Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (52 page)

Finvarra’s first question was unexpectedly kind.

“How are you feeling?”

“I… fine.”

“We are sorry we had to bring you here when you ought to be resting in the infirmary. Are you in pain?”

“No,” I said, and it was true, at least for the moment. Whatever Mrs. Mistlemoore had given me had left my arms numb and heavy at my sides. I tried not to think of what they might look like under the dressings, or how the pain would come flooding back when the drugs began to wear off.

“I am glad to hear it. We will make this all as quick as possible, so that you can get the rest and recovery you need,” Finvarra said. She turned to Finn. “Thank you for your assistance in escorting Jessica. You are dismissed now with our thanks.”

Finn did not move. “High Priestess, begging your pardon, but I will be staying with her.” Finvarra raised a single eyebrow. “Your services are not required any longer, Mr. Carey.”

“My services are always required, if Jessica asks for them. She has asked me to stay with her. I will stay.” He shifted his weight subtly to settle just a bit closer to me, but Finvarra did not miss it.

Marion stood up, glaring at Finn with utmost contempt. “How dare you talk back to your High Priestess! You are bound by the sacred oath you took to obey her commands and you dare to —”

“My oath is to Jessica and the Clan Sassanaigh. I am honoring it.” Finn’s voice rose like a clarion call over Marion’s words, drowning them out.

She looked too shocked at having been interrupted to go on, and a full few moments ringing silence followed his words before she spoke again.

“You are here to serve the Durupinen. The word of the High Priestess is your highest law,” she said.

“He is not here to serve anyone,” said a new voice. Every head in the room turned in surprise to Carrick, who had materialized from the shadows beside Finvarra as though parting smoke. He inclined his head respectfully to her. “We are protectors, not servants. Our oath is not one of indentured servitude, and we do not bend our skills and decisions to the will of the Durupinen. Our role is just as important and valued to the continuation of the Gateways as your own. This young man is doing his duty. You will not fault him for it.”

Marion turned in exasperation to Finvarra, who was not looking at her, but tracing a finger thoughtfully around her mouth.

“If you remain here, as you say, in fulfillment of your oath,” she began, her penetrating gaze blazing between Finn and me like a searchlight, “then I must conclude that you believe Jessica to be in some kind of danger if she is left here in the company of this Council without you. Am I correct in this assumption?”

Finn did not speak at first, but caught my eye. I gave my head the tiniest shake I could manage, and he blinked. It was too much to hope that Finvarra hadn’t caught the exchange, but I could hope that she would not be able to interpret it.

“High Priestess, look at her. She seemed to be in no danger last night when we parted company, and yet here she is, gravely injured. I don’t yet know how this came to pass, and I’m not sure that she does either, and until we do, I must assume that she could be in danger anywhere. I will stay with her until I understand the nature of this situation, and how she can be best protected from it. I would be remiss in my duties if I did not do so.”

Carrick nodded sharply, looking at Finn for all the world as a proud father might look at his son. Finvarra seemed to be weighing his words very carefully on some internal scale before answering. Finally she said, “Very well. There is some wisdom to what you say. Though I can see that you would have remained regardless, do so now with my open invitation.”

Finn clicked his heels together and bowed formally. “Thank you, High Priestess.”

Marion seemed to melt back into her seat, though not without a last virulent look at Finn. Carrick stepped back and resumed his position just behind Finvarra.

“Let us continue, then,” Finvarra said. “We are here, as you know, because of the most extraordinary drawing with which you’ve covered the entire entry hall. It is my understanding that you have produced psychic drawings before.”

“Yes,” I said.

“How long have you been able to do this?”

“Since last year.”

“And since that time you have been exploring this skill with Fiona, is that right?”

“Yes.”

Finvarra seemed to be waiting for me to elaborate, but when I did not oblige, she turned to the Council benches. “Fiona? Can you give us some details from your sessions about the nature of these drawings?”

“Yes, Priestess,” Fiona said, rising to her feet. She was clutching my leather portfolio from our lessons under her arm, along with a bundle of scrolls. My heart sank. I must have left the portfolio in her office the day of Pierce’s Crossing; I’d been too distraught since then to even notice it was missing. Fiona’s eyes darted to me, and their expression, though brief, seemed to be asking my forgiveness. She walked carefully down the steps to a table that had been placed at the base of the benches. She set the scrolls to the side and lay my portfolio open upon the polished wooden surface. “Jessica came to us with an extensive collection of her own art and an untrained but considerable natural talent for drawing.”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t help but feel a faint hint of pride at the compliment, which was the first one Fiona had ever paid me. I watched as she rifled through the stack of papers in the portfolio and slid one out.

“This,” she said, holding it up for everyone to see, “is the first psychic drawing she ever produced. It was pulled merely from a physical object with an attached spirit, though the spirit was not present at the time.”

I had to crane my neck to see it. It was the drawing of Lydia Tenningsbrook that I had unwittingly produced in my very first class with Pierce. The corners of my eyes began to burn, but I blinked the moisture away impatiently. I didn’t have time to go to pieces over Pierce now; I needed a clear head.

“During her time with me, we have explored her ability, which from the start has been surprisingly sharp and accurate. She has connected with many spirits here at Fairhaven Hall, both in class and outside of it. The detail she has been able to provide through her drawings has been the most rich and specific I have seen in a very long time. However, the information she has sensed and drawn has always been relative to the past or the present. I have never witnessed anything of a prophetic nature.”

My drawings floated amongst the Council, passed from member to member and examined over and over again. I wanted to leap from my seat and snatch them out of their hands. It was a violation. They had no right to touch them. They weren’t theirs; they weren’t even really mine. They belonged to the ghosts who had trusted me enough to depict them, to pour their hearts and lives into me and onto the pages. And right there on the floor of the council room, for the first time since I’d discovered who I was, I felt a surge of protectiveness, almost possessiveness, toward the ghosts that had forced their ways so unceremoniously into my life.

“It was determined through our mentoring sessions,” Fiona continued, “that Jessica is a Muse, not a Prophetess, and we have proceeded accordingly with her training. But the drawings upstairs are, quite obviously, a different story.”

Heads all around the room nodded gravely, and many turned to look at me. I knew I was not imagining the fear and hostility in many of the faces. I could not spare a single emotion for them. My entire being had frozen on the word Prophetess.

Prophetess. The prophecy.

They knew. They had to know.

Finn looked down at me inquisitively, sensing my tension. Whatever it was he saw on my face put him on high alert. He placed a hand firmly on the back of my chair, so that I could feel the pressure of it against my shoulder.

Fiona cleared my portfolio away and unrolled several of the scrolls very carefully. She laid them out on the table deliberately, like pieces of a puzzle. Then she stepped away from them and averted her eyes as though the resulting image made her feel ill.

“As you requested, I’ve brought the records that exist of all of our prophetic art throughout our history. We have come to learn over time that they all relate to a single prophecy, like pieces of a puzzle that have revealed themselves over the centuries. When put together in this configuration, they create a single, continuous image.”

All of the Council members were standing and craning their necks to see the scrolls on the table top. A few filtered down the aisle to get a closer look.

Finvarra called out over their hushed conversations. “Mr. Carey, perhaps you could bring Jessica forward. I think that she needs to see this.”

Keeping one hand against the back of the chair where I could still feel it, Finn stepped behind me and wheeled me forward. It took an unnaturally long time to reach the table, as though the room were some kind of optical illusion– the table never seemed to get any closer. Finally, Finn turned the chair around the side of the table and the image lay before me, pieced together from a dozen tattered and ancient rolls of parchment.

I felt no shock, only a heavy weight of confirmation that dropped like a stone into my gut.

Before me lay the very same image I had gouged onto the walls two floors below us. It bled its horror from scroll to scroll, a continuous scene of utter chaos and despair. And there, at the heart of it all, a tiny, long-haired figure in silhouette, arms raised in the center of the open Gateway.

“This image,” Finvarra said, her voice very quiet, but carrying nevertheless over the stunned silence that had fallen, “depicts a prophecy that was made nearly a millennium ago, about the fall of the Durupinen and the rise of the Necromancers. Marion, please bring the Book of Téigh Anonn.”

Marion hoisted the enormous volume off of her bench and lay it open on Finvarra’s desktop. Finvarra opened it to the very back pages, which appeared to be blank. She held her right hand suspended over them and began to chant silently, her lips moving unnaturally fast. When she opened her eyes again, words had seeped up out of the pages and spread as though someone had spilled them upon the surface.

And she read the words that would change everything.

When Keeper and Protector shall unite
And forth from this forbidden union shall be spawned
Two as one from single womb, and Keepers both,
Then shall the greatest of battles commence.
For One shall be Caller with powers unmatched
To reverse the Gates, and call forth the Hordes
To bend to her will and that of our foes,
And One will have to make the choice
Twixt blood and calling, twixt kindred and kin
For she will have the power of sacrifice to end it all
And leave the world until the end of days
To the Darkness or the Light.

“JESSICA.”

I came back from the far side of the new landscape her words had painted.

“Yes.”

“Have you heard this prophecy before?”

“No.”

“You told Celeste that you do not remember making the drawing in the entry hall.”

“No.”

“Can you give us any understanding of how you came to make that drawing?”

The wall rose up before me. There was no way around it, no way over it. The moment had come to tell them everything, and face the consequences, whatever they may be.

“It was Mary.”

Finvarra stared at me. “Who is Mary?”

“She is one of the ghosts here. You all know her as the Silent Child.”

Muttering began to ripple around the room in unsettled waves. I waited for them to die away.

“She has been trying very hard to communicate with me since the very first day I came here.”

Still Finvarra stared, bewildered.

“I’ve never known the Silent Child to approach or attempt to speak to anyone,” she said.

Again a ripple through the Council, this time of shaking heads. “She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t communicate with anyone at all. She’s been Caged for centuries.”

“Caged?” Finvarra whispered.

“Yes,” I said, a sick, hot anger rising inside me for the pain that Mary had been through. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that not one of you ever realized it? Never once stopped to wonder what kept her here, terrified to approach any of you?”

Silence greeted my words. Here and there, a guilty squirm.

“All of your preaching about our duty to the spirits, about our sacred calling. What bullshit!” I shouted, as impulse shot me up out of my chair.

Finn placed a restraining hand on my shoulder, but the wave of nausea and dizziness landed me back in the seat before I’d even gained my footing. I shoved his hand away.

“You expect us to give up our lives, everything we’ve ever known, to become one of you. Everything that’s ever been important to us — our relationships, our education, our plans for the future — we’re just supposed to hand it all over with a big fucking smile on our faces and if we doubt it for even a second, if we dare to question it, we’re treated like outcasts.