58. Testing
58
TESTING
See the horrors that result when governments are suffered to desert the known laws…
— JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN, “THE DISARMING OF ULSTER”
“ A ll right,” said the Chancellor Mage. “Let’s quiet down.”
When none of the other Council members appeared to be interested in following his command, he looked up to the stone roof and murmured a spell.
The walls chimed like gongs that had been rung. Everyone’s hands clapped to their ears, including mine and Jonathan’s. Vibrations pummeled through my body, making me feel slightly ill until they faded away at last.
It was a threat as much as a demand for silence.
One of the shifters turned and growled. “Was that necessary?”
“It was,” the chancellor replied, turning to us. “There are six Council members present at a table that requires eight. We are in desperate need of replacements. The Council will review this document and interview both Robert Connolly and Jonathan Lynch regarding Mage O’Brien’s will and intent. However, Ms. Whelan must still be tested, both for her abilities and her claims against Mage Lynch. If she is what she claims to be, I think we can all agree to at least discuss an exception to the manifestation rule—particularly if there is someone she is willing to name as a regent until she comes of age.”
Murmurs flooded the table—clearly, none of the Council members had considered the possibility of a “regent.” No doubt they all had fae in mind for the position.
“First, we must verify.” Chancellor Se’s voice rose only slightly. He glanced between Robbie and Jonathan. “My brothers, you may leave her with us.”
Fear struck through me.
Don’t worry . Jonathan’s grip tightened. “I’m afraid not. Where she goes, I go. As her mate, it’s my right.”
“Oh?” The Mage’s head tipped to the side, almost as if he were tasting a command for the first time.
Jonathan straightened. “You want her? I’m coming too.”
The Mage examined Jonathan for a minute, his eyes sparkling the color of bright orange flames.
“But the bond isn’t permanent yet.” Beside us, Celine seemed like she had been waiting to announce that very thing.“Mage Mbotu said as much.”
“We all know the costs of mating in full,” Jonathan snapped. “Considering that Ms. Whelan isn’t manifested, I wouldn’t have dared to interfere with that process. The full mating bond can wait a few years more.” He grimaced at my confusion but continued speaking. “Council members, look and See. The bond is already forming without physical consummation. It is strong enough to demand my presence. Do you deny it?”
The chancellor’s eyes lit up with even more power, and both sirens at the table lifted their hands again toward us in response. Though I couldn’t physically see the others’ power, I felt the subtle exploration of the single seer’s invisible prodding. No doubt the shifters were using their supernatural olfactory senses too.
So, we’re not mated? I asked him.
We are. Or will be. It’s…complicated.
And I gather what’s missing is the one thing you avoid.
Guilt threaded through his touch, though he quickly pulled it back. You didn’t know everything. Now you do. And I…it should be your choice to be my mate. Completely, anyway.
I looked at him, and his green eyes met mine forcefully before he turned back to the Council, his back straightened, chest out, like a warrior ready for battle.
My choice? What about yours?
I made mine some time ago.
Chancellor Se looked down each side of the table and back. Several of the mages nodded.
Something in me relaxed.
“So be it,” he said as if the command was little more than a request for extra linens. “As her mate, you may remain, Dr. Lynch. But you may not touch.”
The fear was back.
I’ll be right here , Jonathan told me.
Then he was gone as his hand released mine.
And despite the fact that I was standing in a room with seven other people once Robbie and Celine had stepped out, I felt more alone than ever.
I was given a chair in front of the Council while Jonathan was instructed to stand by the door, a good ten feet away. It wasn’t far, I told myself. He could reach me in an instant.
But, the other side of my brain argued, every one of these fae could probably destroy me in half that time. I clenched my jaw, chin held high. They didn’t need to see my fear.
“She’s nervous.” Senni rose from his seat as he looked at me. “She can shield after all, but not well. I was able to penetrate it within a few seconds.” He glanced at Jonathan. “She missed her mate. And she was afraid of what we could do to her before he could reach her.” With a tip of his head, he regarded me again. “It’s the first bit of wisdom I’ve Seen from you, girl.”
He was a bard, he said, which meant he could See the past. But the “past” apparently extended up to mere seconds after the present. In other words, he was basically reading my thoughts like a novel.
A few seconds after I thought just that, the seer smiled. It was not a friendly smile. “It’s not exactly Austen. But if you have any secrets, I would not hide them. I will ferret out your stories one way or another, and fighting will only make it more painful.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Jonathan, who met my eyes but didn’t make a gesture either way.
Stay , he seemed to say.
But I didn’t know for sure. How could I?
“Senni, stop playing with the mouse and get on with it.” The female shifter with an American accent spoke up. Her brown eyes met mine, and she vaguely toyed with a long braid the color of a foxtail. “I’d like to run the forest before sunset.”
“Mage Perumal, as the only seer in the Council, you must establish the basic talents of the prospect,” Chancellor Se said. “But that is all you must do. Continue.”
The seer walked around the table, hands steepled in front of his chest as he approached. He came to stand in front of me, and I flinched as his hands dropped.
One black brow lifted. “We are seers. What would we do with our hands?” Then he closed his eyes and started to murmur a spell.
At first, it felt like my head was being swaddled in wool, thick and heavy. Then a pressure grew, and the spell, which had turned into more of a mantra, started to overlap in my mind, like children singing in a round.
I grabbed my head. Heat was building along with the pressure—a hot vise that needed relief.
“ ??????????? ???? !” cried the seer and flung his hand toward the ceiling.
My power—or something like it—followed the gesture like a ribbon, a light show of dust and magic. Every face in the room tipped up to watch the specters dancing across the vaulted rock.
I watched, entranced. “Oh.”
It was…stunning. Me, and yet not me. A facsimile of my power rather than the real thing—or at least all the power I’d Had in the past.
The magic swirled and eddied like a pooling river bed. Then Senni spoke again, and it consolidated into lines of a language I couldn’t read and images I recognized as my memories.
“There,” Senni pointed to a particular line in the text scrolling overhead. “She began late. Small bursts of power when she was eight, ten. Telepathy and bardic reading occurred nearly simultaneously, but she mostly divines in dreams.” He looked down at me with genuine surprise. “And all of it, only through contact? How is that possible?”
I spread my hands on my knees and said nothing. He could See the truth anyway.
“She must touch her subjects to See them,” he translated to the Council. “She has no range because her power has no shape.”
A badly stifled growl sounded behind me.
Chancellor Se held up a hand at Jonathan, his eyes flickering with power. “You will remain seated and silent, Dr. Lynch, until the examination is finished, or you will leave.”
“Then I would request Mage Perumal to remain civil,” he replied through grinding teeth. “I am well within my rights to do whatever is necessary to protect my mate, Council or not.”
It was then I saw the way his eyes glowed—not from magic, but from a deeper instinct. The savage wanted very badly to get out and protect me.
I turned forward, aware that anything I might be thinking would likely be discovered in a moment—including my memories of Jonathan and me on the streets of Dublin and in the hotel.
“It’s fine,” I said. “What do I need to do next?”
Senni gestured to the writing on the ceiling, which was moving like several lines of ticker tape all stacked up. “It’s simple. You say you are an oracle, Ms. Whelan. You must prove it and demonstrate your skills, one each on a member of this Council. Your Sight will be amplified here for all to watch.” He turned to the Council members. “Already we know the girl’s Sight is bastardized through touch—that alone should tell us her magic is polluted. If she can See some element of a present mind, who would like to show theirs?”
Every member of the Council seemed to cringe at the prospect. I didn’t blame them. This was why most fae didn’t like seers, according to Gran. No one wanted to have their minds read.
“I will.”
The American shifter who had spoken up to Senni earlier stood and rounded the table.
“I’m Miriam Chang,” she informed me as she came to stand in front of me and held out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Cassandra Whelan.”
Tentatively, I took her hand and saw that She was curious about me. Obviously wondering if I was up to the challenge, but she admired what she thought was either bravery or just naivete. Either way, it was what made me look at everyone straight in the eye.
She was an artist herself, a sculptor in the middle of preparing for a major exhibit at the Whitney, where she would much rather be at the moment than evaluating me.
Thinking about that made her mind wander briefly to the sculpture she was in the middle of, a bust of a woman she had been thinking about for years now. Because the truth of it—maybe it was time to admit it to herself—was that she was in love. And if she didn’t tell Ma?—
Miriam pulled her hand from mine before I could finish reading the rest of her thoughts.
“In love, Miriam?” Senni teased. “I’m impressed. Usually, those kinds of memories practically shout themselves the moment you enter a room.”
Miriam turned to the seer with a stare that could have frozen the entire room. For a moment, I genuinely wondered if my breath would be a white cloud of condensation.
“You have what you need,” she said to Senni, then returned to her seat.
Senni looked up. “Interesting.” He looked back at me. “Have you siren in your lineage, Ms. Whelan?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of, no.”
He frowned again at the ceiling. “You may want to explore that. You took to Miriam’s mind as if it were your own. Experienced all of her thoughts, motives, intentions, and emotions in the space of thirty seconds or so.”
“Is that…good?” I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Power is power,” said Chancellor Se. “We take what the universe gives us.” He looked at Senni. “Continue.”
Senni nodded, then walked across the room to retrieve a box that looked a lot like Gran’s. It was on a shelf containing several identically old, battered boxes. One space was empty.
My skin prickled. Did they know where one had gone?
Senni brought the box back to me and set it on the table in front of me. “Inside this box are significant artifacts rangingfrom last year to the dawn of human civilization. You will interact with them and See the histories attached to them.”
Cautiously, I touched the box, then breathed a sigh of relief when no darkness descended over me. I opened it and one by one, removed the things inside. This was, after all, one of the things I loved to do in another life.
The Burns Library, however, seemed very far away. My heart yearned for the simple days of reading Yeats’s notebooks.
I hovered a hand over what looked like the oldest object in the box—an ancient flute carved from bone and eaten away by the effects of time.
“I…wait a moment.” I tugged out the little vial of water given to me by Aoife.
Touching this flute was sure to invite chaos. But the point here was to show the Council what I could do, to demonstrate my power and my worth. I needed the oldest memories here. The ones that mattered.
I unscrewed the dropper from the vial and let a few drops pour into my palm.
It did the trick. Even the room seemed clearer as I picked up the flute and quietly asked it to show me its most important memory.
The vision was immediate.
A girl, short and dark-skinned with thick, locked hair that reached her shoulders, sat on a stone beside a creek, head bent as she scraped a hollow bone with a flint edge.
The boys in the village loved to blow through the hollow reeds they dried from a nearby creek. One of them had discovered that covering a hole in his reed produced a different sound—similar to the original, but higher. She had wondered what would happen if she made something like it with the tools her father had given her.
At last, the final hole cleared, and she blew the dust out with a deep breath. She took a moment to admire her creation. The boys had stolen her reed when they saw her using one and crushed it under their feet. But this bone, taken from an elk’s carcass, was sturdy and hollow. They could not crush it so easily.
She lifted the flute to her mouth and blew. The sound, pure and clear as a running brook, echoed around the meadow. She laughed, a high tinkling like a bell, and blew again. Her joy was as bright as sunshine as she pressed her fingers on the holes down the reed, experimenting with the new tones they made with her fingers on them and off.
And then she played a song. Short, sweet, but unbearably beautiful. The first song.
The vision disappeared as I set the flute back into the box, and I wiped a tear that had escaped. It was unusual I Saw such beauty, though it did happen from time to time. It was why I had gotten into archival research to begin with.
“Oh… my ,” murmured Mage Mbotu, as she too wiped away a tear. “What a gift. Senni, don’t you agree? The memories of this flute have remained silent even to you.”
More than one mage at the table was battling their emotions alongside her.
“Think of what we can learn,” she said to the others. “The mysteries she can help us solve if she joins. It is critical we protect these important gifts.”
The seer, however, did not seem particularly happy to have witnessed the scene. “Well. It would appear you have some significant talent as a bard, Ms. Whelan. But that doesn’t mean you’re truly an oracle.”
“Tashi, surely this is enough,” Mbotu turned to the chancellor. “She has already demonstrated two primary talents—that alone makes her special, even if she is untrained. No one has been able to recover history from so long for many generations. This knowledge is priceless, and what she may be able to do once manifested?—”
“The tests aren’t finished,” Senni interrupted. He turned to Chancellor Se. “Shall I?”
The chancellor seemed to ponder the options before him, tipping his head from side to side like a metronome. Then he nodded. “Continue. We must understand her abilities in full.”
Senni grinned. “My pleasure.”
My spirits sank. For six weeks, Caitlin had been trying and failing to help me seek the future, which had a stubborn habit of only appearing in convoluted dreams that generally only featured one person.
I twisted in my seat toward Jonathan, who was watching anxiously, half-bound to his chair.
You can do it , he mouthed, for want of our regular bond. A bond I suddenly missed, like it was a part of myself.
I turned. “You’ll have to wait until I sleep,” I told the seer. “I mostly divine in dreams. Perhaps that will change once I’m manifested, but that’s the primary place I’ve Seen the future. And those visions usually have to do with my mate.”
Senni’s upper lip curled. “That can be arranged.” He opened his mouth, but he was interrupted by another counsel member—the Australian siren.
“Dreaming under duress won’t produce anything of value,” he said. “The sirens know this, perhaps even better than seers. I will not accept any sleep that comes of a spell.”
Senni turned to Tashi. “Very well, then we will have her watched this night. But an oracle should be able to call the future. It should come to her, and not just when she cannot understand it.”
The chancellor nodded and turned to me. “Ms. Whelan, you will remain overnight for observation. I trust this will not be a problem.”
I wanted to say that yes, it damn well would be, but caught the sympathetic nod from Mbotu, the one Council member who seemed to be on my side.
I swallowed. “Um, sure. I can do that.”
He nodded and reached for a gavel. “Very well. Then we will conclude for the day. You may leave?—”
“Wait,” interrupted Senni. “There is the matter of the girl’s history and her involvement with Mage O’Brien’sdisappearance, and possibly Mage Lynch’s as well, since he left to find her.” He glared at me. “She must be examined more thoroughly. I strongly recommend the Council take a full history from this seer. Adolescent and delinquent though she may be, she is still the closest link to these events. If she does not wish to share this history, then I will take it from her with the Council’s permission.”
“Objection.” Jonathan stood, shaking his body like a dog shaking off water. “She has rights, unmanifested or not.”
“Rights that are superseded by Council when it is a matter of fae safety,” the chancellor replied. “As the matter has to do with the death of at least one of our members, we must have the information.”
“Besides,” Senni sneered, “this isn’t a court of law, Jonny. ”
“Fine, no objection, then. But if you touch her against her consent, a third chair will open on the Council.”
Senni stood. “You dare challenge a member of the Council!”
“It’s more than a challenge.” Jonathan was across the room and had the seer backed against the stone table in a blink. “I’ll kill any fae who threatens my mate.”
Several other magi were out of their seats, shouting for his release.
It was no use. Gallant as Jonathan was, he was no match for six of the most powerful fae on the planet.
The chancellor raised his hand, and vibrations rang through our ears once again. “Stop.”
They did. Everyone did. He didn’t give them a chance. With a flick of his wrist, Jonathan was propelled back to his seat like an arrow to its target, and Senni was left heaving against the table.
I was starting to understand why Tashi Se was the head of the whole thing. His power was effortless. And vast.
Senni stood against the table, expression searing with wrath toward Jonathan. “You’ll pay for that, pirate.”
“Dr. Lynch is correct,” the chancellor continued as if the seer hadn’t spoken. “Ordinarily we follow due process when it comes to opening another creature’s mind. However, our bylaws allow the Council to break this precedent by a vote in the event of extraordinary need and threat. Considering two of our members are missing, at least one is presumed dead, and that you, Ms. Whelan, may hold key knowledge, the circumstances fit the need. Therefore, we will take a vote.” He glanced down each side of the table and back, then to Senni. “All those in favor of Mage Perumal conducting a brief discovery of these events in Ms. Whelan’s memory?”
Up and down the table, several of the magi glanced at one another. One by one, their hands went up. Only the shifter, Mbotu, and the Australian siren kept theirs down.
Chancellor Se nodded. “A majority has been reached.” He held out a hand and mumbled a short spell. A gust of wind wrapped around my body and tightened like a rope around the chair, effectively binding me in place. One just like it wound around Jonathan’s chair as well.
“Tashi, stop ,” Jonathan snapped behind me. “This is illegal, and you know it. You cannot bind a fae against her will!”
“This law only applies to manifested fae,” the chancellor said calmly. “Ms. Whelan is but a novice.” He nodded at Senni.“Mage Perumal, you may proceed.”
My heart gave a loud thump as the seer approached me, lips curled with satisfaction.
“Don’t fight it,” he said as he tilted his head. “This will only hurt a little.”
My father took me to Disneyland for my seventh birthday. Sibyl didn’t go for reasons obvious to me now. She preferred to stay at the beach or cocooned in the little house on the base. So it was just my dad and me.
It was one of the best days of my life. At a time when other people’s thoughts came to me so sporadically, I didn’t See them for what they were. I felt my father’s love when he held my hand and basked in that attention, the occasional nudge of someone else’s joy in the Happiest Place on Earth, and that was about it.
At one point, he insisted on taking me on Space Mountain, a fairly tame coaster compared to some of the behemoths at California amusement parks. But to seven-year-old me, it was terrifying. The first time the coaster caught enough speed to jerk me back in my seat, the force plastering my body in place, I felt more than peril. I felt trapped.
By the time we got off, I was in tears and wouldn’t touch another ride for the rest of the day.
That was how I felt as Senni tunneled through my mind, searching for every bit of relevant history concerning my grandmother. He didn’t seem to care about my childhood. We raced through it, skipping visions of my mother, slowing only when we reached the moment I had learned of Gran’s death through a strange telegram and the appearance of Jonathan—of my mate.
There, the rollercoaster slowed as he walked through my memories of the house, of Gran’s body, and the memories of hers I’d absorbed from the house. And then the moments before the fire came clear. The appearance of the raven, then the shadow of Caleb Lynch attacking me. The fire, the shadows, the mysterious lynx.
But there was something else happening too. While Senni’s public search felt like a tidal wave of information that he posted to his broadcast as quickly as possible, a different sliver of power wound its way through with the quiet, undetectable precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.
Give me the Secret, it ordered.
No! My indignation, that fight in me, seemed even stronger in recollection than it had in the moment.
The scalpel cut, and something latched on.
What is it? The question wasn’t articulated completely, but the meaning was there, searching, digging through the rest of my past, looking for connective threads to recent events to provide an answer.
Not a scalpel, then, I realized. A needle. Senni could See the threads he sought because that was the shape that his power, his mind, provided. His power was a grid, a great tapestry that wove itself into others’ pasts. He found threads to join with his and tied them together or broke them as he liked.
This was what other fae meant when they said I had no shape. My power was fluid. It borrowed the shape of otherelements. Water, most often.
But this, I could See too.
The needle looped around another thread in my mind, tugging it to the surface.
It was the memory of the box in my bedroom, opening into that dark oblivion, guarding the Secret Gran had told me never to show.
No! my mind cried.
Senni tugged harder, and soon the vision was threaded into his mind too—not for others to See, but only for himself.
The needle went to work, looping around other threads leading from that moment. Conversations about the Secret. The mention in Gran’s will. The discussions I’d had with Jonathan.
But now I could See where he was going. And there was the next thread—the one that would take him to only a few days earlier when we’d discovered the parchment for the first time.
He looked around it.
I cut it back.
Senni reared, and his black eyes found mine with a clear message. Don’t .
I shook my head back as visions of my childhood continued to play on the ceiling like a silent film.
Something bound my mind even more tightly, and that invisible needle tugged on the end of the thread leading back to the Connollys’ attic. He pulled and looped his thread around it.
Stop! I shouted.
He smiled. There was no point.
I started shaking in the chair.
“Release her!” Jonathan’s voice was hidden by the chaos.
I, however, was too focused to notice. Because something else was happening that Senni clearly hadn’t considered. Every time he looped a thread of my memory into his mind to make a copy and send it to the Council, a bit of his power touched me. Even without a physical connection.
And that shape he was providing was suddenly available.
Mentally, I formed a pair of hands that reached out to the fabric he had woven between us, a tapestry of my memories connecting to his. It was rich with life. Colorful in a way I never realized. If He hadn’t been stealing them all, I might have enjoyed the view.
I grabbed the fabric and wrapped it around my mental wrists. And then, with a great internal shout, I pulled. GET YOUR FUCKING MIND OFF ME!
Senni fell back like he’d been punched in the face, crumpling to the ground. The light show above darkened, and the room fell back to its normal, dim lighting.
The seer rocked, head in his hands, moaning in Tamil.
“What happened?” Mbotu asked. “That’s an odd scent. I’ve never smelled it before.”
“It’s territorial,” said Miriam, looking intrigued. “The girl has marked her shape and forced Senni to leave.”
“Did she shield?” asked one of the sirens. “Her energy doesn’t feel that way.”
“That’s because she bent my fucking mind!” Senni managed to sit up at least and thrust a finger so intently that I wondered if lightning itself might appear and scorch me where I sat. “She broke the law. Mind bending is a punishment by death, Tashi. You know this is the truth.”
I blinked as the belt of air around my body loosened. “I—I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to—I was protecting myself from the way you were digging around where you shouldn’t have been! You were taking memories that don’t belong to you, and you definitely weren’t sharing them with the Council.”
Jonathan seemed to be able to move again too. He ran over, gathered me from the chair, and pushed me behind him.
What did I do? I couldn’t help but ask.
Nothing, came his curt response. And maybe everything .
“It was the self-defense of an unmanifested seer,” he argued. “You were violating her right to privacy, whatever the Council decided.”
“Mind bending is one of the highest crimes of our kind,” Senni snapped. “All seers are taught that from the time they are children. Those who manifest it are put to death. You know this, sorcerer .”
“Can you prove it was mind bending?” Jonathan demanded. “Or was it only an effective shield? You cannot expect her to be subjected to that kind of violation and not erect boundaries.”
“She changed my motives and actions!” Senni screeched. “I heard her command as if it were my very own!”
“Stop.” With a flick of his hand, Chancellor Se sounded the gong-like vibrations, this time loud enough that everyone in the room covered their ears again and winced.
Jonathan, however, only covered one, determined to keep his other arm wrapped securely around my shoulders.
Do not let go , he said. I never should have let them separate us to begin with .
When the vibrations fell away, the chancellor fixed his fiery orange Sight on me. “I See.”
What, exactly, I could not say.
“The Council must convene privately to discuss our findings and Ms. Whelan’s future,” he said. “You may exit, and Celine will escort you to the courtyard.” His gaze leveled on me, a steady, slow burn of a thing that belied more power than I wanted to contemplate. “You will go there together and await our decision.”