Shadows of perl, p.14
Shadows of Perl, page 14
“What are these Trials I keep hearing about?”
“Would you walk faster? We’ve already been seen once.” She hurries across the field before slipping beneath the wooded canopy. When I join her, the sun hides from us and the woods become a cone of silence. No hint of a guesthouse. We follow a well-worn path deeper into the forest.
“Trials are how we earn virtue pins,” she finally says. “Accolades specific to our House. Perls are ambitious, if nothing else, and the easiest way to garner favor with my aunt is to have a decorated collar. A complete set is six, and earning all is very rare. My cousin—”
“I know.”
She smirks.
“And the heir to House of Perl has how many?”
That wipes the smile off her face. I don’t suppose Beaulah Perl is happy about that either.
“The guesthouse is just up ahead,” she says.
The hidden abode is two stories, with a steeply pitched roof and the same number of small windows on each side. Its navy-blue painted siding would be hard to see in the shady forest if it weren’t for the overgrown greenery clawing its way up. The wide porch creaks as I hurry up the steps, relieved to be closer to some answers. My mother was just here. The thought tightens a knot between my shoulders. I hold the door open but Adola’s taken off, back toward the estate.
Inside is a cozy living room, and beyond it a kitchen and another sitting room.
“Hello?” I give the common areas a quick walk and listen for any hum of heartbeats, but the guesthouse is quiet. I hurry down the hall of bedrooms and check the first room, twisting its knob, but it doesn’t give. Toushana seeps through my skin, disintegrating the door handle. Beaulah may know I did it, but if I find a clue to where Mom could have gone, I’ll be out of here before Beaulah can question me. I give the door a firm push and it opens.
The room is filled with personal belongings. The bed is unmade and a pile of dirty clothes are on the floor. I close the door quickly and try the next room. And the next. Each locked room is filled with things and reasonably disheveled. None of the items belong to my mother, from what I can tell. Still, I carefully check every single room.
When I twist the knob on the last one, it opens easily. The room is bright and inviting, with a sprawling rug; a large, freshly made bed; and an empty closet. There is a layer of undisturbed dust on the dresser. My heart squeezes. This could have been hers.
I rummage through the dresser but the drawers are empty. Where are you, Mom? Dead, I can almost hear Yagrin saying, again, in my head. I slam the drawer shut. My mother is a survivor! I pull back the covers on the bed and feel beneath the mattresses. Nothing. I sift through linens in a trunk. Still nothing. I remove all the folded blankets, but the bottom of the trunk is empty. I’m tossing them back inside when a stack of crinkled papers tumble to the floor. Each item is a different color, and stained, with ripped edges. I faintly make out faded calligraphy and an envelope to match. The Ditmore. The Caldwell. Harvest Fest. Invitations to various balls. Addressed to various people whose names I don’t know. These were collected. Probably stolen. But who—
The door bursts open, and I shove the stack of invites down the bust of my dress.
“Hello there again.” Charlie smiles. Beside him is a portly fellow with flushed cheeks in a nice suit.
“You can’t be in here, madam,” he says. “All the guests are in sessions at the big house, so I stepped away. I’m sorry I missed you. I would have told you as much.”
I press my palm against myself to hold the invites in place. “I’m just looking around.”
“You’re a special guest,” Charlie says. “Mother wants you in the main house.”
“I wasn’t quite finished.”
Charlie doesn’t move. The suited man’s gaze darts between us. I swallow the urge to protest and escalate this, risking giving up what I did find. But as I leave, I turn to the suited man and ask, “How long has the guesthouse been so full?”
“With the prep for Trials, I haven’t had any open rooms for weeks.” He stares, apparently bewildered by my inquisitiveness.
That was my mother’s room. I follow Charlie out the door. I should’ve expected Beaulah would have eyes on me everywhere I go. She’s cautious to a fault.
When we’re outside, I stop Charlie, annoyed that my plans have been thwarted.
“You’re in charge of security on the grounds?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then who are you?”
“A trusted confidant.”
“Do you live here?”
“I do, most of the time. In the north wing. And all this matters to you because…?”
“Because I want to know who you are and why you have the authority to pull me away. Nothing I was doing concerned you. It was a vacant room.”
“Mother’s House. Mother’s rules. And your mother, Rhea…”
Hearing her name knocks the wind out of me.
“She’s no longer here. You could have just asked.”
“Is it wrong to want to see where she stayed?”
“Not wrong.” We start walking. “But it makes it look like you don’t trust us.”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
We walk in silence until we’re out of the forest.
“I met your mom,” he says. “She was real nice.”
I press the invitations hidden against me, digging my nails into my skin.
“I was bummed I didn’t get a chance to see her off. I was in bed sick as a dog, all day, the day she left. If there’s anything else you want to know, just ask.”
We don’t talk the entire way back to my room, Adola’s warning about Charlie fresh in my mind. I don’t trust Charlie or Adola, but if I had to pick, I’d pick her. I understand the pressure on her shoulders. I don’t know anything about this man or what drives him.
“Mother wants to see you at dinnertime in the cigar lounge,” he says.
I agreed to be her science experiment, so I don’t see a way around coming when she calls.
“If you want me to escort—”
“I can find it.” I offer a tight smile before disappearing inside my room. I didn’t even get a chance to look in the closet, under the bed, or in the bathroom. Who knows what I missed? I have to get back to that guesthouse when everyone, including Charlie, is distracted. I slip out of my shoes before pulling the invites out of my bust. Each is hard and well worn.
My mother never mentioned the balls she attended before she had me. She never talked much about life with Grandmom. But the one thing I do know is that my mom is careful: she only takes calculated risks. Collecting so many invitations from various people would not have been easy. Why would she do that? I flip through the invites again, looking for some kind of message or written note. But there’s nothing. Just papers that have long been trash.
I sigh and shove them back under my mattress. Then I sit and wonder: What are you up to, Mother? Where are you? What did you think of this strange place? Of Beaulah’s secret circle? Her penchant for toushana?
Did it scare her? What will she think of me?
The more I think of my mom, about the last few months, and the room I’m now forced to stay in, the heavier everything feels. I try to picture her kind eyes and summon some memories of her voice. And in my mind I hear what she always used to say: There’s good in you, Quell. You’re going to be okay. I lie down and close my eyes, but the tenderness of those words is drowned out by the events of the evening.
At least for a few hours I won’t have to feel anything.
Thirteen
Jordan
Dinner still swims in my tummy. My father looms over me, his hand firmly on my shoulder, staring at the hunting grounds in front of us. My aunt signals to a small audience watching from the big house behind us. My brother stands in the window. When he sees me looking, he puts his palm on the glass.
“Over here, come along.” She leads me to a wooden platform between two others, where boys much bigger than me are guzzling down water and taping their wrists and ribs. My father follows, but Headmistress Perl stops him with a hand.
“You’ll make him nervous, Richard. Get back upstairs. It’s going to be a long night.”
My father’s lips thin as he departs, but my breath doesn’t come easier.
“Don’t worry about him,” my aunt says. “Just focus on the now.” She gestures to the thicket of trees, their tops glowing in the moonlight. “Master your focus, nephew. It is a weapon.”
“Yes, ma’am.” My hands shake in my pockets. She reaches in and grabs them. She holds them, and I try hard to be still.
“Everything that happens in the forest tonight is just making you into the person you were destined to be. Like the heroes in the stories. You get to be a warrior. Would you like that?” She pats my hand.
I can’t nod fast enough.
“This test is usually reserved for peers five or six grades above you. But you and Yagrin are in the family line: you should be able to handle it.”
I watch the other boys for confidence in their posture, some assurance that whatever we’re doing is going to be okay. But neither looks my way.
“Jordan, have you ever worked really hard to earn something but then lost it?” she goes on.
“Yes. A toy I’d earned from doing really well on my Latin lessons. But I haven’t been able to find it in a long time. I think my brother stole it.”
“And how does that make you feel?” she asks.
“Sad.”
“You are a bit angry with your brother about it, aren’t you?” She strokes my hair, and the gesture reminds me of my mother.
“I guess so.”
“It’s okay to be mad. Let yourself feel that. Use it to fuel your magic. That’s how the Order feels about magic. We’ve worked very hard to shepherd magic through the years so that it wouldn’t be lost. Our forefathers gave their lives to guard it. But there are people who would try to rob us of it or exploit it and control how we use it.”
Her eyes burn like a firestorm and I straighten. This is serious.
“Today’s test is like a game. A way to show us you can help protect what’s ours. That’s what your father does, what your grandpa did, what all Draguns do. Do you think you can do that?”
“I think so.”
She pinches my cheek, and I kind of hate it. But, I kind of don’t. “At the heart of the forest, near the old oak, you’ll find a bunch of things. One is an old family relic. Bring it—and only it—to me in one piece. You may use any magic that occurs to you freely; no one will stop you. You have until sunrise.”
A shiver finger-walks up my spine. That’s a long time to be out here alone.
“And one last thing.” The Headmistress checks her watch. “You will have to make choices along the way. But, Jordan, there are no perfect choices. Only ones that will help you retrieve the relic and those that will not. Choose properly.”
A howl splits the night air. “What’s out there?” I can’t stop fidgeting.
“Wolves and other things,” she says, her gentle hand on my back urging me forward. “But you have no reason to be scared.”
She taps my chest.
“Because they fear the darkness. And we fear no one.”
A horn blows, and she eases me off the platform. My feet thud on the ground and I feel the impact in my chest. The others sprint off, their legs twice as long as mine. I look back. Yagrin’s still watching. As I walk, my heart ticks like a timed bomb. How will my brother know how to find the oak tomorrow, or how to defeat the terrors that wait for us in the forest, if I don’t survive this first? I tighten my fists and close my eyes, imagining my face on the bodies of those glorious warriors in the stories I’ve read, with their fire broadswords and magical armor.
I open my eyes and dash into the forest at full speed. The old oak, I know: I can see it from my bedroom window. I head straight for it, at the heart of the forest. As I approach the clearing, something somewhere howls again.
I scan the woods but don’t see anything. I run faster. I should’ve found the oak by now, but everything is beginning to look the same. I switch directions, scaling sprawling tree roots. A coppery smell burns my nose, but I run and run until my lungs ache. I stop for a breath.
And spot glowing eyes in the brush.
* * *
I blink away the memory, and Headquarters bleeds to full color. I exhale and straighten in my chair. It’s been two days since I turned in my brother, and I still haven’t been able to sleep more than a few minutes at a time. Across the lobby, the Dragunhead’s office door is ajar, and Maei is still not there. It’s ridiculously early, but I had known the pile of reports on my desk would grow while I was away hunting answers about the Sphere. When I arrived this morning, on top was a note from the Dragunhead: Officium est honor volentis.
Duty is the honor of the willing. In other words, hurry up. The pressure to clear my workload before he arrives beats like a drum in my head. I’m usually always ahead on things, and he doesn’t need any reason to question the pendant that hangs from my neck. As swiftly as he gave it, he could rip it away.
Francis’s file is missing several pages. The samples I brought in to be tested are nowhere to be found. So I escalated his death to murder, but the Dragunhead hasn’t yet signed off on a formal investigation. I set the file aside, strumming my fingers across my desk, imagining I can hear the song they would play. But I pound an angry fist on my desk. With the Sphere’s worsened condition, any defenses it has will be weakened. I have to find Quell or get to the Sphere before she does. Not in a month’s time. Not in a week. Today.
But with no whispers of her anywhere, my only option—the second-best sun tracker in the brotherhood—is in a cell that I put him in.
I try to review a few raid reports, but a glimpse of the gold on my lapel drags my thoughts back to the night I earned my first virtue pin. We broke into the family Healer’s stores and had Yagrin ingest some dark stone to make him vomit, so he appeared too sick to go first. I took his spot and earned my pin, the youngest in Perl history to do so, then briefed Yagrin on everything to ensure he could do the same. But he failed.
I can still feel the lashing Father gave me afterward, but what I remember most is the way he looked at me. Like I didn’t deserve the duty pin on my chest. Like my very existence disgusted him because I couldn’t do the task he assigned me: ensure his precious firstborn pass with flying colors.
I stand and pace as I try to read another report. But no manner of distraction can smother the burning in my belly as the past nags my conscience. When we had showed up at Hartsboro’s doors with a tuxedoed Yagrin, he was ten, and I was eight. Though I’ve always been expected to behave as if I’m oldest. Expected to compensate for his childishness. That day he was supposed to be tested on what forms of magic he could show. But I knew he hadn’t unearthed any. I had unearthed two. And then my aunt stumbled upon me doing magic and begged my father to leave me with her at Hartsboro.
My mother cried. My father fumed. He told my aunt how I was a troublemaker, always getting into things that didn’t concern me. But she waved his warning away, and it was the first time I saw someone shut my father up. My aunt’s insistence felt like a warm hug back then; I wanted nothing more than to leave my father’s domineering shadow and become everything my aunt saw in me.
He agreed, only on the condition that I keep Yagrin on track: passing his Rites, earning his virtue pins, and securing the position of House of Perl Ward. But I quickly realized how impossible that was. Yagrin didn’t have any interest in magic, or the Order, or any of it. I did all I could to help him study: preparing all his note cards, reciting with him, giving up my own liberty time to ensure he was ready for his tests. I read texts aloud to him because he refused to do it himself. Sometimes my own performance suffered, but it didn’t matter to Father. Yagrin was the one who needed to succeed.
Perhaps I ruined him.
Memories of our childhood linger like a hungry ghost. I find myself at Maei’s desk and pick up the sentencing roster. How much time, exactly, does Yagrin have left? I open the folder to a long list of names, and Yagrin’s is somehow already close to the top. Ice skids down my spine. I flip the pages backward, trying to understand. These are endorsed executions, one after another.
The brotherhood took in more Draguns this past Season than it has in years. More Draguns means moving through the sentencing lists even faster. Over and over, I count how few names precede my brother’s, but the number doesn’t change. In the time I was gone to meet with Francis, there have been nine burnings. Sickness moves from my gut to my throat. Yagrin’s life hangs in the balance. Days…if he’s lucky. I close the papers on Maei’s desk and stare across the lobby at the pile of work I need to get back to. My brother is a sorry excuse for a Dragun. This is his own fault.
But I can’t move.
He never wanted this life. He did everything he could to avoid it.
“It is his duty!” I kick the nearby trash bin before raking a hand through my hair, grateful no one is in here to witness my petulance. I’ve done my duty. I’ve watched the light leave a person’s eyes; I’ve racked up a handful of bodies in the last two months. And yet my heart thunders harder now than it ever has. I thought he’d have more time. To think. To change his mind and cooperate.
If I do nothing and abandon him to his consequences…
By week’s end my brother will be a body on some other Dragun’s list.
I storm past Maei’s desk and slam the down button on the elevator. I can’t help him if he refuses to be helped. But if I ruined my brother, perhaps saving him is worth one more shot.
