Chapter 4 #4
“Oh, Uncle. Truly? You sensed something? Some power? I never…” Ionáin stopped then, looking down and drawing a deep breath before looking up again, his eyes blazing now with happiness.
“We have to go tell my parents.” He raced down the steps to embrace his uncle before pulling him away with him.
Left to itself, meanwhile, the choir broke apart, too scared and bewildered by Huath’s brutal Inquisition to sing again that day.
Head down, éadha began shuffling out with the rest, still shaking from the fright of almost being caught.
But then Magret called after her, “éadha, can you come here, please? I need another pair of hands to carry these music sheets.”
For a moment éadha thought about pretending she hadn’t heard, but the people around her were already looking at her.
There was nothing for it but to turn back.
Magret handed her a bundle of music sheets and nodded for her to follow.
She crossed the Great Hall, making for a low archway set into the wall underneath the spiral staircase and half hidden in the shadows behind a bust of Ionáin’s grandfather.
éadha’s steps faltered. Magret was headed into the old tunnel connecting the Great Hall to the West Wing.
Its black mouth had always frightened éadha, like something lying in wait beneath the stairs, a pit waiting to swallow any who came too close.
She’d never been down that tunnel; it’d been closed off since Ionáin’s grandfather died.
Now she tried to force herself to follow Magret, but her feet wouldn’t move as a nameless horror gripped her like the cold air that coiled out from its black, lightless mouth.
Magret, though, was unyielding, her face grim as she stepped out; she caught éadha by the arm and dragged her the last few steps into the tunnel.
As they ducked through the opening, éadha saw there were signs of recent passage.
The gate was open, dust was stirred up in places and, farther in, torches cast an uncertain light.
Even in the midst of her fear, she felt a twinge of surprise.
As soon as they were out of sight of the Great Hall Magret turned to éadha with a furious whisper.
“You stupid child, have you any idea of the danger you were in just now? I warned you not to channel before your Reckoning and not only do you ignore that, but you stand there in the Great Hall, brazen as you like, drawing power from all around you and roaring it to the heavens with the most brutal Channeller on the entire Domhain outside the door. Oh, you little idiot, you’re playing with something you’ve no conception of.
Being surrounded by the blind doesn’t make you invisible.
To those who have eyes for power, everything you do with your gift might as well be written in lines of fire across the sky. ”
éadha’s eyes filled with tears, Magret’s words reigniting her terror at Huath’s Inquisition and the narrowness of her escape. But there was no hint of compassion in Magret’s face. “Come. There’s something you must see.”
Taking a torch from its brazier, Magret pulled her the rest of the way down the tunnel and into a room just beyond it.
As they stepped in, éadha realized there were signs of occupation.
A lighted candle on a righted table, a water jug, some husks of stale bread, and, along the far wall, people.
Four of them in a row, in tattered clothes and bare feet, on stone seats that jutted out from the walls.
Two men, two women, all of them slumped as if too exhausted to hold themselves up.
Peering in from the doorway as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she realized with horror that iron chains bound them to their seats.
“So, child, what do you make of this?” asked Magret, moving to hold her torch over one of the men.
His face had caved in, worn to the bone.
As the light cast its feeble shadow across him, he stirred weakly, too tired to rouse himself to look back at the woman and the girl staring at him.
The other three paid them no heed at all.
One of the women was resting her head on the shoulder of the other woman; their eyes were closed as if they were asleep or unconscious, but éadha saw they were still holding hands, tightly, as if they’d braced together against some violent impact.
“I don’t understand,” she replied. “Who are they?”
“These, my dear, are Fodder. The inevitable end of a path that leads from you sipping power from the threads that link you to your fellow singers and whoever else you’ve been thieving life from all the way to this foul place, to these poor husks of what once were men and women.
Huath drained them just now for the power to do his Inquisition, after he sensed your little stunt in the choir. ”
éadha was crying now in earnest, but Magret continued in a harsh, angry voice.
“This is your gift, child. Look upon it. To reach out along the silver threads that bind us all and drain the life from the people around you to play lords and ladies. To take their life force to make dancing lights and fine singing. Is the journey from Erisen to Ailm’s Keep too long, too tedious?
Well then, drain a herder or two, so much more civilized, don’t you think, to arrive in time for dinner?
Perhaps you grow bored of your castle; why, summon a whole village of Fodder, and a Master Architect will draw from them the towers of your dreams in no time at all. ”
éadha tried to turn and run, but Magret held her in an unyielding grip, fingertips tightening down her arm.
“No, you will see this. You won’t just run away to join those pampered idiots on Lambay, all trace of the reality of their power carefully hidden away from them so they drain and play away with no idea, no thought of the consequences of what they do until they’re too far gone to ever care.”
“You’re hurting me; please, let me go,” begged éadha.
Magret only turned to face her and said, “Two nights ago, the cut on my temple, you remember? It wasn’t because I stumbled. It was because you drew on my life force for the power to save that animal, and I collapsed. My thread. That was what you drew on.”
This brought éadha up short. She sagged and would’ve fallen but for Magret’s hold on her, as the full force of her words hit her. “But I didn’t mean…”
“Oh, you learn fast. The perfect Channeller answer. They never mean to hurt people. All they want is to build a beautiful house, or draw out the crops, or create some wonderful illusion. The harm they do is merely an unpleasant by-product, not to be talked of in polite society.” Magret spoke with a controlled rage, eyes blazing as she gestured toward the pathetic heaps before them.
“We have to help these people,” stammered éadha, desperate to somehow make things right. “I’ll bring food and clothes from the storerooms…”
“You’ll do no such thing. We’ll leave this room now, and it’ll be as if we were never here.”
“What do you mean? We can’t leave them here in this cold—they might die.”
“You really have no clue of the system you’re part of now, do you?
You’d be condemning yourself and everyone working in the Keep to suffering far worse than theirs if you lifted a finger to interfere with Lord Huath’s Fodder.
There’s nothing you can do here that wouldn’t make things much worse for many more people, people you love.
Don’t worry, they won’t die. Lord Huath needs them to draw power for the Reckoning.
They’ll be fed and kept alive until then at least and quite possibly afterward.
Huath is well aware of his sister’s squeamishness about the realities of channeling. ”
Magret drew her out of the room and, stepping carefully, led them both outside, through the rear of the West Wing.
The first frost had thawed, uncovering a clear day.
éadha’s face was ashen and tearstained, and she was shivering uncontrollably with a mix of horror and shock.
It was almost too much to take in, how this upended everything she thought she knew.
About channeling, about Masters, about Families.
They walked unspeaking back to éadha’s cottage, empty at this time of day.
The embers of the fire were still warm. Magret stoked it up with logs from the woodpile outside while éadha went to the rainwater barrel at the side of the house, plunging her head into the icy water.
The cold helped to steady her a little. She folded her aunt’s cloak around her and sat on the stone fireseat.
Magret’s normal calm demeanor had returned, the livid rage revealed in the Fodder Wing hidden once more.
Speaking more gently than before, she addressed the silent girl.
“This knowledge is painful, and it’s not your fault you didn’t know.
You grew up with Ionáin here in the Keep without any Channellers, so all you heard was the fairy tale the Families tell their children.
Only about the power, its might and its beauty. Not its source.”
“But Béithe and the other older servants, they must’ve known from before. Why didn’t they tell me the truth?” said éadha.
“Why bring in the darkness?” said Magret simply.
“Old Lord Ailm, Ionáin’s grandfather, was a cruel man, and every person in the Keep suffered terribly under him.
These last years, with Ionáin’s father having no gift, have been a blessed respite.
Can you blame them for choosing to forget for a little while and letting you have a childhood unshadowed by dread? ”
éadha tilted her head back against the chimney wall and looked across at the woman opposite.
“And now it’s too late. It’s only a few days until my Reckoning.
My Reckoner will see my gift, and I’ll be sent to Lambay to train.
I’ll become a Channeller. I’ve no choice in this.
Why show me those poor people now, when it’s too late, when there’s nothing I can do? ”
“Because you can refuse. Because you’ve the chance to be something extraordinary, something almost unheard of: a gifted child who escapes the poisonous grasp of the Masters and the seductive enchantment of Lambay.
” Magret rose, unable to sit still, eagerness in every line of her stance, holding herself back as if fearful of scaring the girl away but willing her to heed her words.
“I don’t understand. My Reckoning is set. I can’t refuse to appear.”
“Yes, but knowing you’re gifted, there’s a way for you to hide it from your Reckoner.
You got part of the way there this morning yourself.
I saw how you damped down your power just as Huath reached out to search the choir.
It’d be a deeper, stronger concealment than that, but there’s just enough time to prepare for it. I can teach you.”
éadha stared into the fire, at the flames leaping hungrily up along the line of the wood where she and her uncle had split it in the autumn.
She wished she could set a fire inside herself, burn away this revulsion.
All the joy she’d felt in her gift, the excitement and pride that she’d be Ionáin’s savior, the Keep’s protector, ripped down to reveal the dull horror of those dark rooms.
How could something so beautiful, so joyous, be the cause of such pain? The threads that’d filled her with such power—was she to cut them all, for always?
Magret had subsided back into her seat, knowing that to push now was to drive her away. There was a long silence, filled only by the quiet crackle of the flames. éadha looked up at Magret across the firelight.
“All I’ve thought since you told me I was gifted was that I could save Ailm’s Keep. If Ionáin fails his Reckoning, I could be the Keep Channeller, save his Family, stop Lord Huath from taking over.”
But Magret was already shaking her head.
“It doesn’t work like that. If Ionáin fails his Reckoning, then he loses the Keep, and he and his father are condemned.
You passing your Reckoning wouldn’t change that.
You don’t come from a Family, you have no name.
It’d take you years to become a full Channeller, years more before you could earn yourself a Family title and land.
Ailm’s Keep would be long gone by then, taken over by Huath. ”
Looking down at her hands, éadha fought back tears as her disappointment hardened inside her like a stone right in her center.
She wouldn’t cry again in front of Magret.
After another long pause, she lifted her head and said, “Even if I can’t save the Keep, you still have no idea what you’re asking of me.
Sitting there saying I should give up my gift and go back to being a helpless nobody. ”
“You’re right. I don’t have your gift, and I don’t know what it’d be like to give it up. But it doesn’t make me wrong. Stop thinking about what you want, and think about what you know in your heart to be right,” said Magret quietly.
“You said almost. That I’d be something almost unheard of. So there’ve been others? Others like me?”
“Child, you must understand I can’t talk to you about this now.
If you make it through your Reckoning undetected, then we can talk.
But I can say you’re not the first to trigger their gift before the Masters reckon them and so earn themselves this chance to choose the path they take. You wouldn’t be alone.”
éadha stood up, arms wrapped about her, eyes still staring into the fire. Her voice was very small, almost inaudible as she said, “I will refuse.”
Magret bowed her head then, in thanks, in pity for the straight figure before her, rigid with misery. “Tomorrow I will teach you concealment. There’s just enough time before the Reckonings begin.”
éadha stayed standing until Magret left. Then with unsteady feet she climbed the stairs to her nest, crept beneath the covers, and cried and cried.