Spirit Ascendancy (23 page)

“How could she do that?” Hannah said. “How could she do that when she knew what I might be, when she spent her own childhood talking to people no one else could see?”

“Would you like to ask her?” Lucida asked.

Hannah looked up into Lucida’s face, where the faintest suggestion of a smile was playing about her lips, but again, Lucida wasn’t going to help her get there.

“What do you mean? I can’t ask her. No one can. She’s gone.”

The smile bloomed, wide and satisfied. “Oh, but my dear little poppet, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. You can.”

Hannah said nothing, though her hands began to tremble violently in her lap.

“You alone have that power. You have control of the spirit world. Do you want your mother to answer your questions? Do you want to hear her reasons, her apologies for yourself? Open the Gateway. Call her back. Bring her before you. Demand your answers and your portion of truth. She owes you that, surely.”

“I… I could see my mother? I could talk to her?”

“Yes. You alone hold the key to that door. Anything you ever wanted to tell her, you could finally ensure she would hear. Any explanation you are pining for, you could demand it from her.”

“No,” Hannah said, and she shook her head so violently it was as though she were trying to dislodge the very words she had just heard. “Even if it’s true—even if I could do that, it wouldn’t be right. Spirits want to be on the other side. They are meant to be there. Bringing them back would be terrible for them, wouldn’t it?”

“Have you ever asked one of the other Durupinen what is on the other side of the Gateway?” Lucida asked.

“Yes,” Hannah said.

“And what did they tell you?”

“That we aren’t meant to know what’s on the other side. It isn’t our job to know. We’re just supposed to send the spirits across and trust to the fact that they are supposed to be there.”

“And were you satisfied with that answer?” Lucida asked, twirling her finger around a tendril of her own hair.

“No. I accepted it, but I wouldn’t say I was satisfied.”

“I should hope not,” Lucida said, “because I remember asking the same question and getting the same answer. And I remember having a knot in my stomach every time I closed that Gateway after a crossing, wondering if I could just keep sending them blindly into the unknown. What if it isn’t the right place for them?”

“Why would they want to go so badly, if it wasn’t the right place for them?” Hannah asked, though a flutter in her voice betrayed her fear.

“When do we as human beings ever want the things that are best for us?” Lucida asked. “Think of the things we pine for and lust for. None of them are good for us. Why would our spirits be any different?”

Hannah could not, or would not, answer.

“The Necromancers aren’t willing to take anything for granted. They believe that the more we know, the better prepared we are. They want to know everything they can about the other side. Knowledge is power, Hannah, and you are the ultimate source of it, love.”

Hannah seemed to have lost the ability to argue. Lucida pressed her advantage. “I know you want to do right by the spirits, and that’s admirable. But what about doing right by yourself? What of taking back what’s rightfully yours? You have only begun to understand what your powers can do. The Durupinen don’t want you to explore it. But you owe nothing to them, Hannah. Nothing to them, and nothing to the spirits. You’ve already given enough. Aren’t you tired of being the victim? Aren’t you exhausted living a life for others, when you could finally be living your life for yourself?”

“Yes.” It was a tiny word. Tiny but so very, very important.

“Good girl. Of course you are. So when Neil comes to ask for your decision?” Lucida asked.

Hannah didn’t answer right away. She was looking down at her own hands in her lap, turning them over, running her fingers over the crisscrossing little scars, the reminders of her pain, the footprints left behind by the ghosts that had trodden across her childhood and destroyed any hope she’d ever had for normalcy. And they were nothing—nothing to the scars she must surely carry inside her.

“Yes.”

We disconnected with a violent motion that left me reeling. Milo lay gasping on the ground again, but even as I looked at him, he began struggling to rise.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s what they’ve been waiting for. We need to find Ileana, now.”

“Wait, Milo,” I said. “Just wait a second!”

“Are you out of your damn mind?” he shouted. “What the hell are we waiting for?”

“Because she isn’t going to do anything about it!” I cried. “I told you what she said when I brought her the information from last time. They don’t care about stopping her. They’ve given up on any hope of halting this prophecy before it can come to pass.”

“So what? So we just sit here on our asses and let it be? How is that any better than what the travelers are doing?” Milo shouted at me, with much more force than I would have thought he could muster after habitating for so long. “We’ll deserve every doomsday-inspired second of that prophecy if we just hang around and do nothing, Jess.”

“I know that. That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I just don’t think Ileana is the right person to tell. She doesn’t care about getting Hannah out of there. If we go to her with this information, she’s just going to keep us here and force me to Walk every second of the day until Hannah forces the Gateway wide open, and then she’ll probably push me through the goddamn thing.”

 “Okay,” Milo said, and he seemed to be making a concerted effort to calm himself down. “So what do we do, then?”

 “We need to get ourselves out of here, and soon,” I said. “We’ll need to get over their wards and out of the encampment before Ileana suspects anything. She already knows I’m pissed at her, so it shouldn’t come as a huge shock.”

“Don’t you think she’ll have extra protection up, in case we decide to make a break for it?” Milo asked.

“Probably,” I said. “Honestly, I’m surprised she hasn’t trapped me inside that enclosure and forced me to Walk twenty-four hours a day in preparation for the apocalypse. But we can’t worry about that now. We already know how to get across wards. We’ve been doing it for the last fifteen minutes.”

Milo calmed down enough to absorb my words. ‘Okay. And what do we do next, assuming we can escape this place, which I doubt?”

“We keep connecting, as often as we can, with Hannah. At some point, someone is going to say something that will give away their location, especially now that Hannah is going to cooperate.”

Saying it out loud punched a gaping hole in my stomach. She was going through with this. In spite of everything the Necromancers had done to us, to the people we loved, to the bond between us, she was choosing them. I could have been sick then and there, if I hadn’t been trying to stay focused on Milo.

“Right,” he said, clearly fighting his own battle to keep it together. “Right. And all we need to do in the meantime is hide from the Northern Trackers, the Traveler Trackers, and the Necromancers searching for us. Cool. No problem.”

“No problem,” I repeated, and we both savored the sarcasm, in our own bitter ways.

“Jess…”

“Yeah?”

“What she said, about how spirits used to be human…” he voice shook.

“Don’t, Milo. Don’t even think about listening to that bullshit.”

“But she believed it. Hannah believed it.”

“Hannah wasn’t thinking of you when she accepted that.”

“I know. That’s the point. She wasn’t thinking of me. How could she be talking about spirits and not remember me? We’ve lost her, haven’t we?”

I swallowed back the fear that was threatening to choke me. “No. Not yet. She’s not lost yet.”

THREE HOURS LATER, I stood outside the Scribes’ wagon, shivering in the moonlight. A chill had crept into the air, or perhaps it was merely my own exhaustion sapping energy and warmth from my body; it had taken the whole three hours for me to gather enough strength to make the walk across the camp. I knocked softly on the knotty wooden door, but the sound still reverberated through my head like I was trying to gain entrance with a battering ram. Flavia poked her nose out of the door like a mole scenting the air and then started violently at the sight of me.

 “Jess! I wasn’t expecting you to come! Ileana told me to wait, but I never thought…what can I do for you?”

“I need your help.”

“Oh, of course! What is it?”

“I’d rather not say out here. Can I come in?”

Flavia nodded and stepped back to let me in.

My first thought was that if I had to move into a traveler camp permanently, I could happily reside in the Scribes’ wagon. It was much larger than any other dwelling I’d seen, fashioned from an old boxcar, and the walls were lined with shelves and cabinets of old books. The floor was covered in a thick red carpet, and the original plush train seats remained, cozied up to wooden tables at which the Scribes set to their work. There was even a small pot-bellied stove in which a fire was crackling merrily. Flavia had clearly just extricated herself from a little nest in the corner; a cup of tea was steaming beside a candlelit chair, a hole visible in the middle of the quilt in which she’d been wrapped. I fought the overwhelming urge to steal her spot while it was still warm.

She indicated a chair across from hers and, reading my mind, pulled open a large chest and handed me another patchwork quilt.

“Tea?”

“Yes, please,” I said, dropping into the chair. It was velvety and smelled like book dust.

When Flavia had handed me a cup of steaming tea and pulled the blinds on the windows, she sat again and fixed me with an analytic gaze, like my reason for coming might be written on my face.

“What is it, Jess?”

“Are we alone?”

“Yes. Yasha’s already gone to bed.”

I could only assume Yasha was one of the other Scribes, but I didn’t bother to confirm this. “I need to ask for your help with something, but before I do, I just need you to promise me something.”

Flavia looked nervous. “I will if I can,” she said.

“If you can’t help me with what I’m about to ask, that’s okay. I don’t want to get you in trouble, and I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with. You’ve been really nice to me, and I’m sure I’d never have learned to Walk without your help. But if you can’t or don’t want to do it, will you just promise me that you won’t tell anyone I asked?”

Flavia considered this with a thoughtfully furrowed brow. After a moment, her expression cleared. “Yes. I think I can promise that. Yes. Okay, I give you my word.”

I relaxed just enough to take a sip of tea. I felt it warm me all the way down into my stomach. “Do you remember the other day, when Milo came into the enclosure to take over my body?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And I told you that we had co-habitated before, and that it had gotten us across the Fairhaven wards without detection?”

Flavia nodded again. “Yes.”

“Well, do you think you could help me figure out if that would work here?”

“You mean you want to leave the encampment undetected?” Flavia asked.

“Yes.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, Flavia chewing her lip in apparent agitation. Finally she said, “Is that all you’re asking me for? Just my opinion on whether it will work?”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “Just some information on how the encampment is protected would be helpful.”

“Can you tell me why you are trying to leave? If I promise not to tell anyone?” Flavia asked.

It was my turn to consider. “Yes. If you help me determine whether I can actually leave, I’ll tell you why I’m doing it.”

Flavia’s expression seemed to clear. Perhaps it was because I was confiding in her, but she smiled at me. “Alright, then.”

I smiled back. “Great, thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I might not have the information you need. But,” she slid out of the chair and stood before the nearest shelf, scanning the bindings, “I must admit that after you told me about it, I looked into it myself.”

My smile widened into a grin. “Of course you did.”

Flavia giggled. “What can I say, I’m a sucker for an academic theory. I also happen to live in the most oppressively boring subculture in the universe, so having a reliable escape route sounded pretty appealing.” She ran her finger to the top of a large red volume and pulled it from the shelf. She lay it open on the table between our chairs and gently blew a smattering of dust from its pages.

I suddenly realized, as I watched her thumb through the book, that she reminded me strongly of Tia, and I thought my heart would burst with both the pain of missing her and the fear that danger would find her wherever she was hidden. I’d heard nothing since she went into hiding. I had to assume that no news was good news, but it still didn’t calm the gnawing feeling in my chest that something could have happened to my best friend and that it was all my fault.

“Are you okay? You look… worried.” Flavia was staring at me, a frown of concern pulling down the corners of her mouth.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to rearrange my features into a more neutral expression. “I just have a little too much on my mind right now.”

“Fate of the living and the dead resting on your shoulders? Yes, I’d say you have quite enough to be getting along with,” Flavia said, fumbling with a pair of dark-framed reading glasses she had tucked into her hair for safe-keeping. “Ah, here we are,” she said as she perched them on her nose. “It says here, ‘The grounds of Fairhaven Hall and many other Durupinen strongholds employ non-binding ward boundaries, which allow spirits to wander in and out freely. Patrolling the boundaries falls to the Caomhnóir, who can expel spirits at their discretion. But as the wards only alert them when broken by living people, the borders must be policed with regularity, and spirits must be further warded from entering the castle and other buildings on the grounds.”

She looked expectantly up at me. “Uh, yeah, that sounds about right,” I said.

“There follows a list of the types of wards used,” Flavia said, turning the page and running her finger down it. “I’ve cross-referenced them with the wards used to protect the encampment, and they are identical. We may do some things differently around here, but when it comes to warding our borders, we all seem to follow the same rules.”

“So then, our co-habitation trick should work again?”

“Yes, I don’t see why not,” Flavia said. “If it worked at Fairhaven, it will work here. You are free to leave the encampment undetected, although,” she closed the book and frowned, “I can’t imagine you will get far. Once our Trackers and other Caomhnóir know you are gone, they will surely come after you. And I must say that they are very good at their jobs.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” I said. “I really just needed to know if we could get out. We’re already going to have a veritable army of people looking for us, so what’s a few more?”

“You should use the boundary near Irina’s wagon,” Flavia said, stowing the book back on the shelf. “The only Caomhnóir on duty there is Andrei, and he’s a… well, he’s not very reliable. He’s supposed to have a partner, but none of the other Caomhnóir will work with him.”

“Anca’s grandfather? Yes, I met him. I think we’ll be able to get by him without too much trouble,” I said, thinking that, if nothing else, we would simply leave something stronger than usual in his hidden flask and wait for him to pass out.

“So, why are you leaving?” Flavia asked, tucking herself back into her chair.

“How much did Ileana tell you about our… disagreement?”

“Nothing, but the story has spread like wildfire. There is no such thing as a secret when you live in a traveler camp,” Flavia said with a wry smile. “You sneeze in the privacy of your own bed in the middle of the night, and a hundred people say ‘God bless you’ and the other hundred hand you a handkerchief. And we’re also notorious gossips; it’s coded in our DNA. We’re all pretty used to it.”

“Right. Well, she’s decided that the prophecy is going to happen no matter what we do to stop it, but I haven’t given up. Someone needs to look for my sister, and not just to keep tabs on her, but to actually get her out of… wherever the hell it is they have her,” I said. “And since we’ve run out of people willing to help us, that someone has to be me.”

Flavia was a scholar. She could have lectured me about the likelihood of the prophecy coming to fruition, or the many references throughout history that pointed to its fulfillment. Hell, she probably could have written a book about how my lack of a solid plan would lead to certain disaster. But she didn’t. Instead she said, “No one can say for certain what may happen. But surely we cannot complain about it if we choose to do nothing.”

“Exactly.”

I took a long sip of tea, trying to frame a question. “Do you think,” I asked, “there’s a possibility that she’s already done it?”

Flavia’s brow furrowed in confusion. “That who’s done what?”

“Sorry. I mean, do you think there’s any chance that Hannah has already done what the Necromancers want her to do, and reversed the Gateway?”

Flavia looked startled. “I don’t think so. We would know, surely.”

“But how will we know? What will happen?”

“I don’t know. No one does. We won’t know until it happens. But the consequences have been foretold to be dire, so I think it will be obvious somehow. An upsurge in spirit activity. Disturbances across our own Gateways. And of course, the appearance of the Wraiths.”

My hands tightened around my teacup. “Those are the ghost zombie things Ileana was talking about, right?”

“Is that really the first you’d heard of them? Didn’t your own Council tell you about them?”

“Flavia, no one even told me about being a Durupinen until a few months ago,” I said. “And even then, no one seemed to think it important to mention the prophecy until three weeks ago.”

Flavia shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s mind-boggling how little you’ve been told, when it concerns you so closely.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“It’s a sad thought, isn’t it, that sometimes a spirit can get trapped in the Aether, the space between the worlds, instead of crossing all the way through? And the worst part is, there’s no way to tell if it’s happened once the spirit enters the Gateway. We just have to assume it’s all gone well. Of course there are certain factors that can increase the likelihood of a spirit getting trapped.”

“Like when Durupinen decide to get a little greedy and leech away some spirit energy during a Crossing,” I said. Even though it hadn’t been my decision, I still writhed with guilt as I said it, knowing it was the reason I was alive.

“Yes, that’s one instance, and an unfortunate one. I understand it is a fairly regular practice in some other clans. Here amongst the Travelers you would be severely punished for such an act.”

“Really? What would they do to you?”

“Your Gateway would be sealed and you would lose your right to guardianship. You would lose both your purpose and your protection.”

My mouth fell open. “Permanently?”

She nodded seriously. “Yes. The Gateway would not be reopened again until the next generation was ready. As you know, that will cause spirits to plague the intended Durupinen until the Gateway is opened again, and there would be no Caomhnóir to help deter them. It’s a terrible punishment, not least because it disturbs the balance.”

I let out a low whistle. “I wish the Northern Clans would take it as seriously as you do.”

“So do I. The number of spirits they have trapped in the Aether is likely to be great. That will mean more Wraiths, if the Gateway is reversed.”

“Can you tell me any more about them? How will we know when we see one?”

 “Well, like I said, there are a few reasons the spirits might be stuck in the Aether. Leeching is one. A spirit could also be torn about his decision to cross, and dissipate his own energy trying to stay behind, or else be weakened for some other reason. If the Gateway is reversed, those spirits will be called back across, but they will be…different.”

“How?”

“They will no longer be themselves. That essential part that makes them human, that knows who they are, will be gone. The trip back across to the world of the living will sap that essence, and all that will return will be a shell, retaining the appearance of the spirit, but with no humanity. Once in this form, they can be controlled completely.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said, sitting up straight, all sleepiness gone. “The blind Summoner!”

“The what?”

“The blind Summoner,” I stared at her, surprised. “Haven’t you heard of them?”

“No, never. What is it?”

“It’s a spirit whose essence has been trapped in a flame, so that you can give it a message to deliver, and…” I closed my eyes. “Of course. I’m such an idiot.”

“What is it?”

“It’s not a Durupinen casting at all, is it? There’s no such thing as a blind Summoner in Durupinen culture, is there?”

Flavia shook her head. “No. I’ve never read a single reference to them anywhere.”

“Of course you haven’t. Because Lucida was already working for the Necromancers. She was already dabbling in their magic, and testing their messed-up theories for herself.” I dropped my face into my hands and kept speaking into them in a muffled voice. “And then she started teaching them to Hannah, to see what she was capable of. I should have known. I knew it was dark, I just knew it. And I told her, I
told
her it wasn’t right.”

“Jess, what are you talking about?” Flavia asked.

“The Necromancers are anticipating the arrival of the Wraiths. They’re experimenting with other ways of controlling spirits and stripping their essence, and they’re using Hannah to do it. God, this is so messed up.”

“They’ve found a way to create Wraiths without the Gateway?” Flavia sounded truly alarmed.