some,” she said quietly, “ages ago, who felt sure that the devastation laid forth in this prophecy was imminent. They chose to destroy all possible risks for fear of its fulfillment. Can I assume that Mary was the child of a Durupinen and a Caomhnóir?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Finvarra nodded. “The prophecy was the very reason that relationships between Durupinen and Caomhnóir were forbidden in the first place. But those who first heard this prophecy allowed their fear to overwhelm their logic. There followed what can only be described as a witch hunt for the children born from these unions. It was a very shameful time in our history. I assure you that we are not proud of it.”

  “She wouldn’t cross over,” I said. “She wanted others to know what had happened to her, to warn them of the dangers. They couldn’t get rid of her, so they silenced her with a Caging instead.”

  “When I first arrived here as an Apprentice, the Silent Child had long since hidden herself in the shadows,” Finvarra said. “I must admit that I never gave her a second thought. She fled from us at the first sign of attention, and she was one of very, very many spirits that haunted these grounds. And in the many years since, I’ve never known her to attempt communication with anyone. But she sought you out, Jessica.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why.”

  It was not a question. She already knew; she had realized the truth, as

  I had, and she was merely waiting for me to state it aloud.

  “She knew that I was in danger because I was like her. She was afraid for me, so she kept fighting against the Caging to warn me.”

  “Because somehow
she knew what even you did not,” Finvarra said.

  “She knew that you were a child of a forbidden relationship.”

  “An abomination, that was what she said,” I whispered.

  “She feared for your life, and so she revealed herself, for what may have been the first time in centuries.”

  “I don’t know how she knew it,” I said. “But she recognized me right away. She attacked me within hours of arriving here, and she’s been coming to me in dreams and drawings for months.”

  “And she feared, as you do now, that you and your sister are the ones spoken of in the prophecy.”

  I swallowed back the impulse to be sick. “Yes.”

  The silence that followed was one of the longest of my life. Several Council members were sitting motionless, their eyes accusing me of being the very abomination Mary’s murderers had thought her to be. Others looked merely bewildered, as though they hadn’t yet caught up with the implications of what it all meant. Siobhán hung her head and shook it back and forth slowly like a mournful pendulum. One woman in the back appeared to be praying.

  “We have no proof,” Finvarra said at last, “of your parentage. We were never able to discover, in all of our searches for your mother, any information regarding your father’s identity. You are quite sure you have no information about him?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “She would never speak a word about him.” I’d always thought this was because the memory of him was, for whatever reason, too painful for her. Now, it seemed, that she was doing everything she could to protect us.

  “Very well then,” Finvarra said. “I think we must take Mary’s actions quite seriously. Marion, please draft a letter summoning a meeting of the Caomhnóir Brotherhood. We will need all members here immediately. A formal inquiry must be made before —”

  “Excuse the interruption, High Priestess. I’ve found the other Ballard girl.” Braxton had appeared in the doorway, his huge paw of a hand clamped tightly around Hannah’s upper arm. “These two girls,” he pointed over his shoulder at Mackie and Savannah, who were hovering nervously just behind him, “were trying to help her leave the grounds.”