Scales: Book 1 of the Fate and Fire Series

by Amity Green

  He smiled wide. He knew it.

  “Nothing’s really wrong, I just have a lot to think about. Sort of an identity crisis, I guess.” I laughed a little. “I’ve learned a lot about myself since I got here.”

  “Anything I might be able to help with?”

  “I don’t know, Peter. It’s stuff like, why magic doesn’t work on me, along with Kai telling me I am an old soul … why the book likes me enough to let me open it and the memories or flashbacks I’ve been having. They belong to someone else, a really, really old presence in my mind. It’s all got me confused and worried, I guess.”

  “Were you able to read from the book?”

  “That’s the thing,” I said, peering up at him. “I was able to open it, but it only said a couple of things.”

  “What were they?”

  “‘Bandia na Teasa’, was the first thing, like that was my name. Then it said, ‘We long for your return’.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Osgar had just come into the kitchen. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to overhear, you said that when I walked in,” he explained.

  I smiled at him. “It was written in the book when I opened it. Or, well, it formed on the page while I watched it being written, if that makes sense.”

  Osgar looked from me to Peter and back. “Do you know what that means?” He asked.

  “Well, obviously the first part of it is a name,” Peter added.

  “I don’t know,” I added. It was hard to sound sure of myself. “I remember a man in a dream I had saying it to me once recently.”

  “It means to Goddess of Warmth. Some translations may cite it as Goddess of Fire.”

  No one spoke for a moment. I toed the tile, thinking, trying to digest what he was telling me. I didn’t feel much like a Goddess of anything, if that’s what the book, Osgar and the burning man from my dream were trying to tell me.

  “This is just nuts.” I looked up at Osgar.

  He shook his head. “Crazy how you’ll buy in to little things and others suffer the need to convince you the hard way.”

  “My life is just one big freaking learning curve, these days,” I retorted. I was going to need some major convincing to believe I was a reincarnated goddess of anything besides bad luck.

  “I have something that may help,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Osgar walked from the room. I sighed really loudly without realizing it until Peter glanced at me.

  “It can’t be all bad. Try to stop with the gloom and doom.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Why must you look at the worst in any situation?” he countered.

  “That’s over-the-top judgmental of you.” It wasn’t him with the problems.

  “I think it would be best to listen to what Osgar can offer,” he said, adding a little sympathy to his words. “And we can’t ignore the fevers and the other anomalies. Ezra saw things in you from the start.”

  The word “anomalies” bothered me. A lot.

  Crispin stuck his head into the kitchen. “Osgar’s asking for you two in the library.”I walked toward the stairs, apprehension building like I was in trouble for something when I was a kid. One time I’d got into trouble at the Home during lunch. I’d eaten my whole meal and I was still hungry. They’d given us bananas that day, whole, big ripe ones that were delicious and quite the treat. I figured one more banana would fill me up. I went to the kitchen and put my tray on a stack of dirties, turned to the lady who’d served us our food and told her a bold-faced lie about how I’d dropped my peeled banana on the floor and had to throw it away. She gave me another. I don’t know why I didn’t stop to think that one of the nuns in the room could have been watching while I ate the first one. At any rate, I got caught lying, and had to wait a half hour before they decided my punishment.

  I had the same feeling walking up the stairs to hear who Osgar deemed I had been in a previous life. It was the same as when I turned to walk back to my seat holding the stolen banana. I was at the mercy of the forces that existed around me.

  Chapter 33

  Osgar sat on the big chair by the library kitchenette, having drug a massive table between two more chairs. Open volumes were strewn around and he eagerly waved us over to sit.

  I began looking at some of the articles, cocking my head and picking out words here and there. We waited for Osgar to finish reading the page he was on.

  “Teigan knows the lore front and back.” The three of us glanced up at Crispin, who looked like he wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “Who’s Teigan?” I waited for an answer from Crispin but he didn’t say anything else.

  “He’s my brother.” Osgar finally said. He put his nose right back in the book.

  I wanted to ask if he was around, but was afraid “Teigan” was one of the casualties during the fight. My face must have betrayed me because Crispin answered the question.

  “It was his turn in the cell.” Crispin sighed, dragging another chair close by. “Poetic really, since he always tried to get us all to allow him our turn inside.”

  “What’s poetic?” And why hadn’t they opened the “cell” if Kai was gone? A raw feeling started in my stomach, building into a knot. Something wasn’t right.

  “He volunteered to guard your door the first night after your arrival. That was the night the moon began a new cycle.” Osgar looked at me, waiting as I digested what he’d said.

  “For my protection.” The guy guarding me that night had been one of the good guys after all. He’d tried so hard to make me realize I should stay inside, to keep safe, even roughed me up some to make me reconsider an escape.

  “You must to be taught so many things, and need to remember so many more, lass.” I hadn’t understood then. Teigan did know things about me, and about this goddess we researched. He’d spent his last free night protecting me from the evils at The Grotto, and I’d given him nothing but grief for it. I dropped my face in my hands.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it. There’s no way you could have known if he didn’t tell you, Tessa,” Peter said.

  It was easy for him to say. Guilt would round off the nice gamut of emotions I’d endured over the last few months. I sighed hard. “My God, that sucks.” I sat back in the chair, trying to compose myself.

  “We all know there’s a chance we won’t make it out each time we go in, Tessa,” Osgar offered. “Teigan may have been gruff, but he meant well. And he was right about you.” He tapped the page of the book he held. “I knew I remembered seeing this,” he said “This is the only reference I can find about Teasa.”

  Crispin whistled low. “You’re a strong resemblance,” he said, looking over my shoulder.

  Two drawings dissected the article, one of a gargoyle in flight and the other of a young woman clad in a long wrap of flowing cloth. The sketch was reflective, as if I stood there on the page. A crown of small blossoms encircled her head. Hair nearly grazed the ground at her feet. I leaned in closer when I saw the talisman hanging around her neck. An arrangement of feathers shaped the head of an owl around a stone set in the center, like the one worn by the burning man in my dream.

  “Who wrote this?” Or at least who illustrated the book? The drawing was detailed, sketched with a skilled hand.

  “Kai.” Osgar looked at me for a second, then nodded. “At some point in time, Kai had seen this goddess. And it wasn’t just a glimpse, he’d gotten a good, up-close look.”

  A red flag flapped at me when remembering the vignette from my encounter opening the book in the courtyard. No other than an innocent child saw the goddess’s mortal form. Was Kai different? Could he ever have been an innocent? Or a child, for that matter?

  “That talisman is interesting,” Peter added.

  “Look at that big crystal.” Crispin pointed at the drawing.

  “It’s an amethyst.” The words were out of my mouth and gone before I even thought to shut up. There was no bringing them back, like sending an email into cyberspace, realizin
g it’s going to the wrong person. There was nothing to be done but explain. I leaned back in the chair a little. All three men looked at me, expectantly.

  “When I nearly died in the cavern, I had a dream. I was in a meadow somewhere, lying in the grass in my human form, although the sun was shining through the trees. An old man knelt in the grass beside me.” I swallowed hard, remembering the way he screamed. “He was wearing the same kind of robe and had a matching owl talisman. The stone in the middle there,” I nodded toward the page, “is an amethyst.”

  They were silent, staring.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “Do you remember anything else?” asked Osgar.

  “He said, ‘Bandia na Teasa’,” I replied. I sighed. “And he caught on fire.”

  All three sets of eyes in the room grew wide when I said that last bit.

  I frowned, looking at my feet. “It was so real. And that smell,” I shook my head to oust the memory. “And then all the birds fell in the water with me and just floated. I couldn’t move. I watched the smoke billow up into the trees, and the birds didn’t even struggle, they landed in the water and died. Like they’d given up living. It wasn’t natural.”

  “Whoa,” said Crispin.

  “I really don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I whispered.

  “It’s fine.” Osgar smiled, warmly.

  I moved on to more pressing questions. “Why haven’t you released Teigan? Is the cell locked or something? Maybe we could break him out.”

  “It’s not that kind of cell.” Crispin gave a sad smile. “It’s a veiled place, hidden from sight and sound. We’ve looked for centuries. You wake up there, then at the end of the cycle, you wake up here.”

  “So he’ll just like, stay there?”

  They nodded.

  “How? I mean, we can’t just leave him.” I searched faces. No one spoke.

  Osgar sighed, dropping his gaze back to the pages before him. “In a nutshell, this explains that Teasa was a goddess that was celebrated, and feared by the Picts, or the Caledonians. They worshipped Teasa as a daughter of Lugh, the sun god, to provide them with a fertile season for planting. Beltane is her time of power. She is a goddess of warmth with the power to oust winter in the spring, but has also been referenced here as a goddess of fire if she is incited. It might be related to the worry that she wasn’t pleased with the offerings they left for her.”

  “The clans likely thought she was responsible for lightning striking and causing a fire in the spring, or something to do with a disaster that they felt accountable for, if they didn’t leave her the best sacrifices at Beltane,” Peter added.

  “Actually the article references the goddess growing angry and becoming a burning light in the night sky at times,” Osgar said, tracing the lines of text with a finger. “This all makes sense considering the wards around here didn’t work on you.”

  “She also sees the Tyrens,” Petra said from the doorway. She paced across the floor, sliding into the oversized chair beside Peter.

  “Kai mentioned trying some sort of coercion a couple times. He was pissy because it didn’t work,” I added.

  Peter sat up a little straighter. “What sort of coercions,” he growled.

  “I’m not sure, but I think he wanted me to trust him so I would go to Librorum Taberna and steal the book back for him.”

  Petra snorted. We all looked at her. “Sorry, that’s hilarious. Kai was livid,” she said, grinning.

  I shook my head at her. “Well, if he knew I had some sort of a tie to Bandia na Teasa, that would explain his fixation. I mean I didn’t know a thing about it, so I was an easy target.”

  “It is said Kai killed a clan elder and took the book, someplace close to Hadrian’s Wall around 180 AD.”

  I struggled with that after holding the book, bonding with it. For some reason that part of the story didn’t sound right. More information never hurt, so I fished. “Where did that book come from, anyway? I mean who wrote it?”

  “The Lore states the book was written by a Roman warrior-turned-scribe. It was a journal, of sorts that the scribe added to when coming into contact with the Caledonians. He described the appearances of the inhabitants of Northern Scotland, as well as the rolls and powers of the druids in their society. War broke out between the encroaching Romans and the native Caledonians, and the warrior who’d been recording in the book was killed. His blood spilt across the pages. At the same moment, a Caledonian warrior was struck down, and the life blood of the two mingled, soaking into the pages of that book, creating a sentience of sorts within the pages recording the bloody war.”

  Osgar looked up from the article sending me a look of warning.

  I shrugged a little. Along for the ride. That was me.

  He clapped his book shut and continued, reciting from memory. “The book was recovered by none other than Lugh’s daughter, Bandia na Teasa, who took it to her home in the trees among the Dryads. Kai, a Roman, followed, and when her back was turned, he stole the book and ran. He disappeared for a time, showing up nearly eight centuries later with Hamish as a henchman along with a couple other ancients, tome in hand, chanting his magic and turning Clan Logan into a clan of gargoyles.”

  Ancients. I got hung up there. “They have horns because they’re ancient.” I looked at Peter. “You’re going to sprout horns,” I teased.

  “So are you.” He smiled curtly.

  My grin faded and I put my hands in my lap. “Funcrusher.”

  Osgar nodded. “They are very ancient. After they took the castle, one of the Clan grabbed the book, apparently being able to see through Kai’s wards, like you,” he gestured to me, “and brought it to London, where a distant descendant named Ezra Finfrock keeps a store of literature.”

  “And you know the rest of the story,” Petra said.

  “You must be careful with that book,” Osgar warned. “It creates monsters.”

  “I can handle it,” I said. The book had shown me very little in the beginning, and I had no reason it would affect the very depth of my character. I was a good person, and I knew that in my heart. So far, so good. I wasn’t going to look at it with a negative light. A token would be paid to use it, but it would be worth it.

  My skin began to tingle. The room had begun to darken.

  “It’s time to turn in. I’ll catch you guys in the morning. I stood, heading for the bedroom I’d slept in with Brea, for lack of a better place. I hoped I would be more comfortable there since Kai was gone. All the men in the room stood when I did. “What was Brea doing when you came up, Petra?”

  “She’s fine. Iain dotes on her as we speak, entertaining her with stories from before the castle was brought down, and what it’s like to change into a gargoyle. She’s quite interested.” Petra grinned.

  “I might have something to add.” Crispin headed toward the stairs.

  “Sure you do.” Petra rolled her eyes.

  I shook my head, smiling. At least Brea was in good hands.

  “I’ll fetch her and bring her up soon,” Petra added.

  “Thank you, Petra.” I still didn’t get the best vibe from her all the time, and it bothered me a little. But I would want the perfect girl for my brother, too. And neither of us saw me as perfect. Not even close.

  Peter intercepted me on the way to the stairs. “You alright?” he whispered against my ear.

  “Yeah, I don’t want to change in front of everyone. I need to think for a while and let all this gel,” I whispered back.

  “Okay then. I’ll be here in the library if you can’t sleep.”

  “Thank you, Peter.” I kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Inside my bedroom at the castle, I shut the door and pulled the book from beneath the bed where I’d stashed it when we’d all come in after the battle. The time had come to have a little heart-to-heart with a Pict and a Roman.

  * * *

  Hearing my thin, streaming voice as a toddler was extremely jarring and surreal, but
I had no trouble understanding that it was me I heard when I entered the book’s trance, coming-to inside of the earliest childhood memory I’d experienced. The overwhelming smell of spilled gasoline, the lack of light, and confused adults shouting put me right into a horrific scene that I couldn’t get my bearings in until an explosion ripped through the darkness, prairie grass and vehicles bursting into raging flames on the roadside.

  And my brother was there.

  I was confused, bleeding—dying rather, and viewed chaos through the eyes of a baby.

  What was that loud boom? And now there is a big fire, too. Hot! Don’t touch! And there is a stranger. Robbie’s crying and where did Daddy go to get Momma? There are more strangers and now there are amlances and a real fire truck …. I got a big bleed now … I don’t want to sleep now …

  Robbie’s yelling!

  “Don’t touch her! I’m watching Tessa! Our dad will be right back with our mom and we have to sit right here ‘cause we promised.”

  We’re being good and sitting here like Daddy said to ….

  * * *

  I hung my feet from the tall, ruined rock wall of the castle proper. My running shoes dangled about fifty feet from the grass and brush below. I’d needed a place to be alone and think so I’d climbed the crumbling walls from the inside the ruins, surprised at the height of the castle from the back by Loch Ore. Sun prickled my bare shoulders, reminding me that the tan I used to be so proud of when I was human was destined to fade into sun-damaged, pasty white skin in the immortal shadows.

  My mind had opened up to me when I peeled back the heavy, patinaed cover of the ancient book. I had no idea which of the two warriors wrote to me at what time, but they were forthcoming with my answer to the question about where my parents had gone when I was little. They were dead.

  I was able to put the pieces together. That’s when the goddess had saved me from dying, too.

  I was blessed, but wounded. Tears chilled my cheeks in the cool wind gusting up from the surface of the loch. Majestic beauty blended bittersweet with my emotions, making it easy to cry.