“Then why don’t you stop Nastasia’s visions?”
The Raven glanced upward. “They come from One with whom I shall not interfere.”
“Who?” asked Rachel curiously.
The Raven said nothing.
“Can you change Sakura’s gift without hurting her?”
“I can, but that is not what worries me.”
“What…” Rachel’s mouth suddenly felt terribly dry. “W-what is worrying you?”
He gazed at her with his blood red eyes. “It would be wisest for me to change you as well, Rachel Griffin. But, to do so would be a great injustice. Unlike these others, your perfect recall is part of who you are. To alter it, after you have learned so many things, would be the same as making you into someone else. Someone new. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Rachel understood exactly. Her memory was woven together like an intricate web. To change her memory, he would need to remake her mind—which was essentially the same as killing her and putting a new person in her place.
Rachel swayed on her feet, feeling faint. The entire universe seemed to tremble with her heartbeat.
Her voice cracked as she begged, “Can’t you leave me the same? Please, I’ll be quiet about—everything. I won’t say anything…to anyone!” She rushed over to him, pleading. “I don’t want to not be me…oh!”
Rachel’s body went rigid. Her pupils slowly widened.
What was she saying?
Wasn’t this the moment for which she had been wishing?
A chance to sacrifice herself for her world?
“I take it back.” She lowered her lashes humbly. “I want to help. I wish to save the world more than I wish to be me.”
The room was utterly silent.
No clock ticked. No bird called. No rumble of thunder came from the tor. All she could hear was her own breathing and the rustle of his feathers. He regarded her more closely.
With fierce determination, she raised her head and met his gaze, though tears blurred her vision. “Go ahead. Change me, too. Unless—” she tried to swallow but could not, “unless I could serve the world better by remaining myself.”
The Raven’s eyes shone as he regarded her. They were not scarlet anymore. They were gray and very, very steady.
“Child,” he lay his hand on her cheek, “I would sooner rip the sun from the heavens than change you from who you are.”
“Are y-you sure?” Rachel barely recognized her own voice. Looking up at him towering over her, she searched his face. “I don’t want to be the one who destroys the world.”
“I know you will protect the world,” the Raven replied gravely. “I will find another way. These are not your mistakes. They are mine. I let these people into the world to save them from the chaos Outside. I had to change them. If I just let them appear, with their old memories, it would disturb all the people on this world. Such disruptions draw great attention to the chaos outside of the barrier. That chaos would begin to batter down the Walls. It thrives on attention.”
He looked immensely sad. “If the Walls break, this world will end. I will not be able to save everyone. I will only be able to save a few. It is not something I want to see happen again.”
Rachel nodded wordlessly, but her fear had evaporated.
The Raven, who had so terrified her, now seemed inexpressibly dear.
The Raven pointed at Sakura. “I will alter her so that her power cannot undo my changes. I am sad to have to reduce her gift, but I will give her something to lessen the loss. Then I shall change their memories, all of them, so they remember falling asleep after hearing of Enoch’s brave sacrifice. I will not lessen her feelings for him. It is painful for her now, but I would be loathe to take away even more of her previous life.”
He reached into Sakura’s chest and pulled out a glowing sphere of light. It glittered with many colors, some bright, some muted, all dancing and sparkling inside the sphere. The Raven ran his fingers through the glittering globe. Then he frowned.
He reached into Joy’s chest and drew out a similar sphere. It, too, danced with many colored lights, predominately purples and greens. He ran his hand through it, catching some of the purple light. Putting Joy’s shining globe back, he moved the purple light through Sakura’s ball, making slight changes to the dominant colors.
“What are you doing?” Rachel asked, fascinated.
“Joy’s gift is to alter memories. I am borrowing it to help Sakura forget again. This way, I do the least damage to her.”
“Where did Joy get this gift?” Rachel asked. “Did you give it to her?”
“I did not. I will not speak of He who did. These gifts you each have been given are great things. I cannot make them. I can only diminish them and replace them with something less elegant,” said the Raven. He thrust Sakura’s sphere back into her chest.
“As for you, Rachel Griffin, I can see many paths stretching into the future, some more likely than others. When I interfere with the world, it can make these paths come to be or, as now, disrupt them. Then my vision of things to come grows dim.
“I ask that you tell only one person of what transpired here. My vision of the future is clouded, but I believe I know who that person will be. I will shield his mind and yours from the tampering of others, enough that no one who walks this world will be able to draw the information from you without your consent.”
Rachel curtsied. “Thank you, sir.”
The Raven cocked his head. “I have spoken to you more today than I have spoken to any mortal in many centuries. And the previous conversations were not very stimulating.”
An idea seized her, a ridiculous desire that would probably get her killed for her hubris. But she had just faced death and been reprieved. Rushing forward, she threw her arms around the towering figure and hugged him.
Above her, the Raven let out a sigh. Resting his hand on her head, he gazed down at her with the faintest, ghostly hint of a smile.
Then he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Nine:
The Unfortunate Wife of Mortimer Egg
Nothing had changed.
Yet, everything was different.
That night, at the Knights of Walpurgis meeting, Rachel was unusually quiet. The next day, when Sakura showed up for flying class, her broom neither refused to work, nor flew off at breakneck speeds. As she circled the track, Sakura clapped her hands with excitement. The bells in her hair rang merrily. Rachel, in her roll as the assistant instructor, cheered encouragingly.
After class, Rachel slipped away into the Oriental gardens. Finding a grove of thick bamboo, she hid within. Amidst the dimness of the leafy green stalks, she wrapped her arms around her knees and wept, mourning in secret the loss of the gift that had kept Sakura from flying.
• • •
Later that evening, Rachel and her friends gathered at the Storm King Café. She was dying to tell them what had happened in Joy and Zoë’s dorm room, but she could not. Nor had she had a chance to talk to Gaius. The secret pricked at her like burrs in her clothing, never giving her a moment’s peace.
How was she going to find the strength to keep from telling people?
The answer, of course, was: by remembering. Her blabbing of secrets to Sakura had sparked yesterday’s disaster. With one brief phrase, spoken out of a desire to comfort, she had nearly destroyed the very thing she so yearned to protect. The Guardian had been right when he warned the Elf that giving Rachel the memory-protecting Rune could end the world.
It nearly had.
She wished she had asked the Raven more questions. If he removed memories, was he responsible for what happened to her second cousin, Blackie Moth? She also wished she had asked about the statue in the forest. He was there when she found it. Had he removed its wings? And what about angels? Was he the one who had hidden from her the picture she had seen in the book in her grandfather’s library?
Was he an angel?
As she sat lost in thought, her friends chatted and laughed. Rach
el tried to follow what they were saying, but their words seemed so trivial, so frivolous. It was like trying to follow the logic of a dream. She could not put into words why everything was so different. But it was.
Something had happened inside her. Confronted by death, she had chosen saving the world over her own life. Her life had been given back to her, and, yet, she felt transformed, almost as if he had altered her. She knew she would never again be the same.
Every moment, henceforth, was a gift from the Raven.
In the depth of her heart, she vowed that he would never regret that gift.
Xandra Black brought their drinks to their table, her little, blue-trimmed white paper hat perched atop her black hood. Rachel absently sipped her egg cream. Beside her, Nastasia, who had again chosen cream tea, offered her a scone. As Rachel turned to respond, Nastasia made a slight noise. Her head jerked, and her eyes rolled back, only the whites showing.
Rachel jumped up. “Nastasia’s having a vision!”
“Better her than me,” murmured Xandra Black, where she stood behind the marble counter, wiping it with a sponge.
Nastasia swayed in her seat. Sigfried lunged forward and caught her shoulders, steadying her. Her head slumped. Then she straightened, herself again.
“Quickly!” The princess leapt to her feet. “We must alert the dean!”
• • •
The dean gathered proctors, who gathered Flycycles, Mr. Chanson, and the student members of the Brotherhood of the Hart. This group flew off for the docks. Rachel wanted to run and tell Gaius, but the princess insisted that Von Dread and his cronies were not to be trusted. For Rachel to explain why it would have been sensible to tell Dread would have required revealing that he knew the secret of opening the school wards—a secret even the proctors did not know. Dread could jump directly to the source of the trouble, while the proctors first had to cover the half mile to the docks on brooms. Not knowing how serious the matter of the vision was, Rachel was not willing to spill his secret to Nastasia.
Once the proctors were under way, Nastasia returned to the café and shared the details of her vision. “I saw an apartment in New York City—high up and very posh. A woman was standing by the window, blowing her hair with a mundane device. The door opened. Two Agents let a second woman into the apartment. She was wearing a shadowcloak. I could not see her face.
“The first woman put down her device and said, ‘Serena, so kind of you to come by.’”
“Wait…Serena, as in the fourth member of the murderous quartet?” asked Rachel. Chills traveled up and down her body. No. No, no.
“Very possibly.” Nastasia replied. “This Serena woman stepped closer to the first woman and said, ‘My apologizes, Mattie, I’ve always liked you, personally, but I have learned that you are in our way. You’re keeping our master from reaching his full potential. If Mort is not man enough to do what needs to be done, I shall do it for him.’”
“What did she do?” Rachel’s words came out in a hoarse whisper.
“She made a gesture. A silvery distortion surrounded the hair blower, which sparked and smoked. The first woman, the one named Mattie, cried out and crumpled to the floor. The second woman, Serena, leaned over and snapped her neck. It made a very ugly sound.”
Rachel’s breath caught. “Oh!”
“The last image was of Serena screaming that Matilda Egg had been electrocuted.”
“Does this mean…” Joy whispered, her face a pale green, “that the demon Azrael will escape his bonds and kill us all?”
“Most likely,” Rachel whispered back. Her head felt light, as if she were swimming through the thick air of the suddenly blurry cafe. She drew a deep breath. “If it happens. We stopped the other two visions, right? The dean and the proctors will stop this one, too!”
That was the purpose of Nastasia having these visions, was it not? To give them sufficient warning? But what if they failed to stop it? Would the existence of Mortimer Junior be enough to keep his father from losing control? Would that smiling boy, with his freckles and his phooka, be the next target? She pictured an Agent informing him that his mother was dead, and his father was wanted for the murder.
Her mind shied away. The thought was too painful.
Yet, the fate of Mortimer Egg, Jr. was nothing compared to what would happen to everybody else, if the demon inside his father broke free. Squeezing her eyes closed, she mentally begged: Please don’t let her die. Please don’t let her die. Please don’t let her die.
Rachel paced back and forth across the black-and-white checkered floor of the café, clasping and unclasping her hands repeatedly. Oh, why had Nastasia not told them sooner? She would not have hesitated to reveal Dread’s secret, had she known the direness of the situation.
Returning to her friends, she found them looking drawn and frightened, except for Siggy who sat sharing a hamburger and fries with Lucky, looking utterly unconcerned.
“I was afraid of this,” Valerie stirred her elderberry cordial with a pink straw, “ever since Siggy told me that you told the dean what you learned, Nastasia, I’ve been worried. Egg and Browne both worked for the Wisecraft. The Wisecraft is where I got attacked. We don’t know how many more leaks might exist in the organization. Agents might still be geased.”
The princess frowned sternly. “It is far more likely that the King of Bavaria is the weak link. He openly encourages practitioners of black magic to move to his country. His son stated openly that he planned to share the information we gave him with his royal father.”
Rachel dropped into her chair, cold shivers running through her limbs. If the vision came true and Mrs. Egg died, and the demon got free and destroyed mankind, it would either be her fault or Nastasia’s.
She had told Dread. Nastasia had told the dean.
“Should we go to the Memorial Gardens and say a prayer at a shrine?” Joy asked.
“To whom would we pray?” the princess asked.
“Hera, maybe?” suggested Valerie. “Freka? Or Isis? The goddesses who protect wives. That’s who the cops who work for my father pray to when they have domestic violence cases.”
Salome interrupted, “My evil mother adores Isis, so naturally, I’m inclined against her.”
“You should not call your mother evil.” Siggy looked up from his fries to scowl blackly at Salome. “At least, you have a mother.”
“You don’t know my mother.” Salome ate the cherry off her sundae, unperturbed.
“Or maybe,” Valerie continued, “I don’t know…who is in charge of keeping the world from being destroyed? Odin?”
“My father does not approve of invoking the gods,” the princess stated. “He says we are better off without their interference.”
“That’s…an odd thing to say.” Without really paying attention, Rachel had spread clotted cream on the scone the princess had given her. Some part of her noted that what she was spreading was Double Devon Cream, from her home county back in England. She wondered absently if any of it came from cows that lived on the tenant farms of her family’s estate.
“My father says a great many odd things,” the princess confessed.
Footsteps came down the stairs. The handsome young proctor, Mr. Fuentes, staggered in, dirty and exhausted. He crossed to Nastasia and sank into a chair.
“We fought the red-haired assailant, Miss Romanov, but she got away,” he said apologetically. “Your brother Ivan did well, but he’s been hurt. He’s at the Halls of Healing.” Seeing Nastasia’s white face, he added, “He should be fine. His injuries were not serious.”
“And Mrs. Egg,” Rachel’s mouth was dry, “did you arrive in time to save her?”
Mr. Fuentes shook his head. “We arrived too late. Mrs. Egg was already dead.”
• • •
It seemed strange to attend class the next day. Their fellow students argued and chatted, unaware of the impending disaster. Rachel walked through the crisp chill of the late September air, bright red maple leaves swirling among the go
lden birches. Overhead, the sky was a perfect cerulean blue.
How could the day be so beautiful, when such a horrible fate loomed?
When she reached art class, Mortimer, Jr. was not there. When Rachel casually asked Juma where his friend was, he shrugged and said that a proctor had come to get him, something about a call from home. He thought perhaps Mortimer’s aged grandmother had died.
Rachel nodded wordlessly and took her seat.
Her luck finally ran out this morning. Mrs. Heelis announced they would begin the practical portion of their curriculum today.
“Our class is more than just an opportunity to learn to draw,” old Mrs. Heelis explained as they concluded a discussion of the Greek sculptor and mathematician Phidias, whose statues of Athena, Poseidon, and Apollo were still the models used for these deities by most temples. “We strive to bring to life the loveliness that the ancient Greeks saw when they comprehended the Golden Mean and its relationship to beauty in art. This is why our study of the history of art starts with the Greeks, and not with the Egyptians, with cave paintings, or any of the earlier peoples who committed acts of art upon the world, but who did so without the symmetry and elegance that proper proportion and the Golden Ratio brings to artistic expression.
“We will cover earlier peoples later in your scholastic career. Now, we wish to develop our artistic eye.”
Mrs. Heelis smiled kindly at the class. “Speaking of artist’s eye, we have worked to master drawing the three basic shapes: circle, triangle, and square. We have learned how to shade them, and we have made physical versions out of clay. As of today, I am sufficiently satisfied with your progress to allow you to begin conjuring real objects.”
A great cheer went up from the students. Even Rachel cheered, until she realized that this was the fundamental activity at Roanoke that required a familiar.
The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel (A Book of Unexpected Enlightenment 2) Page 35
