The Fire Opal (19 page)

“We believe that Phee breathed in some of her mother’s soul, and that accounts for her strange wisdom and unnatural intuition. And we think that particles of the souls that dissipated inhabit the air all around us.”

“Yes, and Phee seems to have inherited some of her mother’s memories! She knows things from well before she was born,” Wheeta added.

“So Phee’s mother does live on, in a sense,” I said.

“Well, yes,” Gudrun whispered. “As all dead mothers
live on in their daughters. But Phee cannot speak to her or even see a spark of her, like the rest of us see our mothers shimmering in the ice.

“The three girls who lost their mothers this way, Phee, Lloyda and Rue, escaped this barge in their despair. They tried to reach the Holy Isles of Danu. They made it into the dark circle of the sea, the Realm of the Shee. But Uria’s mermaids brought them back.”

Little Phee stood and pushed up the sleeve on one arm, revealing a series of ornate scars in the shape of teeth. My heart filled with sadness and I was overwhelmed with a desire to take her into my arms.

“When the mermaids brought them back, an example was going to be made of them. They were going to be killed,” Gudrun said. “But then Phee had a premonition. She signed to me and I translated for the goddess: ‘In a bog at the northwestern coast of Ireland, a man will find things you lost in battle.’ With her signs, Phee spelled out a name and I said it out loud: Tom Cavan.

The goddess listened and said that the executions of the three girls could be put off. Phee described other things she could
see
about Ard Macha, and Uria, remembering it well as the battleground where she once fell, believed in Phee’s clairvoyance. Phee’s life was spared, but Uria decided to put Lloyda and Rue to death, and had their bodies thrown into the sea.

“Phee didn’t tell the goddess everything about her premonition. She didn’t tell her that a young Irish woman would be sent by the Swan Women.”

“A young Irish woman?” I asked.

“You,” she said. “But all that happened long ago. Since then, we’ve done nothing outwardly rebellious, and Uria has forgotten us. She and her henchwomen are not suspicious of us.

“Phee had a vision, like the one she’d had about Tom Cavan and about you. In it she saw how dresses could be made with ethereal threads, dresses and veils that could contain each ghost soul and help keep it intact so that it could gradually reenter its original body when the right moment arrives and the souls can be released. We have made ethereal dresses and veils for all of them. Work has already begun on the dresses for your mother and sister. I will show you those soon, but first, I will show you this.”

We went through another curtain into the deepest chamber, where she pointed to a similar ice dresser, but this one with five drawers.

“These are the tundra priestesses, the five mothers of the five ash girls who are imprisoned downstairs. They were killed when Uria found them in her lair. Their ghost souls, we believe, dissipated long, long ago.”

These regal-looking women, unlike the three others, lay in heavy, still postures, their hands folded on their chests. Each looked solemn and stared straight up, thin ribbons of blood frozen midspill at the corners of their mouths.

We bowed our heads, gazing at them in silence, until Gudrun touched my arm, indicating that we were going.

I followed her, Phee and Wheeta back out through the grim and frozen dormitory, into the front chapel where
the ghost souls were kept and through a curtain. On dozens of dress forms hung delicate pale opaque shifts, tiny balls of light dripping occasionally down over each garment and rolling to the floor.

A group of tundra girls, wearing spectacles with lenses of thick crystal, were gathered around a concentration of blue lamps. They squinted at their needles and threads, wizened children bent over delicate work.

The thread they used was barely substantial and, like the dresses, dripped with the occasional tiny pellet of light. One girl swept up a group of these pellets into her hand, squeezed them and then worked them into a single strand of thread.

“When the time comes, we have a vehicle for each of our mothers’ ghost souls,” Gudrun said. “These are for your mother and sister.” She pointed to two dresses being created by a slender long-necked girl in the corner.

“Thank you,” I said to the girl as I knelt to look at her work.

The girl took out a long blue needle and a wooden spool.

“She needs to take soul thread from you, Maeve, to make the dresses truly powerful,” Gudrun said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Before an answer came, the girl inserted the needle into my fingertip, and I felt a tiny sting. In a moment, a very fine, almost invisible thread began to issue out through the hollow of the needle. The girl wound it carefully around the spool.

She nodded at me, blinking several times, her eyes
damp from all the concentrated squinting. A few droplets had frozen into tiny crystals on her eyelashes. She turned away from me and began again to ply her needle.

“When our mothers’ ghost souls are free of the ice, these dresses will help them each have a separate image. Their particles will all stay in one place, and the dresses will be their engines of transport,” Gudrun said.

“Transport?” I asked.

“Yes. There are many things you don’t realize about the power of dresses, especially when they are enhanced by ethereal thread. Each daughter contributes thread from her own soul for her mother’s dress. You will learn.”

“I will try,” I said nervously, afraid at how much they were all depending on me.

“What is the first task you have?” Gudrun asked as we stepped through the curtain again, back into the presence of the ghost souls in ice.

“I am supposed to find Danu’s Fire Opal and bring it to her at the Holy Isles.”

Phee gestured excitedly to Gudrun.

“The ash girls,” she said. “Somehow you must go to them. Phee says they can help you find the Fire Opal.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

Just then we heard a massive boom and crash, as if thousands of pieces of glass were breaking all at once.

Wheeta went out to see and came back quickly. A strong blast of wind had knocked down the chandelier in the empty ballroom.

“You should go back to your room,” Gudrun urged.

I looked at Mam and Ishleen pulsing softly behind the facades of ice. I ached to stay longer with them, but Gudrun rushed me out of the chapel. “Someone is bound to come.”

I quickly went into the room where I was staying and closed the door.

The blue fire in the grate had dwindled, and one of the coals was whistling. When I looked at the carved face on the mantel, I saw that it had changed its expression, no longer with set teeth as if pronouncing the letter
S
. The lips were now round and pursed, as if they and not the coal were the source of the whistle. I had the distinct feeling that the face was watching me suspiciously.

I listened hard at the door but heard no one come to inspect, and found that curious. I tried to sleep but felt painfully restless, and finally, in the middle of the night, I got up again, thinking I might go see Mam and Ishleen and listen for the soothing vibrations of their presence. I was crestfallen when I found the chapel door locked. I wandered again through cold, snaking corridors until I found the place where pristine, decoratively carved ice walls and perfectly sheened floors gave way to a dark and primitive passage, the ground dirty slush.

Though my heart was banging so hard that my rib cage shook, something propelled me forward. The sound of Uria’s breathing and heartbeat had been steadily amplifying the closer I got, and an unsettling odor, something vaguely rancid, intensified on the frigid air.

Still, a curiosity edged with horror drove me. I pushed on a rough stone door, and it groaned open. The tunnel
before me was dim. A silhouette of what looked like some kind of stone embankment about six feet away from me suddenly moved, and I stopped in my tracks. Before I could discern what it was, light issued from five places deeper in the passage: five bodiless human heads were staring wide-eyed at me, frowning and furrowing their brows. Insect legs unfolded from beneath them and they began to move forward—quivering, uncanny spiders.

They halted suddenly as the embankment shifted, and a large, hunched creature turned and looked directly at me. His head was rough and human-looking, but his flesh looked as if it were made of stone—dark, damp marble veined with cloudy white streaks. He breathed audibly and noisily, like an asthmatic, sputtering clouds of condensation issuing from his mouth as he did. He was chained there at the rocks, forced to be a guard at the door of Uria’s lair. As he gazed at me, I experienced the shocking certainty that I knew him, and that he also recognized me. For a few moments, he focused on me and did not move. The pity I felt for him in that moment eclipsed my fear of his monstrous form, and I thought that if that moment could have gone on a little longer, I might have figured out who he was.

His lower body shifted suddenly and awkwardly, and he rose up onto four stiff, spindly legs. From the waist up he was a muscular human male, but he had the lower body of a deer or a hind, a kind of bizarre centaur. Standing at his height, he had to struggle to balance himself, but when at last he did, he reared back slightly and
opened his mouth wide, his eyeballs rolling. Terror shot through my spine like a needle.

My trespassing clearly disturbed Uria herself. Her breathing grew loud and uneven, and the drumbeat of her heart pounded in my nerves and eardrums.

Somehow I managed to turn and run. When I reached the familiar corridor, I saw doors creaking open and closed. I rushed into my room and shut myself in.

A tiny cold particle hit my cheek, and I turned, trying to find the source. Several more fell and drifted on the air of the room, and soon a snowstorm began all around me, driving down at a slant from some mysterious source.

I got into bed under the canopy and closed the bed curtains around me. Uria’s hectic breathing continued. The racing heart would slow down, only to speed up again to a gallop. The hotter her temper, as evident in her breathing and heartbeat, the colder the air.

All at once the breathing and heartbeat came to an abrupt stop. I heard something unidentifiable then that terrified me: a metallic cranking and almost whirring noise that seemed to be approaching from a distant corridor and coming closer and closer, then stopping just outside my door.

I wrapped the blankets around me, shivering violently, my teeth chattering so hard I thought they’d break. After an interminable pause, the loud thing began to clank again and whirr, then continued on its way until I could no longer hear it.

When it felt safe, I moved the curtain and looked out
into the room, the snow flying like furious birds. The face over the mantel wore a surprised smile, as if enjoying the storm. It opened its mouth suddenly and tried to catch a snowflake on its white tongue.

I heard the clanking, squeaking thing return and held my breath as it stopped again outside my door. When at last it continued on its way, I let go a deep sigh, finally recognizing how exhausted I was.

Uria’s breathing and heartbeat resumed, at first hectic and loud, and gradually growing calmer. The snow thinned out until only an occasional sparkling fleck wandered the air. White drifts were gathered in every corner, and a thick white blanket covered the floor.

I lay back as the air took on a more temperate climate, and then I sighed deeply and closed my eyes. When I opened them a few hours later, the snow was gone and the floors were damp.

CHAPTER 17

I
t was Mrs. Cavan who opened the bed curtains in the morning and brought me a tray. I drank the hot tea and ate the warm oatcakes and boiled eggs so quickly that I had to catch my breath when I finished.

The face on the mantel had a placid, vacant look to it, and Uria’s breathing was soft—quiet, even—her heartbeat slow and steady. There was clearly no threat on the air, and that heartened me greatly, as if it had all been a passing nightmare.

“I heard that you were wandering around last night,” Mrs. Cavan said.

“Yes. I couldn’t sleep.”

“I don’t want you doing that again,” she said sternly, and focused threateningly on me. She inhaled deeply through her nostrils. “Come with me! I have ordered
dresses to be made for you. The seamstresses have been working on them since before dawn. You need to be fitted, and the hems need to be measured. And, of course, a ceremonial dress is being created for you for tonight’s performance of ‘The Canticle of Fire,’ when you will first be in the presence of Uria’s emanation and possibly introduced to her, depending upon her mood.”

I followed Mrs. Cavan a long way down a windy corridor. By day, the light was different on the barge, but still drained of the warmer colors, as if the spectrum in this world of ice could not include them. A cool, glimmering sun outside penetrated the ice walls, so a hallucinatory light imbued with pale blue flooded the interiors.

“It’s getting too warm around the barge,” Mrs. Cavan said. “Soon it will enshroud itself with cold fog.”