“So what did my mother believe?”
“She never spoke to you about this?”
“No. She died letting me believe I was an ordinary girl.”
Her dark eyes soften with sadness. “That must’ve been so hard for her.”
“For her? What about how hard it was for me?”
“I’m sorry. Of course it must’ve been a terrible shock, finding out what you are only after her death. But you must understand—–”
“No. Stop.” I wave her words away. “I don’t want to listen to any more excuses for my mother’s lies.”
“All lies are not betrayals, Jess.”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay then. If that’s what you want.”
“It is. All I want to know is what she thought of this… thing inside me.”
She tilts her head to the side in that bird-like way of hers. “Your mother told me that for as long as she could remember, she had always been aware of a ‘presence’ inside her. Unlike you, of course, she knew about her complex identity right from the start, which might be why she accepted this so calmly. In fact, she told me that she found this presence reassuring while she was growing up. It was comforting for her to know that something older and wiser was sharing her consciousness—–an almost god-like being who seemed to know everything but rarely intruded, merely guiding her every now and then, very gently.”
I frown. “I never felt anything inside me while I was growing up.”
“And one day you should ask yourself how your mother managed that, and why she did it, and what it cost her.”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
She lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t push it. “Your mother told me it was only later, when she became a seamaster, that things changed. The more power she got, the more she began to suspect that the presence inside her—–the waterdragon, if you will—–was far from benevolent. Something older than humanity and completely pitiless towards its fate.”
“Yes. That’s what Ingrid told me. She walked away from the ocean when she was fifteen years old. The power inside her was so evil that she had to turn her back on the magic forever.”
When I look up at the sky again, a cloud has moved in front of the sun and everything looks grayer and colder. Even the forest seems vaguely threatening, as if I don’t belong here and never will.
“Ingrid doesn’t know everything. Once Bella became a bloodmaster, she changed her mind about the nature of the presence inside her. By that time, she and Ingrid were hardly speaking though, so I’m not surprised she didn’t tell her much about it.”
“Changed her mind how?”
“For one, she stopped seeing it as evil.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. She also stopped thinking of it as a presence.”
“Why?” I sit up straighter, my heart racing.
“Because she began to realize that whatever lived inside her was made up of many presences: clearly separate personalities that couldn’t be reduced to a single consciousness. And yes, some of those personalities were evil, or cold, or indifferent. But others were warm, and wise, and good. The dragon inside her, she began to think, was not one thing. It consisted of many layers, and those layers in turn were made up of the personalities of everyone who had carried this strange and complex presence in their blood before her, passing it on through the generations.”
I bite my thumb, thinking about her words, testing it for truth against my own experience. “So, what are you saying? Are all the girls who ever carried this… genetic mutation, or whatever, still alive somewhere inside me?”
“Let’s leave the scientific talk to your keeper, all right? Your mother never talked about a genetic mutation—–she talked about the dragon inside her.”
I flinch despite myself.
“Ah, I see you do not like that word. But your mother never minded it. She didn’t see the dragon as a monster, some invisible beast living within her flesh—–at least not by the time I met her. Instead she saw it as something more like a… What is the word? Receptacle? No. Container?” She waves a hand as if wanting to grab the word from the air. “What is the right word for a thing one uses to keep something precious safe?”
“Container, I guess.”
“All right. When I knew her, your mother thought of the dragon inside her as nothing more than a complex biological container which held the consciousnesses of the hundreds of generations of women who had gone before her.” Her eyes light up with a private memory. “No, wait. Now I remember. She called it a vessel. A vessel of consciousness. And she was proud and humbled to be the bearer of something so precious.”
The thought makes me shiver. “So they are still alive inside me.”
“Alive? No. Nor are they ghosts, or demons, or disembodied spirits. Those concepts were developed to describe the unnatural process when part of a human’s consciousness remains on the physical plane after the body’s death. But you are not merely human, Jess. You are dragon too. And it is natural for a part of a dragon’s consciousness to linger here after the death of its body. In essence, that’s what dragons are: what was once a single tree becomes part of the forest, what was a single knot, becomes part of a great net. The individual disappears; the whole remains.”
I give her a look. “Don’t even start with the analogies again.”
“It was this view of hers that made your mother so adamant to raise her daughter as an ordinary, fully human girl. She believed that the minds of the women who bore this vessel of consciousness before her had been warped, either by too much power, too soon, or else by the tortures of the Black clan, designed to control such powers. She became convinced that the dragon could only become what it was meant to be if it was guided by the awareness of someone who is fully human, and healthy and whole.” She laughs, a low, satisfied sound. “And here you are.”
“None of this makes any sense to me.”
“Don’t break your head about it; it’s merely a theory. There’s a good chance that none of it is true anyway.”
“You’re not making me feel any better.”
“Oh, was that what I was supposed to be doing?”
I watch a small greenish anaconda snaking through the water. At least, I suspect it’s an anaconda. What other snakes swim in Amazonian rivers? You’d think I’d know, seeing that I apparently have thousands of generations of knowledge locked up somewhere inside me.
We spend a long time in silence while I try to make some sense of what she told me. “You said you struggled to accept my mother’s and your father’s ideas. Does that mean your father believes the same thing my mom did?”
“Not exactly. They disagreed on a few crucial issues.”
“Like what?”
“My father believes that the dragon carries inside it not only the awareness of its direct female ancestors, but also the consciousness of all keepers, male or female, who have pledged themselves to that dragon.”
“What?”
“Have you ever thought about who keepers really are, Jess?”
Her look suggests I’d be stupid not to have thought about it, so I decide to bluff it out. “They are people with some magic of their own,” I say as confidently as I can, “a magic not that dissimilar to mine. Gunn says that all keepers share some DNA mutations with girls like me, but that none of them can actually transform into… You know.”
“And have you ever thought about what that implies?” She smiles at my blank look. “Let me put it this way. What kind of people usually share DNA?”
I frown. “Family.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, I think you do. It’s not that difficult. The descendants of the Ten have always given birth to both girls and boys. Trueborn girls become dragons, unless they’re too compromised by the Black Clan’s tortures, and trueborn boys become…”
I feel my heart lurching in my chest. “Keepers.”
“Yes. And so do their children, and their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren.”
“I never realized,” I say slowly, my mind whirring, scrambling to take in this new piece of information. So every keeper in the world was once related to someone like me? This would mean—–
But I don’t get a chance to think it through because the Green Lady suddenly steers us towards the shore.
“We’re here.”
The real ‘secret village’ of the ‘Lost Earthkeepers of the Amazon’ turns out to be a huge disappointment: nothing but a handful of rudimentary shelters in a part of the deep forest that looks just like every other part of the deep forest.
“Is this it?” I ask, unable to hide my disappointment as I step off the boat and onto dry land.
“What did you expect? Wooden walkways and architecturally designed bamboo huts?”
“No. Of course not. But, I mean, there’s nothing here.”
“We’re a nomadic people, Jess. We move with the rhythm of the forest, taking only what is freely given. There is no need to hoard any of the wealth around us.”
“Then why the big secret? Why would you care if outsiders see any of this? There’s nothing to hide. It’s just… forest.”
“Exactly.” When she turns to me, her face is shining. It’s clear to me that she’s moved almost to the point of tears, overjoyed to be home. “But to us this forest is holy—–one of the last small islands of this world that remains untouched by human greed. I would not defile it simply to satisfy the idle curiosity of outsiders who care nothing for it.”
“You think the Order of Keepers will defile your forest?”
“I have seen their cities, Jess. There is nothing natural left. Even their so-called ‘retreats’—–the Green Lord’s country estate, the White Lady’s snowy wastes, the Blue Lord’s azure island —–have been tainted by man’s need to master nature.” She shakes her head, grimacing in disgust. “And all is bleared. Smeared. Seared by trade, and wears man’s smudge, and shares man smell.”
“Um. Okay.”
“It’s from a poem. Gerald Manley Hopkins. Your mother taught it to me.”
I avoid her eyes, more hurt than I want to admit. It’s true; my mom loved poetry.
“So where will we find your father?”
She points the way ahead. “I can show you where his body lies. But you will have to take me to where his spirit still lingers because that is a place I cannot reach on my own.”
Of what happened over the next hour or so I have very little recollection.
Not because the magic took me so deeply, necessarily, but because I tried to give father and daughter a few last moments of privacy by actively turning my consciousness away from what I was witnessing.
Physically, I sat between them, holding both the old man’s hand and his daughter’s. But mentally I was miles away, trying to think of anything except the fact that I was somehow bridging dimensions by my mere presence, my mind floating over realities that
Our sister! Hear
We call to you in
desperately await your help – there is
The Alpha will sacrifice us
his revenge
a mind unhinged…
The distress call of the half-dragons reaches me like a partially transmitted radio signal: scratchy and broken and unclear. But their raw desperation immediately shocks me out of the trance the Green Lady’s father put me in, and suddenly I’m tumbling, stumbling, plummeting through places and times and realities so dark that only nightmares survive.
“My Sister! You cannot leave me. You have promised to accept my pledge. Do not turn from me now, while my strength is waning.”
My mind sways and rushes as time and space itself seem to bend, twisting around me, making me remember things I cannot remember.
I groan out loud, trying to fix my thoughts in one reality, trying to understand what I must do.
I must save the half-dragons!
“You promised to give me the chance to become a strand in the great web once again.”
It is true. I did promise.
I must save the Pendragon women!
Yes, but you also have a promise to keep.
So many promises to keep.
A laugh. Not unkind. Somewhere deep inside of me.
And miles to go before you sleep.
And miles to go before you sleep.
Chapter 19
If history has taught us one lesson, it is this: between the Keepers and the Kept there can be respect but no intimacy, admiration but no affection, appreciation but no love, sympathy but no tenderness.
Inappropriate attachments or entanglements between Keepers of the Black Clan and their Wards are therefore strictly forbidden. For in the unfortunate event that such a relationship should develop, the undoubted consequences will be havoc, devastation, and utter disaster.
From Orations of Aelius (1st Century CE); translated from the original Latin by Sofia Rodriguez (2003)
We leave the Amazon in a mad rush, desperate to get back to the Pendragon compound as soon as possible. The distress call I received from the half-dragons might’ve been unclear, but of one thing I have absolutely no doubt: we’re in a race against time.
If we don’t get there soon, the half-dragons will die.
After a short debate, we decide to travel without any Enthrallment spells to hide us because Jonathan can’t risk having to go into a resting state. Every second counts, and he needs to arrive home full of power and ready to take on his father.
“You can’t draw on your magic either,” Jonathan tells me, his face pale with worry and surprisingly ordinary now that it’s completely stripped of bloodmagic. “You need to control it, okay? We’re not stopping, so if you burn through a lot of power again, you’ll just have to deal with the consequences.”
I nod, remembering that terrible flight from the desert. “If there’s no time to rest afterward, I can’t do magic. Believe me, I know that better than anyone.”
“You say that now, but it might be more difficult to remember when we’re attacked by Skykeepers.” Gunn’s tense voice comes from behind us as we make our way to the river. “Which will probably happen. You will have to let go of your need to control every situation and trust me to handle it.”
“I don’t need to control every situation.”
“Just remember that you can’t use your magic. And not only because we don’t have time for you to rest. Your shine has grown too powerful; it will give away our location immediately.”
“Zig can help me control—–”
“No.” His voice is harsher than I’ve ever heard it. “If he touches you again, I’ll rip his fucking arm off.”
“For God’s sake, Gunn.” I turn around to scowl at him. “He was helping me, okay?”
I sneak a quick look at Zig, who’s walking behind Gunn. But he looks completely impassive, as if he hadn’t heard him.
“We’ll talk about this later.” Gunn brushes past me and Jonathan towards the jetty where our boat is waiting. He spends a few minutes untying some knots and pushing at the boat, the muscles in his huge back straining with the effort. “Back off!” he snarls at Jonathan when he tries to help.
Jonathan steps back without arguing. We get into the boat and Gunn starts the engine. Nobody says a word.
The first part of the journey goes pretty smoothly, if you can call being stuck in a small boat with three absolutely impossible guys who won’t talk to you, or each other, pretty smoothly.
After a couple of hours of grim silence, I find myself missing Daniel with an ache that’s almost physical. Jeepers. What I wouldn’t give for a friendly face right now. Or a lame joke to break the tension. Or a random comment about rivers, or trees, or forests. I look at the bleak faces of the three people in the boat with me, and I wonder how it can be possible to feel so completely alone in the world, and so completely lost.
Zig must sense something of what I’m feeling, because he narrows his e
yes at me. “You okay?”
“That’s none of your fucking business, slayer.” Gunn’s voice is so low he’s practically growling.
“Really, Gunn,” I say. “There’s no need to be so rude. He was just asking a question. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Before Gunn can say anything, Jonathan gives a malicious little laugh. “Your keeper has always hated me, but it seems Zig has now made his shit list too. You know what? I’m beginning to suspect he doesn’t like it when you play with other boys.”
“Shut up.” Gunn's voice is quiet, but only a fool wouldn’t pick up on the anger simmering beneath the surface.
A fool like Jonathan, it seems.
“It’s funny; up until now the Waymonds have always been really tight with the slayers. And no wonder, given their line of work.” He looks from Zig to Gunn and then back to me again, his eyes widened slightly as if waiting for me to make some connection.
When I don’t respond he smiles spitefully. “If you ask me, this brand-new tension between them is little more than plain ol’ jealousy. Your keeper simply doesn’t like sharing. He wants you all for himself—–and really, who can blame him?”
I pull a face at Jonathan. “Stop baiting him, okay? I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re just making everything worse.”
But Jonathan is clearly on a roll, because he flashes me a lazy grin before he leans back and starts singing. He’s got a surprisingly good voice and he’s hamming it up, belting out some stupid pop song I vaguely remember from years ago.
“Everybody wanna steal my gi-i-i-rl! Everybody wanna steal her right away!”
“If you don’t shut up right now, I’ll make you shut up.” This time there’s no mistaking the anger in Gunn’s voice.
Jonathan smirks at him, then keeps on singing. “Only one left in the whole wide wo-o-orld! You can’t touch her cause she belongs—–”
He doesn’t get to finish because Gunn leans over and, with a calm, almost casual movement, smashes his elbow into Jonathan’s face.
“Gunn!” I cry, stunned. “The hell—–”
Treasurekeeper Page 19
