by E. E. Holmes
As I trudged back up to the castle, I felt renewed from my artistic release and my mental regrouping. I tried to hold on to that feeling as I entered the crowded entrance hall at 8:25 to prepare for the welcoming ceremony. I pointedly ignored the way the crowd parted for me like I was carrying a particularly contagious form of leprosy and found Hannah and Karen by the fireplace.
“I was starting to wonder if I’d have to come looking for you,” Karen said, draping my sash over my shoulder.
“Just needed some air,” I said as she handed me a safety pin. I secured the sash in place and pulled the triskele necklace over my head. “Have I missed anything interesting yet?”
“No, we’re just about to line up in formation,” Karen said. She smoothed out my sash, now secured to my shoulder, and looked with satisfaction between Hannah and me. “Perfect. Now when the music starts, I’ll show you where to line up. Just follow the progression outside. You’ll be on the western side of the courtyard.”
“Aren’t you coming with us?’ Hannah asked in a slightly panicked voice.
“I’ll be out there, but I have to take my place among the other adults. When the moment comes, I’ll come to light your candle and stand with you.” At this she handed us each a tall, white taper in a tarnished brass candlestick.
A sharp echoing gong resounded around the hall, and, like a flock of doves taking flight, the Apprentices fluttered around, arranging themselves into two long columns. Peyton, I noticed at once, was at the very front of the queue, bearing her own candle and an expression so smug that I could cheerfully have slapped it off her face. Maybe I should let Milo loose on her, I thought. I glanced around for him, but he was nowhere in sight. In fact, for the first time since I’d arrived here, I didn’t see a single spirit anywhere.
“Where’s Milo?”
“Upstairs. He’s not allowed at the ceremony, none of the spirits are,” Hannah said.
“Why not?”
Hannah just shrugged.
Karen guided us quickly into position about a third of the way from the front, where we hurried to imitate the other girls around us; chins up, shoulders back, and candles raised in both hands before us. As nervous as I was, I still managed to register the fact that I felt like a complete tool, and barely managed to cover a nervous laugh with a snorting sort of cough. Hannah looked whiter than I’d ever seen her.
“Relax, or you’re going to snap that candle in half,” I muttered.
She threw me half a smile, then drew a long, slow breath and relaxed her grip on her taper.
Just behind me, a tall gangling girl with freckles and a long blonde braid of hair was chewing nervously on her lip and standing on her tiptoes, searching the hall. She was so preoccupied that her candle was dangling loosely in her hand, tipping out of its holder. Just as I opened my mouth to point this out, Celeste came sweeping by, righting the candle and adjusting the girl’s sash.
“Phoebe, mind your taper, please,” Celeste said, and then her eyes fell on the empty space beside the girl. “Where is Savannah?”
“Dunno,” Phoebe said. “Haven’t seen her since lunch.” Celeste raised her eyes to the ceiling as though praying for patience and then hurried away though the crowd.
A haunting, wailing melody began to reverberate through the hall. Every head turned to the rafters where an auburn-haired woman in a long white dress was playing a sort of rustic set of panpipes from the balcony. Then a second melody rose to meet and intertwine with the first, this time played on violin by a blonde woman. By squinting into the shadows, I realized that the blonde woman was Catriona. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been casually lounging on my window seat in my bedroom in the dead of night as though she and Lucida hadn’t just broken in. Seeing her now, like a wraith in the rafters, was nearly as dreamlike and surreal as that first time we met.
The music signaled the start of the procession. As we shuffled forward, torches and lanterns all along the stone edifices flared to life. With a deafening groan, the great front doors creaked open to reveal a sky on the rosy brink of twilight. We crunched along a gravel path between the trees, and entered the central courtyard for the first time.
The courtyard was circular, flanked by the curved inner walls of the castle itself. The four turreted towers loomed over the space, which contained a wide, perfectly round pathway of stone and, at its very center, a crumbling archway raised on an ancient stone dais. It looked as though someone had transported one of the famous mystical structures of Stonehenge right into our midst. I could barely take my eyes from the thing, so strong was its allure.
“What is it?” Hannah whispered.
I managed to tear my eyes away from it for long enough to see that her expression was enraptured. “I don’t know.”
I looked around us. Every face was staring at the archway with unmitigated reverence. A thrill of terror jolted through me like electricity. To be so close to something that had so much power; that could, I knew, hold us here or cast us off, or even simply swallow us all. All it would take was one tiny, tempting pulse of energy, and I knew I would have no choice but to sprint right through it to whatever lay beyond. It was, I realized, a physical manifestation of the Geatgrima, the Gateway which lived in each of us.
The Apprentices formed a circle on the inner walkway and turned to face the center. Then the music swelled with the addition of bagpipes and the Durupinen processed in. Each was dressed in a long white gown with a clan sash, each carrying a lit white taper in a gold candle holder. The expression on every face was eerily similar; reverent and peaceful. I felt a sudden flutter of panic as I wondered if they’d all been hypnotized or brainwashed or something. They walked in two by two, though here and there one of them walked alone. Karen was one of solitary ones, and I knew that the empty space beside her was meant to be my mother’s. The absence of her suddenly expanded inside me, a silent explosion, and I forced myself to look away before it consumed me.
I concentrated instead on the other faces parading past. Though some of the women were quite average-looking, a disproportionate number of them were strangely beautiful—that same flawless, airbrushed sort of beauty that I had noticed at once when meeting Catriona and Lucida for the first time. It was thoroughly disconcerting, and somehow I had a feeling it had little to do with moisturizer and expensive hair care products. I mean, Karen was attractive, but not in that almost eerie, otherworldly sort of way. It was like the freaking Stepford Wives out here. I scanned the Apprentices around me, but none of them shared this preternatural glamor, as far as I could tell.
The music changed again, its melody shifting from something that floated and buffeted on the wind to a regal sort of march. The Durupinen formed a larger circle around our smaller one, and then turned expectantly toward the North Tower. The Apprentices followed suit. Two columns of Caomhnóir filed in strict formation from the tower doors and spread out across the ramparts where they turned, as one, to face the courtyard at attention. Several of them, I noted in surprise, looked barely older than me. A moment later a woman appeared upon a small balcony there, raised her arms, and silence fell.
I knew before she spoke that this must be Finvarra, the woman who, from the shadows, had been pulling the strings on the twisted puppet show that was now my life. She was the high priestess of the Durupinen, the woman who sent Lucida and Catriona to find us, who made sure that every trace of my abilities to communicate with spirits was wiped clean from Pierce’s investigative equipment. She was no more or less than the singular most powerful force within the Durupinen, and I had imagined many times walking right up to her and giving her a piece of my mind. Now, as every breath was held in anticipation of her words, I knew that I never would have dared to do it. Finvarra fairly glowed with an aura of power. Her face looked like it had been carved from marble, from its high cheekbones to its full lips. Her hair was pure, shining white, and I knew that, if the wind hadn’t lifted it into billowing waves all around her, it would easily have reached her waist. Her expression
, as she gazed out at us all, contained the kind of peace and surety that one only sees in paintings of saints and martyrs.
A last quavering note from Catriona’s violin shivered on the air, and then Finvarra’s voice rang out into the attentive silence.
“On behalf of the generations of Durupinen that have graced this place before you, I welcome you all with an open heart to Fairhaven Hall. Apprentices, you step today onto a path that has been forged ahead of you, over many centuries, as the Durupinen have played our crucial role as the gatekeepers of the portals between the spirit world and the living world. We have maintained, through our commitment to our gift and traditions, a delicate balance between light and dark, between life and death, between secret and knowledge. We are eternal and enduring… ”
A tiny orange light bobbed around in the corner of my eye. I turned to see Lucida creeping out from between two bushes, a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. She was slinking her way toward the empty space beside Catriona, whose formerly solemn face was now twitching with repressed laughter. Lucida stumbled slightly on the uneven cobblestones in her wildly inappropriate stilettos and had to grab onto Catriona’s arm to steady herself. I don’t know why she bothered to try sneaking in; she might as well have been wearing a blinking neon sign as the little black dress and leopard coat ensemble over which she’d hastily thrown her blue clan sash. She fell into ranks, ignoring the sideways glances from the women around her. As she turned to flick her cigarette into the grass, she caught my eye and winked.
I snapped my head back around. Dislike for Lucida welled up inside me just as it had upon our first meeting. Then, it had been her total lack of regard for my feelings or the gravity of the emotional baggage she had unloaded on me; she’d treated the whole encounter like a performance put on for her amusement. Apparently her lack of respect extended into all areas of her life, including sacred Durupinen ceremonies. I mean, okay, I wasn’t exactly sold on all of this Durupinen stuff yet, but I was here wasn’t I? I was standing here, holding my stupid candle, making an effort.
I tried to pick up the thread of Finvarra’s speech. If she had noticed Lucida’s unceremonious interruption, she wasn’t letting on. Her voice cut through the twilit silence. “For some of you, the knowledge of the Durupinen has been a part of your lives from your earliest memories. Your childhood was steeped in our lore and traditions, and therefore your arrival here has been a foregone conclusion, a long anticipated step on the path you’ve always known you would travel. For others,” and here I felt sure her eyes flickered down to look directly and Hannah and me, “the discovery that you are one of us has opened heretofore unimagined vistas of possibility before you.”
I leaned slightly toward Hannah. “No shit,” I murmured under my breath. She giggled softly and gave me an admonishing nudge with her elbow.
“Whatever your path to arrive here tonight, your journey forward will be the same, and all of you will be united in the exploration of your gift. I hope that you will help each other, support each other, and look to the guidance of your teachers, instructors, and mentors to guide your way. With our gift comes enormous responsibility, a responsibility that you may now fear, but that, in time, you will come to cherish as a sacred duty for the good of all humankind—your destiny and your calling. As a symbol of this, your clan Elders will now light your candles.”
At this, Karen and many of the other Durupinen stepped forward out of their circle. We turned to face them, the tiny flames of their candles bobbing forward like synchronized fireflies until they stood in front of us. Karen tipped her flame first to my wick, and then to Hannah’s, and both candles flickered to life. All around us, voices were murmuring, but it wasn’t until Karen’s voice joined them that I could make out what they were saying.
“This light I bestow upon you as a key. And thus, my door closes, and yours shall open.”
Her eyes were full of tears as she said it, but she managed a small smile. I felt a lump rising in my throat, and swallowed it back, along with the impulse to thrust the flame, and everything it stood for, right back at her. A strange battle was raging in my chest, between a seemingly innate but mostly dormant desire to do all that Finvarra had asked of us, and a louder and much more logical instinct for familiarity and self-preservation.
“And now, Apprentices, please bring your flames to the Geatgrima in the center of the courtyard. By placing them there, you are pledging your life to the protection of your Gateway, and to serve the spirits who shall cross through it.”
As though the Geatgrima itself was waiting for this instruction, I suddenly found its pull irresistible, and before I could consciously decide to do it, I was walking with sure and steady stride toward the dais. It was just as I had realized in the garden: it wasn’t that we didn’t have a choice, but that the choice had already been made. We all knelt around the dais, and placed our candles carefully upon the roughly hewn stone. No sooner had we done this but the individual candle flames were whipped into a frenzy, as though by a wind that none of us could feel. They danced higher and higher, their flames spreading until a ring of fire encircled the Geatgrima, which continued to pulsate with its own formidable energy. And as the circle rose higher and higher, the smoke began to swirl and undulate, twisting itself into strange symbols and shapes and figures as it climbed the sky, obscuring the first of the evening stars above us. At last, as the flames climbed to the top of the Geatgrima, they exploded in a halo of sparks and extinguished. We stood transfixed until the smoke cleared away, and through its last trailing tendrils my eyes met Finvarra’s. Her visage, so calm a moment before, looked troubled as it lingered on my face. I nodded once to her, but she did not return the acknowledgment. Instead, she said something to the ghost of a tall man who had materialized just behind her. Then she turned her back on me and disappeared into the yawning black mouth of the North Tower.
5
GENDER POLITICS
DAMN YOU, JET LAG. Damn you straight to the ninth circle of hell where you were undoubtedly concocted by the devil himself. I wasn’t a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, but getting out of bed usually didn’t resemble scraping roadkill off the freeway quite to this extent. I groped around for the alarm clock on my bedside table and bashed it into silent submission. It was seven o’clock in the morning on my first day of classes.
“Kill me.”
“I don’t think that would make a difference around here,” came Hannah’s voice. “They’d probably just make you go to class anyway.”
“Ha, ha,” I said, blinking the sleep out of my eyes and trying to bring the room into focus. Hannah was loitering by the door, fully dressed, with a backpack at her feet, as though our room was a stop on the midtown bus line. She was also chewing her fingernails obsessively.
“Hannah, you might as well sit down and relax for a few minutes. I still have to shower and everything,” I said, sliding out of bed. The drop was higher than I expected, and I had to grab onto the bedpost to keep from falling. I’d forgotten how high off the ground these old-fashioned beds were; Hannah could barely get into hers without using the little footstool we found tucked under it.
“I can’t sit, I’m too nervous,” she said.
“What time did you wake up?”
“Five-thirty. I couldn’t fall back asleep so I just got ready instead.”
“Ew. Okay, well, I’ll try to be quick. You don’t have to wait for me, if you want to go eat.”
She looked at me like I’d just suggested she jump off the roof of the school.
“Or not. Be right back.” I grabbed my shower caddy and slipped past her out the door.
Everybody thinks they want to live in a castle until they actually try it. It’s beautiful to look at, but a castle in the English countryside the first thing in the morning is flipping freezing. I cursed under my breath in the deserted bathroom, hopping back and forth from one bare foot to the other as I fumbled with the shower taps and waited for the water to warm up. The goosebumps were ju
st relaxing back into my skin when the bathroom door banged open. Without warning, my shower curtain was ripped back and a girl jumped right into the stall with me.
What the hell —”
“Shhhhhhh!” She clamped a hand over my mouth.
I froze, arms folded protectively over my bare chest, staring into the panting face of this complete stranger. I knew she wasn’t a ghost; the hand still covering my mouth was far too solid and warm, and smelled like nail polish.
Before I could even think past my own shock about what to do next, I heard the bathroom door swing open again.
“Savannah? Are you in here?” It was Celeste.
I looked into the girl’s face. She shook her head with a pleading expression. I wrenched my face away from her hand and called, “It’s just me in here, Celeste. It’s Jess. Who are you looking for?”
“Oh, hi Jess. Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. I was just looking for one of the other Apprentices.”
“In the bathroom?”
“Yes,” she said with a wry laugh. “Sorry about that. I need to talk to her, but she’s being … anyway, didn’t mean to disturb you. Have a good first day of classes. I’ll see you after lunch in History and Lore.”
“Okay.”
The door closed with a gentle bump. We stood motionless another moment, listening to footsteps fade away down the hallway. The girl heaved a sigh of relief and collapsed back onto the shower bench.
“Cheers, mate,” she said with a laugh. “That was a close shave.”
