Lies and Prophecy

by Marie Brennan

  Exams had ended, and the next term didn’t start until Monday; I had the place to myself. And though it was cold, this was the best place to work from, without anything to interfere.

  I seated myself on the dead grass and rotated my head to loosen my neck. The trees surrounding me reached for the sky with skeletal branches, forming a delicate lacework arch over my head. I breathed in the stark bite of approaching winter, and sank into a trance.

  Sensations dropped away one by one. I closed my eyes, focusing on the blackness behind my lids. The sigh of the wind, its cold edge against my skin, the chill of the earth beneath me, the scent that promised snow later—all faded into emptiness.

  When I was ready, I sent my mind outward, casting about for any sign of Julian. It was appallingly rude—psychic spying—but I didn’t care. He’d been gone far too long. Yes, sometimes he went off on his own, but never like this. And if he was in trouble….

  If he was, I didn’t know what I would do about it.

  I had no chance to find out. It was a lost cause before I started; Julian’s shields put mine to shame. He could have been sitting next to me and I wouldn’t have known it. Maybe he’d gone too far away for me to reach, but if he was anywhere on Welton’s campus or even in the town, he didn’t want to be found.

  Frustration rippled my trance. I breathed it down and surfaced slowly, restoring my mind to my body, then opened my eyes.

  And nearly choked on my tongue.

  Julian was seated cross-legged on the ground across from me. He was still wearing the boots and breeches from his costume, and the shredded remains of his shirt. It looked like he’d crawled under a few thornbushes in it. I would have wagered good money Julian hadn’t eaten in the four days since I’d last seen him.

  The wind whipped strands of his hair into his eyes while I opened and shut my mouth a few times like a landed fish, searching for words. When they finally came, they weren’t pretty.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  His grey eyes were as remote as the sky above us. “Around. I’m sorry, Kim.”

  “Sorry? You damn well better be! What the hell happened? You get attacked by something, we get drowned without warning—and if that storm was natural, I’ll eat my PK textbook—then suddenly it’s gone, and so are you, then you don’t come home for four days, leaving us all half-dead with worry! You owe me an explanation.” I glared at him, all the more furious because he seemed so utterly composed.

  “I can’t give you one.”

  “Damn it, Julian—”

  “I don’t know, Kim. Believe me, I’d tell you, if there was anything to tell.” Julian scrubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand. The action made him human, rather than the distant, Otherworldly being that had been sitting across from me. My anger, building since he sent me home like a child on Samhain, drained away.

  “So what now?” I asked, when the silence became too much.

  Julian left off his study of the dead grass, fixing his gaze on its usual spot, just below my own eyes. “I was hoping you could help me.”

  “Help you? How?”

  “Divination,” he said. “You’re the best I know. I need you to look for me, find out anything you can. Knowing something’s after me, that I can deal with—but I don’t know what it is. I’m hoping you can fix that.”

  I almost laughed. He wanted me to help him, when I’d just figured out how useless divination was? His bleak expression stopped me, though. He needed my help. Julian, who was never frightened. Julian, who never asked for aid.

  The future was mud to me, but this was a question about the here and now. That, maybe, I could get.

  The snow would hold off for another good hour, if I was any judge, and this glade would serve my purposes well enough. I didn’t want to wreck what remained of my trance by running to my room, but I needed a few things….

  Julian caught my key when I tossed it to him. “My silver bowl’s in the upper left drawer of the dresser. My focus ought to be on my desk. And grab my scarf—I think it’s on my bed. This coat isn’t enough.”

  He was off without a word, vanishing into the forest. I passed the time by re-centering myself, preparing for my task.

  After ten minutes Julian was back. He’d already filled the bowl with water from the creek. I wrapped the scarf around my neck and put the dish on the ground, letting its contents settle into stillness. My focus, the flawless quartz crystal Julian had given me for my birthday last year, hung from a silver chain. I slipped it over my head and gripped the stone in my cold hands.

  Then I took a deep breath and fixed my eyes on the surface of the water, and the smooth reflection of the black tree branches overhead. The wind had died away to nothing. I collapsed in on myself, looking outward with more than natural sight.

  My final impression of the outside world was of Julian, tense, wary, as if expecting another attack.

  ~

  Consciousness came back gradually. First I became aware of sounds. After a while I identified them as voices, and was pleased with this success. My sleepy brain sorted through them and attached names: Liesel and Julian.

  I decided to open my eyes. They slowly focused on a rectangle—the Celtic knotwork poster on the ceiling above my bed. I contemplated that for a while, tracing its intricate twists with my eyes, before turning my head to look at the rest of the room.

  Liesel and Julian were sitting on Liesel’s tidily made bed, talking in low voices. My movement caught Julian’s eye, and he was on his feet in an instant.

  “Are you all right, Kim? What happened?”

  Everyone’s favorite question lately. My brow furrowed as I tried to chase down my scattered thoughts.

  “Julian showed up an hour ago, right in the teeth of a snowstorm, carrying you,” Liesel said, also coming to my bedside. “You were just asleep, it seemed, but you wouldn’t wake up—”

  She stopped speaking. I had my eyes fixed on Julian, waiting for some kind of answer. I remembered him appearing in the glade….

  “You went rigid,” he said quietly. “I shook you, emptied the scrying bowl, took off your focus—” I could see it on my bedside table, the silver chain snapped. Emergency methods for breaking a trance. “Nothing worked,” Julian continued, mouth grim. “Until suddenly, for no reason I could see, you screamed and went limp. Right on cue, the snow started falling.”

  Snow. Cold. A black void, and in it—

  Now I remembered.

  “Liesel, clear out,” I said curtly.

  “What?”

  “Leave. I need to talk to Julian alone.”

  She was surprised, and a little hurt, but I couldn’t take the time to explain everything to her. She trusted me, though, and I blessed her for it. Without further ado she picked up her purse and left, shutting the door quietly behind her. There were advantages to having an empath for a roommate.

  I didn’t speak immediately. Julian settled back on the edge of Liesel’s bed, looking at the floor. She’d lent him an old, faded grey sweater to replace his ruined shirt; he was lean enough that it fit. It was easy to forget that Julian was only a few inches taller than me. His physical presence was much more imposing.

  “You knew.”

  He shook his head, still not lifting his eyes from the floor. “Not for sure.”

  I pushed myself upright and sat with my arms wrapped around my knees. My memory was clearing up all too nicely. I’d gone into trance, everything normal, looking for whatever we encountered on Samhain.

  Unfortunately, I found it.

  Julian raked his hands through his hair and stood, moving to stand at the window and stare outside. “I don’t know what it is, Kim. I was hoping you could learn that. But yes, I had a feeling you would find it. Where divination is concerned, you have more raw talent than almost anyone I know. And you knew what to look for; you were there for the attack. You were the only one I could ask. This gods-forsaken campus is so remote, there aren’t any other Fiain around to help me.”

  “
And so you tossed me out as bait?” I asked acidly.

  He bent his head, gripping the windowsill until his knuckles went white. “I didn’t expect real trouble.”

  That got me moving, uncurling and rising to my feet. “Trouble? That thing was waiting for me! And merrily I go, sticking my nose out, putting myself right in its path! You could have at least warned me—”

  “Of what?” His laugh had nothing of humor in it. “Right now you know as much as I do. Kim, I know you’re scared, but however bad this is for you, you’re a lot safer than I am. It’s after me, not you. You just happened to be in the way.”

  “Because you put me there!”

  His shoulders went rigid. For a moment, I was almost afraid of what he would say. Then the tension vanished, too abruptly to be real. “You’re right.” He straightened, but didn’t face me. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”

  Before I could react, he strode out the door and was gone.

  ~

  “Argant-Dubois?”

  “Here,” I said dully.

  “Bailey?”

  I sketched in my notebook while waiting for Domenico to finish the roll for Elemental Correspondences. My pencil produced a collage of staring eyes and spirals—hardly soothing. I hadn’t seen Julian since he left my room, four days ago.

  “O….” Domenico peered at his sheet, unsure how to pronounce the next name.

  “Just say Connor,” a voice said from the back of the room. I twisted around in my seat and spotted Robert Ó Conchúir, he of the infamously difficult last name. When had he come in? I hadn’t spoken to him since the day before Julian showed up. Not for lack of trying; he’d been avoiding me, and I didn’t know why.

  The moment Domenico dismissed us, I leapt to my feet, but Robert had already left the room.

  Undaunted, I hurried outside and saw him walking towards the end of the campus that held the Arboretum. “Robert!”

  If he didn’t stop, I would chase him, and then we’d have a scene in front of all the students hurrying to their next classes. Maybe he guessed that, because he halted in the middle of the snow-crusted grass. But when I caught up with him, I found no welcome in his eyes. “Lovely friend you are.”

  “What?”

  “He comes to you for help, and you tell him to go hang.”

  “I did not say that!”

  Something broke inside him, some leash of self-control. I’d never seen Robert in such a genuine passion. “You don’t understand, do you? I’m his roommate, and that’s turned into friendship over time. But you? You’re the first one he befriended by choice. You know what it took for him to ask for help—but do you have the slightest idea what it cost him when you refused?”

  His anger went through me like a knife. I actually staggered back a step, unable to face him so closely. “Robert—he almost got me killed. I know he didn’t mean to, but—”

  The noise that came out of him was half-growl, half-yell. “Exactly! He put you in danger. For the love of all the gods, Kim, he’s Fiain! Endangering others is their cardinal sin, and you shoved his face in it!”

  All the affectation of speech was gone. Robert’s hands were curled half into fists, and he might as well have used them on me, the effect his words had. He was right: I hadn’t understood. Not well enough. And because of it, I’d hurt Julian.

  I had to fix this. “You’ve seen him. Or at least spoken to him. When?”

  “Three days ago.” Robert dragged his answer down to a decent volume. “There’s been no sign of him since. If you happen to spot him—don’t screw it up again.”

  This time, when Robert walked away, I made no effort to follow.

  ~

  The final salt in the wound was that, for all my efforts, someone else found Julian before I did.

  “Rafael tripped over him in the Arboretum,” Liesel told me breathlessly, two days later. “Julian was just lying there, passed out. They got him to the clinic, but nothing they did seemed to register, until suddenly he woke up on his own. And he swears blind he doesn’t remember anything from Geoff’s party onward.”

  Julian, unable to remember? It made me suspicious. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. “They tested him for every drug they could think of, but he came up clean,” Liesel went on. I snorted. Julian would sooner claw his own eyes out. “No head trauma, either, physical or psychic. So they don’t have any real choice but to let him go. They can’t even file anything, since there’s no sign of any crime.”

  “Haven’t they asked any of the department heads to look into it?” I asked. Surely even our thick-witted university administration would think of that.

  “Madison, Fitzgerald, and Bradley. All drew a blank.”

  Of course they had. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything. And while they were better than I was, I had a personal connection to the events. It wasn’t just that the future was muddy; now something was guarding the present and the past, too.

  I had to go to class then. To my intense frustration, Robert didn’t show up. Our lunch habits had been broken by the new quarter, so I went to Hurst alone. I was staring at their latest offering and wondering whether it had ever been edible when I felt a presence at my side. I glanced up to see Julian—much the worse for wear.

  He looked like he’d been dragged through hell, backward and face-down. After two heartbeats of staring at him like he might vanish again, I wedged my tray on the serving shelf and grabbed him by the shoulders, only just barely stopping myself from flinging my arms around him in a hug. Julian’s hand rose to grip my wrist, and if my sleeve protected me from the effect of skin contact, that touch still said more than enough.

  We stayed that way for a while, ignoring the people edging around us, the not-very-quiet ripples of gossip. I could feel the bones of his shoulders through his shirt—a white shirt that played up his pallor nicely, and made the hollows below the high bones of his face that much darker. Once I collected my wits, I retrieved my tray, forced Julian to get some food, and went to sit by one of the windows. The view of the iced-over pond and dead trees was depressing, but the floor-to-ceiling glass let in plenty of the cold November sunlight. It washed out what little color Julian had to begin with, leaving him ghostlike and unreal, the way I’d seen him at the beginning of the year. I fought the urge to take hold of his arm again, just to make certain he stayed solid.

  The silence between us stretched out while I picked at my lumpy mashed potatoes, trying to figure out how to apologize. Julian didn’t touch his meal. The food might be scarcely edible, but he needed to eat. Before I could bring that up to get a conversation going, he spoke.

  “What happened, Kim?” The question of the month. “I remember nothing. I look back in my memory and there’s a complete blank between listening to Robert sing at the party and waking up in the clinic. I’ve tried every way I know of to break through, but it’s as if there’s nothing there. And that scares the hell out of me.” His voice sounded tight, not scared, but I supposed for Julian that counted as terrified.

  If he didn’t remember anything … then he didn’t remember what had happened to me, and what I’d said afterward. But lying to make myself look better would be an even bigger betrayal, so I took a deep breath to center myself and began right where his memories left off, relating the events of the last week and a half in as much detail as I knew them. The growing shock on Julian’s face had to be genuine; no one could fake that. He remembered nothing.

  He laughed bitterly when I was done, though none of it seemed to be directed at me. “I seem to have been busy. Any idea what I was doing right after Samhain? I didn’t tell you anything?”

  I shook my head mutely.

  He curled his fingers into a tight fist. “Well, what do we know? I’m attacked; I disappear. I reappear, apparently in full possession of my faculties, at least as far as you could tell.” I nodded. “Then I leave you, talk to Robert at least once, and vanish again.”

  “So we go talk to Robert,” I said.
>
  ~

  Our quarry was on his way out of Kinfield when we arrived. Robert took one look at Julian’s expression and reversed direction.

  I cast a sidelong glance at him as we climbed the stairs, but if he was still angry, he’d shelved it for now. We settled into their common room, and he listened as we told him what we had figured out so far.

  “You said very little,” he told his roommate, leaning his chair precariously onto its back legs. “And answered precious few questions. Mostly you paced and swore at the walls.” That was unexpected; Julian didn’t go in for displays of temper. Displays of anything, really. “Then you went in there—” He nodded at Julian’s room. There were two off the common room, both big enough for a bed and a desk if you didn’t need to breathe. Robert’s desk was out here. “You shut the door behind you and stayed a while. When at last you emerged, you looked calmer. Then you said….” His voice trailed off as he closed his eyes to remember. “You said, ‘At least I’m not the only one imagining this.’ And you snorted, rather cynically. Then you seemed to see me, and said, ‘I’m going to see if her advice is any good.’ Then you left.”

  I closed my eyes to think. After my failure, Julian had apparently decided to take matters into his own hands. Was that where things had gone wrong?

  Then another thought came to me, and my attention snapped to Julian. “You said ‘her.’ Were you referring to me?”

  Julian’s head came up in a swift arc. “Robert—did you hear me talking in there?”

  “Impossible to say. I had music on.”

  The three of us leapt to our feet. Julian reached his screen first. His long fingers flew, waking it and bringing up the call log for the past week.

  “Ariana,” Robert said, just as Julian reached the name. Ariana, no last name given; a call had been made to her at 10:42 p.m. on November fifth. It was the most recent entry.

  Julian hit redial. After two rings, the screen flickered, and brought up a woman’s face.

  I realized then why there had been no last name. A telephone directory would list her under Fiain. There was no mistaking it, even though the skin-crawling effect of her presence couldn’t be transmitted by the screen. The inhuman tinge was still there, subtly, in the cast of her features, the lightning blue of her eyes.