Chapter 14 Maeve
Maeve
Jude’s remaining boot swung from his hand as they entered the house, tracking muddy drips on the wooden floor.
He stopped, scraping a hand over the short crop of his hair.
‘I’ll draw you a bath. Get some oats for it.
For the…’ his gaze raked down her body, landing on the tear in her dress and the leg beneath.
‘For the inflammation. It’ll be ready in a few minutes. ’
Without waiting for her response, he turned the corner and disappeared towards the kitchen.
Maeve gazed up into the dark confines of ánhaga.
The tangled mess of her hair would take hours to wash and detangle, and she didn’t even want to think about the state of her poor dress.
She rubbed her fingers absently over the wound on her thigh.
Pain pulsed up her leg and curled around her hip, burning faintly.
She still felt the ghost of his unexpected touch – surprisingly gentle and alarmingly cold.
The scratch was the least of her worries.
She didn’t know how, but when his fingers first brushed her wrist, she’d felt the abrupt stirring of a memory, similar to the uncanny feeling of remembering somewhere you’d never been. After, a fine layer of gold had covered her vision for a heart-wrenching second before she’d blinked it away.
She hadn’t missed the shock flying across Jude’s face when it happened, the careful way he searched her eyes after.
Had he somehow pried into her head? Was that the corruption of his magic Ezra had warned her about? And, perhaps more importantly, how had he done it?
A slippery sense of vulnerability coated her limbs. More than vulnerability – violation.
Slowly, she reached for the smooth contour of the key tucked beneath the neck of her dress. She was surprised Jude, cautious, paranoid Jude, hadn’t noticed her slip it from his neck when she pulled him from the bog, a move born more out of opportunity than anything else.
If he hadn’t noticed already… he would soon.
She needed to break into the locked room.
Now, with pain still pulsing behind her eyes, the memory still ripe on her tongue.
Now, with Jude preoccupied elsewhere.
Guilt wriggled in her chest. He’d fallen into the bog trying to protect her from the same fate. He’d followed her into the storm, trusted her to help him free from the earth’s hold. Even now, wet and covered in mud, he was drawing her a bath first.
But… would she get another chance? How long did filling a bath take? Not long enough.
She had minutes – if that.
Maeve took one step up the stairs, then another.
Soon, she was racing towards the top, keeping her steps as quiet as she could.
That infernal itch picked up as she approached the door.
An urging to keep walking, to lay her hands on its worn wood frame, its shiny brass handle.
This time, she obeyed wholeheartedly. She wasn’t thinking of Ezra waiting for her updates, or the advancement she desperately wanted.
She wasn’t even thinking of Jude, who would be coming to find her in mere minutes.
There was only the door and whatever lay trapped behind it.
The lock gave with a faint click. Maeve stepped inside.
Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t this.
Bookshelves rounded the room, covering the walls until they reached a window at the far side, each crammed with more spines than she could count.
Gold glittered on every surface, falling through the air.
Like dust, but finer and less substantial.
Slowly, she turned her palms skyward to collect the powder on her fingers.
The room was gilded light and spun-sugar gold, awash with something strange and beautiful.
She turned in a slow circle.
The gold was the same as in her studio. Was it a mark the saints’ magic left behind? Had Jude been exercising his abilities in here? She froze, gazing at the falling powder as a thought occurred.
Had he been answering prayers?
She moved around the room, inspecting the books. A mix between fiction, Abbey tomes, and clothbound, title-less volumes. Her touch left a clean streak across the spines.
A book laid open across a desk pushed under the window. Jude must have left it there, ready to be picked up again the next time he visited. She stepped closer. The pages bore the same texture as her sketchbooks, the shape of the letters unfamiliar. Runes, maybe?
At her sides, her fingers twitched. The pages seemed to shiver in anticipation.
And she knew: the book wanted to be touched.
It wanted her touch upon its gilded surface.
She glanced over her shoulder towards the open door.
From a floor up came the faint sound of water, the creak of floorboards.
Would Jude wait until the bath was full to find her, or expect her to meet him there?
Either way, she didn’t have long.
Her heart rabbited in her chest as she hovered her hand over the pages. Warmth buffeted her palm. She wanted more of it; wanted the book in its entirety. Consumed, like a gulp of air before a fall.
She dropped her hand onto the page. All at once, the world spun out from underneath her.
Shelves swirled into windows, dropping through levels of bedrooms and hallways and windswept moors as Maeve fell from one world into the next.
Nausea surged up with a lash of vertigo.
She tried to scream, but her lungs wouldn’t draw air, the sensation so unlike anything she’d ever experienced that it filled her lungs with pure panic.
She was standing at the edge of an unfamiliar room when the world stilled.
Some parts of it were hazy, like a painting that had been smudged before it could fully dry.
Other elements were as crisp and detailed as her vision.
Her body felt weightless. Not fully corporeal; more ghost than human.
She looked down, seeing nothing but floorboards under her.
The slightest hint of smoke layered under the sea salt when she breathed in.
Sweet and familiar – she was in the Abbey.
Was she in a memory?
The bedroom was smaller than hers and so messy she felt the low-level panic that emerged in places that didn’t subscribe to her particular level of tidiness.
She looked around, heart lurching into her throat as she spotted the boy standing by the open door.
Though he was younger, around the age he’d been when his icon was painted, it was unmistakably Jude.
Somehow, she had to be in a memory. His memory.
Jude closed the door behind him, crouching to shove a triangular piece of wood between the bottom of the door and the floor, effectively locking himself in.
Cursing under his breath, he kicked aside piles of misplaced items to throw himself onto the bed.
His legs were overly long and thin, ankles and wrists delicate where they poked out from his ill-fitting clothes. His hair grew in wild curls to his jaw.
Suddenly, he clamped his hands over his mouth and screamed.
An animal noise, one that sent Maeve skittering backwards into the door. Before he could shout again, a knock sounded on the closed door. The handle rattled, the wood groaning as whoever was on the other side tried to shove it open, stopped by the wood jammed at the bottom.
Jude remained on the bed. His breath quickened as the doorjamb squealed on the stone floor.
Another knock, louder this time. ‘Jude—’ the stranger said. Their voice was fully textureless.
Maeve flinched at the sound of it. It was as though Jude’s memory had fallen short creating the voice, like he’d forgotten who was behind the door in the first place.
‘I know you’re in there. Open the door,’ they grunted. The door didn’t budge. They drummed their fingers on the wood in a rapid staccato. ‘Fine. Have it your way. I thought you’d like to know that a decision has been made.’
Jude stood up. His eyes were wet. He took one step towards the jammed door and stopped. ‘I don’t want to go. Please. This is my home.’ His voice cracked. ‘Please.’
The stranger’s sigh trickled through the door.
Was Maeve seeing his final day at the Abbey? In the memory, he looked midway through his teens, he was in his maybe early twenties now. Elden said he’d been exiled for over eight years.
Nearly a decade. He’d just been a boy when he’d been sent away.
She had recognized the truth in theory, but the reality was so much worse than she ever could’ve imagined. The thought of this version of Jude wandering ánhaga alone was too horrifying to consider.
‘It’s too dangerous for you to stay,’ the stranger said.
Jude stumbled back to the bed. He sat heavily, fingers curling over the edge of the mattress.
‘Keeping you here endangers everyone. The whole Abbey will suffer if you remain. You don’t want that, do you, Jude?
To hurt anyone else? Not after what happened. ’
Who was this stranger to ask Jude, a boy barely out of childhood, to give up his home? Maeve might not have understood what Jude had done to deserve punishment, deserve exile, but no child should be made to believe his very existence hurt people.
Her left hand gave a sudden pulse of pain.
She looked down, finding angry crescent moon marks pressed into her skin from her nails.
Pressure built steadily in her throat. She trusted the Abbey.
She’d given her life in service, an act she didn’t regret.
A decision she would make again and again.
But this… she didn’t know how to reconcile Jude’s tears with her long-held beliefs.
Perhaps she wasn’t seeing the whole picture.
This was just a slice of a memory, after all.
And from an unreliable source at that. Jude had his own biases, held nearly as strongly as Maeve’s loyalty.
That was bound to impact his memories as much as it leaked into his current reality.
He didn’t even remember the identity of the voice behind the door, she reasoned.
Of course, the memory would be filled with inconsistencies.
She took a steadying breath and tried to focus on the stranger’s voice and not the muffled sound of Jude crying into his clasped hands.
‘We’re sending you somewhere you will be safe,’ they said, voice softening.
Though the voice was still strange in its anonymity, the cadence reminded Maeve of the interactions she’d had with the nurses at the Abbey any time she felt unwell.
Straightforward, yet still caring. Was that who was on the other side of the door?
‘You won’t hurt anyone ever again. Is that not what you want?’ the stranger asked.
‘The Goddenwood?’ Jude choked out. His eyes were fever bright with a sudden dash of hope.
‘No…’ they replied, slow and careful. ‘Not there. Somewhere else.’
Jude’s lower lip trembled. He scrubbed his eye with the back of his fist. The slender slice of his wrist she could see was wrapped in a bandage, blood seeping through the edges.
Hardening the soft lines of his face seemed to take effort.
It was the same stubbornness Maeve saw in the present Jude. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone. I never—’
‘Shh,’ the voice soothed. ‘All that matters is that it doesn’t happen again.’
‘Is… all right?’ Jude asked. The space a name would fall came through as a buzz.
Silence hung in the air. Jude stared blankly forward as he waited, fingers drumming on his thighs. ‘Time will tell. What matters is there isn’t a repeat performance.’ Another pause, this one longer. Then ‘… is missing. But you knew that, didn’t you?’
A strange buzz obscured the name. Did Jude not remember that, either? Maeve studied him, cataloguing the way he flinched at the missing name. Why would he have forgotten such a fundamental detail?
‘Okay,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll go.’
A light tap on the door, like the stranger wanted to convey their approval. ‘You’ve made the right choice.’
As the memory faded, she caught the tail end of Jude’s expression as he listened to the footsteps leaving his door.
The young lines of his face, both familiar and not, shifted from heartbreak to anger to resignation, settling there.
He scraped both hands over his head, pulling at the hair around his temples until long strands released into his fingers.
The other hand rose to his mouth, forming a fist.
Maeve came back to herself with a gasp.
She was lying flat on her back on the floor of the library.
Gold dust shimmered in the air, casting the room in a sense of unreality.
Jude’s stifled whimpers still rang in her eardrums as warmth ran from her eye to slide down her jaw.
She didn’t know how she could face him again after what she’d just viewed, knowing she’d see the echo of his boyhood self, broken and pleading.
Her heart rattled unsteadily at the thought of it.
Suddenly, the soft pad of footsteps sounded from the corner of the room.
Maeve shoved to her feet, heart pounding a dangerous rhythm as she turned towards the door, already knowing who she’d see watching her.
And there he was: Jude, bandages and a jar of poultice in his hands. Eyes fixed firmly on the book open beside her feet.