by E. E. Holmes
When I got back to our room, Hannah was already curled in a ball under her blankets. As much as I wanted to talk, I decided not to disturb her. After all, my Rifting had probably been more traumatic for her than it had been for me and adding the news of our grandfather just felt cruel. I texted Karen that I’d see her in the morning, pulled on a clean pair of pajamas, and practically fell into bed.
I ought to have been asleep before my head hit the pillow, so achingly exhausted was my body, but my brain would not shut down. It was not racing with images of Agnes or the Tansy Hag or giant flower patches or dead girls climbing into tombs, nor was it dwelling on thoughts of my grandfather and his long-awaited Crossing. No matter how much I tried to reign them in, my thoughts just kept wandering out to the courtyard, where Savvy and the Geatgrima were locked in their stand-off. At dinner, I had agreed to wait until the morning to visit her, but as the sleepless hours stretched on, I knew I couldn’t wait. Finally, I picked up my phone and texted Finn.
Are you awake?
I am now. Is everything all right?
I need to see Savvy.
I know. We’ll arrange it in the morning.
Can’t wait. I need to see her now. Please.
There was a long pause. Finally, he replied.
Meet me by the east entrance to the courtyard in fifteen minutes.
I expelled a sigh of relief and slipped silently out of bed, determined not to wake Hannah. I pulled a sweatshirt on over my pajamas and slid my feet into my slippers. I was halfway to the door when I backtracked to the desk and scribbled a quick note for Hannah explaining where I’d gone. The last thing she needed was to wake up and have another scare that something dreadful had happened to me.
Went to the courtyard to visit Savvy. Please don’t worry, Finn is with me. Be back soon. Love you.
I didn’t pass a single soul, living or dead, until I reached the front doors. The Caomhnóir there narrowed his eyes at me but allowed me to pass without giving me the third degree, for which I was grateful. The grounds were eerily silent as well, giving the impression that the natural world was holding its breath, rapt with the same anticipation as the rest of us for what would come to pass in the courtyard.
Finn was already waiting for me when I rounded the east corner of the castle. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had been thoroughly annoyed, or even angry with me for pulling him out of bed for a totally unnecessary midnight excursion, but his face betrayed no such reactions. Indeed, the smile with which he greeted me was so luminous, so pure and full of love, that I stopped in my tracks and basked in it for a moment, wondering, as I did so, how the hell I ever got lucky enough to find someone who looked at me like that. Somewhere a karmic accountant had royally fucked up, but I was so grateful.
“Hello, love,” he said, reaching out his hand for mine and pulling me in to close the rest of the distance between us. I pushed up onto my tiptoes and kissed him in reply.
“Well, that was quite the greeting,” he said a bit breathlessly when I pulled away.
“It wasn’t a greeting, it was an apology,” I told him. “I’m sorry for dragging you out of bed like this. I know it’s ridiculous, but…”
He caught my chin with the crook of his finger and tilted it upward so that I was looking at him. “It’s not ridiculous. It’s natural. You don’t need to apologize to me.” With that, he took my hand and began walking along the eastern wall of the courtyard toward the entrance.
“How many Caomhnóir are on duty in here?” I asked.
“Just one,” Finn said. “And Milo, of course. He came to me right away when the shifts were being sorted out. He made the argument that it was important to have a spirit guard as well as a living one. Spirits can notify leadership or alert for help much more quickly and efficiently than Caomhnóir can, and of course, there’s no chance a spirit will doze off on the watch.”
My heart surged with affection for Milo. “But he’s not taking all the shifts by himself, is he?” I asked.
Finn shook his head. “No, he recruited several other trustworthy spirits from the grounds who agreed to devote their time to the task. The spirits are just as concerned as the living about what’s happening with the Geatgrima. There’s been a shift in the energy from the Aether that they find troubling. Hannah told us that several of them came before the Council yesterday to testify as much.”
“A shift in the energy?” I asked, a new cause for alarm blossoming in my chest. “What does that mean?”
“They’ve described it as a sort of shift of focus. The Geatgrima used to exert a kind of pull on all of those around it, Durupinen and spirit alike. But now, that pull seems to have concentrated itself on Savvy alone, so that others can come and go in the Geatgrima’s presence and feel… well, nothing.”
My eyes widened. “That’s… bad, isn’t it?”
Finn shrugged his shoulders but his expression was very serious. “I cannot say. But I certainly don’t think it’s cause for celebration.”
I felt the urgency I’d experienced in the immediate aftermath of the Rifting surge again in my chest. The fact that Savvy had neither moved nor spoken in the last few days had perhaps given everyone a false sense of security that the situation, however strange, was at least at some kind of standstill. But these observations by the sprits on the grounds dispelled this comfortable notion. We may not be able to see what was happening to Savvy, but something was indeed changing—shifting—and every minute lost was precious. We could not afford, for her sake, to wait and see. We needed to act swiftly.
Finn came to a sudden stop just a few steps short of the archway that would reveal the courtyard interior. He turned to me, leaning in close so that I could hear his whispered instructions over the breeze that had picked up over the trees. “Wait here while I speak to the Caomhnóir on duty. Those who have stood guard within the courtyard walls have reported strange symptoms—fatigue, headaches, confusion, disorientation. One of the older Caomhnóir even blacked out. As a result, it is not unusual to check in with them and put them on break if they need it. I’ll send this bloke on his way, and then flag you down when the coast is clear to enter.”
“Why do I need to wait for the other Caomhnóir to leave?” I asked. “Is the courtyard off limits?”
“No, but we don’t want to draw any attention to you at present,” Finn said. “Savvy is your friend, of course, but if the Caomhnóir reports that you are sneaking out to visit her in the middle of the night, it’s going to cause suspicion. Better to have him safely out of the way and sidestep the whole mess.”
“Won’t he report the fact that you relieved him of duty?” I pointed out.
Finn grinned. “He reports to me.”
I grinned back. He winked at me and disappeared through the entrance into the courtyard. I tiptoed along the wall until I came to a carved niche that revealed a view of the far corner of the courtyard. Although I could not see Savvy, the Caomhnóir was stationed within my line of sight. He was a tall, thin, gangly kid, barely out of his teen years, with a shock of straw-blonde hair and a heavily freckled face. He did not seem to see or hear Finn approach until he was right in front of him; he kept his eyes trained on Savvy, his mouth slightly open.
“MacDonald!” Finn barked, and the boy leapt back in shock, shaking his head to clear it and staring around wildly before he managed to focus on Finn, who was barely a yard away.
“S-sir!” MacDonald stammered, snapping quickly back to attention.
“I’m relieving you of duty. Take a break, clear your head, come back in an hour,” Finn said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“That’s all right, sir, I don’t need to be relieved,” MacDonald said, throwing out his chest.
“I’ll be the judge of your fitness, MacDonald,” Finn barked. “I was so close before you noticed me, I could have beat you round the head. That’s no proper frame of mind to stand guard. Now get your head cleared properly and I’ll see you in one hour. Not a minute before, understood?”
/> “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” MacDonald said, dropping his eyes to his feet and heaving a sigh. “My head is pounding fit to burst.”
“Evans is on duty in the medic’s office, he’ll get you sorted with a paracetamol or the like,” Finn said, and his voice was a bit kinder. “Go on, now.”
MacDonald turned and marched out of the courtyard, the tops of his ears bright red on either side of his head. Finn took MacDonald’s post and, after seeing him safely out of earshot, waved for me to join him.
The sight that greeted me as I entered the courtyard was essentially unchanged from the last time I’d seen it. There was Savvy, frozen at attention. There was the Geatgrima, ancient, crumbling, and mysterious. And there was the strange, glowing current of energy now connecting them. I’d seen it all before, and yet it looked new to me, because my understanding of it had changed.
I walked forward slowly, pausing only to give a wave to Milo, who was hovering above the scene like a guardian angel. He blew me a kiss and gave me a sad little smile before turning his watchful eye back on Savvy. As I drew nearer, I thought I could understand what the spirits who had testified before the Council were talking about. The lure of the Geatgrima was there, of course—I could feel the nearness to the Aether, just like always. But that lure seemed very focused now, like a bright light that had been narrowed to a thin beam, and was no longer bathing all the surrounding souls in its light—it was trained very specifically on Savvy. The current of energy itself—the glowing threads of connectivity linking them together—drew my attention as I approached closer and closer. It became clear, as I watched it, that it was not a one way current, where the Geatgrima was sucking or leeching something from her, as I had originally feared. Instead, it seemed as though Savvy had completed some kind of circuit, and the energy (or power or whatever that glowing substance was) was flowing back and forth in both directions, so that it seemed, in a way, that Savvy was attracting the Geatgrima as much as it was attracting her. I didn’t know if this made the whole situation more or less terrifying, but it tightened my grasp on the reality of it, and that was something.
I approached as near as I dared—or rather, as near as I could get before Finn started forward in a panic and I had to hold up a hand to let him know I wouldn’t get any closer. Even I wasn’t foolish enough to reach out and touch Savvy, though I wanted nothing more than to tear her away from the Geatgrima’s grip and wrap her in the fiercest of hugs. So instead, I spoke to her.
“Hey, Sav,” I said, but the words barely made it out of my mouth. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hi, Savvy. Boy, I leave for two days, and you get into an existential tug of war with the source of all Durupinen power. I just can’t take my eyes off you for a second, can I?”
She didn’t reply, of course, though the Savvy in my head gave a raucous chuckle at that.
“I know you’re still in there, so I’m going to assume that you can hear me,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m mad for trying to talk to you, but if there’s one person at Fairhaven who deserves to know what’s going on, it’s you.”
Somewhere over my head, Milo was sniffling. I tried to ignore it, but my own eyes were getting blurry as I lost some ground in the battle with my tears.
“I promised you I would try to find out what was going on, and I did. Or at least, I’m on the right track. Everything I tell you is going to sound crazy, but no crazier than what’s happening to you right now, so I trust you to roll with it.”
And I told her everything—about the tapestry, and the Tansy Hag, and my wild ride into the deepest depths of the Rifting, and everything that Agnes had waited hundreds of years to tell me.
“I haven’t quite made sense of it all yet, but it seems to me that you might be the Sentinel she’s talking about,” I explained, speaking the theory aloud for the first time, as though checking to see if it sounded any more plausible in reality than it did in my head. “I think the Geatgrima might be trying to get its power back. I’m not sure if it’s trying to steal it from you, or if you’re keeping it from collapsing, but either way, we’ve reached a point where there’s no going back.”
This was the darkest heart of it, I thought. This unknown leap we had to take, and knowing that Savvy, at least, hung in the balance. It was almost unbearable to think about.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” I whispered, “but I know what I have to do. I have to follow Agnes’ instructions. I have to find a way to get her message to all three of the people she told me. I have to trust that those three people will do the right thing before it’s too late.”
Even as I said it, I wanted to scream, because I didn’t trust them, and I didn’t trust myself, and I didn’t want this fucking job. It was too much on my shoulders, too many ways it could spiral into disaster, too much, too much, too much… but I swallowed that scream because I couldn’t bear to add it to Savvy’s burden which, though I did not understand it entirely, I knew to be far more cumbersome than mine. I mean, how the hell could I complain as she stood here, locked in some kind of silent, epic struggle for the integrity of the Gateways?
I waited until I could be sure that my voice would remain steady before I went on. “I can’t promise you that you’ll come out of this okay. I can’t promise that, Savvy, even though I want to. But I can promise that I’m going to fight for you as hard as you are fighting for all of us right now. I can promise you that.”
I gasped. For the tiniest fraction of a second, I could have sworn that Savvy’s right eyelid flickered. The movement was so tiny, so fleeting, that I swallowed my shout to tell Finn and Milo what I’d seen. Instead, I kept it for myself, choosing to believe that she had heard me, and that, even while locked in the deepest of spiritual trances, she had found a way to tell me she was all right, that she understood, and that she wasn’t gone at all, but was right in front of me, whole and complete.
A laugh bubbled up from some deep place inside me, and I was never so grateful in my life to receive even the merest suggestion of a trademark Savannah Todd wink.
“Jess, are you okay? Are you… laughing?” Finn asked, in a whisper that nonetheless carried clearly across the courtyard.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping away the tears that had finally spilled out of my eyes. “Yeah, I’m fine. I think I might be able to go to sleep now.”
4
A Second Sentinel
BY THE TIME I MADE IT back up to my bed from the courtyard, I could barely keep my eyes open. I half-expected Agnes and the Tansy Hag to be waiting for me behind my eyelids, but my sleep was dreamless and deep, and when I woke the next day, the sun high in the sky, it was with a clarity I hardly dared to hope for. The frenzied hysteria of the night before had evaporated, leaving in its place a galvanized certainty that I was doing the right thing. I would not question whether I should carry out Agnes’ instructions. I would only question how. I wasn’t exactly calm—there was still an undercurrent of anxiety—but I felt ready to plan my next move. I rolled over, hoping to talk to Hannah about it all, but found a note on my nightstand instead, scribbled on the back of the note I’d left for her when I’d gone to see Savvy:
Had to do damage control with the Council after last night. Will catch up with you when I’m done. Flavia wants to see you in the library once you’re up. I saw Karen this morning, and she told me about Grandfather. I’m okay. I hope you are, too. xo Hannah
I texted Finn, who was organizing morning rounds with the Caomhnóir, and then swung through the dining room to grab a coffee and a muffin on my way to the library. I’d barely made it out of the dining room, however, before a voice called out.
“Oi, Jessica!”
I turned to see Catriona marching toward me, her face a thundercloud.
“Aw, shit,” I muttered to myself, before foisting a smile on my face and raising my hand. “Hi, Cat.”
“Don’t ‘hi, Cat’ me,” she snapped, grabbing me by the elbow and steering me into a darkened corner of the entrance hall under the second-fl
oor gallery. “Where have you been, then? I agree to send you off to the príosún, completely against Tracker protocol, for some reason you refuse to divulge to me, and then when you arrive back, you vanish for two days solid amidst all of this madness.” She gestured toward the front doors, which I could only assume was a reference to Savvy and the Geatgrima.
“I, um, got sick,” I said, wondering if it was too late to try to look pale or exhausted or… mildly nauseous. “Stomach thing.”
“Oh, come off it, Jessica, what kind of fool do you take me for?” Catriona hissed at me. “I did you the courtesy of trusting you when you asked to go to the príosún. Do me the same courtesy now.”
I froze. I was not prepared for this. I had not anticipated telling anyone else about what Agnes had told me, and there was no way in hell I was going to just blurt it out in the middle of the hallway to a Council member, no matter how much I might trust her, and it was true that, unlikely as it would have seemed even a year ago, I trusted Catriona more than nearly anyone else in the castle. But with this?
Catriona interpreted my hesitation as weakness and plowed on. “I’m not completely clueless, you know. I talked to Lucida night before last,” she said.
I could see the coffee sloshing around in my trembling cup and fought to steady my hand. “Oh, did you?” I asked, trying and failing to sound casual. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s a bloody disaster,” Catriona said. “Are you aware she hasn’t called me once in all the years she’s been incarcerated? Not a single phone call. But last night, wouldn’t you know it, my mobile rang and it was Lucida. And do you know who she wanted to ask me about?”
“No, who?” I asked in a small voice.
