Plague of the Shattered

by E. E. Holmes

  I have been allowed this single moment only: to stare down upon the mortal shell of my beloved sister before it is taken away. I am expected to say goodbye to a soul that has already fled this world. How cruel, knowing what they know of spirits. I am ashamed to say that I have shed no tears for Hattie. My heart aches with a pain beyond description, but I have no tears left in me. I have had no tears for a long time.

  I do not know for sure what will become of me. For the foreseeable future, I am to be imprisoned at the príosún on the Isle of Skye under a multitude of Castings, kept under the watchful eye of the Caomhnóir so that they can be sure I will not bloom into the terrible threat the Council fears I shall become. If they decide that even those walls cannot contain my danger… no, I dare not speak the words, let alone record them upon these pages. It would make the possibility too real—and therefore too dreadful—to fathom. But one thing is for certain; the Durupinen will never allow me, in body or spirit, to tell my story.

  But you can. You are my truth. You are the last recorded testament of what has become of me. My true thoughts, my hopes, my dreams: they all live in you. I hide you in the coffin of my beloved sister in the hope that, someday, when the irrational fear of the present has subsided, I can lead someone to you, and all shall be revealed. It will surely be too late for me, but perhaps my story can save another Caller from the strangling clutches of this fear.

  Tell them, Little Book. Tell them I was Eleanora Larkin. Tell them I did no harm to anyone. I had so much to give of myself to the world.

  And the Durupinen destroyed me.

  Eleanora

  19

  Naming Eleanora

  I FINISHED READING BEFORE FINN DID, and so I had a full minute to let the horror of what I’d just read wash over me like a tide.

  “So, this is it. This is her. The Shattered spirit,” Finn said, somewhat breathlessly.

  I nodded.

  “But this is brilliant!” he said, and leapt up, book in hand. “We can end this!”

  Fiona appeared in the doorway. “What is it? Did you find something in there?” she asked. Her teeth were chattering.

  “We’ve got it. A name. Eleanora Larkin.”

  And even as he said it aloud, the name rang a bell in my mind, a bell that struck just the right note, just the right frequency, to send a shivering sensation down into my fingers, which twitched with the truth of it all.

  The terrible, terrible truth.

  “Oh, at bloody last!” Fiona said, and she looked absolutely weak with relief. She reached out a hand for the book, and Finn gave it to her.

  “Let’s get this up to the castle. The sooner the Council see this, the sooner the Shards can be expelled.”

  “And what about Hannah? What does this mean for her?” I asked, standing up.

  Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know yet. We won’t know, until we get this spirit patched back together. She should be able to communicate better then, and we will finally get to the bottom of what she’s after.”

  Eleanora.

  This was the name of the ghost, the spirit who had turned Fairhaven upside down for the last few days. She wasn’t just a spate of Shattered fragments—a scourge of which we needed to be cleansed. She was a person. A girl with a heart and a mind and a will to live and love and make her mark in the world.

  And the Durupinen had destroyed her. They sacrificed this poor girl on the altar of their own terror—terror of a Prophecy they could not escape, no matter who they flung into its waiting jaws to satiate it. Just as they sacrificed The Silent Child. Just like they sacrificed my mother.

  Just like they had nearly sacrificed Hannah and me.

  When would this damn Prophecy release its hold on us? When would we be finished cleaning up its messes and sidestepping its horrific consequences? Wasn’t fulfilling it enough to be free of it? Would it seriously follow us forever, dogging our footsteps, forcing us to wade through the shadows of the travesties it left behind?

  “Well,” Finn said, and I knew he was swallowing back many things he wanted to say, “We’ve got a name, here, haven’t we?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yes, we have.”

  “That’s it, then. If we’ve got a name, we can begin the expulsion,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, I suppose we can,”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it,”

  I looked at him. His expression was set. “Are you happy about it?”

  “I understand what you mean. This,” and he tapped a finger on the book, “is terrible, and no mistake. But what can we do? She’s got to be expelled.”

  “I know. I just… what happened to her…”

  “I know.”

  Every heavy, anxious, desperate feeling I had welled up inside of me at once. “Finn, I’m sorry about what I—”

  But Finn shook his head. “Don’t. We don’t need to do this right now. There will be time for that later. Use your connection to let Hannah and Milo know what we’ve found, and then help me get Catriona back up to the castle, will you? The Council will be going spare if she’s missing too long.”

  I swallowed all of those feelings, pushing them right back down where they belonged. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

  §

  We struggled back toward the castle with Catriona draped between us, barely conscious. Fiona marched several yards ahead of us, leading the charge. We’d made it about halfway across the open stretch of lawn leading to the front doors when a shout stopped us in our tracks.

  “There they are! They have her!”

  We turned to see Seamus and Braxton jogging up the path that led to the barracks. “What’s happened?” Seamus called as they reached us. “What’s happened to her?”

  “She’s fine,” Finn said. “Just weak.”

  In one deft movement, Seamus hefted Catriona over his back in a fireman’s carry. “Where did you find her?” he asked.

  “She led us down into the graveyard,” I said. “She wanted us to open one of the mausoleums so we could find that.” I pointed to the book in Fiona’s hands.

  “A book?” Seamus asked, incredulous. “She leapt out the window and braved these temperatures just for a book?”

  “It’s a very important book,” Fiona said testily. “It’s given us the spirit’s name. We can expel her now. That is, if we don’t all freeze to death while we stand out here and explain it to you.”

  Seamus narrowed his eyes at Fiona, but stopped asking questions. He turned to Braxton. “Alert the Council and tell them to meet us at the hospital ward. Make sure that Mrs. Mistlemoore accompanies them.”

  Braxton saluted and ran for the castle doors. We all followed him in shivering silence.

  §

  Waiting outside the hospital ward doors while the Council examined the diary was excruciating. I paced in the same tight circle so many times that I was surprised not to see a whole in the floor beneath my feet.

  “Jess, you’ve got to calm down,” Finn said at last.

  “Finn, never in the history of the world have the words ‘calm down’ ever made anyone feel calmer,” I snapped.

  He almost smiled. “Fair enough.”

  “I just don’t understand why they couldn’t let us in there!” I said for at least the fifth time. “We are the ones who found the diary! I’m the one who drew the pictures! I’m the one the spirit tried to communicate with!”

  “The Council values its privilege,” Finn said, shaking his head.

  “The only thing they value about their privilege is abusing it,” I grumbled. “I should be in there, I could help. I mean, did you see the way they looked at me when they walked in there? They were all glaring at me like I’d done something wrong—well, besides lying, breaking Catriona out, and robbing a sacred Durupinen burial ground.”

  “Imagine them not inviting you in there, after all that,” Finn said with a chuckle. “I’m surprised they even allowed Fiona in, quite frankly.”

  “What do think it meant?” I asked. “Eleanor
a’s message about the Caller betraying her?”

  Finn shrugged. “I can’t say. She was a Caller, after all. Maybe she meant that being a Caller is what led to her betrayal?”

  I considered this. “That’s possible. She didn’t mention any other Callers in that diary.”

  “Don’t fret about that now,” Finn said. “When the Council unites the Shards, they’ll be able to ask Eleanora what she meant, and then they’ll know at last that Hannah had nothing to do with it.”

  I shook my head. “They still blame her. Hannah was the victim, not the enemy, but they still blame her for everything to do with the Prophecy. They were just salivating for a reason to punish her for something.”

  “Fear is a powerful thing. People think hatred fuels the great wars and feuds of the world, but it’s simply not true. It’s fear at the root of that hatred. It’s always been fear first,” Finn said. “The men who wreak their destruction upon the world have always been utter cowards at heart.”

  I took a moment to digest this. “Speaking of fear, I didn’t see anything that would have explained the fear she seems to have of fire. Did you?”

  “No,” Finn said, “although that diary ended just as she was being arrested. Whatever happened with the fire may have happened after she stashed that book with her sister.”

  Unbidden, I imagined staring down at Hannah’s body, and desperately hiding the only honest evidence of my existence in her cold, dead hands. I choked back a sob. Emotion flooded over me so quickly that, for a moment, I thought I must be having an Empathic episode.

  “Are you quite alright?” Finn asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m trying to separate myself, but it’s just too awful. Hannah and I came very close to a fate like that. I just hate that these echoes of the Prophecy are still reverberating through the spirit world. It’s like the damage will never be done, even though it’s over.”

  The door to the hospital ward burst open and Fiona marched out, followed by Braxton. Fiona made a beeline right for me, but Braxton marched past as though I did not exist and disappeared around the corner.

  “What? What is it? What’s going on?” I asked swiftly.

  “They’re setting up the Circle now,” she said, and she looked relieved. “I don’t know whether they believe our story about Catriona escaping on her own, but it doesn’t matter at this point; they can’t prove otherwise, and we’ve handed them exactly what they needed to name the spirit and end this fecking nightmare.”

  I let out a sigh of relief I didn’t even realize I was holding. “So, this is it, then. They’re going to expel her?”

  “Seems like it. But they want you and your sister in there,” Fiona said.

  “Us? Why?” I asked.

  “Well, you were the first one the spirit made contact with, through those sketches. They feel that Eleanora might be more likely to talk if she sees you, because she reached out to you before. As for Hannah… well, the Council wants to clarify that Caller comment, so they think she should be present as well.”

  I shook my head. “This is ridiculous. Okay, should we go get Hannah?”

  “No, that’s what Braxton’s just gone to do,” Fiona said, pointing up the hallway after his retreating form. “The Council isn’t trusting you to go fetch anyone after our little jaunt into the Larkin mausoleum.”

  “That wasn’t my idea,” I said indignantly. “They can blame you and Eleanora for that. I’d better warn Hannah that Braxton’s coming for her, though.”

  I sailed through the connection easily probably because Hannah and Milo had the mental door wide open, desperate for news. “Hannah? Milo?”

  Their words tumbled over each other in a cacophonous jumble, so that I winced with the force of it.

  “Jess!”

  “What happened?”

  “What is it?”

  “Did they read the diary? What did they say?”

  “Braxton is on his way up to get you. The Council wants us both here for when they start communicating with Eleanora.”

  “Did… did they say why they wanted me there?” Hannah asked, her fear thrumming through the connection like an electric current.

  “For the same reason they’ve got you trapped in our room; they want to make sure you aren’t the Caller Eleanora was referring to,” I told her, trying to combat her fear with calm, soothing energy. “They are just being thorough. I’m glad they want us there; it will be even more satisfying to witness their realization that they were wrong in person. Bring some popcorn.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” Hannah scoffed, utterly unimpressed with my attempt at humor, although Milo gave an appreciative chuckle. “We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Finn, Fiona and I waited in tense silence for Hannah, Braxton, and Milo to appear. From inside the hospital ward, a series of moans and screams signaled that the Hosts were being disturbed in some way—perhaps from being herded into the Circle in preparation for the Casting. The sound made my skin crawl. How horrific for this spirit to find herself back in the same castle where she was so demonized and vilified, all for a gift she had no control over. I half wanted to charge into the hospital ward, throw open the window and set all the Hosts free, just so Eleanora wouldn’t have to spend another minute here. But of course, I knew that wouldn’t actually solve anything.

  Hannah, Milo, and Braxton appeared. Braxton at least had the good sense not to use his authority to intimidate Hannah physically; he walked alongside her rather than escorting her, and kept a respectful distance. Hannah, though obviously nervous, at least had her head held high as she reached us.

  “Ready?” I asked her, holding out a hand.

  “Ready,” she said, and took it.

  The hosts were all sitting in the center of the Circle, back to back in a tight little knot. They seemed to find some comfort in the physical proximity of their fellows; the moaning and shrieking had dulled into a soft sort of collective whimper. The Council stood around the perimeter of the circle, tense with anticipation. Off in the corner, Mrs. Mistlemoore stood tensely next to a desk, where two Scribes had piled all of the Fairhaven resources on Shatterings.

  “Jessica. Hannah,” Keira called, motioning us forward. “We would like you on hand for this Casting. It is possible the spirit will want to communicate with one or both of you.” Her tone was friendly enough, but I still felt Hannah tense beside me at the sound of her own name.

  Neither Hannah nor I answered, but stepped forward, still clasping hands. I squeezed Hannah’s fingers and caught her eye, winking at her. She gave a tiny smile in reply. Through our connection, Milo’s support broke over us like a warm, loving tide.

  Keira began the words of the Casting, reading them from a book so ancient that she handled the crumbling pages with a pair of gloves on. The moment she began, all of the Hosts went suddenly rigid.

  “We Summon thee, Shattered one, to the Circle hence. We gather your Shards together to resume your true form. We name thee, Eleanora Larkin, and with the speaking of your name, our Summons cannot be resisted.”

  For a long, loaded moment, absolutely nothing happened. The very air in the room seemed to have frozen, each molecule suspended in place.

  Hannah’s hand tightened in mine. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The energy. Something’s not right,” Hannah hissed.

  As though to confirm her feeling, the Hosts all opened their mouths at the same time and unleashed piercing screams. A phantom wind, borne of their collective energy, swept through the room, ripping the sheets from the beds and the curtains from the windows, and extinguishing every candle. Then the Hosts’ heads drooped onto their chests and their screams faded and died.

  Keira dropped the page of the book and stepped back from it in alarm. “What was that about?” she asked the room at large.

  Blank stares met her question. Mrs. Mistlemoore shook her head, her mouth hanging open. The Scribes were feverishly flipping through their books, clearly at a loss. Bu
t after a moment, it was Hannah who answered.

  “They’re not all here,” Hannah said. “The Shards. There’s still at least one missing.”

  Keira frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. The Naming is meant to draw all of the Shards back together. Any others left in the castle should have been drawn here at once.”

  Hannah shrugged defensively. “I don’t know why it isn’t working,” she said. “I’m just telling you what I sense. I don’t sense a complete spirit here. The pieces don’t make a whole.”

  “Well then, we must have the wrong spirit,” Isla said throwing a hostile look at me. “If the Naming has not worked, then we must not have the right name.”

  “You’ve got the right name,” I snapped at her. “That’s Eleanora Larkin in there, I’m sure of it.”

  “You must be wrong,” Isla said with a dismissive shrug. “You’ve simply misinterpreted your drawings, and led us on a wild goose chase.”

  “She hasn’t mistaken shite,” Fiona shouted. “You might be a Council member, Isla, but when it comes to the gifts of a Muse, you don’t know your arse from your elbow.”

  “That’s quite enough of that, thank you,” Keira said sharply before turning back to Hannah. “So, what does this mean, then?” she asked in a muffled voice. “Where is the missing Shard?”

  Hannah gripped my hand for support. “I don’t know.”

  “That Casting should have gathered them,” Mrs. Mistlemoore said. “Once the naming has been performed, the Shards can be pieced back together and then expelled. That’s how it’s meant to work.”

  Keira looked frantically from Hannah to Mrs. Mistlemoore, and then around at the circle of waiting Council members. “What should we do? Should we try again?”