Chapter 16
C HAPTER 16
AUDEN
I don’t sleep. More precisely, I don’t remember sleeping.
Everything from the past six hours runs through my mind like a flip-book. Just scenes adding up to a whole.
Finding nothing with my cousins.
Literally nothing .
Just locked drawer after locked drawer, all opening with our keys, all opening to nothing. We kept turning our keys, expecting a different result. Madness.
It’s like every scrap of paper died with Ursula.
And we have no idea if it was our grandmother or her murderer who removed everything but the will from the room.
Then it’s suddenly morning.
The birdsong filtering through the diamond-pane windows with the haunted blue of a new day.
I’d fallen asleep in the study. The mantel clock reads five thirty-eight.
And so I stumble down four flights of service stairs, into the basement kitchen, through the brewing of three pots of coffee, and haul my best approximation of a Chef Maggie breakfast spread into the solarium. Thank God the woman is a champ at making everything ahead of time. With her preparation skills, even a boarding school whelp like me can present top-quality sustenance while she lies in a Cinderella sleep, hopefully getting the kind of rest my grandmother never allowed her.
Then, croissant in hand, I decamp to my room, where I wash my face and trade the buttery flakiness of the lingering pastry for a toothbrush and paste.
As I rinse, it hits me.
Right there, in the last line of the clue.
We worship.
I swallow a gulp of water, pull on a clean Walton-Bridge lacrosse T-shirt and shorts, grab my running shoes, haul open the door to my third-floor suite—
And nearly flatten Winter, standing there, hand raised to knock.
“We worship?” I ask before it even computes that she’s basically dressed exactly like me.
A little smile creeps at the corners of her mouth. Her skin is bare and as perfect as magic can make it, any sign of last night stripped away. “Great minds, Auden.”
“Let’s get Evander—”
“Already tried.” Winter nods over her shoulder, reddish-blond ponytail swishing. Of course she did. His suite is between hers and mine. “He’s not there.”
I can’t decide if I’m annoyed, frustrated, or mad. Maybe just tired. We should be doing this together. As a team. “I guess either he’ll find out because we’re successful or because we can cross it off the list. Let’s jet.”
We’re stepping onto the starburst tiles of the garden walk less than a minute later.
Ursula’s shroud is undisturbed to the right, as hard and smooth as the night before, the deep, reddish brown of the Colorado soil blanketing the small fall of her body.
Beyond, the table is in shambles, shards of porcelain and glass glittering in the meager light. White-jacketed waiters lie crumpled in the grass, and the magical fairy lights that edged the garden from twelve feet up litter the garden perimeter like a fallen police line. All evidence of Ursula’s spells collectively failing or taking effect.
All of it detritus of our terrible night.
We don’t discuss it.
Past the lawn’s edge, Winter and I veer left onto the manicured beginnings of a path that will become nothing but bare earth and gravel in a mile or so. It’s a trail as old as the house itself, one that leads up a steep incline to a small peak called Mercy’s Point.
Normally, I’d only willingly suffer through a run like this in the name of training for lacrosse season. But this morning I plan to suffer through gasping breath and screaming quads to inspect what Shadrack Hegemony himself installed at the top of Mercy’s Point more than a hundred years before I was born.
A chapel.
An outdoor chapel—with pulpits facing both east and west, for sunrise or sundown services, and general devotion. It’s the only place on the grounds even remotely religious.
We worship.
We make it a mile, lungs heaving in the altitude and incline, before I catch a scrap of a red Walton-Bridge lacrosse jersey up the trail and know that it’s confirmation that we’re on to something.
“Evander!” I try to shout, but it comes out in a half wheeze because though I’ve had a month to adjust to the altitude, I am running uphill on a suspicious amount of rest after the second worst day of my life.
He doesn’t even flinch at the noise.
“Either he’s got his AirPods in or he’s being a straight jerk,” Winter grumbles, tone indignant and determined. “Coach Rose’s weekly hill repeats are about to come in handy.”
She puts on the jets. With a groan, I follow. My jog shifts into an all-out, mountain-climbing churn of steps. It’s not a sprint—we’re not super athletes, and it is a sixty-degree incline at eight thousand feet—but it most definitely is a race pace.
“Evander. Ulysses. Hegemony!” I grunt out as we close in on his broad back.
When he doesn’t acknowledge that or our footsteps, Winter slams on the brakes, sticks both fingers in her mouth, and whistles so loud that every dog in Grand County probably just started barking. That fails to work also, so I pelt him with a pine cone. It bounces off the back of his head.
Evander finally turns around. He does not have his headphones in.
We gape at him, breathing hard while walking the final ten feet or so to meet him on the trail.
Though I’m not sure I slept, I’m pretty damn convinced Evander spent his entire night pacing the halls. He hasn’t shaved, dark stubble lining his jaw, and somehow even the beads of sweat dotting his temples look utterly exhausted.
I elbow him in the ribs. “Jesus Christ, man, did you think we were Kaysa’s ghosts?”
“Don’t hand him a viable excuse for ignoring us, Auden.”
Rather than defend himself, Evander draws a water bottle from a pack around his waist and takes a swig. As soon as he lowers it, Winter snags it for a drink of her own. “I assume you’re here because you had the same thought I did.”
“We worship,” I confirm.
“Can’t believe I didn’t think of it the moment we read the clue.”
With that, his single-mindedness slides back into place. He turns around to keep climbing toward the summit, which is about another mile, but Winter isn’t done. She shoves the water bottle to my chest and jogs past Evander before making sideways progress so she can both move forward and eviscerate him at the same time.
“And I can’t believe you thought of it and your next move wasn’t to go get us . Because you know what our first thought was? Finding you. You, who happened to be already out here without us.” She halts, and Evander nearly runs smack into her. He has to weigh at least twice as much as she does, but Winter doesn’t even flinch. Not that she flinched when I did something similar mere minutes ago. “I know you’re the patriarch. I know that you want to be High Sorcerer too and feel like the title is yours alone to win. But we’re your family—your only family, in fact. And like Auden said last night, we’re on your team. Act like it.”
Evander’s head drops back like it’s filled with bricks.
“You’re right.”
“I am. And you have no excuse. I don’t want to hear you’re tired. Or that you thought it was your responsibility.”
Evander’s shoulders heave in a sigh. “Anything to add, Auden?”
“Nope, I think Win pretty much covered it, except… last one there’s a rotten egg.”
I toss the water bottle straight at Evander’s face and dart past him, past Winter, and around the next switchback. Evander bobbles the bottle, which thuds to the trail, while Winter’s competitive spirit churns into full speed ahead with a squeak and lunge.
In the end we hurtle ourselves to the top of Mercy’s Point in a dead heat of bumping shoulders and jumbled elbows. The toe of my running shoe hits the flat head atop the mountain first—a fact my cousins both register and totally ignore—and we’re there.
The sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue, and beneath it is the outdoor chapel. Five rows of pews, with a pulpit on both the eastern and western horizons. The sun has just crested the eastern pulpit, its rays caught in the moldering planks of the little wooden lectern. It’s something that needs to be stained, or replaced altogether, the wood soft, split, full of holes. The one on the western end isn’t much better. The outer border of the little outdoor chapel is lined with faded red brick, uprooted by time, weather, and probably global warming.
The bricks and the wooden pulpits and benches were pristine the last time I was up here—preserved by Ursula’s spells, just like the garden, lawn, and the plants in her office. Another sand grain of her magic, evaporated. Something we’ll need to remedy.
Evander pulls out his phone and reads the clue aloud.
“When breath became air,” he recites, trailing a pair of thick fingers along the first pew. “The mountain stood tall with forever frost.” He squints around hard enough that his thick brows plunge those circles under his eyes two shades deeper. “We’re not high enough for any summer snowpack.”
“Nowhere on the grounds is,” Winter amends, stealing Evander’s water bottle again and stepping onto the nearest pew—when the wood groans, she thinks better of it and hops back to the dry earth. “But maybe when Shadrack first arrived that wasn’t the case? The earth has warmed about two degrees since he moved west.”
Evander nods and continues. “Though the call of the falcon, and flick of salmon fin, did not dim the fires… we worship.”
It really is gorgeous language, and despite the stress of it all, the part of me who reads Leaves of Grass is going to be exceedingly disappointed if Shadrack blew all his poetic talent on the first clue.
In a round, Evander tilts his exhausted face to the sky—no falcon; to the ground—no running water featuring salmon nor circle for burning.
“Maybe we have it wrong.”
He sits heavily on a pew, prescient enough to put his weight on the T where a leg meets the bench—the most solid part of the rotted wood. “We’ve got the tributary out in the southwest quadrant. It has salmon but they don’t leave deep water to spawn in running water until August at the earliest. And falcon eat fish, but they’re more likely to steal it from a bear than from the stream. Not to mention that’s a pretty low-lying area and the first section is all a mountain covered in trees.”
“You are so literal.”
I plunk down opposite him, straddling the bench, and swipe a bead of sweat out of my eye. He’s grinding his molars and staring at the rock-strewn dirt as if it’ll spit out a tea-leaf answer. Winter hovers somewhere over my shoulder, her shadow falling like a knife slash across the pair of us.
“Evander, the clue is a metaphorical description of the sweeping beauty of the Rocky Mountains,” I explain. “This is the only place on the grounds where any sort of worship has taken place unless you’re counting the groveling the Cerises have been known to do.”
Winter coughs out a laugh.
“And, because you’re the ambassador of the Hegemony Literal Society…” I knock his sturdy hiking boot with the toe of my running shoe. He continues to stare at the dirt between us. “I’ll point out that this is the place Shadrack built to literally worship the beauty of the natural, elemental world. It’s been magically maintained by every Hegemony after him. Which means every Hegemony, including Ursula, thought it worth their magical energy.”
Her name is heavy this morning, and we sit with its weight for a good minute.
When I feel like I can, I glance to Evander ahead, to Winter behind.
“All three of us, separately, decided it would be the first place we’d look. That means something. And let’s not forget these are supposed to be clues, not riddles. Shadrack, Ursula, every previous High Sorcerer wants us to find the masters.”
We start with everything man-made.
The pews. The bricks lining the space. Then, the pulpits. Evander, being Evander, insists we should divide and conquer, but what he truly means is that he should handle one while Winter and I start with the other.
As expected, they’re in just as bad a shape as the pews—worse even, with more nooks and crannies and joints to collect water and mold. Winter pries the railroad ties Shadrack used as nails free with magic and elbow grease as I steady the top portion of it, the soft wood twisting and splintering, even though I’m holding it with a cushion of air between my fingertips and the rotten construction.
“Without the benefit of magic or modern stain sealant, this thing is basically sawdust,” Winter grumbles, using her own magic to tip up the pulpit shaft now that it’s free from the base, a verdant mist engulfing it. She knocks it with a knuckle and listens hard. Her nose crinkles, sun-hewn freckles showing without her usual heavy makeup. “This one is solid—”
“Wait.” Evander’s voice is strained, like he’s holding up a parked car and not a half-balanced, mostly rotted pulpit. “There’s something here—Auden, I need your help to grab it.”
“What’s wrong with my help?” Winter whines as she works with me to gently right our pulpit.
“Nothing, just—come.”
I give her a hand, and to my surprise she takes it, standing and dusting her fingertips on her overpriced leggings. Across the summit, Evander has both hands above his head, a force of wind funneling through the calling power of his fingertips. Above him, the pulpit bobs steadily on the emerald updraft he’s created, like a hawk playing on the breeze.
The strain on his purpling face is enough that we both break into a run. When we crash in next to him, he grits out, “It’s in the recess. Nailed in.” He’s holding steady, fingers flexing and concentration unwavering.
I can see now why Winter can’t retrieve what’s inside. Though she’s tall, she doesn’t have enough height to reach inside the hollow pulpit where it’s currently suspended. It’s clear Evander’s doing all he can not to destroy it, trying to keep it steady and sturdy with pressure inside and out to prevent the ancient wood from flying apart.
“Auden,” Evander grumbles, impatience and strain in his voice.
“Trying not to defeat your efforts. Give me a sec.”
It really just takes a moment, and then I see my opening—the right place to enter the air stream Evander has created without upsetting it. I press my hands together and enter the hollow base of the pulpit like an Olympic diver, while leaning my torso away as not to inadvertently bump the updraft, working blindly, quickly, to retrieve whatever’s inside.
“You’re sticking your tongue out,” Winter teases.
“Concentrating.” Then, a weight drops delicately into my hands. “I’ve got it.”
Evander immediately shifts the magical air stream to whisk it straight up and off my arm. Next, he sets the altar gently on a patch of dirt beside the base, and presses forward, saying, “Let me see,” at nearly the same moment Winter whispers, “What is it?”
Almost in answer, the ground beneath us begins to shake.
It’s violent enough that Winter’s center of gravity abandons her and she falls into Evander. He catches her, and I work on instinct, clutching the relic to my chest with one hand and throwing up a spell to surround us with the other. The moment the magic locks into place, a cushion and a shield, I curse, voice strangled, “The safety wards.”
The same safety wards that Ursula promised had been disarmed for our protection.
The same safety wards that detonated ten years ago.
The perimeter of the chapel explodes in a wall of pure green fire. It rings us, hot and heavy, shooting twenty, thirty feet toward the rising sun in thick, flaring, dangerous magical power—
And then, as quickly as it came, the fire snuffs out.
Shield in place, I lift my head.
Nothing is left. Not even a thin curl of smoke.
That isn’t—
That shouldn’t—
This is not how it should work.
A security ward injures before any magical protections can be shown. It wasn’t meant to maim us, it was meant as a sign. A remnant of the wards removed by Ursula, proof that we are touching an artifact powerful enough to demand the strongest protective spells known to the Four Lines.
I swallow and present my tightly balled fist. “I suppose that’s as good a proof as the next clue that this is a master.”
“She could’ve warned us that the wards would still discharge,” Winter mutters, nervously sweeping wisps of wayward hair back into her ponytail. “Especially with… well…”
“Let me see,” Evander cuts her off with a gruff repetition of the very last thing he’d said. I’m prepared to point out that no one appreciates an asshole, especially when narrowly escaping a redux of childhood trauma, when I see his face. All color leached from his brown cheeks, eyes glassy, mouth turned down at the corners. He stares at my hand as if it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to the here and now.
The memories of what was are hard on him too. He doesn’t want to talk about it.
Fine.
I extend my closed fist and open it. Together, we peer down in a little bent-headed circle at the item nestled in my palm.
An ornate silver ball and chain.
The bauble is reminiscent of a tea diffuser, though it doesn’t appear to have any holes, just lacelike silver scrolling in looping and interlocking patterns.
“A locket…” Winter muses. “That was not what I was expecting, I’ll be honest.”
“Not all relics are finger bones and locks of hair,” I tease.
“Ew, no. I was thinking, like, Excalibur or something.”
I shrug and gently sweep the delicate chain to the flat of my palm and present it to my older cousin. “For the patriarch.”
Evander accepts it with a curt nod, blinking away the dampness, though he can’t hide the crimson rimming his lashes. He sniffs, staring down at the master.
All that power, all that pain, packed into something so small, delicate, unobtrusive.
“Wait, says something…” Winter ducks until her nose is an inch away from Evander’s palm. Her fingers lift to probe the relic. Evander rips it away.
“Don’t touch.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Winter snaps back. “It’s as much mine as it is yours or Auden’s. Let me see it. I’ll give it right back, patriarch .”
Evander sighs but doesn’t react as Winter tips the underside of the orb-shaped pendant into view. I watch her blue eyes, so much like Ursula’s, read something I can’t see… and I watch as the spark of excitement within them dims to confusion.
“No…” she says, almost to herself, pale brow crinkling. “No, that can’t be right.”