by E. E. Holmes
“Relax. We’re not leaving until dawn. But there are some things I’ve got to tell you first. If you’re going to come along for this ride, you deserve to know what you’re signing up for.”
“About bloody time!” Catriona said, shifting down the bench to make room for me.
“But before I tell you what I can, I need some answers, too,” I said, sitting down beside her.
“Like what?” Catriona asked.
“Like what in the actual hell is she doing here?” I said, nodding toward the spot where Lucida’s form had just vanished into the shadows.
Catriona sighed. She offered her cup to me and I took it. She refilled it with wine for me and began to talk. “Do you remember that I told you I’d gotten a call from Lucida? The first call she’d made to me since she’d been imprisoned?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You said she wanted details about me, if you’d heard anything about what I’d been up to since I’d been back.”
“That’s right,” Catriona said. “And by the time I’d returned to the Tracker office after I’d found you, she’d called again. I knew something was dodgy. Two phone calls in as many days after five years of silence? As soon as the general assembly meeting was over, I excused myself on Tracker business and set out for Skye Príosún.”
“I’m surprised Celeste let you go, with everything that’s going on at the castle,” I remarked.
“She nearly didn’t. But I’m no use at Fairhaven sitting around, watching and waiting with everyone else, and I told Celeste as much. We’re still trying to sort out the mess at the príosún anyway, let’s not forget that.” She gave me a resentful glare, as though I had abandoned her, which, to be fair, I had. I’d taken a leave of absence from the Trackers to help Fiona with her recovery, and then I’d abandoned Fiona as well to follow Agnes’ clues.
“So, what happened then? When you got to the príosún?” I asked in an effort to get the conversation back on track.
“When I checked in with the guards there, they told me that Lucida was behaving like a total nutter—refusing to eat anything brought to her cell, refusing to be escorted anywhere by Caomhnóir, and threatening to attack anyone who came near her. They were worried she’d starve herself to death. Lucida hadn’t mentioned anything like that when I’d spoken to her. All I’d gotten from her were endless, obsessive questions about you. Obviously, I went right down to see her. She was in better shape, physically, than I’d feared, but mentally—she was beside herself with panic. She was convinced that the Caomhnóir were going to try to kill her.”
I raised my eyebrows “Why?”
Catriona threw her hands up in frustration. “That’s what I said. I said, ‘Lucida, that’s crazy, you’ve been in here for more than five years. Why would the guards suddenly want to do you in?’ She said it was because of the Necromancers. Now that they had infiltrated the Caomhnóir, she couldn’t trust the príosún guards anymore. I told her repeatedly that all of the compromised Caomhnóir had been removed, that all of the current guards were either cleared of wrongdoing by the Trackers or else brand new to the príosún—on assignment from other clans around the world while we sorted this mess out. But she wouldn’t be swayed. She just kept babbling on and on about how she knew too much, and that the Necromancers would never rest once they heard she’d survived the attack at Fairhaven.”
“You already knew she was freaked out,” I pointed out. “Remember how she kept asking for additional protection at Fairhaven when she heard the Necromancers were coming to testify before the Council? Well, she was right about that, wasn’t she?” Indeed, it had been Lucida’s murder of Ambrose, my own former Caomhnóir and Necromancer convert, who had snuck back onto the grounds bent on revenge, that landed her back in Skye Príosún in the first place. Lucida had refused to defend herself against the charges of killing him, but it was clear that he had initiated the attack, and that she had killed him in self-defense.
“Yes, I daresay she was right about that, although we have no evidence that Lucida was the intended target of that attack. She could simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I didn’t reply. This theory felt like a hell of a stretch to me. Lucida escapes from the castle because she’s terrified of a Necromancer attack and then, no sooner does she reach the border of the grounds then she happens, purely by chance, to fall victim to a completely unpremeditated Necromancer attack? Not likely, but Catriona, ever the Tracker, would hold on to every conceivable explanation until the hard evidence ruled them out one by one.
“Anyway,” Catriona went on, “once she was back in the príosún, she felt no safer than she did at Fairhaven. I would even venture to say that being locked up again only served to amplify her paranoia. By the time I went to see her, she was out of her mind with terror. I’d never seen her so unhinged, and I’ve seen her at her absolute worst. I knew I couldn’t leave her there like that. Not… not after everything we’ve been through.”
“You left her there for five years,” I said, surprising myself with the bluntness of the observation that sounded much more like an accusation than I had intended. But if Catriona was hurt by my words, she absorbed the blow without so much as flinching. She nodded, allowing for the truth of it to expand between us before replying.
“When Lucida was first sentenced to her time in Skye Príosún, she accepted it. She didn’t beg and plead for mercy. She didn’t try to make deals or sacrifice others to lessen her punishment. She met her consequences with far more grace than I’d known she possessed. Honestly, I sometimes wondered how she’d turned traitor in the first place, if she had that much character hiding in there to begin with. Regardless, she betrayed not a bit of fear or regret when they marched her away to Skye, and I never once pitied her. I was full of self-pity, mind, but for Lucida? Not a jot.” Catriona shook her head. “But this? This was something else entirely. I’ve never seen her like that. I knew I had to get her out.”
I blinked. “Get… get her out? Do you mean… Catriona, please don’t tell me you’re on the run right now.”
Catriona didn’t reply. I groaned.
“Oh, my God. You have got to be kidding me. You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Look, I didn’t break her out,” Catriona said hurriedly. “Not… not the way you’re thinking. It wasn’t some kind of swashbuckling adventure where we fought our way out. I just… I forged some transfer papers for her. I told the guards that she was being transferred to another príosún, and just walked her out in cuffs. It could be weeks before they discover that she’s been broken out.”
“But when they do, the entirety of the Caomhnóir and Tracker forces will be after you, Cat!” I cried. “My God, everything you’ve built, your career, your place on the Council… is it really worth it?!”
“Would it be worth it to you if it were Hannah?” Catriona asked.
I looked up at her and saw, to my shock, that there were tears glittering in her eyes. Her face was transformed by the emotion, her expression a silent plea for understanding.
“Yeah,” I admitted at last. “Always.” I realized in this moment that several nearby Travelers were staring at us, and I hastened to lower my voice. “Look, I get it, I do, but if the Trackers are now after you, they’re going to be after me, too! It’s one thing if you want to sacrifice yourself for Lucida, but now you’ve dragged me into it! I’m trying to fly under the radar here, and you’ve just put a giant target on my back!”
“I know,” she said, her voice trembling with a desperation I’d rarely heard there before. “I know, and I’m sorry, but—”
“It’s going to take more than an apology to fix this, Cat!”
“She showed me, Jess. She showed me the mark of the Tansy Hag.”
I froze. My heart, thumping in my chest a moment before, seemed to go still.
“She showed you?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you what it means?”
“I know the Necromancers cut it into
her flesh,” Catriona hissed. “I know that they think it’s some kind of evidence of our great crimes. I know they think they’ve discovered a secret that’s going to take our power from us. And I know that, whatever it is, it’s part of the reason you’re here. So if you can shed some light on any of that, now would be the time to do it.”
I dropped my face into my hands. This was too hard. Too hard to know what to tell, and what to keep secret. Agnes never gave me any guidance for this, for who to trust and who to keep in the dark. If I’d been able to stay in the Rift just a little bit longer, would she have sworn me to secrecy, made me promise to take her words to the grave? Or would she have told me to gather my own army, to use every resource at my disposal to make sure that I was able to carry out her orders? Surely, if she trusted me with this task, she trusted me to make the decisions along the way to carry it out? I had to believe this was true, and so that meant I needed to decide; who were my allies in this, and did I trust them enough to tell them the whole truth?
I looked into Catriona’s face and found that the answer to that question came surprisingly easy.
I handed the mug of mulled wine back to her. “Here. You’re going to need this,” I said, and plunged headfirst into the story.
By the time I had finished, the mug was still clenched tightly in her hand. She had not taken a sip. She had not spoken. I’m not sure she had even blinked. It took several moments of loaded silence before she managed to respond.
“All my life, I wondered,” she whispered at last, “why it was that the Geatgrima drew us in so powerfully. It stood there, a mere symbol, and yet it felt like so much more. My God, it all makes sense now.”
I exhaled with relief. “You believe me, then?”
Catriona looked as though the question I had asked her was absurd. “Why in the name of the Aether would you make something like that up? What possible motivation could you have?”
I shrugged. “I’m sure others will think of a million reasons not to believe it.”
“Well, I’m not others,” Catriona said. She looked down at her own hands for a moment, as though she had suddenly found a stranger’s hands attached to her wrists, then knocked back the entire mug of wine in a single go. She looked back at me, her expression deadly serious. “Many of the Durupinen are going to fight this. Right to the very highest ranks.”
“I know.”
“Some of them will try to bury this, and you with it.”
“I know. I thought you might be one of them.”
Catriona’s lips curved into a sad, half-smile. “There was a time not that long ago when I surely would have been. But I’ve seen too much of our world start to crumble. Since the Prophecy came to pass, we’ve been coming apart at the seams. The leadership doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s true. I’m in the trenches every day as the head of the Trackers, and I’ve never seen such upheaval and chaos as I’ve seen in the last few years. It was as though the Prophecy had upset something incredibly delicate, something forgotten and fragile, and we’ve been frantically trying to keep it from shattering every moment since. And now it all makes sense. We’ve been living on borrowed time, perhaps for centuries, without even knowing it. And by fighting so desperately to keep things as they are, we’ve been waging war against how they ought to be. That has to end, and it has to end now.”
“Do you think I did the right thing, keeping this from the Council and from Celeste?” I asked her.
“Oh, yes,” Catriona said, nodding her head sagely. “You’d never have made it out of the castle, I guarantee it.”
“So, you’ll stay? You’ll come with us?” I asked.
“Of course. As much as I’ve struggled with what the Durupinen have done to Lucida, I’ve never doubted that being a Durupinen is the best of who I am. Now I know what I need to do to truly fulfill that purpose, as it was always meant to be fulfilled, and I’m going to bloody well do it.”
“What about the castles? The money? The power structure? The traditions?”
“Tear ‘em down,” Catriona said. “Tear ‘em down and watch ‘em burn. They were always the worst of us anyway, weren’t they?”
I smiled. “Yup. They really were.”
12
At the Ruins
ALTHOUGH MY BODY ACHED with exhaustion and I could hardly keep my eyes open, I did not fall immediately into bed when I returned to the wagon where Annabelle and I would be staying the night. Instead, I opened the connection and found two frantic and familiar energies waiting for me.
“Jess, thank God! What took you so long?” Milo sighed.
“Sorry, it’s been a little crazy, but I’m fine,” I said.
“If we hadn’t heard from you soon, I wouldn’t have been able to stop Finn from coming after you!” Hannah said, and I could feel the rolling waves of her anxiety fill my head like the sea. “He’s going spare, Jess. What’s happened?”
By the time I finished filling them in, their shock had turned my mental space into a barren, echoing void. It was actually rather peaceful, until they began to process the details.
“Lucida? Are you serious?”
“Ileana is coming with you? After she imprisoned you like that?”
“At least she believed her!”
“Yeah, but what if it’s a ploy? What if she turns on her?”
“You guys, please, the speculation is not helping,” I said wearily. “I’ve asked myself all the same questions. It doesn’t matter. There’s only one way forward. I have to keep going. But there is one thing I need you to do for me.”
“What is it?”
“Yeah, how can we help?”
“I need you to find Finn and fill him in on everything. And I need you to tell him he has to meet me in Kent.”
“You want him to come?” Hannah asked.
“Yes. I think we’re going to need a Caomhnóir, and Ileana is refusing to bring one from the Traveler camp. She doesn’t want anyone else here to know what’s happening, and I can’t say I blame her, but it leaves her unprotected. Finn has experience with Elementals and I don’t think we’re going to be lucky enough to meet someone called ‘the Keeper of the Elementals’ without encountering at least one.”
“Not to mention the fact that he’ll probably take it upon himself to show up anyway, once he realizes you’re about to walk into a forest full of Elementals with Ileana and Lucida, of all people,” Milo pointed out.
“Exactly. So, let’s salvage a little bit of my dignity and invite him before he can crash the party, okay? I’ll feel better if he’s here, anyway. Now what’s happening at Fairhaven?”
“As far as Savvy, nothing seems to have changed, but amongst the Council there have been… developments,” Hannah said carefully.
“Developments?” I asked, all sleepiness gone in an instant. “What kind of developments?”
“People aren’t happy with Celeste’s ‘wait-and-see’ approach,” Hannah said. “Patricia Lightfoot is heading a faction to try to garner enough support for a no-confidence vote.”
“A no confidence vote?” I repeated. “You mean she’s trying to get Celeste removed?”
“Well, it would be the first step,” Hannah admitted. “If there were a no confidence vote, and Celeste lost, they would be able to hold an election to officially run someone to oust her. And… well, I’m sure you can imagine who has her power-hungry little eyes on the candidacy.”
I didn’t need to imagine. I knew.
“Marion.”
“Of course,” Milo replied. “Does that woman even exist if she’s not causing as much trouble as absolutely possible?”
“She can’t possibly be eligible. She’s not even on the Council,” I pointed out.
“I asked Keira about that, and she says it doesn’t matter. There’s a loophole. Because of the manner in which Marion lost her seat, she can use the election as an appeal. By voting for her, people will be giving their approval for her reinstatement.”
“But that doesn’t mean you’ll lose you
r seat, will it?” I asked with a gasp. Hannah had fought tooth and nail to be elected into the seat that Marion had been ousted from.
“No, because that’s not the seat she wants anymore,” Hannah said, and the acid in the reply was like fire inside my head. “She’s got her sights set higher now. Although if she were to gain the High Priestess seat, there’s no doubt she’d use it to make my life hell.”
“And there’s nothing Celeste can do to stop her? No rules she can invoke? No appeals she can make?” I asked, incredulous.
“No. A no-confidence vote trumps all other decrees,” Hannah replied. “Her only avenue is to appeal to the International High Council and of course you know why she won’t do that. She’s afraid the Northern Clans will lose autonomy if the International High Council gets involved.”
“Which is really just another way of saying she’s afraid she’s going to be stripped of her own power,” I growled, “which makes her little better than Marion at this point. So, what’s Marion doing, then? She can’t possibly be openly campaigning.”
“She’s doing what she does best,” Milo replied. “She’s floating around like she’s queen bee again, swarming around with her little cronies and buzzing about for support. Quietly, of course, but everyone knows what she’s doing.”
“But people couldn’t wait to distance themselves from her when she lost her seat,” I thought desperately. “Why the hell would they want to form an alliance with her now?”
“They see it as an opportunity,” Hannah said. “The pendulum has swung back in her favor and they all can’t wait to climb back on her coattails. They’ll abandon her in an instant if she loses, but they’re willing to gamble on her in the short term.”
“You know what? I’m starting to understand exactly why we’ve held onto the Gateways for so long,” I said, my anger seething. “Drunk on our own power from day one, and we haven’t learned a damn thing, have we?”
“Apparently not,” Hannah replied. “But the thing is, Jess, even if they lose the no-confidence vote, they’ll have called together the entire Northern Clans to Fairhaven to hold it. It’s just like the Airechtas, every single clan needs to be represented. It will be impossible to keep the situation with Savvy a secret anymore. The word will spread like wildfire and the International High Council will find out anyway. Marion and the others are counting on the fact that they will strip Celeste of her authority for keeping it from them.”
