by E. E. Holmes
“I do hope you’re right, my dear. I do hope so,” Mrs. Mistlemoore said, and she gave me a wan smile. “I’m going to consult with the Scribes and see if we can’t make some progress with your suggestion. Please excuse me.” With a quick gesture to all of us, she backed into the ward again and the door swung shut behind her.
Finn nodded curtly at me. “Well done,” he said. “That may very well make a difference.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“It sounded like a good idea to me,” Róisín said. “We should be trying anything at this point, shouldn’t we?”
Bertie, who was still standing just behind Finn, looked sadly deflated. “I don’t know what to do for the best,” he said. “ought I to stay here? To find Miss Phoebe? The Caomhnóir handbook was not at all clear in its instructions for handling this type of situation.”
“There’s nothing you can do for Savannah here,” Finn said, closing his eyes in an attempt to control his annoyance. “She is under the constant supervision of the staff. Phoebe is the vulnerable one right now. You should focus your attentions on her in case she is the next to fall to a Shard.”
Bertie nodded thoughtfully. “Hmm… yes, you make a fair point. The statute about preferential protection could be interpreted as such, and yet I question—”
“Go. Phoebe. Now,” Finn said through gritted teeth.
“Right-o,” Bertie muttered, his face blazing red as he scurried off.
I took a breath that seemed to stagnate in my lungs. “I need to get out of here. Go for a walk. I feel like I’m suffocating in here.”
Without saying goodbye to anyone, I turned and headed down the hallway, walking as quickly as I could.
“Jess. Jess!” Finn was following at a jog. He caught up with me easily with his annoyingly long strides. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I just told you. For a walk,” I said without slowing down.
“It’s December. It’s freezing outside. The Caomhnóir are guarding all the exits,” Finn reminded me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll get my jacket. They aren’t forcing people to stay inside the castle, just inside the grounds.”
“Even so—” Finn began, but I held up a hand.
“Look, if you want to come with me, that’s fine,” I said. “But I’m going. I just… I can’t be inside this castle right now.”
My voice broke with the last word, and I gave myself away. Finn must have heard it, because he didn’t argue with me again. He marched along silently beside me, waiting as I retrieved my coat from my room and then tailing me all the way down to the entrance hall. After a short, whispered exchange with one of the Caomhnóir guarding them, the great front doors swung reluctantly forward to release us into the night.
§
It was glorious, that fresh air. I drank it in, though it seared my lungs and made my eyes water. It felt clean, as though each breath of air in the castle was contaminated with fear, tainted with the possibility that, as you took it into your lungs, you were infecting yourself.
I set out across the barren stretch of lawn, frosted blades of grass snapping under my feet. I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to put the castle behind me.
“Jess,” Finn said, after a solid twenty minutes of walking. His voice sounded more like his real voice now, instead of the one he’d been using since we’d arrived here, the one that was layered over with indifference. I could have cried just hearing it, my name, spoken in that voice.
“What?” I asked. I had to unclench my teeth to answer him, and now they wouldn’t stop chattering.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I just… I can’t be in there right now,” I said.
“We can’t stay out here, though,” Finn said coaxingly. “We’re both going to freeze.”
I wanted to argue with him, but I could barely feel my face. “Don’t make me go back in there,” I said, though I was not sure he heard me. A needling wind seemed to suck the words right out of my mouth and carry them off into the air.
“I know a place where we can talk,” Finn said. “Follow me.”
He surged past me and struck out for the forest on the far side of the grounds. I followed him without asking where we were going, just so grateful that he wasn’t insisting on dragging me back to the castle. We entered the cover of the trees and struck out along a path I knew.
“Finn? You do know where this path leads, don’t you?” I asked him, slowing to a stop.
He turned and smiled reassuringly at me. “Don’t worry. We’re not following it to the end. There’s a turn off. Come on.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and followed. This winding path ended in the ruins of the Fairhaven príosún, an ancient prison that once housed those who committed crimes against the Durupinen. All of those prisoners were long gone, of course, but their pain and anger and fear lived on in a dangerous creature called the Elemental. It lurked among the ruins, feeding on the negative emotions of any person unlucky enough to cross its path. I had come face to face with it twice, and I had absolutely no desire to do so again.
As Finn had promised, a half-hidden fork in the path veered away from the príosún, and after a few more minutes of walking, a small stone hut loomed out of the darkness.
“What is this?” I asked warily.
“It used to be a sentinel checkpoint for Caomhnóir, back when Fairhaven was used as a battle ground,” Finn said. “I hid in it three years ago, when I snuck back onto the grounds after…” After he abandoned us at the Traveler camp. He didn’t want to say it, and I didn’t want to remember it, so neither of us bothered to complete the sentence out loud. “Now it’s just a ruin, like the príosún, left to rot. I found it while I was still a Novitiate. I used to come here to write, sometimes.”
He pushed the door open and disappeared into the opening. After a few moments, a light flared, illuminating the interior. I walked forward and ducked inside.
The hut only had one small room, perfectly circular, with two windows set into the stone walls. The light came from an ancient oil lamp hung on a hook. It smoked and sputtered, filling the place with a rich, waxy sort of smell. The flickering light revealed several straw mattresses heaped with blankets, a small table with two stools set under it, and a cast iron, pot-bellied stove with a pipe that ran up past the wooden rafters and disappeared into the thatch of the roof. Finn was already kneeling beside the stove, shoving logs through the door on the front. Before long, a fire blazed in the grate and the tiny space was filled with warmth that sent an aching feeling back into my extremities.
“I’m just picturing you sitting out here in your abandoned cabin in the woods, brooding and writing in your journals,” I said, rubbing at my fingers to help the blood flow. “It’s just so… Thoreau.”
Finn grinned. “Like that, do you?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Misanthropic writers are so sexy.”
He stood up, brushed off his hands, and gestured grandly to the stove. “We’ll be defrosted in no time.”
“Does anyone else know about this place?” I asked, moving a few steps closer to the fire.
“No,” Finn said. “Or if they do, they don’t bother with it. Every time I’ve come back here, it’s been just as I left it. I brought those blankets down from the barracks and chopped this wood. The key is always right where I’ve hidden it. No one has ever found me here, in all the years I’ve used it. So, let’s talk.”
He pulled the stools out from under the table and set them both in front of the fire. He sat down on one and patted the seat of the other. I sunk onto it, basking in the warmth from the flames.
“Talk to me,” Finn said, after a few silent moments. “Why did you need to get out of there so badly?”
“It’s just everything,” I said sighing. “I know I should have been afraid of the Shards already, and I was. I watched Catriona and Siobhán both get infected. It should have been very real to me already. But…” I shook my head
, swallowing back an urge to cry.
“I know,” Finn said. “Savvy is one of your best mates. It’s different.”
I nodded. “And that damn castle already makes me feel claustrophobic to begin with. I hate being back here. I hate that every time I walk into the Grand Council Room, I feel like I’m on trial for my life. I hate the stares and the assumptions. I hate that I have to put everything in my life on hold to be here. And most of all I hate that you and I have to turn back into strangers to do it.”
“We’ll be out of here soon,” Finn said soothingly.
“Not soon enough,” I said.
I looked up. He was staring into my eyes with a look I knew, a look that sent my heart into my throat.
The look before a kiss.
He pulled me into him and kissed me like he hadn’t been able to since we’d come here, a kiss without hesitation or fear. I melted into it.
“Oh God, I miss you so much,” I said, my lips still pressed against his lips.
“I’m right here,” he said.
“You are, but you’re not. That’s what makes it worse,” I said.
Maybe it was to escape the fear of what was happening back at the castle. Maybe it was the fact that his lips burned every remnant of good sense from my brain. But whatever it was, I let it take me over. I stopped thinking. I pulled him down on top of me, right onto the pile of blankets and mattresses and God knew what else and let the delicious weight of him crush the last of my fear right out of me.
Every minute we’d been forced to act like indifferent strangers only served to fuel the hunger as we kissed each other, as he tugged at the buttons of my jacket, as I flung his cloak impatiently to the floor beside us. And in that moment, I didn’t care what risk we might be taking, or who might come bursting in the door.
Let them find us, I thought. Let them try to pry us apart. I fucking dare them.
§
“So much for staying away from each other while at Fairhaven,” I said.
Finn chuckled, a deep throaty sound. “Yes, there’s that plan scuppered. I really do like this hair, you know.” He was twirling a strand of it between his fingers.
I laughed. “I’ll be sure to tell Milo.”
Milo? Why Milo?”
“Any and all fashion decisions I make for the rest of my life are to be fully credited to him, apparently.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Milo’s just having an afterlife crisis, I think. If he wants credit for the vast collection of oversized black sweaters and scarves I bury myself in while we’re here, he’s welcome to it.”
“You really don’t even know how very beautiful you are,” he added, running a finger along the curve of my jaw.
I snorted and jerked my head away, hoping he wouldn’t notice the heat and color now flooding my cheeks. “Please. I know exactly how beautiful I am. I’m a freaking bombshell.”
Finn smiled. “I’m serious, you know.”
“So am I. You better be careful, Carey. I’m totally out of your league.”
The smile faded a little as he found my eyes again. “You don’t need to keep that armor on with me, you know. You’d feel a lot freer without it.”
I dropped my eyes to my own hands, which were steadily shredding away at a frayed spot on the edge of the blanket we were lying on. “You seriously underestimate armor. It gets a bad rap, but actually it’s very warm and comfy in here, thanks.”
“Jess…”
“I fought for this armor, you know,” I said, and my voice was angrier than I’d thought it would be when I opened my mouth. “I wasn’t born with it. No one handed it to me. I earned the right to every single inch of it. Then I tested it, and I found every chink, and I filled them. This armor is a fucking masterpiece.”
“It is impressive, yes,” Finn said, with an air of surrender. “I suppose I was rather hoping you might make some room for me in there. It feels that since we’ve been here—and I don’t think I’m wrong—that you’ve been pulling away from me. Do you deny it?”
Was there any point in lying to him? “No.”
“What can I do to close the distance, Jess? How can I convince you to keep a space for me in there?”
The frayed spot on the blanket was starting to unravel nicely. I kept at it. “Here’s the thing with that,” I said. “I tried to do that a few years ago. I opened up to you. It didn’t go so well, so I reinforced things. It gets harder and harder to get this thing off.”
“I know. That’s my fault. I’m here now, though. I’m right here,” he said. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I believe it right now,” I said. “But what about in a week? In a month? In a year? We’re hiding, Finn, and it’s only a matter of time before someone finds us. And then what?”
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “I can’t predict the future, Jess.”
“That’s a bullshit answer and you know it,” I said, dropping the blanket in frustration and sitting up. “This, right now—sneaking away to a remote place, looking over our shoulders—this is it. This is the most that we can ever be! Don’t you want more than that?”
“You know I do.”
“I just never envisioned love being like this. I mean, I’m not saying I want to marry you or anything,” I said swiftly, feeling a strange panic welling in my chest. “I’m not trying to fly ahead to these crazy, huge commitments or anything. Maybe things will work out between us and maybe they won’t. Maybe you’ll always think I’m beautiful, and I’ll always think you’re adorably deluded about that fact. Or maybe we’ll wake up one day and whatever this is between us will have cooled and solidified into something heavy that weighs us down, until one of us ends it. I don’t know. You don’t know. But one thing I know for sure is that we’ll never get the chance to find out. We’ll never walk out in the sunlight holding hands. We’ll never…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. A stream of images was flooding through my head, like flashes of memory from a Crossing spirit, images from another life, a happier one; walking along a beach hand in hand; moving boxes together into an apartment; running through the rain to his waiting car; even—insanely—him running a hand over my rounded belly. I didn’t even know if I wanted these things. Some of them scared the shit out of me. I just knew that having the choices ripped out of my hands was as bad as having them forced upon me.
“I hate that this was our only time together in a week. I hate sneaking around like I’m your goddamned mistress. I hate watching you check to make sure you don’t smell like my perfume,” I said, as I watched him sniff surreptitiously at the collar of his shirt.
Finn looked affronted. “I don’t think of you as my—”
“I know that, but it doesn’t change how I feel,” I said. “And if we’re not going to try to get the rule changed, then I’m always going to feel this way.”
“We’ve already discussed this,” Finn said sharply. “You know why we can’t do that.”
“I could if Hannah and I took that Council seat,” I said.
Finn laughed a sharp, short bark, then caught sight of my expression. “You’re not serious, are you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Finn turned to face me. “You hate it here. All you’ve said since we’ve arrived is how much you loathe this place and how you can’t wait to get home.”
“I do hate it here. But I’m starting to think I hate our permanent state of limbo more.”
“And how exactly do you think taking a seat on the Council would fix that?” Finn asked.
“It might not,” I said. “But it would give me a chance to do something about these stupid rules that are keeping us apart.”
“And if you can’t change them? If they refuse to lift the sanctions on Durupinen/Caomhnóir relationships?”
“We’ll be no worse off than we are right now,” I said. I could feel my temper breaking the barriers with which I was trying to keep it in check.
“Except if they find out about us. Which of course they
will. We’ve been through this, Jess. Seamus already knows about us. Petitioning to change that rule will be tantamount to openly declaring our love for each other.”
“He says as though that would be the worst thing in the world,” I said through gritted teeth.
“It will be the worst thing in the world if it means they separate us, which they will undoubtedly do,” Finn shot back.
“So, what if you just… quit?” I blurted out. I hadn’t meant to say it. I barely realized I was thinking it, but the half-formed thought was out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Finn froze. “Quit.”
“I didn’t… I mean, I don’t… well, yeah,” I muttered.
“You think I should quit,” he repeated.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I was angry at how small my voice was. I took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean to say that, but… would you ever consider that?”
His face was a mask. His mouth was barely moving. “Would you consider it?”
I started. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t quit,” I said.
“Why not?”
I laughed incredulously. “Finn, I am a Gateway. It’s inside me. I can’t turn it off, and I can’t get away from it. If I quit, it would mean nothing; the Gateway would still be there. The spirits would still show up, demanding passage. There’s no quitting this, or else I would have already done it already.”
“I see. So, you think your Calling is inherent and mine is a choice?”
I squirmed uncomfortably. “It’s more of a choice than mine is,” I said, hating the defensive note in my voice.
“I see. I see.”
Finn started pacing. The silence between us spiraled and deepened; I shivered as though the temperature had actually dropped. Finally, he turned to face me, and I had rarely seen him look so angry.
“This is the world I grew up in. It is all I know. My Calling is to be a Caomhnóir, and I have known it as long as I have known my own name. It is in my blood, just as much as being a Durupinen is in yours. This is not some job I can quit. It is who I am, and I resent the fact that you could ever think otherwise.”
