by E. E. Holmes
“I don’t like the idea of any Durupinen saddled with unreliable protection, whether they’re my problem or not,” Finn said, his scowl deepening at the sound of my laughter. “I have half a mind to report them to the International Grand Council, though, of course, they’re notorious for their inaction in regional matters. There’s a reason the Caomhnóir exist, you know, and it’s not simply to cramp your style.”
My smile faded. “I know that. I’m sorry, Finn. I was just trying to lighten the mood.”
Finn sighed, and sagged a bit. “I’m sorry, too. I hate being back here. It’s forcing me to relive memories I would much rather forget.”
“I don’t like it very much myself,” I admitted. I reached out and took his hand.
“You do realize that just a few yards from here is the spot I found you and thought you were . . .” he couldn’t even finish the sentence, choking on the last word and swallowing it back.
“I know,” I said. “But I wasn’t. Try not to think about it.”
He nodded, but still looked troubled.
I stepped in close to him and caressed his cheek with my hand. “It was also the first place we ever did this.” And I kissed him gently.
I felt his body relax, felt him lean into the kiss, felt his lips tremble before pulling away to lean his forehead against mine. “There is that,” he said with a soft chuckle.
The smell of him, the taste of his lips, left me dizzy. Although we were alone in the wagon, with the shades drawn, I knew it wasn’t safe to get carried away here, surrounded by Durupinen we could not trust. Reluctantly, I stepped away from him and sat down on the bench Flavia had just vacated.
“Were you able to find out any more about the trial?” I asked, in an effort to change the subject.
Finn shook his head as though to clear it, and when he spoke again, he sounded like his usual brisk self. “The Traveler Council has been hearing witnesses and evidence during the last week. So far, there have been three days of testimony pertaining to Irina’s alleged crimes leading up to the events at Whispering Seraph. Your testimony will conclude the evidentiary portion of the trial. Then the Court can choose to hear character witnesses.”
“What are character witnesses?” I asked.
“They give their opinion about the defendant. So, for example, if they know from experience that the accused is violent, or kind, or what have you. They provide their observations so that the Council has a clearer picture as to what kind of person the accused really is. It is meant to sway them, one way or the other, in the sentencing process. The Council will decide on innocence or guilt by simple majority, and will recommend a sentence to the High Priestess, but it will ultimately be up to Ileana how and if Irina is punished.”
I bit my lip. “So, it comes down to Ileana’s mercy?”
“Or lack thereof, yes,” Finn said grimly.
We lapsed into silence, each consumed by our own thoughts about what was to come. I had no idea if Ileana would be disposed to forgive Irina. She was certainly possessed of the unpredictable, mercurial nature that seemed a hallmark of the Traveler Clans, and I did not think she would take Irina’s betrayal lightly.
One of the first things I needed to do, before the trial began, was to talk to Irina. I had no idea how I would pull it off; it didn’t seem likely that she’d be allowed to have visitors, not when she was treating bystanders like kindling, but there had to be a way to let her know I was here. I didn’t want the first time she saw me to be sitting on a witness stand, perhaps unintentionally sealing her fate with my account of her actions at Whispering Seraph. I needed her to know that I hadn’t forgotten my promise, that I was here to help her . . . even if I still had no clue how I was going to do it.
I also needed to decide if I was going to tell Finn. Keeping my promise to Irina would be difficult enough without Finn hovering over me, weighing the dangers of every decision, but then his help, if he were actually on board, could be invaluable. Only Milo knew about my promise to free Irina. I hadn’t even told Hannah, which I knew was shitty of me, because she deserved to know, but I couldn’t bear the idea of adding any more stress to her life than she already had to deal with as the newest, most controversial member of the Council. She had her whole life to sort out: school, work, moving to a new country, not to mention the onerous responsibilities of her new position. She didn’t need to know that I was entering into pacts with an unpredictable, half-mad woman who would betray me in a moment if it meant her own freedom.
Nor did I need to deliver on this pact, I told myself repeatedly, in my most reasonable, grown-up, logical voice. I could walk away from this. I could do my utmost to free Irina with my testimony. I could beg on bended knee before the Traveler Council to let her go, to show her mercy. But if that didn’t work, I was under no further obligation to her.
I flopped down onto the bunk and sighed to myself. Silly, Jess. You know you never listen to that voice.
Ever.
17
Siren Song
AT FIRST, THE SINGING did not wake me.
It wound itself into the tendrils of a dark and terrifying dream, issuing first from the mouth of my own sister, then from the mouth of the Silent Child—silent no more—then from the gaping twin mouths of the Elemental, when it had taken the form of two girls on the night of the fulfillment of the Prophecy.
When I did finally wake from the dream, drenched in an icy sweat and gasping for air, the singing continued. At first, as I attempted to slow my galloping heart rate and calm my heaving breaths, I thought the singing was simply reverberating in my head, the echoing aftermath of a nightmare. Surely it would fade in a few moments, leaving me in the silent embrace of the winter woods, and I would drift back off into a deep and—please God—dreamless sleep.
But it did not fade. The haunting voice continued to drift into my wagon on the current of the frigid night air, sending shivers down my spine and a cold shaft of fear through my heart. An instinctive warning was nudging its icy little fingers into my ribs.
This song was dangerous.
“Finn? Do you hear that?” I whispered in a voice still cracked with sleep.
No answer. I squinted across into Finn’s bunk, but he was not in it. The covers had been thrown back. I knew he wasn’t in the wagon; it was much too small to hide anyone, and much too cramped for him not to have heard my call, even if he’d been just outside. I glanced over at the wood stove, the only source of heat and light in the room, and saw that the little curved door had been left open. There was nothing but embers, pulsing with a red glow, inside the belly of the stove, and no logs left in the basket beside it. Before I had time to panic about where he might have gone, I knew. Finn had gone to get us more firewood so that we wouldn’t freeze to death in the night.
Even as I breathed a sigh of relief at this realization, my ear was drawn, again, to the song. I slid out of my bed, dragging my thick blanket with me as I shuffled across the floorboards to the door. I unlatched the two halves and swung open the top one. The camp was entirely still, almost perfectly silent, except for that voice.
I couldn’t understand the words; it was in a language I did not recognize, though I hazarded a guess that it was an Eastern European dialect. This particular band of Travelers were at least partly Romanian—this much I knew from Annabelle. The song itself was haunting, a sort of lullaby that lured the listener on the lilts of a melancholy, minor key that intrigued the heart as much as it shattered it. I couldn’t have stopped listening to it if I’d wanted to, so alluring was the sound.
Had I been thinking logically, I never would have done what I did next, but the song eviscerated logic. I pulled the blanket more tightly around me, slid my feet into my slippers, and pushed open the bottom half of the door. I stumbled trying to descend the wooden steps, but caught myself before I fell flat into the frosty grass. Regaining my balance, I shuffled off down the path, snatching a lantern from a post beside our wagon to light my way.
On all sides, wagons and t
ents loomed up out of the darkness. Their stillness disturbed me. Why was no one else awake? Why was no one else following the call of this song, seductive as the call of land for a sea-weary sailor? Surely other people could hear it?
Disturbed, I considered two possible explanations. The first was that I was dreaming, though the bone-deep chill of the night air made this one seem unlikely. The second was that I—and only I—could hear the song. Was it possible the song was just for me?
This thought, rather than pulling me up short, acted as a bizarre sort of stimulant, propelling me up the pathway even more eagerly. Was there something I needed to know? Was some spirit trying to send me a message? My fear and doubt about my role here was so all-consuming that even a creepy, middle-of-the-night ballad was welcome if it could help me figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.
I was so eager to arrive at the source of the song that I didn’t take stock of my surroundings, didn’t stop to wonder if I was headed in a direction I had traversed before. If I had, I might have realized sooner where I was headed. Instead, I tripped out into the tiny clearing and felt my heart judder to a stop at the sight of the wagon before me.
Old and decrepit. Covered in runes. A wagon turned prison for the dangerous woman inside.
Irina.
The song was issuing from the wagon, though I could not see the singer. She was hidden somewhere in the shadowy recesses of the wagon’s rounded wooden belly, but her voice was free, drifting through the clearing like a bird coasting on a breeze. Now that I knew who was singing, I wondered how I didn’t know it from the very first note. Who else could weave a musical web of such profound sadness, for who in this wide world had suffered as she did now?
I had just decided to take a few steps closer when a muffled crashing sound sent me stumbling back into the cover of shrubs. A second figure had barreled into the clearing even less gracefully than I had done and landed sprawled in the powdery snow so that it rose up around him like a cloud of sparkling dust. It took a few moments of watching him curse as he untangled his gangling arms and legs before I recognized him: it was the tall lanky Caomhnóir who had led us to the camp, the one Dragos had called Ruslo.
Ruslo brushed the snow from his pant legs and then straightened up, staring in a mix of fear and wonder at the wagon before him. I opened my mouth to call to him, but then a movement in the darkened mouth of the wagon caught my eye, and I turned to see what he was gaping at.
Irina stood framed like a goddess immortalized on canvas by a Renaissance master. Her hair, a tousled, feral halo of curls, seemed to float around her face. She was stark naked save for the shackles around her ankles. The pale, moonlit curves of her body were made all the more mysterious by the many runes that had been inked onto them. She moved with a sinuous fluidity, a seductive primality more alluring than anything I had ever seen. Her lips caressed each word of the song that was issuing from her mouth, and her hips swayed to the sultry rhythm of it.
The vision of her was nearly enough to draw me from my hiding place, but it was Ruslo who shuffled forward, mouth agape, toward the wagon. The sound of his clumsy footsteps snapped me back to reality, and to the danger of what we had both stumbled upon.
“Ruslo!” I called, but almost no sound came out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Ruslo! Don’t!”
Something was wrong with the air. The sound of my voice was muffled, as though I had shouted the words into a pillow rather than into the open space of the clearing. Ruslo did not seem to have even heard me. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Ruslo! Don’t go near her! She’s dangerous!”
He did not even turn. My words fell uselessly at my own feet. My heart sped up. The idiot was drifting right to her, a storm-tossed ship guided by Irina’s siren call, and he did not even see that he was about to be dashed to pieces on the rocks.
“Ruslo! RUSLO! Come back here!” I flung the blanket off my shoulders and scrambled to my feet, determined to catch him and drag him back. But I’d only taken a few steps when I ran smack into something solid and was knocked to the ground again. Dazedly, I shook my head and stared around. I couldn’t understand what I’d hit. Only an open stretch of clearing lay before me. I stood up, wincing at the pain in my hip; I’d landed hard on a tree root sticking out of the ground. Moving cautiously this time, I put my hands out in front of me and walked slowly forward. Within seconds, my hands met with an invisible barrier, as though Irina’s clearing existed on the other side of a glass wall. I pressed. I prodded. I reached out a fist and pounded as hard as I could. It made no sound. It felt like air that had been turned solid. I jogged first to the left, and then to the right, hands extended, probing for a weak spot, an end to the obstruction, but I could not find one. I could not move beyond it, but what was it? And why was Ruslo able to get through it, while I was stranded like a helpless spectator on the other side?
Ruslo.
I looked up and saw to my horror that he was now only a few yards from Irina’s wagon. In desperation, though I knew it was useless, I flung my shoulder against the barrier over and over again, shouting so loudly that my voice cracked with the effort.
“Ruslo, no! Don’t listen to her! Get out of there! You’re not safe!” I shrieked.
An eerie silence met my words. Irina had stopped singing, though she made no sign that she had heard me. She draped herself in the doorway of the wagon, and she was cocking her finger invitingly at Ruslo, who stood in the grass before her.
“You’ve followed my song. Now taste of the pleasure it promised,” she cooed.
Ruslo shook his head slightly, as though the end of the song had brought him, at least partially, to his senses. “What pleasure can a man have from you, you crazy old witch?” he said, though his voice shook with barely suppressed desire.
Irina laughed, and even the laugh sounded like a seduction. “Old, am I? My soul may be old, Guardian, but this body is young and supple. See for yourself.” She turned slowly on the spot, and Ruslo seemed to shiver.
“So, I come in there with you and you light me on fire? I saw what you did to Andrei,” he said, crossing his arms defiantly.
Irina threw back her head and laughed. The sound crackled with raw desire. “That decrepit old man? You truly believe that I could overpower a strong young man like you? Do you truly believe you could not have your way with this body, to bend it to your will?”
Ruslo shifted nervously. He licked his lips. “Of course, I could, but that’s not the point. You want to attack me. You want to attack everyone. That’s why they put you out here.” His voice was slurred slightly; he had obviously been drinking again. Irina heard it too and smiled; it was almost as though she knew her prey was that much weaker, that much more vulnerable to attack.
Irina slunk another step closer to the edge of the wagon, and Ruslo took another involuntary step toward her. “They put me here because they fear me. They are weak. Cowards. But not you. You follow a song filled with danger. You face down the monster in her lair, don’t you, Guardian? You take what you want. And you want this body. I can see it in your eyes.”
I watched, paralyzed with panic. Ruslo’s feeble resistance was cracking. I mean, hell, I half-wanted to throw myself into the wagon. There was something beyond natural allure at work here, of that I was damn certain. Was there a Casting that could make a Durupinen irresistible?
I didn’t know what to do. Should I run back to the camp for help? It would take me several minutes just to reach the nearest tent, and by then, Ruslo would surely have fallen victim to the latest of Irina’s increasingly frenzied bids for freedom. Desperately, I called back over my shoulder toward the camp.
“Help! Help us, please! It’s Irina, she’s attacking, help!”
Neither Irina nor Ruslo acknowledged the sound of my voice; the barrier must have been designed to keep both my voice and my body from crossing through into the clearing, or else they were both too wrapped up in the power of their attraction to spare me a thought.
“What is a
body for, if not to feel pleasure?” Irina whispered, her voice little more than a caress. She began to take deep, shuddering breaths, undulating each through her body in a hypnotic sort of dance. “What are desires for but to be fulfilled? I can see it in your eyes, guardian. Are you a fool who denies yourself what you so desperately desire? Or are you a man who takes it for his own?”
Ruslo licked his lips again. Even from several yards away, I could see his hands trembling.
“Take me,” Irina breathed.
And Ruslo broke. With an animal moan of longing he charged forward, and leapt into the mouth of the wagon. He grabbed Irina by the arm and pulled her roughly in against his body. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and kissed her violently on the mouth. Irina’s arms reached up around Ruslo’s neck. Her own hands wound through his hair. And then, I saw Irina’s eyes open, saw her lips curl into a half-smile around the kiss.
And for one last, passionate moment Ruslo truly believed that he was the mighty conqueror.
Fucking fool.
It happened faster than I could process it. One moment Ruslo was kissing her, and the next, he was sprawled on the ground, Irina’s legs locked around his torso and the chains of her shackles wrapped tightly around his neck. Irina twisted the chain up into her hand. Ruslo jerked and twitched, but seemed unable to free himself. His feet dangled, twisting madly over the edge of the wagon.
“Help!” I shrieked. “Help! Someone, anyone, please!”
I pounded uselessly against the barrier, my cries turning to sobs, convinced I was about to watch a man be murdered right in front of me, and then I froze in horror. Irina was struggling to hold Ruslo still while she stretched across his body to reach something on his belt. A glint of silver at the end of a leather-bound handle. A knife. She was staring at that knife as though it were the singular most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
