by E. E. Holmes
Lucida shrugged. “Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. There was no other way.”
“There were lots of other ways.”
“Don’t be naïve, love. The Prophecy was the only way. It was coming. It was bigger than you, and it was bigger than me, and all we could do was choose a side, fight like hell, and hope we chose right. You chose right. I chose wrong. But if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change my mind. It was worth it, taking my chance at burying this place. I regret only that it’s still standing.”
“And what about Cat? What about what you did to her with the Shattering? What about everything you put her through for your long shot at revenge? Not even a tiny bit of regret there?”
Lucida’s face tightened for a moment. “Cat understands,” she said shortly. Her defiance was almost pitiable as she lay there, too weakened even to sit up.
I shook my head in disgust and moved on. I needed to stay focused on why I was here. I was letting her get to me the way only Lucida could, and if I carried on like this, she would derail me completely. Get in, get the answers you need, and get out, Jess. I took a slow, steady breath.
“Look, I didn’t come here to rehash your considerable resume of screwing over people who have trusted you. You can do that on your own time. I’m here because I need some details about how you communicated with Eleanora Larkin in the príosún.”
“What does that matter to you?” Lucida asked, betraying her first hint of genuine interest in what I had to say.
“Since when do you care what matters to anyone? Just answer the question.”
She probably would have stayed silent out of pure spite, but I had piqued her curiosity with the unexpectedness of my question. “Callers can connect in ways that the Durupinen don’t understand. We sensed each other inside the príosún and, over time, we connected by Cross-Calling.”
“Cross-Calling?”
“Called each other, like. One soul to another. She reached out, and I reached out, and we connected. It took time and practice, but we learned to communicate.”
“But there are wards all over that prison to stop you from being able to communicate with spirits, aren’t there?”
“Oh sure, but Eleanora was forgotten, wasn’t she? Buried in the rubble years ago. No one was checking up on her, making sure she was contained or restricted. Mind you, there were still dozens of Castings around the ruins of her cell, so she couldn’t break free. But not one of those Castings can stop two Callers from connecting if they work at it long enough. At first, we could only communicate for brief moments. Then over time, the connection itself grew clearer and stronger.”
“How?”
“Think of it with a prison break metaphor, if you will,” Lucida said with a hint of a wry smile. “We were digging a tunnel with bloody psychic spoons, yeah? And we just kept digging and digging, clawing and poking, until we broke through. And once our connection was strong enough, I was able to Call her right out of her cell and straight to me.”
“And she was free to move around and communicate once you had Called her out?”
“That’s right.”
“So, at that point, could she have communicated with someone outside of the príosún?”
“Unlikely,” Lucida said, shaking her head.
“Why is it unlikely?” I asked.
“Because within moments of her breaking free, she had Shattered. She didn’t have the time or the desire to communicate with anyone else. Her singular focus was to Cross.”
“And your singular focus was to destroy her,” I said, clenching my teeth to stop myself from shouting at her. “How in the world did you convince her she’d be able to Cross without the other half of your Gateway there? She was a Durupinen, too. She knew how Crossings work.”
“She was desperate, vulnerable,” Lucida said, her voice dispassionate. “I told her a few lies about the nature of our Cross-Calling connection, told her it would open the Gateway right up for her. She didn’t understand very much about her own gift, so she believed me.”
I bit back a livid diatribe about Lucida’s victimization of Eleanora. What was the point? The woman in front of me was utterly incapable of remorse, and there were still several important points I needed to clarify.
“So, in the days leading up to the Shattering, the only person that Eleanora could possibly have communicated with was you?”
“That’s right,” Lucida said.
A strange thought occurred to me. Eleanora had traversed Lucida and Catriona’s connection when she Shattered. She had possessed Catriona, even though she hadn’t ever communicated with her directly. What if she had done something similar with me?
“What about another Caller?” I asked.
Lucida frowned. “What are you on about, then? Another Caller, what?”
“I mean, could Eleanora have reached out and communicated with another Caller? One that was outside the walls of the príosún?”
“Like who?” Lucida asked.
“Like Hannah,” I answered.
Lucida narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you think that—”
“Just answer the goddamn question, would you please?” I snapped.
“In a word, no. Cross-Calling only works if both Callers are actively attempting to communicate at the same time. Hannah—and the rest of the castle, for that matter—didn’t even know Eleanora existed before the Shattering, did they? So, there’s no way that Eleanora and Hannah could have established any kind of communication, accidental or otherwise.”
I remained silent as her words settled onto me, weighing me down, like stones in my pockets. It really didn’t seem that Eleanora could possibly have reached out to me in any way. So, where in the world had the sketches come from?
“Is that it, then? Is that all you wanted to know?” Lucida asked, breaking into my tangle of thoughts.
“Yes,” I said, standing. I couldn’t bring myself to thank her, so I just sort of nodded at her. I had already turned to leave when I remembered. “Wait. No, actually, that’s not it,” I said, and I reached into my pocket for Hannah’s letter. “Hannah wrote this and asked me to give it to you. I told her I would wait while you read it.”
Lucida cast a wary look at the letter, as though expecting it to explode. “Have you read it?”
“No. I have no idea what it says. That’s between you and Hannah,” I said.
Lucida hesitated, then reached out for the letter, but a sudden loud banging noise made her jerk her hand back. I turned to see Hannah striding purposefully up the ward. I leapt to my feet, instinctively placing my body right in front of Lucida, as though I could prevent Hannah from having to look directly at her.
“Hannah, what are you—”
“Don’t, Jess. Don’t give her the letter. I want to say it for myself.”
“Hannah, you don’t need to do that. You’ve got everything you want to say right here.” I held the letter up and shook it at her. “Why put yourself through a—”
“I know you want to protect me, but I don’t need you to,” Hannah said. “I have something I need to say to her and I’m going to say it.”
“But, Hannah, she’s—”
But Hannah had already pushed her way past me. I stumbled backward with the force of it. I watched helplessly as Hannah marched right up to the edge of Lucida’s bed, squared her shoulders and said, “I came to apologize to you, Lucida.”
If I looked surprised to hear these words come out of Hannah’s mouth, it was nothing to the expression on Lucida’s face. Whatever snide remark she may have been concocting died on her lips, and her trademark smirk slipped right off her features to be replaced with a wide-eyed look of shock. She looked, for a moment, like a child in the throes of a nightmare.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah went on, and her voice shuddered with emotion. “I’m sorry that you grew up under terrible scrutiny and suspicion. I’m sorry that your own sisterhood made you feel like a dangerous outsider. I’m sorry that their cold detachment cau
sed you to seek acceptance elsewhere, and I’m sorry that the Necromancers were there to provide it. I’m sorry that I was the cause of it. I was the one the Durupinen rightfully feared, and many, many lives were destroyed in anticipation of my arrival, including yours.”
I finally found my voice. “Hannah, stop. You don’t owe her any—”
Hannah spun and glared at me, her expression so fierce that I sat right back down on my chair again. “Maybe not. But the people who do owe it to her will never admit it, so someone has to acknowledge it. Someone has to stand up and say that this wasn’t right.”
Her face was so fierce that I leaned away from her. She turned back to Lucida. “You deserve to hear these things, even if I’m not the one that owes them to you. But that’s okay. It costs me nothing to say them.”
Lucida’s face spasmed with emotions I couldn’t identify, and then settled into an unsettlingly blank expression. “I suppose this is when you expect me to apologize to you in turn. Is that why you’re doing this? Some naïve, misguided attempt at the myth of closure?”
Hannah shook her head. “No. I don’t want your apology. I don’t need it. I don’t for a second believe that you’ve got the capacity to say the words and mean them, and I’ve watched you lie to me too many times already to subject myself to it again.”
Lucida attempted a smirk and failed. Her mouth just sagged crookedly. She blinked convulsively, like she was fending off tears. “Come off it, pet. I know you’ve been dreaming of the day I beg your forgiveness for my wicked ways.”
Hannah laughed—actually laughed. “I used to. As recently as an hour ago, the thought of facing you absolutely terrified me. But something happened to me this past week. I took charge of myself. I finally admitted that my role in the Prophecy wasn’t something to forget. I stopped trying to move on from it. I stopped trying to bury it. I took it out and I dusted it off, and I put it on. People didn’t like it, at first. They were clinging onto their fears and their prejudices, and I expected that. One of them even decided to take a swing at us with a knife the other day. But we persisted, and we spoke our truth, and now we’ve got these.” And she held up a stack of papers I recognized at once as the pledges we’d found stuffed under our door, except there were seven of them now. Perhaps Lucida realized what they were, too, for her eyes widened at the sight of the rainbow of broken seals. “They just keep showing up—two more of them, just since Jess left to come down here. And whether I win or not, it doesn’t matter. People understand the enormity of their mistake and they are trying to atone for it. And so, I’ll be wearing that Prophecy like a badge of honor from now on. It’s a new kind of battle scar and I’m done covering it up.”
Lucida laughed, too—a single, humorless bark of a laugh. “Badge of honor, eh? Don’t fool yourself. They’ll keep tearing at you, love, just like they did me. They’ll keep tearing and pulling and ripping that scar wide open just to watch you bleed.”
But miraculously, Hannah was smiling. “If I believed that, I would have reversed the Gateway for good. But I don’t. And I never will.” She held up the pledges again. “I have a chance to change things, and I’m going to change them. I’m sorry that it was too late to help you, and Eleanora, and all of the Callers who came before you, but it won’t be too late for the next Caller who comes through these doors, I can promise you that.” She sighed deeply. “So, I guess that’s it. That’s all I wanted to say to you. I suppose Jess could have given you the letter, but I needed you to see for yourself that I’m not broken, as hard as you tried to break me.”
She turned and walked away. Lucida stared blankly after her for a moment, then, her eyes filling with the tears she’d been trying to hold back, she struggled up onto one elbow and called after her, “I don’t regret it. Any of it. And I don’t need you swooping in here and bestowing your pardon on me like the bloody Queen of England. I don’t need your forgiveness!”
Hannah stopped, one hand on the door handle. “Well, that’s good, Lucida. Because if you think back over our conversation, you’ll find that I never gave you my forgiveness. And I never will.”
And without so much as a backward glance, my sister closed the door on Lucida in every possible sense of the word.
10
Scouting
IT SEEMED THAT Hannah Ballard could not and would not be stopped.
There was a new confidence in her step, a new gleam in her eye. Her strength had always been there, a molten core beneath her seemingly delicate surface, but now it was on display for everyone to see. Free of her fear of Lucida, and armed with the pledges, she walked through Fairhaven with a sense of belonging there.
Milo had nearly died all over again when he found out she went to see Lucida without him.
“I mean, I’m your best friend and your Spirit Guide! How do you just leave me out of something like that?” he’d shouted.
“Because as my best friend and my Spirit Guide, you would have done everything in your power to talk me out of it,” Hannah had calmly replied. “And I would have listened to you, and then I wouldn’t have been able to close that door. I’m sorry, Milo, but I had to do that on my own.”
“But I missed it! I need transcripts! I need a dramatic reenactment! Can you just do the whole thing again?” Milo cried.
“Sorry, sweetness,” she said, sympathetically. “That was a one-night-only performance.”
I was happy that Hannah had found so much closure, but I was still left with more questions than answers. I managed to catch Fiona at the end of the next day’s Airechtas session to tell her everything I’d learned from Lucida about Cross-Calling. I couldn’t be sure, because she was so difficult to read, but I thought I saw something like fear flash in her eyes.
“Right,” she said finally, avoiding my questioning gaze. “Right. Well, then. Cheers.” And she turned abruptly away from me and stalked toward the staircase.
“Fiona!” I called after her, more than a little annoyed that she hadn’t at least acknowledged how difficult it must have been to face Lucida. “Wait! Does that . . . what does that mean, for the sketches?”
Fiona stopped, but did not turn to look at me. “It means Eleanora was telling the truth. And I have some more work to do.” And she walked away without saying another word.
I muttered to myself all the way back to my room. My brain felt fried. The morning’s session of voting on obscure and seemingly meaningless measures had sapped me of the will to live. To get a little of it back, I planned to dig out my sketchbook and bring it with me, along with some lunch, down to the conservatory. It was a beautiful little spot I’d discovered during this stay, where several of the Durupinen were in charge of growing a variety of plants and herbs commonly used in Castings. It was warm and full of dappled green light, and it smelled like sage and lavender and springtime. It was like an oasis in the icy white desert of the English winter, and the perfect place to forget where I was and why I was there. It would also get me out of Hannah’s hair for a while. She planned to spend the afternoon putting the finishing touches on her speech, and for some reason, me sitting there staring at her wasn’t helping her concentrate.
As I turned the final corner, I saw someone standing outside our bedroom door, bent down as though examining something on the floor. As she tucked her curtain of dark hair behind her ear, I recognized her.
“Róisín?”
Róisín straightened hastily and spun on the spot, looking startled. I could see her sister Riley standing waiting for her on the other side of the doorframe, arms folded sulkily across her chest. It occurred to me that I had never actually seen her smile.
Róisín, however, flashed a brilliant one at me as she walked over to meet me.
“Hi,” she said, through those glittering teeth.
“Hi,” I replied warily. “Uh, what’s going on? What are you doing here?” I was having unpleasantly vivid flashbacks of arriving back at our room on our very first day at Fairhaven and finding “Go home, traitors!” splashed across it in red p
aint. Ugh, this castle was just teeming with fond memories.
“I’m just . . . running an errand. For our clan,” Róisín said, her smile tipping into a sheepish expression.
“What errand?” I asked.
“Well—”
“Róisín, we’re just supposed to deliver it and go!” Riley said in a clipped voice. She was determinedly not looking at me and tapping her foot against the floor, where it made a disproportionately loud noise against the ancient stones.
“Well then, you go,” Róisín snapped back. “I want to talk to Jess for a minute.”
Riley looked like she was chewing on something nasty she wanted to say, but swallowed it back. With a huffy sigh, she turned and stalked up the corridor and out of sight.
“Sorry about her,” Róisín said, cocking her head back over her shoulder where her sister had vanished. “She’s not very good at shaking off old prejudices.”
“I get that sense, actually,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. We aren’t here for the adulation, although, as you can see, it is pouring in from all sides.”
Róisín allowed herself a laugh, but then her face quickly sagged into a frown. “I still can’t believe what happened to you the other day. I was just shocked. We all were.”
“Don’t worry about us. Actually, that’s one of the better receptions we’ve gotten in that room.”
Róisín smiled. “I daresay that’s true. Still, I’m sure you and Hannah are both a bit shaken.”
“I’m not a good enough actress to convince you that’s not true,” I conceded.
“Nor do I expect you to,” Róisín said. “It was terrifying merely to watch it happen, let alone experience it. But I’m so pleased that you haven’t allowed the attack to derail your clan’s candidacy. That would have given your opponents exactly what they wanted.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but couldn’t figure out how to say what I was thinking without sounding like a huge bitch, so I closed it again. Róisín was too observant to miss it, though.
“What? What were you going to say?”
