Chapter 23
Tendrils of music and laughter snaked down the corridor to wind themselves about éadha, pulling her aching legs toward the Banqueting Hall.
It was her first time going to a formal ball, and she didn’t have a suitable outfit, so she was still in her normal Keeper tunic and pants, tucked into her old leather boots.
She’d left her hair loose; she hadn’t cut it since she’d arrived on Lambay, and now it hung down her back in long, dark curls.
Enormous doors stood wide open, revealing an antechamber that opened into the space beyond.
Story after story it rose, reaching the full height of the tower.
All the way up there were balconies and crosswalks, and in between cushioned aeries.
The walls were hung with tapestries while heavy red curtains framed the deep-set windows that led on to stone terraces built over the sea.
As éadha stepped into the antechamber, the setting sun shot its last golden flares through the western windows as it sank behind Erisen.
Were-lights sprang into life all through the hall as the daylight faded, a relay of torchbearers catching and carrying the sun’s light on into the darkening night.
Fires were lit at intervals all around the walls with alcoves in between, some filled with tables of laughing apprentices, others discreetly curtained.
Just like on First Island, there were tables creaking with food: freshly channeled nectarines, plums, and strawberries from the greenhouses all piled high, luscious sweetmeats and cakes of every description.
But this time there were also decanters of wine from the vineyards and barrels of beer brewed from force-grown hops standing all around the room, ladles and rows of goblets beside them.
On the balconies above, musicians played, fiddles and flutes swirling.
Powerful bass drums, normally used to set the beat of a house raising, throbbed all the way down to the roots of Second House far below their feet.
As éadha arrived, Eoghan flew up in the air to where the fiddlers stood, shouting, “Come on, put a bit of life into it—it’s a party, not a funeral!
” before grabbing a violin and playing a whirling frenzy of a tune, channeling power into his fingertips until they blurred, moving across the strings with impossible speed, flying all the while higher and higher until he was playing from just underneath the tower dome.
Beneath him the apprentices gathered, cheering and clapping.
In front of éadha, a red velvet rope barred her entrance to the main hall. A senior Keeper gestured her toward a bench against the wall of the antechamber. “Apprentice Keepers may only enter at the grace and favor of a Channeller.”
Gry and some other Keeper students were already sitting there, and she settled down beside him. He was dressed in a midnight-blue tunic with white wings embroidered on his collar, the signet of the Flemin Family. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, one crossed over the other.
“Better get used to this” was all he said to her before tipping his head back and closing his eyes.
The hall was packed, not just with éadha’s year but with the previous Second Island class—the Risen. They’d just passed their final tests, and at midwinter they’d ride away to their Westport posting. But until then, they’d share Second Island with éadha’s class, the two groups overlapping.
Used to her smaller class on First Island, this throng of eighty or so apprentices laughing and chattering in the Banqueting Hall seemed enormous to éadha.
The skills of the Risen were also far beyond éadha’s group.
They’d spent their term on Second Island learning the crafts of illusion and dragon combat, and this was their chance to show off.
All through the hall, illusions swirled: starbursts of color showering down from the dome, scenes from famous battles racing across the tapestries and out into the night to disappear with the snap of a finger.
Remembering Senan’s gloating about finally getting his hands on what he’d called the volunteer Fodder, éadha looked about, but she couldn’t see any.
Ionáin, meanwhile, had arrived shortly after éadha, sweeping past in a phalanx of Family apprentices, Ailbhe at its head, regal in a silver column of a dress.
He didn’t even glance her way as he passed her bench.
He was dressed in an embroidered tunic éadha’s aunt had sewn for him not long before he left Ailm’s Keep.
She remembered how he’d grumbled about the fittings when they’d sat together on the fell just before his Reckoning.
“It’s nonsense—all I need is one warm coat and a pair of good boots.
Do you think if I pass my Reckoning I’m going to waste my time on stupid parties when I could be flying? ”
The disconnect between then and now left her dizzy.
When she closed her eyes and focused, she could sense a thread between them, silvery and true, snapping taut wherever Ionáin went in the Banqueting Hall.
Yet when she opened them again, there he was, downing glass after glass of wine—a thing she’d never seen him do before—and laughing loudly at Coll’s jokes with the same new hardness in his eyes she’d seen earlier.
Not once acknowledging his oldest friend in all the world perched on a hard bench beyond a red rope.
“Talk to me,” said Gry abruptly. éadha looked sideways, surprised; she’d thought he hadn’t been paying any attention. He pulled himself a little further upright so his eyes were level with hers. “Stop making it so easy for him.”
éadha drew back a little, even as she felt her silver fish stir into life inside her at the look in his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Stop making it so bloody obvious you’ll come running as soon as he clicks his fingers, no matter how much he ignores you when it suits him.”
éadha flushed and said hotly, “It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t play games like your kind.”
“Ouch,” said Gry, sitting forward, his eyes on the group in front of them. “We do talk sometimes, you know, you and me. That’s not playing a game. It just happens to also remind him other people see you too. You’re not his secret.”
“He’s doing what he has to,” said éadha, more quietly now, as if her heart couldn’t summon up the energy to lay those words down like the marker they should be. The memory of the look in Ionáin’s eyes in Senan’s apartment was still too raw.
“Maybe,” said Gry. “But he’s also being very stupid.
Leaving you alone with me like this.” He waggled his eyebrows dramatically.
éadha laughed out loud at his expression, though deep inside she felt her power surge in restless response.
Gry’s face softened before he went on. “It’s like you think you don’t exist for anyone except him.
That you’re just lucky if he even notices you.
” He paused, then said, “But have you seen you?”
éadha stared at Gry—the way the candlelight picked out his cheekbones and hooded his eyes so they seemed darker, more intense.
As if he was reaching out to her beyond words to ask a question that couldn’t be said out loud.
She closed her eyes and just for a second reached out with her power toward him, feeling again, as she had in the infirmary, the sense of a power just as caged and ferocious as hers, her body responding without any volition on her part at the thought of what it’d be like to touch—to really touch—a power like that.
The fire that’d unleash. How it might burn her up.
She swallowed and turned her face away, back toward the party.
It was the molash in the air, she told herself, heightening everything, making her body turn traitor. It wasn’t real.
She wasn’t ready for the thought that mightn’t be so true anymore.
Beside her she heard Gry let out a long, slow breath before saying, “Good talk.”
She said nothing, willing her heartbeat to settle down.
“But just to give fair warning. After this”—he nodded over to where Ionáin was standing, still ignoring her—“I’m done playing fair.”
“Don’t I get any say?” said éadha, turning back toward him and raising her eyebrows.
“That’s the point,” said Gry. “I don’t think you realize you do.”
They were interrupted by a loud shout from Senan.
He’d turned red-faced and irritated as his group began to disintegrate, the Keeper girls leaving him to go watch the Risen Channellers weaving their beautiful tales.
éadha saw Ionáin shuffle across the center of the hall to join Ailbhe, followed closely by Coll.
She’d never seen him drunk before, his face flushed and hectic, his hair in disarray.
She watched, baffled, as he clutched a wine goblet to his chest before calling a servant over to refill it, swaying slightly on his feet until Coll dragged him to a seat where he slumped, propping his head up with his hand.
At the same moment, Linn passed by the velvet rope. Seeing éadha and Gry there, backs and legs numb from their long vigil, she waved them in with an expansive hand.
“Come in, come in, how silly, come in,” she cried, before wandering off unsteadily. In the center of the room, Senan called loudly to the Risen Channellers.
“It’s all very well for you to play with pretty pictures, but is that really all you can do? Surely it’s about time we used some real power?” He flew up and out onto the highest west-facing terrace, followed by some of the Risen.
“Very well then, Cousin,” a blond-haired boy called back, laying his yew staff down. “Ever heard of were-diving?”
“That sounds more like it.”
“The rules are simple. One person sends a were-light diving to the sea as fast as they can, the other has to dive and catch it before it hits the water or take a dunking.”
“All right. Ready? Go!” Senan called up a shining were-light and sent it streaking down toward the waves far below.