Emily started toward one of the beds, then raised her eyebrows at Celine. The other girl shrugged and flopped down on the other across from her.
Emily slid her backpack off her shoulders and shoved it under her own bed, feeling suddenly embarrassed by the fact that Celine seemingly had no possessions beyond the tattered sheet wrapped around her shoulders. She untied her coat from around her waist and tossed it over the tiny footboard.
Curious, she moved to the window and stood looking out into the dusk.
Their little room faced away from the ocean and toward the city beyond. From here, Emily could see that they were in but one of what appeared to be a ring of towers, all connected by a high stone wall. Far below, she could just make out a garden with a tiny fountain at its center, nestled in the shadows of the mammoth towers.
She felt something brush against her arm and glanced over to find Celine standing beside her at the window, her hands resting on the stone sill.
“There’re seven towers, yeh see?” she said quietly. “That’s why they call it Seven Skies.” She turned to study Emily, and there was a troubled look in her eyes. “Yeh really don’t know, do yeh? I mean, yeh don’t know about this place or nothin’?”
Emily shook her head and Celine sighed. For a while, the two girls only stared out the window, watching the shadows deepen in the garden below as the sun sank behind the fortress.
“Ev’ry few years,” Celine began, “Marianne sends some men far and wide in search of girls who she suspects will ’ave the sorts of talents she’s lookin’ for, and who will become her apprentices. Sometimes, there are only two or three girls they can find. Sometimes, there are as many as a dozen. It’s a great honor to be chosen. It means a chance to make a be’er life…”
She paused for a moment, and then, almost as an afterthought, said, “No ma’er your station.”
Emily tried to make sense of it, tried to put the pieces together in her mind, but she still did not understand. How had she gotten here? Why?
Inspiration struck then, and she turned to Celine, grasping her arm. “You were on that boat, right? For how long?”
Celine frowned at her. “Few days. I’m from Coalhaven, and that’s a bit of a journey from ’ere.”
Haven? Emily’s heart missed a beat. It was strange, hearing her name spoken by this girl so casually…but of course, “haven” was a word, wasn’t it? A place of sanctuary. Lots of places were called “haven”. She pushed it aside and plunged on.
“Did you see me? On the boat, I mean? Did you see me come aboard?”
“Course I did. Yeh came on just yesterday, didn’t yeh?” she looked at Emily and frowned again. “Yeh don’t know ’bout that either, do yeh then? Jaisus. Yeah, yeh came aboard yesterday evenin’, ’round about dusk, I think. We was in port at a li’l town up the coast from ’ere, but I don’t know what it was called.”
Emily leaned against the window sill, staring at Celine with an intensity that made the other girl shift her weight nervously.
“So yeah. Man brought yeh on board. I ’eard ’im tell the sailors yeh were to study with Marianne, and that he’d only just found yeh in time.”
“What do you mean he ‘brought’ me on board?”
“Carried yeh, didn’t he? All wrapped up in a sheet and all. D’yeh mean to tell me yeh was asleep through all that?”
Asleep? Unconscious maybe?
“I think maybe I was unconscious or something. I don’t remember any of it.” Celine gave her a blank look, and Emily realized she didn’t know the word. “Umm…knocked out?”
Celine’s expression cleared. “I reckon yeh must’ve been. It just looked like yeh was kinda sickly. The man took yeh into the cabin, and there yeh was until we got ’ere and I woke yeh up.” She patted down the ragged, dirty sheet she wore as if it were a dress, clearly pleased with having told her tale. But Emily still had questions.
“The man…are you sure he was a man? Not a boy? With long hair tied back with a piece of leather? What did he look like?”
Celine shook her head, turning to stare back down into the dark courtyard below. “It was kinda ’ard to see ’im clear,” she said. “He was dressed in a ’eavy cloak. He ’ad dark skin an’ white hair.” She looked at Emily as if to ask if that description was what she was looking for.
Emily turned to look out the window again herself with a pang of disappointment. At least if it had been the boy, it would have given her the hope that some small part of this insanity was starting to make some kind of sense. Instead, she was wrapped up inside mysteries within mysteries. She wasn’t even sure what she felt anymore. At first, she’d wanted to figure out where she was and why. It had seemed, standing on the boat, that this must surely all be a dream. Then, as they’d made their way through the market, she’d thought briefly that the most important thing would be for her to figure out how to get back to where she belonged.
The thing was, she wasn’t sure where that was anymore. Home? She didn’t have a home anymore. Her mother was gone, and she’d never been anything more than a nuisance to her stepfather. What would she be going back to? Casey, she supposed, would miss her. But Casey had good parents, and a big house, and a little sister and brother, and a dog. Casey would be fine without her.
Emily turned toward her bed. She’d only taken a step or two when she felt Celine’s tiny hand on her arm. She turned to face her, blinking back the tears that stung her eyes.
“It’ll be a’right,” Celine said. Emily nodded and offered her a small smile.
She sat down on the edge of her bed, taking off her shoes and slipping out of her winter clothes. She left them in a heap on the floor beside her bed, and lay atop the hard mattress in only her underwear. She rolled over and faced the wall. A cool breeze found its way in the window, drying the sweat from her body and the tears from her face.
Across the room, she heard Celine making herself comfortable in her own bed, and the last of the light drained away.
For a long while, they both lay in silence. Emily thought Celine must have already fallen asleep, but after a moment, she heard the girl’s voice float across the room to her on the night air.
“Thank yeh,” she said, and then, miraculously, after a time, both girls drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Six
Emily woke to the sound of Caireann’s voice reverberating off the cold stone walls of the tower.
“Yeh’ve got ten minutes to wash and dress yerselves. There are clothes in the trunks. When yeh’re ready, come down the stairs and I’ll meet yeh at the bottom. Hop to it now.”
Emily sat up, rubbing her eyes and feeling distinctly unrested. Across from her, Celine, still wrapped in her sheet, groaned and buried her head beneath the lump of rolled up burlap that was intended for use as a pillow.
Someone’s less of a morning person than I am, she thought, amused, and yawned. She wondered what time it was. Only the faintest rays lit the room around her; it was barely dawn.
Wanting to know the time made her think of her phone, and she scrambled to pick up her clothes from the floor beside the bed. She searched through them and found it right where she’d left it, in the pocket of her jeans.
As it tumbled into the palm of her hand, its solid reality brought her predicament home to her as nothing else had. She folded her fingers over the cold glass of its screen and held it tight. It felt alien to her somehow—so out of place in these antique surroundings. It also felt very real.
It’s not a dream, she marveled through the fog of sleep that still clung to her mind, and a strange echo of that thought seemed to resonate somewhere deep inside her.
Blinking sleepily, she pressed the home button and held her breath, sure that the battery must be dead by now.
The screen lit up at once, but where the status bar should have shown her signal strength, she was greeted with the message “No service”. The battery indicator said it still had a quarter of a charge remaining, and the time readout told her it was 5:06 on Tuesday, the th
irteenth of December. Judging by the summer heat, the date was off, and there was no way to know if the time was exactly right, but it seemed like it must be at least in the neighborhood.
She stared at the glowing screen, feeling the phone’s familiar weight cradled in her hand. After a moment, she became aware of a change in the sound of Celine’s breathing, and she looked up to find the girl standing beside her, staring down in fascination at the screen of her phone.
“What the devil is that?” she breathed. “Is it sorcery?”
“No. It’s just my phone,” Emily said, but Celine only looked at her blankly.
“Tell you about it later,” Emily sighed, and she powered the phone down. No sense in letting the battery run dry. If she got back, she might need it. It wasn’t going to do her any good here, anyway.
The basins had cold running water of a sort. It trickled out in a sluggish stream that smelled strongly of salt and sulfur. They bathed themselves as best they could, the water’s chill stinging their skin, then fumbled with the complicated latches of the trunks.
Inside, they found loose-fitting tunics that hung to their knees and pairs of soft leather boots that looked like something out of a Robin Hood stage production. They cinched the tunics at their waists with broad, leather belts. All the clothes were the same size; the tunic fit Emily well, but Celine positively swam in hers; the boots were too big for Celine and too small for Emily, but they would do.
Emily shoved her own clothes, backpack, and coat into the trunk with some trepidation. She didn’t like the idea of leaving her things here—the only things that still linked her to her own—what? World? At least she wouldn’t be sweltering today, she supposed. She could already feel the temperature rising with the heat of the summer sun.
At last, they staggered from the room, Emily thinking darkly that she’d gladly kill for a cup of coffee. She certainly did not feel like she’d slept for nearly twenty-four hours the day before, as Celine’s story suggested. Perhaps unconsciousness didn’t count as sleep, though. God, how she wished she knew what the hell was going on.
They were the last to join the group of wan and puffy-eyed girls at the bottom of the stairs, and it earned them a severe look, though nothing worse, from Caireann.
“First, yeh shall have yer breakfast. Then, I’ll be showin’ yeh around where yeh can and cannot go, and what yer chores will be over the next fortnight. After those fourteen days, the mistress will be conductin’ visits with each of yeh to determine who’ll be taken on. Any questions?”
A squat girl that Emily thought had been the one in the finest clothes yesterday, though it was hard to remember now that they were all dressed identically, spoke up.
“I thought we were all to be taken on.”
Caireann shook her head. “Nay. Only two or three are usual from the group.”
“What happens to the rest?” asked a wiry girl who stood beside the first. The group seemed to hold its collective breath as Caireann surveyed them imperiously.
“That’s the mistress’s affair,” she replied. “Some stay, some are sent away.” Her tone made it clear that line of questioning was closed. “Anything else?”
There was silence.
“Right. Come along then.”
Breakfast consisted of the same dull porridge as the night before. Emily got most of it down this time. Better was the tea that was doled out in old, chipped cups. It was sweet and tasted of jasmine and mint, and though it wasn’t coffee—not even close to coffee—it had a similar effect, and she drained her cup greedily.
When they had finished, Caireann led them out into the garden they’d seen from their window. It was far grander up close in the bright sunshine than it had been from their tower room at dusk. Flowers bloomed everywhere; vegetables of every description grew in neatly tended rows, and narrow stone pathways wended through it all.
The pathways intersected at the center of the garden, where a stone fountain ran with clean, clear water. The girls gathered around it, and Emily closed her eyes, leaning into the spray and relishing the cool mist against her hot skin. Already the sun was beating down, making the ice and snow of the twin cities seem very far away. That world seemed like the dream now, she thought, like something from another life. Had it really only been two days ago that she’d been running for her life through the snow and ice, her stepfather screaming and taking shots at her? The memory felt like something that had happened a long time ago—like something that had happened to someone else.
She opened her eyes and saw, through the mist and fantom rainbows that danced on its surface, that a statue of an exceptionally realistic mermaid lay at the bottom of the fountain. She clutched a long and highly ornamental sword in her hand, its blade resting against one bare breast. The fountain’s water shot up and out from a long, crescent-shaped gash carved into the mermaid’s slender throat, and her mouth was open in what seemed to be a terrible scream. Emily blinked. Surely, the artist had not intended to make it look as though the mermaid had slit her own throat, had they? The water gushed, looking horribly like blood, from the chiseled wound, and sunlight shimmered in its spray.
Celine tugged on Emily’s arm, and she looked around to see Caireann waiting patiently for the girls to give her their attention once more. When they had, she began pacing back and forth before them, meeting the gaze of each girl in turn as she spoke.
“This is one of the mistress’s gardens,” she said, indicating the greenery that surrounded them. “Over the next fortnight, it will be yer duty to tend a portion of it.” She paused and surveyed them all with her hands clasped beneath her chin. “How well yeh do will factor into her decision of whom to take on as apprentices. Each of yeh will have a section that is yer sole responsibility. Yeh may help one another…to a point. A helpin’ hand holds the torch that leads the lost and lonely wanderer, but the everlovin’ flesh can be burned just as easily from the wanderer’s face with that same torch.”
With that gruesome pronouncement, she turned on her heel and began assigning spots to each of the girls, making her way slowly and methodically through the group.
Emily and Celine received rows that ran side by side along the south end of the garden. Emily’s consisted of a red leafy plant at one end that she thought might be some kind of cabbage and white wild roses at the other. Celine’s was a long stretch of fencing covered over with grape vines.
After taking them into the greenhouse to show them where the gardening tools were kept and instructing them to fill pails of water from the fountain when it was needed, Caireann led them back inside.
They gathered again in the dining room, and Caireann took a place at the far end of the table. One by one the girls sat upon the long benches and watched her expectantly.
“Yeh’re welcome to go about this tower and the garden as yeh wish. Yeh’re forbidden from entering any of the other towers or to venture out into the city.”
She waited, and, when no questions were forthcoming, she went on.
“I think we’ve nearly done enough to be gettin’ on with for one day. I would like a word with each of yeh, privately, and then yeh’ll be free to explore the rest of the tower and do as yeh please until tomorrow.”
She rose and motioned for the nearest girl to come with her.
The rest of the group fell into nervous chatter as soon as they’d disappeared through the door.
“I thought we were all to be apprenticed,” the squat girl grumbled to her friend. “I wouldn’t have come if…”
“Oh shut up, Jo,” the wiry girl said, rolling her eyes. “You know there’s no choice about coming.”
“…Did you see the fountain!”
“…What were those purple flower things?”
Celine turned to Emily, suddenly looking weary and far older than her years. “I don’t ’spect I’ll be chosen.”
“Why do you say that?” Emily asked, surprised.
“Never been first at nothin’. Can’t ’ardly read or write. I thought that when I was b
rought ’ere, it meant that all that stuff didn’t ma’er. But o’ course it does. It always does. It’s a competition, ain’t it? Never been much of a one for competin’.” She ran her fingers along the wood grain of the table sullenly and didn’t meet Emily’s gaze.
Emily reached out and lifted Celine’s chin with a pair of fingers, gently forcing the girl to raise her head and look at her.
“Look around you,” she said. “What do you see?”
Celine surveyed the room around them. “I see a table…and benches…”
“No…I mean the others. Look.” Emily tugged on the shoulder of her tunic, displaying it to Celine as if it were a prized concert t-shirt. Celine looked, then her gaze moved around the room, taking in the other girls.
“Everyone’s wearing the same thing,” Emily said. “I think Caireann did that on purpose. We’re all equals here. It doesn’t matter where you came from or what you know.”
She paused for a moment, and a stroke of inspiration came to her, as it might to any teenager of her generation who had spent countless hours turning pages to wander the halls of Hogwarts. “You said she’s a sorceress, right? What they’re looking for here is sorcery, not literary ability or penmanship. You might be the most talented here at that, just like if they were looking for girls who were blonde, you’d be the best at that, too. You’re the only one here with blonde hair.”
Celine looked around the room again, as if assessing the color of the hair of the other girls—testing the truth of Emily’s words. There was hope in her eyes then, and it warmed Emily’s heart to see it.
Their conversation was interrupted as Caireann returned with the first interviewee. The girl looked pale and unsettled, and she left the room at once without a word to the others.
One by one, Caireann made her way down the table toward Emily and Celine, and as the girls came and went, the chatter slowly trailed off until there was only silence.
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