by R. A. Rock
Tess gave one nod. “Okay.”
“Okay?” he repeated, not sure if he should be happy about that answer.
“You can come. You can help. But that means we’re counting on you, Ethan. You have to be there for us. Otherwise, just don’t even come. Don’t even say you’re going to do it. Because letting us down at a crucial moment could mean that we all die.”
“I know that, Tess. I can be serious when I need to.”
“I’ve seen that,” she said, her own face solemn. “But it’s whether you will. When it counts.”
“I couldn’t live with myself if any of my own Hunters hurt you or Finn or Jayde. I can help protect you. And I will.”
“Okay, Ethan.” Tess held his gaze. “This is your chance to prove yourself.”
And Ethan sensed that he wouldn’t get another.
This was it.
There was no longer any choice.
He had to become a better man.
He only hoped he was up to the task.
Chapter 38
By the time Tess and Ethan arrived in the lobby of Jayde’s apartment building, it was dark outside. When Ethan headed straight for the stairs, Tess hesitated. What about her plan to do this on her own? Didn’t it make more sense? Wasn’t it the right thing to do?
So Finn would get the help he needed. So Jayde wouldn’t lose her precious and short mortal life. So Ethan wouldn’t waste his career, helping a silly Faerie woman with her Faerie drama.
He looked at her. “Stars?”
“Go on up. I just need a minute to think. I’ll be up soon.” She said this without being sure if it was the truth.
Ethan studied her, tipping his head a little.
“You know what you look like?” he said, not going up.
“What?” she said, hoping to let him say his piece and then get rid of him.
“Someone who’s about to run.”
“What? No, I don’t.” She scowled at him.
“You do,” he said, his brown eyes warm and kind, without their usual sharpness. “I’ve done it enough. I can spot it a mile away. You think you’ll be doing us all a favor by going off and trying to do this thing on your own.”
“I’m not—”
“You are,” he said, interrupting her. “I know the feeling. If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
Tess pressed her lips together and folded her arms across her chest. Why was he all of a sudden such an astute judge of character?
“You think you’re protecting us by taking it all on. Doing it on your own. Am I right?”
“So what if you are?” Tess refused to admit anything.
“Remember what I said about insanity? Aren’t you just doing the same old thing, Tess?”
This shocked Tess out of her annoyance.
Was she?
Finn had said that she needed to stop trying to do everything on her own. That they were a team and that she needed to allow herself to depend on people again.
“You were the Captain of the Guard for the Dark Court for hundreds of years, right?”
Tess gave one nod.
“You can’t have been able to trust many people.”
“No. I only had one person I could trust there. My friend, Nat.”
“One person.” He shook his head. “And I thought I was alone.”
“I don’t need your pity, Ethan. I did what I did for the good of the land.”
“I know. But that means you have scars, Tess. Inside. Where no one can see.” He dropped his eyes. “And I know what that’s like, too. But it’s just like when a physical wound is healing. What happens if once it’s closed over, you stay in bed, keep it still, and rest?”
Grudging understanding dawned on Tessa’s face.
“The scar gets too tight. If you’re not careful, you can lose mobility. When I got an arrow through my shoulder, I had to move it and have it massaged as it was healing.”
“Right, otherwise you wouldn’t get back the full range of motion.”
“Yes, I get it. What’s your point?”
“The other kind of scars work the same way,” Ethan explained. “If you don’t stretch your trust muscle, Tess, you might never learn to trust anyone ever again.”
Never trust again…
“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Ethan said. “Least of all you. I’m willing to bet your relationship with Finn helped heal a lot of those issues but…”
But that was over now.
“You want back your full range of emotions, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do.”
Ethan gave her a half-smile. “Then come upstairs with me. It’s not easy for me to do this either. It goes against habits that are centuries old. In fact, I’m feeling pretty queasy and like I might run for the airport at any moment.”
She chuckled at his lame joke that was maybe not a joke?
Then she felt serious again.
Was Ethan right?
Would she stay stuck and never be able to relate to people properly ever again if she didn’t take this risk now?
It was possible. There were defining moments in everyone’s life. Where you could look back and say, “after that, everything was different.” What if this was one of those moments? And if she chose wrong?
Taking off on her own would definitely be a step backward at this point. And she thought about how Jayde, Finn, and now even Ethan had committed to seeing this through—to finding the Chalice and sending it back to Ahlenerra with her.
And yet she was going to turn her back on all this help and support and try and do it by herself?
No, she supposed she wasn’t that stupid.
Getting the Chalice and ending the Severance was not something she could do with a hope and a prayer.
She needed help.
And with Finn at her back, Jayde’s brilliant mind, and Ethan’s powers, along with Tessa’s own skills, maybe they just might have a chance of finding the Chalice and bringing it home.
Those were actually pretty good odds.
Ethan was still waiting. “Coming?”
And Tess made her decision.
“Yes,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I think I will.”
Ethan opened the door to the stairwell without saying anything but she saw on his face that he was pleased.
It made her nervous to have to depend so very much on others but she recognized that feeling as simply being out of practice trusting people. She had depended on Finn more than once since she had met him and that had worked out okay. Mostly.
This would too.
She had to believe it.
No other option was even a possibility.
As much as she wanted to, she simply couldn’t do this alone.
A couple minutes later, they stood in Jayde’s living room.
“Okay, Jayde,” Tess said, glancing around at the others. “It looks like we’re all in. How do we find the Chalice?”
Jayde stood up, excited.
“Well, we start in my spare room.”
Chapter 39
Tess walked around the empty room, gazing at the walls, which were covered in papers from the floor to as high as Jayde could reach. Each paper contained some kind of question, or clue, or piece of information that might help her in the search. There was the sound of shuffling papers as the others looked at different items pinned to the wall.
In a flash of realization, Tess understood that Jayde’s spare bedroom marked her search for the Chalice over years. It was after ten at night and Tess was tired, but her hope burned brighter looking at all this. If Jayde couldn’t help them, no one could. She probably knew everything there was to know about the Chalice and where it could be found in North America. Tessa’s flagging energy picked back up as Jayde began to speak.
“For a long time, I thought that the Chalice was buried beneath the Omahk.”
“Wait, it’s not?” Finn frowned.
“I don’t think so, not anymore,” Jayde said. “I got a friend of mine fr
om the geology department to come out and use his seismic wave technology to detect caverns beneath the Earth.”
“And?” Ethan said, still gazing at the walls. “Were there any?”
“Well, it’s a very inexact science at present,” Jayde said apologetically. “And the equipment sometimes misses caverns that are there. But if it detects a cavern, then there is a cavern.”
“So?”
“So at first I thought that it was the equipment. That it was missing something that was there.”
“But he wasn’t missing anything?”
“I don’t know. We won’t know unless we excavate.”
“So we have to excavate?”
“No. Because I don’t think the Chalice is under the Omahk anymore.”
“But I thought—” Tess was completely confused at this point.
“So did I,” said Jayde, holding up her pointer finger. “Until I found this text from when the Jesuits first made contact with the Indigenous people of Manitoba.”
She went straight to a spot on the wall where an unwrinkled sheet of freshly printed paper had been tacked up.
“Here. I just located it a couple days ago because it was only made available in the database very recently when some archeologists in the east started cataloguing the large amount of information that the Jesuits in Canada collected. The diary is super old and written by—”
“Fernand Larocque?” Ethan guessed.
Jayde gave him an incredulous look. “Yes. How did you know that?”
Ethan tapped his head. “Not just mush up here. Plus, my friend, Doyle is an amateur historian and dug up a bunch of your work and anything else he could find about the Chalice actually being in North America. He had access to the same database you’re talking about.”
“And he found Fernand Larocque?”
“He did. Quite fascinating.”
“Yes, especially—”
“The stories he wrote down, right?” Ethan said. “The one about the Chief that came from afar?”
“Exactly,” Jayde said, her face lighting up.
“And you know what’s the most fascinating thing about that story?”
“What?”
“It’s the exact story these two tell about how the Chalice got to Earth.”
“You’re kidding,” Jayde and Tess said at the same time. Then they smiled at each other.
“Not kidding. What’s the story you read in the diary?”
“A Great Chief came from afar. And he brought a woman with him. He was like a god. They both had powers. They could make miracles. But when they arrived on Earth, it was in the middle of the longest, coldest, most dangerous blizzard in years. The Great Chief from afar and his companion nearly froze on the open prairie, but Sakiwayo saved him, brought him back to the village, warmed him up, fed him. And filled his golden cup so that the Great Chief might drink.”
“Golden cup?” Finn perked up.
“Yes,” Jayde said. “The Great Chief brought a golden cup with him, and Sakiwayo filled it with water, and it was said that when the Great Chief drank the water from the golden cup, he was miraculously healed.”
“I bet he was,” Tess murmured.
Jayde smiled. “When the Great Chief and the woman were recovered, they demanded that Sakiwayo help them hide the golden cup. He agreed, though he was a little put out not to be asked.”
“Understandably,” Ethan said.
“The Great Chief said he needed three landmarks that would not disappear over thousands of years. So Sakiwayo told him of a place called the Stone Dancers.”
“What’s that?”
“In Northern Canada, the people called the Inuit have something called Inukshuk. They look like stone people.” She pronounced it in-ook-shook. Then she corrected herself. “Well, technically, that’s not the right name for the ones that look like people… But never mind. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that there’s a place called Inukshuk Point on Baffin Island. There is a circle of Inukshuk. They look like people in a circle dancing.”
“Really,” Finn said. “That sounds a heck of a lot like Faeries dancing at a revel.”
“Right,” Jayde said. “What do you want to bet that place has a higher concentration of magic, just like Stonehenge and the Omahk?”
“What were the other two points?”
“The second was a Medicine Wheel that had already been in existence a thousand years and would likely last thousands more.”
“The Omahk,” Tess guessed.
“Of course,” Jayde confirmed.
“And the third point?” Ethan said, studying the map that only showed two points with circles around them—one in Alberta and one in Nunavut.
“That’s the thing. The journal was damaged. There’s parts missing from the story.” Jayde’s face was suddenly devastated.
“Oh no,” Tess said, feeling her heart fall.
“Yes, so I know that there’s three points. But I don’t know what the third point is. And without that, we can’t find the Chalice. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, Tess. I wish I could be more help. But I thought that maybe with all four of us working on it…”
She dropped her eyes, maybe a little ashamed that she didn’t have the answers Tess and Finn needed.
What? Jayde didn’t know where the Chalice was? That couldn’t be right. Their search couldn’t end here and now. Not when they had only just gotten started.
It wasn’t fair.
But since when had life ever been fair to Tess?
“It’s why I’ve never been able to prove my theory. I could never pinpoint exactly where the Chalice was. First, I thought it was at the Omahk. And now that I have this new information, I’m so close to figuring out where it’s buried. But without the third point, we can’t find it. Your King set it up that way on purpose.”
Finn was thinking and he began voicing his thoughts. “The King wanted to be able to send someone to find the Chalice when he wanted it. And he needed landmarks that wouldn’t disappear.”
“Right. The Omahk and the Dancing Stones are all part of the story. See here?” Jayde pointed to a huge map of Canada that covered most of one wall. She had marked those two locations with stars, which Tess thought was fitting.
“This is the Omahk, near Majorville, Alberta.”
She pointed to the star on the left-hand side of the map.
“The Dancing Stones are located here on Baffin Island.” Her pointer finger tapped high up on the map, near the arctic circle.
“How are we going to find the last point mentioned in the story?” Tess asked, feeling desperate. “We have to.”
They were all silent, thinking. Then Finn spoke, his eyes staring into Tessa’s. “I know who can tell us where the third point is.”
“Who?” Tess wondered.
“You, Tessa.”
Chapter 40
Everyone looked at Finn, where he stood next to the map with the stars on the spare room wall.
“What are you talking about, Finn?” Ethan said. “You losing it, man?”
“She has the memories from the Keeper of the Scroll, Ethan,” Finn explained.
“I forgot,” Ethan said, suddenly understanding.
“That's right,” Tess said. Then she tilted her head at Ethan, studying him. “How do you know so much about the Fae anyway? The Great Hunter from the Earthly Realm.”
She narrowed her eyes at Ethan, an expression of suspicion on her face. Ethan looked a little embarrassed.
He glanced around at the other three. “I… dated a Fae woman once a very long time ago. So to speak. You know, the one I mentioned? And during that time, I spent quite a lot of time in Ahlenerra and around the Fae.”
Right. Ethan had had a thing with Perdira.
This seemed to satisfy Finn and Jayde because they were both nodding. Tess felt mildly disgruntled at this explanation but wasn’t quite sure why.
“So, you’ve got the Keeper’s memories?” Ethan thought about this. “It’s true, then
, Tess. You should know where the third point is. The Keeper’s job was to keep tabs on everything to do with the Severance. No doubt, he knew all about what it took to break the spell and where the King had hidden everything.”
“But I can’t access the memories without the ring my aunt gave me,” Tess said to Finn.
“That’s not true,” Finn said. “At the Hundred Years Ball, you remembered where the Keeper’s secret quarters were without the ring.”
“But that was unconscious. I’ve never done it consciously.”
“I don’t mean to slow things down here but I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about,” Jayde said, as though she hated admitting her ignorance but like she wasn’t going to let that stop her from learning something new.
“Tess has her own magic and energy,” Ethan explained. “Her Starlight. But she received the Keeper of the Scroll’s Starlight and it’s there alongside her own.”
He squinted at her, doing that thing he had done before when he looked at Finn’s magic.
“I can see her Starlight. But there’s like another layer of her energy that’s different. They’re two distinct fields, though. With no connection.”
“The ring gave me connection to the memories, but the guards took it from me when they threw me in the Dark Queen’s dungeons,” Tess told them. “I can’t access those memories without it. I did it that one time before but I don’t know how I did it. And I haven’t been able to do it since.”
“Maybe Ethan could do something?” Jayde suggested. “He’s got some power, right?”
Tess tried not to smile at the look on Ethan’s face. This mortal was really giving his ego a onceover.
“Yes, I have power,” Ethan said, as if he were trying very hard to hold on to his temper. “But I’m not quite sure how I would connect the two fields of magic.”
“Well, it’s like Tess can’t get to it,” Jayde said, walking back and forth in the small room, her hands behind her back. “So, what do you need when you want to get in someplace?”
“A door,” Finn said. “You need a door.”
“Right,” Jayde said, giving him a brilliant smile. “So, Ethan. Can you make a doorway from one field to the other?”