by E. E. Holmes
I spun around and gasped. “Hannah Ballard, that was sassy! You just sassed me!”
She grinned mischievously. “I spend entirely too much time with you and Milo. The sass was bound to wear off on me eventually.” She turned and pointed to the wall by my bed. “Another one, huh?”
I looked where she was pointing. “Yeah.” Another psychic drawing hung taped to my wall. It had happened again in the middle of the night. I’d woken already sitting up straight, hand aching, head pounding, with a strange, overheated feeling, like I had a fever.
“Isn’t that the same girl as the last sketch?” Hannah asked.
“The very same. She’s very persistent, but she’s not giving me much to work with,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“She’s not giving me any sense of what it is she wants—no clues, no context. She just sort of… stares at me. It’s like I’m seeing her, but there’s no message she’s trying to send.”
“Hmmm,” Hannah said thoughtfully, looking at the girl again. “Maybe she doesn’t know what she wants yet?”
“Well, I wish she would make up her mind before interrupting my sleep again,” I grumbled. I crossed the room, pulled the picture off of my wall, and shoved it under the bed with the other one.
One spirit’s face was replaced with another as Milo sailed clean back through the wall.
“Have you finished announcing my new coiffure from the top of the highest towers?” I asked him, tempering the sarcasm with a smile, just in case he was still upset.
Milo attempted half a smile in return, but then his face settled back into an uncharacteristically serious expression. “I came back to give you a message. From Carrick.”
Hannah looked up sharply. “From Carrick?”
Milo shrugged apologetically. “Yeah. He cornered me out on the grounds. He wants you to meet him in the entrance hall as soon as you can. He’s waiting for you there.”
Hannah and I stared at each other. Everything inside my body seemed to have twisted into a tight, painful knot. Carrick. Our father. Well, the ghost of our father, but that was the only way we’d ever known him.
“Why?” I asked sharply. “Why does he want to see us, did he say?”
Milo shook his head, and his expression was knowingly sympathetic. I could feel waves of empathy rolling in through our connection, washing over me, trying to soothe me. “He didn’t say. He just said he needed to see you, and could I please go find you to deliver the message.”
“Well,” Hannah said, and I could hear the struggle raging behind her voice. “I guess we should get going, then. I’m sure he wouldn’t have sent for us if it wasn’t important.”
“Right. Yeah, obviously,” I said. I looked down at the bathrobe I was still wearing. “Just give me a minute to get changed and we can go.”
Milo nodded. “I’ll let him know you’re on your way,” he said. “Just give my energy a little tug if you need me, okay, sweetness?” he added, winking at Hannah.
She smiled weakly at him. “Yeah, okay.”
Milo turned back to me and pointed imperiously to my suitcase. “Don’t forget. Blue.”
§
Carrick was waiting for us in the entrance hall, just as Milo had promised. He hovered by the fireplace, staring into the fire as though each leaping flame held a sentence he longed to read. He wasn’t easy to see at first; the glow of the fire outshone him, so that he seemed to fade into the wall behind him.
We walked over to him—Hannah just behind me—and stood for a moment, waiting for him to notice us. When he didn’t, I cleared my throat.
“Uh, Carrick? Hi,” I said, ever a masterclass of awkwardness.
He looked up, almost startled, and straightened up like we had announced a military inspection. “Jess. Hannah. Milo found you then, did he? Excellent,” he replied. I could hear him struggling against the formality in his voice. “I… that is… it’s nice to see you both.”
“You, too,” I said, because that that’s what you were supposed to say. The truth was that I didn’t know if it was nice to see him or not. Mostly what I felt whenever I was around him was an unsettling mixture of discomfort, curiosity, and anger. I forgave myself this confusion, though, because perhaps never in the history of the world was there a father-daughter relationship so fraught with strange and unfortunate circumstances as ours, starting with the fact that I’d only ever known him as a ghost.
All of this rose up between us like a wall in the few moments of silence that had followed my reply, a wall that Carrick valiantly attempted to scale as he said, “I… well, I’ve come because Finvarra sent me, but… that is to say, I was glad of the excuse. I would have sought you out myself before long.”
“Yeah, we would have come to find you, too,” Hannah said. Maybe it was her loss of direct emotional connection with our mother, but speaking to him seemed to come much more easily to her than it did to me.
There was a long awkward pause, made more awkward by the fact that Carrick had a habit of bouncing on the balls of his heels when he was nervous. I decided to take pity on him and speak before he turned into a ghostly pogo stick.
“So, you said that Finvarra sent you to find us?” I prompted.
“Yes!” Carrick seized on the question like a drowning man to a lifeboat. “Yes, she has expressed a wish to see the two of you in her office. I volunteered to track you down and escort you there.”
Hannah and I looked at each other in surprise. “She wants to see us? Why?” I asked, trying to sound less nervous than I felt.
“I must admit, she did not confide her motives to me, merely the request to see you. Would you be so kind as to follow me to her office, please?” Carrick asked. He was certainly endeavoring to keep his tone friendlier than any other Caomhnóir in this place was bothering to do. I’d rarely heard the word “please” from any other member of our over-protective brotherhood, but then again, I didn’t get the impression that we had much of a choice but to follow him.
“Uh, sure. We don’t have to be anywhere we need to be right now,” I said.
“Very good, then,” Carrick said, and he started marching down the hallway.
Assuming this meant we were to follow him, Hannah and I set off. I reached out and gave her hand a quick squeeze. It was clammy and trembling, as I had expected it would be.
“Why don’t you track down Milo?” I nudged her. “See if he wants to come along?”
Hannah smiled, looking slightly calmer just at the thought. “Good idea,” she said. I felt our connection to Milo expand with light and warmth as she sent the request humming through it. Almost instantly, his reply came singing back.
“You need me, I’m there. That’s the deal, sweetness.”
“I don’t know if Finvarra will let you into the office during… whatever it is she’s asking us there for,” I warned him. “But even just having your moral support would be helpful.”
“I’ll be right there,” he assured us.
Carrick, who had heard none of this, seemed to realize that he had left us far behind him. He halted his steps long enough for us to catch up to him.
“I do apologize. I’m not used to keeping step with anyone,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Hannah said.
“Yeah, it’s good to keep moving in this castle. These hallways are freezing in the winter!” I said. “At least we’re keeping our heart rates up!”
“I heard all about your first assignment for the Trackers,” Carrick said, in an attempt to make conversation. “I was pleased to hear that you handled it so well.”
“You heard that we handled it well?” Hannah asked, surprised.
“Oh yes,” Carrick said. “Catriona isn’t one to hand out compliments to anyone, but after hearing the details and reading between the lines, it sounds as though you dealt with the challenges admirably, whether she wants to admit it or not.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling profoundly relieved. “Thank you.” I’d been worried that word of our
attempted Crossing would have reached the Council, or maybe even Finvarra, and that there would be fallout from it. So far though, it seemed, Catriona had either not divulged this detail to others, or those she had shared it with had not thought it worthy of note. Either way, it was just fine by me.
We couldn’t say anything more to Carrick at that point, because we had begun the long climb up the staircase of the North Tower, and it was all we could do not to collapse in a breathless heap, let alone carry on a conversation. Carrick did not knock to announce our presence, and yet we heard Finvarra’s voice from the other side of the door the moment we arrived at the threshold.
“Enter, please.”
It took me a moment to realize that Carrick would have a connection to Finvarra just as Hannah and I had to Milo, and that must have been how Carrick had alerted her that we had arrived. It was strange to think of anyone else having the same kind of bond we had with Milo.
“Wait for me, sweetness!”
“Think of the devil, and the devil will appear,” I said as Milo zoomed into being beside us.
“And just who are you calling a devil?” Milo asked, a single eyebrow perfectly arched in his outrage.
Before I could answer, Carrick cleared his throat and gestured toward the door, which was now open.
“Hello again, Carrick,” Milo said.
“Spirit Guide Chang,” Carrick said, nodding respectfully.
“Did you notice Jess’ hair? Doesn’t it warm up her skin tone?” Milo asked.
Carrick looked flustered. “I… I’m afraid I did…”
“You don’t need to answer that,” I said to Carrick. “Seriously.”
“Do you think it would be alright for Milo to come with us?” Hannah asked quickly.
Carrick did not even hesitate, glad of a question he could safely answer. “Of course. The three of you are Bound, and Finvarra understands the closeness of that bond better than anyone. You needn’t even ask. Please, enter.”
Prepared for a “no,” it took me a few moments to absorb the readiness of the answer, and to shuffle myself forward through the door. What I saw when I walked through it froze my steps again.
Finvarra sat in a wheelchair in the back of the circular room, gazing out over the grounds which were visible from the enormous windows behind her desk. She was attached to an IV; a plastic bag full of fluid hung from a metal stand beside her chair. It was shocking to see how much she had deteriorated since we had last seen her less than two months ago. Her sunken cheek rested on a shriveled, wasted hand. Her neck looked abnormally long, and her once lustrous hair was so thin that I could see her mottled scalp through it.
Hannah had been unable to stifle a gasp, and Finvarra smiled slightly at the sound of it before she turned her head to face us.
“Am I that stunning?” she asked in a quavering voice that nevertheless maintained its regal tone.
“I… I just… sorry, I didn’t mean…” Hannah stammered, but Finvarra silenced her with a wave of her skeletal hand.
“A poorly delivered joke, my dear. Believe me, I know what I look like, though I’ve decided that looking in mirrors is bad for my morale, to say nothing of my vanity.” Her eyes were kind, and I felt Hannah’s body relax beside me.
“No one told us how ill you were,” I said. “It’s just a little bit of a shock, that’s all.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Finvarra said. “Please, do sit down.”
She gestured over to a small sitting area where two wing chairs and a settee were all grouped around a coffee table. We sat in the wing chairs and then watched nervously as Carrick used his energy like a poltergeist, sliding Finvarra’s wheelchair and IV stand slowly across the floor just as if he were physically pushing it. Every tiny movement seemed to jostle and pain Finvarra, and she sat tensed with her eyes screwed up against the discomfort until the chair rolled to a gentle stop beside the settee. It was gut-wrenching to watch.
“There now, what a production,” Finvarra said when she had gathered the strength to speak again. “Imagine so much fuss just to cross a room.”
We had no idea what to say about this, so we just smiled politely. With the exception of visits to my grandfather at the Winchester Home for the Aged, I’d never spent any time around anyone who was so sick, and I could feel my palms starting to sweat. I had an unrelenting urge to run from the room so that I didn’t have to look at Finvarra and face the awful truth about the bleakness of her future.
“Now, then. How are you both?” Finvarra asked, endeavoring to keep the tone light and cordial.
Hannah looked at me as though she were stumped and wanted me to answer. “We’re fine, thank you,” I said. Courtesy dictated that I next ask how she was, but the answer to that question was so obvious that I didn’t bother.
“I was pleased to hear,” Finvarra went on, “that you did so well with your first assignment with the Trackers. I had a full report of the situation when Catriona returned.”
I smirked a bit. “I didn’t get the impression Catriona was all that impressed with the job we did,” I said.
Finvarra made a sound that was half-chuckle, half-cough. “Catriona is never impressed with anything. She fancies it makes her seem more mysterious, but I must admit I find it rather dull.”
I caught Hannah’s and Milo’s eyes and we all grinned. It was strange to hear Finvarra criticizing another member of the Council, but kind of awesome at the same time.
“So, is it your intention to remain with the Trackers, as least for the immediate future?” Finvarra asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “For now, at least.”
Finvarra nodded. “I am glad to hear it.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. Surely this couldn’t have been the only reason Finvarra wanted to see us? I mean, she could have asked us this in passing at any point during the upcoming Airechtas. It was little more than small talk, really. Why the urgent meeting? Why the privacy?
As though my silent questions had floated across the coffee table, Finvarra shifted slightly in her wheelchair, wincing, and folded her hands in her lap. “You are probably wondering why it is I have asked you here today. I deliberated for a long time about whether I would. I nearly did so when you were here in October, but talked myself out of it. However, the Airechtas is upon us now, and I have run out of time.”
I squirmed a little. What did she mean, run out of time? She was obviously very ill, but surely wasn’t days from death. Or was she? Carrick was certainly watching her intently, as though assessing the toll that each movement, each word, was taking on her meager store of energy.
“As you may already have deduced, there is an empty seat on our Council to be filled at this year’s Airechtas. Marion has been stripped of her position as part of the punishment for her actions of three years ago. I assume you know that Marion’s Council seat once belonged to your family?”
Hannah and I nodded. Karen had told us as much when we had first arrived at Fairhaven Hall. Apparently our clan, the Clan Sassanaigh, had been one of the most powerful for centuries, until our mother’s disappearance and attendant dishonor had caused our fall from grace.
“I must now confess something to you both. I was primarily responsible for your clan’s loss of that seat. I had just become High Priestess, and I was determined to establish my authority in the midst of a messy and divisive situation. You never knew your grandmother.”
It wasn’t a question. She knew that our grandmother had died before we were born. The stress of our mother’s disappearance and our grandfather’s accident with the Gateway took a fatal toll on her heart.
“She was a… difficult woman. She did not have many friends on the Council by the time your mother ran off. She had played the system too many times, become entangled in too many underhanded bargains and betrayed too many alliances. When the opportunity came to strip her of her Council seat, I leapt at it. I knew it would be a popular decision, ensuring that many would be loyal to me going forward.”
She stared at us as though waiting for us to comment on this political chess gambit, but we knew better. When we didn’t offer words of support or condemnation, she went on.
“Your grandmother ought to have borne the weight of her own mistakes, but not those of your mother. Still, I raked her over the coals for a situation she could not possibly control. When word reached me shortly thereafter of her death, I was quite relieved. She could not cause trouble, could not bring her political prowess to bear on me for what I had done to your family. I could not have hoped for a cleaner ending to the scandal. The guilt for my part in it would not come until many years later.”
She looked down at her hands and then quickly away again, as though she had forgotten how skeletal they had become and couldn’t bear to be reminded. “I did not see my motives then as selfish, but I recognize them as such now. Your family gave centuries of devoted service to the Council, but all I could think about was elevating my own power and status. I told myself that I was doing it for the good of the Northern Clans, but that was merely an excuse, a paper-thin shroud that tore away at the slightest touch, exposing what I really was.”
“Why are you telling us this?” I asked suddenly. It was like listening to someone in confession, and I couldn’t stand the guilt of it all. “It doesn’t matter to us what happened back then, honestly. We don’t care about that Council seat. I mean, sure, it would have been nice for someone other than Marion to have had it, but—”
“I am telling you,” Finvarra interrupted, “because it matters to me. I am reaching a point where the mistakes of the past are hanging like stones around my neck. I cannot escape the weight of many of them, and shall have to drag them through the Gateway with me.”
I squirmed. She was talking about her own death so matter-of-factly. We dealt with death every day, but to be able to face it yourself with such detached composure? I couldn’t help but admire her strength.
“But this mistake,” she went on, pointing a quaking finger at the two of us, “I have the opportunity to fix, and I will take it.”