The Keeper's Curse

by Diana Harrison

  “Tabarnac!” she swore, jumping on one foot and holding the injured one.

  She heard an explosion behind her and flipped around. A palewraith had just knocked over a lamp on the nightstand. The side of Emmy’s mouth curled up.

  Interesting. They went off if she was in pain as well as fear. Was there an emotional connection that summoned them?

  She closed her eyes and thought of her mother. Immediately her blood began to boil, and when she opened her eyes, there it was, floating three feet off the ground. In its way, it was quite beautiful; the gold, clear light inside the dark fog made it appear like the sun shining through behind thick clouds on a stormy day. Her curiosity inched her forward, wondering what it would feel like to touch it but by the time she reached it, it faded again.

  For the rest of the afternoon she practiced, but rarely did she accomplish much more than summoning a palewraith. She was never able to get it to do anything, and not once was she able to get close enough to touch one.

  She didn’t even hear the footsteps on the stairs, and when Jade swung the door open, she only realized she was there when she squeaked.

  “What are you doing?” Jade asked.

  Emmy lowered her hand. “Oh, um, I thought I’d practice a little bit.”

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “A couple of hours?”

  Jade shook her head. “You don’t want to play with them too long, just to let you know. They get annoyed when you do.”

  This was a new development. “They can think?”

  Jade tilted her head to the side. “I wouldn’t go that far, but they can feel. They’re pure consciousness. Probably more aware than we are.”

  Emmy stared where the palewraith had been floating all afternoon. “They don’t seem to have a brain.”

  “Well of course not! They’re dead. I should have clarified before, but palewraiths are crafter souls. That’s what happens to us when we die.”

  And just like that, the thought of the palewraiths made her queasy again. Those black, glowing clouds were once people, and she had been playing with them. “They’re ... dead souls? And we use them? That’s disgusting.”

  Jade seemed unfazed. “Not really. I mean, it’s always been this way. You’re born, you live, and you become a palewraith. You serve the next generation of crafters. It’s better than rotting in the ground, isn’t it? That’s what I heard happens to humans.”

  Emmy nodded. “To our bodies, yeah,” she said. “But we don’t know what happens to our souls.” Emmy turned away from her. “So ... only people like us can do this? Normal people can’t?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jade replied, sitting on the edge of the bed and bouncing steadily. “The palewraiths are the source of all magic in our world. They can do almost anything, but they limit us to physical powers. Like moving things around.” She began pulling individual hairs out of the blanket. “They’re really powerful, and we can’t control them properly in the real world. We could hurt humans, that’s why we stay away from them.”

  She thought that was reasonable enough, considering how out of control she was in her living room. Here, she had to exert herself to get them to work. She thought of thousands like herself roaming a city, scared, confused, angry – she could see why life was set up this way.

  Before she mused too much, Alex came into her room, glowing at the sight of them talking together.

  “I see you’re feeling better,” he said with a smile so wide it had to be painful.

  “She was using the palewraiths,” Jade said. “And doing quite well until I walked in.”

  “I was just testing it out.”

  “Still, that’s excellent you’ve been trying,” Alex said. “I know they’re creepy at first, but don’t worry about it, okay?” He peeked over his shoulder down the hallway. “Hey, do you want to come downstairs for dinner?”

  Taking advantage of her transient bravery she decided she would.

  At dinner, Emmy wasn’t sure if Alex and the Woodworkers talked so much for her sake or if they really were that friendly, but she was finding her taut muscles beginning to unwind. Despite the way they looked and the way they lived, they appeared to be like any normal family.

  The dad, Sol, was a lot like his son in the way he barely spoke, but unlike Gabe, it seemed to be more because he was in a sour mood. Vera always made up for this with her lively chatter, and there was hardly any topic Jade couldn’t talk about.

  Being the observer, Emmy didn’t say anything. Instead she took in her surroundings, noticing strange things about the kitchen, like how they didn’t have a phone or a digital clock, or anything electrical. When she looked out the window, instead of a driveway, there was a stable with several horses inside. With the exception of the certain things, like hygiene and the plumbing, she felt like she had been thrust into the seventeenth century. When she excused herself, Alex offered to walk her back to the attic.

  “They keep staring at me,” Emmy whispered.

  “They’re worried about you,” Alex said. “And you’re just as strange-looking to them as they are to you. You and I are probably the closest they’ve ever gotten into coming in contact with humans.”

  Emmy frowned at her brother. “Why do you guys say that?” she asked. “You say ‘humans’ as if we aren’t.”

  Alex took a long time to answer this, probably to get out of earshot of the Woodworkers. They climbed back up the ladder and into the attic, making Emmy feel a lot safer in her little haven.

  “Don’t ever say this in front of anyone,” Alex said, plopping down on a box beside her bed. “But crafters are really weird when it comes to humans.”

  “You said it again –”

  “Relax, okay? We may be freaks of nature but we are human. It’s just ... crafters have been kept away from people for so long now – hundreds of years – they’ve completely forgotten what people are like. They think humans better than we are, because they don’t ... well, have to be kept away in little glass balls away from civilization.”

  Emmy bit her lip, a little disturbed by this, but still glad she knew. She suddenly realized there was a whole world around her she knew nothing about.

  “Can you teach me?” Emmy asked. “Before school starts, can you just teach me the things that every kid would know? Crafter 101 stuff?”

  “I think that’s a great idea. I’ll be in your room at ten o’ clock tomorrow.”

  ***

  The weekend was a busy one, getting ready for school. When Jade went out to shop for new clothes, she asked for Emmy’s measurements and returned with a mountain of silk, bodices, blazers, and fur, dropping the massive bundle all on the kitchen table. The only thing in the pile that Emmy could ever see herself wearing was a black, skin-tight tracksuit.

  “That isn’t to wear for regular classes,” Jade announced as Emmy went to pick it up. “It’s for peacekeeping class.”

  “The only mandatory class every student needs to take,” Alex said. “It’s an hour and a half, every afternoon, last class of the day. It’s also the most fun. Basically we’re taken out into the woods and we fight each other. Sometimes it’s every man for himself, sometimes in teams, and once in a while we actually get to track down a criminal.”

  “The idea is to duplicate different war scenes,” Jade said.

  Emmy held up her new tracksuit and raised an eyebrow. “You guys condone violence?”

  “Not condone. Encourage,” was Alex’s blunt answer with a grin. “Lesson number one: Methelwood came out of the Ministrial, which is the orb that connects all the other orbs.”

  “It’s the hub of our world,” Jade said, holding up a pair of trousers to Emmy’s waist. “They have the courts, the best universities, and all the governors of the orbs live there – everyone important, really. It’s where you’re going to take your admission exam.”

  “Yeah, anyway,” Alex went on. “Methelwood was created specifically to use whenever Ministrial has a problem. Whenever war breaks ou
t – and it happens a lot – Ministrial calls on us. That’s why we’re so educated in politics and war.”

  As Jade undid Emmy’s bodice to see if the one she bought would fit her, she asked, “Do you have to get a job in peacekeeping?”

  “Only when there’s a shortage of applicants,” Jade said. “Which there isn’t now.”

  “Don’t worry, Em,” Alex said, trying on his new blazer. “Your dreams of being a psychologist aren’t dead.”

  It was funny how quickly he was able to read her, as if they hadn’t been away from each other for five years.

  Jade and Alex began chatting about the peacekeeping class, comparing their scores. From what Emmy could gather, there were the morning classes (theory – classes like politics, history and science) and afternoon classes (practicum – classes like yoga, fencing and archery). There also appeared to be an extra grade. Crafters had to stay in school until they were nineteen (which was their legal adult age), suffering through a grade 13.

  That evening Emmy moved to the backyard to start practicing. Alex had promised to train her every evening for the next three months on how to use the palewraiths properly, something she would hold him to.

  “It seems so random,” Emmy said, backing away from Alex to the edge of the forest. “Sometimes I can summon one and sometimes I can’t. Can you talk to them?”

  “It’d be nice,” Alex said, “but no. The thing you have to keep in mind is you own them. People use their hands to move them but you don’t have to – it’s a mental thing.”

  “They seem to pop up when I’m mad,” Emmy said.

  “Yes, they tend to be more sensitive when your heart rate goes up, because that would be when you need them, especially if you’re scared.”

  “So I need to train myself to get upset?”

  “Pretty much.”

  At first she was hopeless, feeling stupid waving her arms around. But the more frustrated she got with Alex, the more frequent a palewraith would pop up in front of her, even if it was only for a second before fading away again.

  She slept well that night, exhausted by the practice, and the following day was just as busy. Alex had brought home school forms to fill out regarding class scheduling and enrolment, a task that proved to be difficult to do since she didn’t have proof of citizenship, which every crafter received after their admission exam.

  By the time Alex led Emmy up to her room for bed that evening, she had spiralled downward into a panicky mess.

  “They had a list of crafts on the application, and I didn’t know which ones I had,” Emmy wailed, as Alex pushed her onto the bed. “I don’t even know what a craft is!”

  “I’ll give you a list of the crafts in the morning,” he said calmly, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “It’s just another word for ability. Now clear your head and get some sleep.”

  He sounded so much like their father the back of her eyes started to burn. She tucked herself in as Alex let himself out and climbed down the ladder. She tried to empty her head, which proved to be impossible. Emmy wasn’t fond of school in general, but now she was downright terrified.

  Her eyes lingered on the moon, once in a while seeing a visible change in its position. Was she going to get any sleep? She began counting stars, and when she ran out, she counted trees. The boughs encircled her little window, and that was when she noticed it.

  There had been something on one of the branches all night. At first she had thought it was some sort of growth, but then it ruffled, and a light flashed her way. Emmy got to her feet and went over to the window, pressing her face up against it to get a better look.

  It was a silver raven with pure white eyes, staring right at her.

  Get a grip, she told herself, but she felt a prickle in the back of her spine. She had never seen an animal look so directly at her, eyes so unmoving from her face.

  She shook her head, pulled down the blind, and trudged back to bed. Emmy fell asleep with two white lights glaring at her through the curtain.

  Chapter 4

  Urquhart Institute

  The compulsion to vomit on Monday morning died with Alex and Jade, who kept her busy by drilling her with information on what to do. Alex’s list of crafts, of what different crafters could do with palewraith magic, was settled in Emmy’s pocket:

  Transposer – can move things with mind

  Driver – can make someone do anything with a verbal command

  Breaker – can teleport

  Flyer – self explanatory

  Elemental – can control an element (subgroups: salamander (fire), nymphs (water), sylphs (air), and gnomes (earth)) – usually only one of the four

  Shifter – can change the body into any shape (includes invisibility)

  Strapper – abnormally superior physique; very strong, very fast etc

  Like Alex had informed her, while palewraiths could do much more, crafters were limited to only physical powers such as these. Jade explained that everyone was a transposer (like Emmy herself), with the ability to shift the palewraiths, which was the bare minimum to be a crafter. She took that moment to declare she was a strapper as well, one of the more specialty crafts.

  In the excitement, they almost forgot to inform her that Jade was in her grade and would be able to help her the whole way along. Emmy figured it was probably the polite thing to insist she could get along on her own and she didn’t want to bother Jade, but she was too scared Jade would agree with her and run off.

  Jade couldn’t seem to slow herself to walk at a leisurely pace and trotted ahead of Alex and Emmy, smiling all the way.

  “She’s going to give me diabetes,” Emmy said.

  Alex laughed. “Jade? She’s harmless, just a little hyper is all. Are you warm enough by the way?”

  Emmy wrapped her new overcoat with ermine lining closer to her. The wind had picked up, and although it wasn’t snowing, the snow blew upwards against her already-reddened skin.

  “I’m okay. Hey Alex, you know that glass bracelet Mom put on me? Should I put it back on for school? It seemed to stop the palewraiths.”

  “Yeah, probably. You’re right by the way, it does block the palewraiths.”

  They walked a few more steps, and when he didn’t say any more, Emmy asked, “What is it?”

  “It’s made from this material called ‘frenum’.” He ran a hand through his hair, his face quickly turning red. “The reason you didn’t manifest when you were a preteen like me is because when Mom would visit me every few months, she’d bring back a load of frenum and she’d ... pulverize it, and put it in everything you ate. It kept your powers dormant.”

  Emmy stopped in her tracks, and her jaw dropped. In her white fury she heard a tree fall behind her.

  “I’d put the bracelet on,” Alex advised.

  Muttering to herself, Emmy took the bracelet out of her pocket and clasped it on.

  “I don’t believe this,” she shouted, stomping towards the school. “I don’t believe this. Was she trying to get herself thrown in prison? Why would she do this to me and not to you?”

  “I don’t know, she’s always been more protective of you,” Alex said, with a trace of bitterness in his tone. “You’re the youngest, I guess. And you’re a girl.”

  Emmy wanted to counter the accusation, but he looked so miserable she let it go. There was no point in upsetting him further by getting into the details of how Annalise protected Emmy in ways she hadn’t with Alex. And she didn’t need to; they were blatant.

  Of the two of them, Alex had always been the more responsible one, getting into less trouble. Emmy’s friends had always been a large part of her delinquency, but Annalise always worried the most when Emmy went off on her own. She never meant to do it, but every once in a while her mind would wander on her way home from school, and before she knew it, it would be nightfall, with an itch in the back of her mind unfulfilled despite being physically exhausted.

  “What were you doing?” her mother would always scream at her.

&nbs
p; “I was looking for something,” she would always say.

  “What?”

  Emmy would always tell the truth, and it would always get her grounded. “I don’t know.”

  Still, she found it curious that Annalise would go through all this trouble for her. It was so much effort, so much lying, and for what purpose?

  Alex saw her staring at her bracelet and mistook her expression. “It isn’t perfect,” he said. “If you get excited enough, a little bit of powdered frenum isn’t going to stop you.”

  She tucked her hands in her pockets, hiding the bracelet. “Yeah, they seemed to be more uncontrollable out of the orbs. This is way more manageable.”

  Alex nodded. “There are wards up around the orbs as well as a wall of frenum. It’s to keep us grounded. That’s why Dad can’t be here, by the way, or any human. The toll on our bodies is pretty tough. They couldn’t handle it.”

  The idea of her dad alone in their house was still too fresh in her mind. The thought had obviously occurred to Alex too, because neither of them spoke until they reached Urquhart Institute.

  It didn’t take too long until they reached a wrought-iron gate decorated in an intricate design of whirls like vines with the two letters “UI” embossed in the center. Jade opened the gate, and Emmy’s jaw dropped again.

  The grounds, untouched by snow, were freshly cut, and necklaced by a low, cream, granite wall. In the middle was Urquhart itself, flanked between two oak trees, and came across less like a school and more like a private liberal art’s university. It looked like it was made out of one enormous slab of rich dark wood, with gilded outlines of the windows and doors. The flagstone path they had been on led right up to the front entrance.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  “I’ve been going here for five years so yeah, I’m pretty sure,” Alex said.

  The only flaw was the clusters of students in threes and fours, bright in lively conversation, littering the grounds.

  At the front entrance, Jade smiled and beckoned them, and they headed her way. As usual, Emmy couldn’t stop staring at the crafters, and they must have noticed, because eyes with colors like malachite green, midsummer sky and coal black all stared back at her. She focused on the ground.