Chapter 14 #2
Emrys leans back a bit. “Objects may have magic bound to them, Ms. Vale. Only certain types of spells--protective, usually--and only certain objects. That leaves them imbued.Still, the observable effects are…subjective. Does the imbued object carry real power, or does its bearer merely think it does and act accordingly?” He shrugs.
“Arguably nothing more than superstition, really. "
I think of Morgan, surveying the scapular Kai had thrown on the table at Easter. And you claim this is totally different from magic.
Or earlier. When we’d been crossing campus with Lanz, so many weeks ago, right before we’d left for St. Ignaty’s, when Morgan had copped to making Elena a dummy love potion.
Get someone to believe that things work a certain way—like really, truly, believe it—and they’ll do everything it takes to affirm that it’s so. Even if it kills them.
"The line between what is a genuinely imbued object versus simply treated and revered as such is fuzzy, at best," Emrys goes on. "And I'll admit it's not my area of expertise--material culture never has been. But Mr. Pendragon, I believe, has—”
"Yes," Kingston finishes for him. "I've seen it happen."
What? I look at Kingston. "You have? When? Where? Did Morgan--"
"No," he says quickly, and just as quickly apologizes for interrupting me. "I'm sorry."
God, it'd be irritating if it weren't so sincere. I shake my head. "It's all right."
He nods. "No. Not Morgan. This sort of thing is beyond what she can do. But yes, I've witnessed things imbued with magic."
He leaves it at that.
"And do you think," Emrys puts in, his gaze drifting back to the dress and crown, "that perhaps this is that? Something imbued?”
Kingston shakes his head. "I was hoping you could tell us."
Silently, pensively, he looks back to the costume.
We all do.
I can't help it. I have to. Morbid, maybe, but if this was what I would have died in--I want to see it again, touch it again.
Properly. Wordless, I get out of my seat and take the dress in hand, shaking it out to its full length out in front of me.
It's long, loose, and two pieces, I realize now—a ballooning white blouse and a red sort of smock with those wide stripes of gold-and-blue embroidery down the middle, from top hem to bottom.
There’s lettering in it, I see now. Words.
I tighten my hold, bring it closer to my face like I’m reading a book, and as I do—
Crack. A snap, a shock, spikes against my hands like a firecracker going off.
"Ah!" I wince, suck in a gasp of pain, and drop it in surprise. The fabric billows to the ground, and as it falls it—
Shifts.
Rippling through the air, the red goes dull. The sheen of the fabric coarsens. And when the dress hits the floor, it's nothing like what it was. Brown, rough. Ugly.
It has transformed.
I stare, disbelieving, mouth open, but I barely have time to react, because Kingston is leaping up to my side.
"Watch out!"
He catches me, hard, around the chest, and pushes me away from--from fire, I realize, leaping white flames engulfing the red crown on the table just beside me. In a split second, the thing curls and blackens, disintegrates, and the flames crackle out.
Gone. Like they'd never been there.
My mouth is hanging open. I look at Kingston, whose eyes are wide with alarm, and Emrys, who stands motionless and staring. Astonished, almost amazed.
"What..." I suck in a breath. "What the hell was that?"
Emrys peers from the pile of ashes on the coffee table to the rumpled mass of brown at my feet. "I was hoping you could tell us, Ms. Vale.”
"I..." I shake my head. “I didn’t do that.”
My mind flies to another day with Emrys. When I'd just gotten back from Roaring Brook, when Emrys had laid out for me his theory that the Grail was a person, that that person was me. What he’d told me.
Things have happened to you that you can't explain.
He wasn’t wrong then. And now…
Did I do this?
Kingston crouches and retrieves the dress, or whatever it is it turned into. Frowning, he brushes his fingertips over the fabric. "Sackcloth," he says.
Sackcloth. A word I've heard but can't properly define, one of those terms like manna or terebinth trees or swaddling clothes that only ever seems to come up in the Bible. The kind of thing that maybe—I thought, anyway—doesn't even exist anymore, if it was ever real to begin with.
"Goat hair," Kingston explains, seeing my confusion. "Traditional garment of penance. It’s—” He hesitates. "Not comfortable."
I don't want to ask why he knows that.
"Ah, but of course," Emrys says. "Sackcloth"— he steps to the coffee table and rubs a sooty pinch of it between his fingers —"and ashes."
That, too, rings a bell in my memory. A two-word pair, like milk and honey or fire and brimstone.
“‘Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer,’” Kingston says. “‘With fasting and sackcloth and ashes.’” He swallows. “The book of Daniel.”
Both of them stare at me.
Instinctively, I put my hands out in front of myself, like I might need to physically push the two of them back from me. "I don't know what's going on. I promise you, I don't."
Kingston's knuckles flex as he grips the garment tighter. But he nods. And he believes me. I think.
I look from him to Emrys. Desperate.
“Again, I am loath to pry,” Emrys begins. “But I’m afraid, once more, I have to ask. What exactly did happen to you, Ms. Vale? Before you came to Caliburn, I mean.”
My eyes shut like a reflex. I take in air, cold enough to prickle and scented like woodsmoke: in through the nose, out through the mouth, just like I learned in all those sessions with Jessie the therapist.
I haven't told them. Not really. Not except Kai, and even then in a roundabout way, since I didn't know any of it was real at the time. Not my version of things, beyond what followed me in rumors and whispers and accusations.
"There was a fire," I say at last. "In the church. My church. I lit some candles. But it spread. Fast." I pause. Pause a long moment. "Faster than it should have." I swallow. "And I couldn't get it out."
"You were alone?" Kingston asks.
"Yes." I look at the floor. "It was the middle of the night. I used to sneak in a lot."
"Why--"
"I don't know," I all but snap, suddenly irritable. "I just felt drawn to it. It felt right to be there. I didn't think it was bad to be in a church, so I went."
The cure to all wounds.
The vessel of vessels.
The words ring in my mind. The words I’d thought, practically heard, for weeks.
Months. Internal echolalia—a compulsion to mentally repeat words and phrases, over and over, as a way to self-regulate—that’s what Dr. Riggs had called it when I’d made the mistake of sharing with him.
Another symptom of the psychosis. Another brick in the wall.
Snippets of language I’d heard somewhere, in a homily or a prayer, and had stuck in my mind, swirling around and around like flakes in a snowglobe.
I stare at the floor, reciting the rest of it before I lose my nerve.
“I wasn’t thinking straight. When I woke up I was hurt. Burned. They said I was lucky I didn't lose my arms, that it should have been hot enough to damage muscle. Except it didn’t actually hurt. I didn’t feel anything.” I breathe out. Get back to the facts, Gwenna. “The church was destroyed. And…”
Without meaning to, I clutch my left shoulder with my right hand. Pressing my forearm to the flesh just above my heart.
"I had this scar," I finish. "Everyone said I did it to myself. Self-harm. But I don't remember that. I wouldn't have." My eyes fly to Kingston. "I hate blood," I whisper.
I'm not sure if I collapse into him or if he embraces me. But that's where I end up: wrapped in him, trembling, eyes damp and scrunched into his sweater.
“I think we’re done for now.” Kingston’s voice. “We’ve discussed enough.”
I extricate myself from his arms, rub my eyes with my wrists, sniffling. “No,” I insist. “No, I’m—”
“Ms. Vale.” Emrys holds up a hand, politely silencing me.
“Your martyrdom is to be commended, but distressing you further will not make the sun rise again.
We have now, at least, pulled further puzzle pieces from the box, so to speak.
Even if they did not quite hold form as might have been hoped.
" He eyes the grainy black pile of ashes, the lumpen sackcloth. Considers a moment.
“What do your friends in France make of all this, Mr. Pendragon?”
The Consistory. I shudder, thinking of the blank non-faces I'd seen under their robes, how they'd moved over campus like gliding ghosts.
I hadn’t even thought of them.
"They..." Kingston hesitates a moment. Even after I pulled away, he’s still got my hand in his. “They don’t know. Yet.”
Yet.
The single syllable makes me want to cry.
As if he can sense it, Kingston tightens his hand around mine. “It’s complicated,” he says to Emrys. “With my father—”
“Of course,” Emrys says, waving the notion away. “That is entirely your prerogative. I only ask to be thorough.” He looks to me. “Take heart, Ms. Vale. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich. More words I used to repeat. Consciously. Willfully. Hopefully.
Now, I just shake my head. Look around at the unending night beyond the windows, the small radius of firelight just before us. “Will it?” I say darkly.
“Oh yes. Empirically.” Emrys smiles. “I do not have the faith of your mystic anchoress, Ms. Vale,” he says, apparently registering my confusion.
“She made her assertion out of sheer belief. An assurance, deeply felt but materially unproven, unprovable, that Divine Love would, in the end, be a balm to all. I, however…I have simply seen. No need to believe when one has played witness. What is to come is what has already been, for me. And so I borrow those words that, for me, have not yet even been spoken, to tell you truly: all shall be well.”
“Then what do we do?” Kingston asks. “Now?”
“That, I have told you, I do not know. I know that you emerge triumphant, in the most general sense. That the world continues and does not die--or else I would not have had anywhere to come from, would I? But by what means, or at what cost? I…” He blows out a regretful breath and spreads his arms wide.
As Emrys speaks, Kingston’s grip on me tightens further. “Do you know if anything like this ever happened before?" he says. “In history. Any analogues, or—”
“You would know as well as I would, Mr. Pendragon," Emrys says mildly. "We've been reading the same texts. Apocalyptic visions. Wastelands. An earth made to slumber against her will. Not uncommon themes."
"But you've never seen anything like this," Kingston presses.
"As I told Ms. Vale," Emrys says, "I have not. But my suspicion is the same as yours—well, yours singular, Ms. Vale,” he amends, "if Mr. Pendragon will not own the realization, despite the preponderance of evidence.”
Kingston says nothing.
"I'm afraid that it stands to reason that your quest has gone from theoretical to practical," he goes on, "urgent even."
Kingston snaps up. "What do you mean?"
"He means there's a deadline,” I say shortly, "Don't you?"
Emrys nods. "Of sorts.”
“It's not just about solving the puzzle anymore,” I say. “We have to do something with what we know about me, or else…”
I can't finish the sentence.
"Or else," Emrys says soberly.
Both of us look at Kingston.
“I can’t make any decisions unilaterally,” Kingston says. “We can’t,” he amends, looking me in the eye. I nod.
“So we have to talk to the others.” About what, to do what…I don’t really know. But Kingston’s right: they have to be part of it, whatever it is.
“Then talk you must.” Emrys nods. “I await your decision with trepidation and trust.”
Kingston stares into the middle of the room. Behind him, the fire crackles.
“Gwenna,” he says. “Could you give us a moment, please?”
“Oh.” I blink. “Of course.” I let go of his hand—reluctantly—and slip out to the hall, to the stairs.
I have no reason to think Kingston’s up to anything. But if he thinks I can’t still hear them talking, that I’m not going to walk as slowly as humanly possible back to my room…he’s wrong.
I take one step, then another, barely ascending, gripping the banister hard, and eavesdrop for my life.
“…dedicated my life to this, and I’m not giving up,” Kingston’s saying, voice low and even. “I’m not. But I have to know. Whatever it is—whatever she is. Will she have to die?”
A long pause.
“I’m afraid that, Mr. Pendragon, is the question at hand.”