The Fire Opal (17 page)

“They’re guards,” Mrs. Cavan said. “They usually swim around the ice but are waiting out a tidal shift.”

The sea splashed up and in, wetting our shoes and hems and rolling over the thick supine bodies of the mermaids, then slapped the walls as it exited.

One of the creatures—I was certain it was the one who had tried to pull Mam into the undertow when she was pregnant—hoisted herself up to look at me. Her large blue-scaled tail pointed tensely up and abruptly slapped down hard against the ice. She screamed as she focused on me, and many of the others grew agitated. They were all unhappy-looking with distressed faces. The one who knew me bared her jagged teeth as she peered at me, and began to foam at the mouth.

“She’s with me!” Mrs. Cavan shouted at them. “She’s going to marry Tom.”

This news seemed to unsettle some of them, and they slapped their tails hard against the ice floor, screamed and made agonized, inarticulate noises.
They
couldn’t also be enamored of Tom Cavan, I thought, horrified.

“Such dangerous creatures,” I commented, half under my breath.

“In the sea they are terrors, but on land or on the ice like this, they are much less frightening than Uria’s other protectors,” Mrs. Cavan said. “Besides, they’re only a threat if you are a traitor to Uria, or …” She turned and looked at me as if her mistrust for me pierced her again. “If you prove to be devious in one way or another.”

As we climbed up to the next landing, I became aware of an amplified breathing and the sound of a heart beating, as if the ice barge itself were alive.

“What is that?” I asked, looking around for the source.

“That’s Uria, the goddess. Her breathing and heartbeat can be heard throughout this floating palace. Tom says that her nervous system is the central pulse of this entire barge.”

Once we were at the next level, my heart raced as I recognized the vast, drafty ballroom, empty of any furnishings, its floor of polished ice reflecting everything above it with the clarity of a mirror. I was certain it was the place I had always seen in my vision. Everything had a dull blue cast to it, duller even than the unsettling lack of color in Mrs. Cavan’s cottage. Here, though the overall impression of the light was blue, it felt drained of life, not pleasant like most blues. The walls, carved of ice, were encrusted in places with frost, and the gusting wind glimmered with particles.

The massive chandelier, hanging with icicles, swayed
and chimed above us as a cold wind moved through the room and out into the corridors. Just as in my vision, there was a vast emptiness about the room, in spite of elaborate white and pale blue decorative plasterwork on the walls.

Then I saw the door to the other room, the room I was sure Mam was in. I steadied myself and continued to follow Mrs. Cavan obediently. Every step through the corridors echoed loudly beneath our feet, setting off a series of echoes, which, however loud, never eclipsed the pervasive breathing and heartbeat of Uria.

“It sounds as if the goddess is sleeping now,” Mrs. Cavan commented to me over her shoulder. “We must be moving through her dream.”

She turned suddenly and stopped. “I should explain,” she said. “You won’t actually meet Uria. She stays isolated in one area, her own wing off the farthest corridor, and no one is allowed to go there.

“She does have an emanation, a figure that represents her, and you will probably meet that emanation tomorrow night. But not even Tom has been in the presence of the actual goddess.” She leaned her face close to mine, and her eyes bulged with emphasis as she said, “And
he
is the most important person in her palace.”

With a self-satisfied and gloating expression, she looked almost accusingly at me, then whipped her head back around and continued on her way.

In one very long room that we passed but did not enter, I saw what looked like dead bodies behind a thin
layer of ice on the wall, some frozen in the act of twisting or struggling, others slumping forward as if surrendering to a dark fate.

I wanted to stop, go inside, and look closer at this awful scene, but Mrs. Cavan rushed me through. “Tom is likely in the dining hall at this hour,” she said.

A harsh gust of wind blew and moaned as we approached a set of massive doors. Dread seized me as Mrs. Cavan turned the knob and it made a loud, squeaking noise.

Inside, her son was slumped over a long table big enough for fifty people, his head on his plate, a wine goblet spilled over beside him. The ruffled cuffs of his sky-blue velvet jacket, drained of its vibrant color in this light, were stained with wine.

Another man sat at the opposite end of the table, also in a drunken stupor, facedown, arms outstretched. He was wearing the uniform of an English soldier. Three more English soldiers lay passed out on the floor.

“It’s too late!” Mrs. Cavan cried. “He’s had his dinner.”

She gestured for me to step out, then closed the door with a boom and lead me up a new corridor.

“Why was he with English soldiers?”

She gave me a frown and a dismissive wave of the hand.

She opened a creaking door to another room. We entered, and I was stunned to see my missing dress, the one I’d labored so hard over, on a dressmaker’s dummy, the hem rippling, the sleeves lifting and flapping in the
gusting winds. Next to it stood another dressmaker’s form, this one bare but fitted, I thought, to the measurements of my body, and beside it, bolts of heavy silvery or metallic fabric.

“My missing dress!” I shot Mrs. Cavan a suspicious look, at which she stiffened and recoiled.

“You seem ungrateful. You ought to consider yourself lucky that I have anticipated this turn of events.”

I looked at her cautiously.

“You’ve been ungrateful to me in the past, Maeve,” she said, and I knew she was referring to the time I’d rejected the gift at the Dungarven shop.

At that moment, I saw movement. Sitting on the floor, studying the stitch work on the hem of the dress, was a young girl, perhaps fifteen years old, wearing a colorful fur-lined hat. Her skin was very pale blue, and she had about her a gaunt, skeletal grace. Gazing at me with large eyes both brimming and deep, she held mine a beat longer than she might have, so I sensed in her a desire to talk with me.

“I am having dresses made for you, Maeve,” Mrs. Cavan said. Then she turned to the girl. “There are specifications,” she said to the girl, then bent over and whispered into her ear. A shadow passed over the girl’s brow, as if she did not like what she was hearing.

The girl’s eyes flashed meaningfully in my direction. I recognized a plea in her expression.

I heard a blast echoing through the room, a crash, and a sound of groaning.

“It is only the ice outside,” the girl said, noticing my
unease. “It breaks and shifts. It sounds like it’s in pain, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

Mrs. Cavan took me to a nearby room where I would sleep. Like all the other rooms I’d seen so far, it was vast and echoing, the few pieces of furniture all elegant and crowded into one area. The bed had a canopy and curtains, and there were carved white plasterwork figures and faces on the walls, most of them frosted over with ice.

Mrs. Cavan gave me a nightdress, then lit the fire in the grate.

“Let me offer you a little advice, Maeve,” she said. “Be grateful and don’t ask a lot of questions.”

It seemed to me that Uria had paused in her breathing to listen to Mrs. Cavan’s words, but I wasn’t sure.

With the lights out, the firelight around the coals was a deeper blue than any color I’d seen here so far. Never having seen blue fire, I was fascinated and got near it, hoping to warm myself against the frigid air, but it did not seem to issue any warmth at all.

There was one carved face among all the others that had no ice on it, and that was on the mantel just above the grate of the fireplace. It wore an odd expression, its teeth set together, so I could not tell if a sudden soft hissing noise I heard was coming from the face or the fire itself.

There was no possible way I could sleep. The thought that Mam’s and Ishleen’s ghosts were trapped here somewhere drove me to leave the bed in a cold ecstasy.

A candle with a blue flame was burning just outside my room, so I took it with me, advancing into the dark corridors, listening carefully all the time to the amplified breathing and steady drumbeats of Uria’s heart, trying to remember from my vision the way back to the ballroom.

I pushed a door, and as it emitted a ghostly twang, my candle flared as if in a draft, and I found myself in the long room where the mass of struggling figures ran a great length of the ice wall. I held the flame up to the faces. None belonged to anyone I had ever known.

I heard voices whispering in Spanish, the names of ships:
Santa Maria de la Luz, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Santa Rita
. These were, every one of them, armada Spaniards, all their bodies held hostage in a long row in the ice. Suddenly I heard one whisper
“La Hermana de la Luna.”
I stopped cold, recognizing a face: one of Francisco’s shipmates from
La Hermana de la Luna
, the one who had waved from the galleon after Francisco had boarded. I gasped, and my candle pulsed before his face, grotesquely lit from below. I had not seen this man on the beach among the other dead, and now I wondered if Francisco was also here.

I searched every face but did not find him.

I thought of the illuminated carved ice figures on the upper terraces of the barge, and found a staircase that ran outside in open air and up to the outer decks. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of carvings, not like the
Spaniards with real bodies behind ice, but hollow ice carvings filled with pale illumination, some trembling or pulsing, some bright, some dim, and it looked as if they were all female images. It was both breathtaking and deeply disturbing, the lit ice and the suggestion of graceful faces and figures.

There were so many, and a raging wind blew gusts so frigid that my head ached as I stood there. How strange: this barge was close to Ard Macha, yet it felt arctic, colder than any place I’d ever been.

I heard a creak and turned.

A tiny figure of a girl wearing the same multicolored hat that the seamstress had worn, a few soft tufts of hair peeking out from under it, stood ill clad, shivering and barefoot at the head of the stairs I had just ascended. I stared at her, then turned again when a shadow moved above me on the air. A massive vulture was circling around, then came down and landed, its heavy talons clutching at a rail. It perched itself only six or seven feet away from me. Extending its wings, stretching them to their full span, it underwent an eerie transformation: its head, neck and chest became human and female, while the rest of it remained a vulture. My heart sped. The creature’s head came suddenly forward, and she narrowed her amber eyes at me, then smiled, showing her teeth. Terror tingled at the tip of my every nerve.

When I looked again, the little girl had disappeared, but I could hear her soft footfalls growing distant.

I ran back toward the stairs I had come up and began to descend. As I rushed through the echoing chambers,
an arctic blast followed me. I found myself moving through the vast room of my vision, the chandelier swinging with great agitation and twanging melodiously. I noted with tremendous relief that Uria’s breathing and heartbeat remained calm and steady, and I hoped that meant that she was oblivious of my trespassing.

I felt a twinge of panic when I sensed someone watching me. Looking to my left, I saw the door to the mysterious room slightly ajar and the tiny figure of the girl peering out, beckoning me inside.

CHAPTER 16

S
till flustered, the cautious side of me ached to find my way back to my room and hide under the covers, but there was such urgency in the way the girl had gestured to me, and such a pulsating and fateful sensation associated with that door, that I rushed toward her.

The room we entered was a dim and bitterly cold space glimmering with blue candlelight and crowded with ice sculptures. Little girls, all wearing the signature colorful winter hat and a similar thick fur-lined dress, stood before one sculpture or another, gazing at it or whispering quietly, as if they were praying in a chapel. The seamstress who had made eye contact with me earlier turned from the ice figure she stood before and looked at us, then opened her arms to the tiny creature
who had lured me there. The little one rushed into the embrace and let herself be warmed.