Fever 5 - Shadowfever (24 page)

Now, as I glanced around, it affected me differently than it had the first time. In my absence,
sidhe
-seers had organized the dusty chaos, dug old tomes out of trunks, carried in bookcases, and arranged things for easy access and cataloging.
I love books, they’re in my blood. I wandered the dry stone room, stopping here and there to pass my hands over fragile covers I longed to touch but wasn’t willing to risk harming.
“We’re copying and updating everything,” Kat said. “For millennia, only the Haven was permitted access to these histories and records. In a few more centuries many of them would have been dust.” She gave Rowena a look of gentle rebuke. “Some of them already are.”
“Och, and if you one day carry the scepter of my position, Katrina,” Rowena said sternly, “you’ll come to appreciate the limits of a single lifetime and the difficult choices that must be made.”
“The prophecy,” I said impatiently.
Kat motioned us all to a large oval table. We pulled out chairs and tucked in around it.
“We translated as best we can.”
“Some of the words aren’t Old Irish Gaelic,” Jo said, “but appear to have been invented by a person self-schooled.”
“Jo’s our translator,” Dani said, with equal measures of pride and disdain. “She thinks research is fun. As fecking
if.
”
“Language!” Rowena snapped.
I blinked at her. She was still on that kick? I’d gotten so inured to “fecking” that it hardly even seemed like a cussword to me anymore.
“Ain’t your problem no more. You ain’t the boss of me.” Dani gave Rowena a hard stare.
“Och, and you’re so happy on your own, are you, Danielle O’Malley? Your mam would rise from her grave were she to ken her daughter left the abbey, consorts with a Fae prince and others of dubious blood, and takes orders from none at the tender age of ten and three.”
“Don’t give me no tender-age bunk,” Dani growled. “ ’Sides, I’m gonna be ten and
four
soon.” She beamed around the table. “February twentieth, don’t forget. I like chocolate cake. Not yellow. Hate fruit in my cakes. Chocolate on chocolate, the more the better.”
“If you two can’t be quiet, leave,” I said.
The book Kat opened was surprisingly small, thin, clad in dull brown leather, and tied with a worn leather cord. “Moreena Bean lived in these walls a bit over a thousand years ago.”
“A
sidhe
-seer whose gift was vision?” I guessed.
Kat shook her head. “No, a washerwoman for the abbess. They called her Mad Morry for her ramblings, ridiculed her insistence that dreams were as real as those events we lived. Mad Morry believed life was not a thing shaped of past or present but possibles. She believed that every moment was a new stone tossed into a loch, causing ripples that those ‘revered among women’ for whom she toiled were too dull of mind to see. She claimed to behold the entire loch, each and every stone. She said she was not mad, merely overwhelmed.” Kat smiled faintly. “Much of what she’s written makes no sense whatsoever. If it has come to pass, we can’t tie it to current times or understand her signs. If all she penned in these pages is supposed to pass in order, we are only at the beginning of her predictions. A mere twenty pages in, she tells of the escape of the
Sinsar Dubh.
”
“She actually calls it that?”
“Nothing in here is ever that clear. She writes of a great evil that slumbers beneath our abbey, that will escape, aided by ‘one in the highest circle.’ ”
“A washerwoman knew of the Haven?” I exclaimed.
“Like as not, she eavesdropped on her betters,” Rowena pronounced.
I rolled my eyes. “Elitist to the core, aren’t you?”
Kat removed a sheet of yellow legal pad upon which Jo had scribbled a translation and handed it to me.
“There’s a great deal of rambling before she gets to the point,” Jo told me. “This was a washerwoman circa 1000 A.D., who’d never seen a car, a plane, a cell phone, an earthquake, and had no words to describe things. She goes on and on about ‘in the day of,’ in an effort to define when this event would take place. I focused on translating only what pertained to the
Sinsar Dubh
itself. I’m still working on the rest of her predictions, but it’s slow going.”
I scanned it, eager to find proof of my heroic role, or at least no proof of a villainous one.

The Beast will break free and scourge the earth. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot be damaged. An unholy tree, it will grow new leaves. It must be woven
. (
Walled? Caged?
)
From the mightiest bloodlines come two: If the one dies young, the other who longs for death will hunt it. Jewels from icy cliffs laid to the east, west, north, and south will make the three faces one. Five of the hidden barrier will chant as the jewels are laid, and one who burns pure
(
burned on a pyre?
)
will return it to the place from which it escaped. If the inhabited … possessed
(
not sure of this word … transformed?
)
seals it in the heart of darkness, it will slumber, with one eye open
.

Jo sniffed. “I did the best I could what with the woman not spelling a single word the same way twice.”
“Would it’ve killed her to be a little more specific?” Dani groused.
“She probably thought she
was
being specific,” I said. The nuances of language changed constantly, especially dialect and lingo. “Really, Dani, who’d be able to translate ‘dude—sucky’ a thousand years from now?”
But it wasn’t only language that compounded things. Communicating a dream was difficult. I’d been so troubled by my Cold Place dreams in middle school that I’d finally told Daddy I was having a recurring nightmare. He’d encouraged me to write it down, and together we’d tried to decide what it meant.
Logical, pragmatic Jack Lane believed the brain was like a vast computer, and dreams were the conscious mind’s way of backing up and storing the day’s events in the subconscious, filing away memories and organizing lessons. But he’d also believed that if a dream kept recurring, it suggested the mind or heart was having a problem dealing with something.
He’d proposed that my dream reflected a child’s natural fear of losing her mother, but even at ten, that hadn’t quite rung true for me. Now I wondered if Daddy had secretly worried that the recurring dream had something to do with the biological mother I’d lost, that perhaps I’d been trapped somewhere cold, forced to watch her die.
That was what I’d been thinking, too, until my recent experience in the White Mansion with the concubine and king, when I’d realized she
was
the woman from my dreams, coupled with my latest dream, where watching her die felt like
I
had perished. Now I was troubled by an entirely different possibility.
Regardless, when I’d attempted to write down my Cold Place dream, it had come out looking a lot like this prophecy: vague, dreamy, and confusing as hell.
“Besides, we think we have it sorted out,” Jo said. “The word ‘Keltar’ means magic mantle. The clan of the Keltar, or MacKeltar, served as Druids to the Tuatha Dé Danann thousands of years ago, when the Fae still lived among us. When the Compact was negotiated and the Fae retired from our world, they left the Keltar in charge of honoring the Compact and protecting the old lore.”
“And we’ve learned there are five male Druids living,” said Mary.
“Dageus, Drustan, Cian, Christian, and Christopher,” Jo said. “We’ve already dispatched a message to them, asking them to join us here.”
Unfortunately, Christian was going to be a problem.
“You said you knew where the four stones are,” Kat said.
I nodded.
“So all we need is you to tell us where the Book is, one of the Keltar to pick it up and bring it here, the four stones laid around it, and the five of them to re-inter it with whatever binding song or chant they know. It sounds like one of them will know whatever needs to be done at the end. I spoke to one of their wives, and she seemed to understand what was meant by ‘the inhabited or possessed.’ ”
“Re-inter it where?” I demanded, watching Rowena closely. It looked as if my only role in the entire matter was to track it. This entire time I’d been feeling as if I had to do it all, but my part in the prophecy was really very small. There was nothing in the prophecy about me that was bad. Just that Alina might die and I would long for death—been there, done that. I felt a huge weight slip from my shoulders. There were five other people responsible for the bulk of it. It was all I could do not to punch the air with a fist and shout,
Yes!
“Where it was before,” she said coolly.
“And where’s that?”
“Down the corridor Dani said you couldn’t pass,” Jo said.
The Grand Mistress shot her a quelling look.
“Can you get past the woman who guards it?” I asked Rowena.
“Don’t fash yourself with my business, girl. I’ll do my part. You do yours.”
“V’lane couldn’t get past it, either,” I fished, wondering why.
“No Fae can.” Smugness dripped from her words, and I knew she’d had something to do with that.
“Who is the woman that guards the hall?”
Jo answered, “The last known leader of the Haven.”
Rowena’s current Haven was cloaked in secrecy. “You mean my mother?”
“Isla was not your mother! She had only one child,” Rowena snapped.
“Then who am I?”
“Precisely.” She managed to try, convict, and execute me with the single word.
“The prophecy said there were two of us. One dies young, the other longs for death.” Had she and I been alone, I wasn’t sure how far I would have gone to force answers from her, but I knew this much: I wouldn’t have liked myself when it was over.
“Like as not, a washerwoman ate a bad bit of fish, had dreams on an uneasy stomach, and declared herself a prophet. The word is bloodlines. Plural.”
“Her spelling was appalling. There are extra letters in many words,” Jo said.
“You’ll need to neutralize those particular wards,” I said coolly.
“There will be no Fae present when we seal the abomination away!”
“V’lane won’t give me the stone,” I told her. “There’s no way he’ll just hand it over.”
“Spread your legs for another Fae and whore it out of him,” she said flatly. “Then you will turn them all over to us. There is no need for you to be present when the ritual is performed.”
My cheeks pinked, and it infuriated me. This old woman got under my skin like nobody else could. I wondered if my mother—
Isla
, I corrected hastily—had felt the same. I’d been so elated to discover the identity of my biological mother, and now, with everyone telling me she’d had only one child, I felt as if not only my mother had been stolen away from me but maybe even my sister as well. I’d never felt so alone in all my life.
“Feck you, old woman,” I said.
“Don’t waste it on me,” she retorted. “I’m not the one with the stone.”
“What was it you said to me once? Wait—I remember.” I used Voice at the full extent of my power when I said, “
Haud yer whist, Rowena.
”
“Mac,” Kat warned.
“She’s allowed to call me names but I can’t tell her to shut up?”
“Sure, and you can, on equal ground, without compulsion. You rely on such powers in times of no need, you run the risk of losing what makes you human. You’ve a hot temper and a hotter heart. You need to cool them both.”
“
You may speak, Rowena.
” Voice had never sounded so pissy when Barrons used it.
“Your loyalty must be first to us, the
sidhe
-seers,” she said instantly.
“Do you want the walls back up, Rowena?” I demanded.
“Och, and of course I do!”
“Then the Seelie will have to be involved. Once the Book is re-interred, the queen will need to come search it for the Song of Making—”
“The Song of Making is in the
Sinsar Dubh
?” she exclaimed.
“The queen believes fragments of it are, and from them she can re-create the entire Song.”
“And so certain you are you wish that to happen?”
“You don’t want the Unseelie locked away again?”
“Aye, I do. But they’ve been without the Song of Making since long before we encountered them. If the Fae regain that ancient melody, their power will once again be limitless. Have you any idea what those times might have been like? Are you so certain the human race would survive it?”
I blinked at her in startled silence. I’d been so focused on getting the Unseelie reimprisoned and sending the Seelie back to their court that I’d not deeply examined the possible repercussions of restoring the Song of Making to the Fae. It must have shown on my face, because Rowena’s tone softened when she said, “Och, so you’re not a complete fool.”
I gave her a look. “I’ve had a lot on my plate. And I sure learned Voice fast, didn’t I? But we have other, more-immediate problems: I know Christian MacKeltar, and he’s missing. He’s been trapped inside the Silvers since Halloween. We can’t do a thing until we find him.”
“In the Silvers?” Kat exclaimed. “We can’t go in the Silvers! None can!” “I was there myself recently. It can be done.”
Rowena appraised me. “You’ve been in the Silvers?”
“I stood in the Hall of All Days,” I said, and was surprised to hear a touch of pride in my voice. I finally allowed myself to ask the question that had been gnawing at me ever since I’d heard there were two prophecies and, in one of them, I supposedly doomed the world. Was it really about me? Or was it as vague as this one? “I heard there were two prophecies. Where’s the other one?”
Kat and Jo exchanged uneasy glances.
“The washerwoman rambled ’til the end of the page about how many stones there were to throw into a loch at any given moment and that some were more possible than others,” Jo said. “She claimed she dreamed of dozens such stones, but only two seemed likely. The first could save us. The second was far more likely to doom us.”
I nodded impatiently. “I know. So what’s the second prophecy?”
Kat handed me the slim volume. “Turn the page.”
“I can’t read Old Irish Gaelic.”
“Just turn it.”
I did. Because the ink she’d used had stained through the sheets of vellum bound into the thin journal, Mad Morry had written on only one side of the page. The next page was missing. Small pieces of parchment and torn threads protruded from the binding. “Someone tore it out?” I said disbelievingly.
“A good while ago. This is one of the first volumes we cataloged once you removed the wards protecting the library. We found it open, on a table, with this page and several others missing. We suspect it was whoever destroyed the wards outside your cell when you were
Pri-ya
,” Kat said.
“There’s a traitor in the abbey,” Jo said. “And whoever it is either translates as well as me or took random pages.”
“To have bypassed my wards and gained access to this library,” Rowena added grimly, “it could only have been one of my trusted Haven.”