I was eager to do as Kat suggested, I told them, excited to work together toward common goals, putting the needs of the sidhe-seers first. From this moment forward, I vowed, I would speak no ill of the Grand Mistress, provided she did the same of me.
I sat.
She would cooperate, Rowena said from her podium, despite that I’d continually proven myself unreliable and dangerous, allying myself with the likes of V’lane.
“Excuse me, so did you,” I pointed out.
“Only for the greater good.”
“You wouldn’t allow me to be part of the greater good. You denied me welcome here.”
Kat stood. “Stop putting us in the middle! Grand Mistress, we must lay aside our differences. Do you not agree?”
Rowena was still a moment, then nodded tightly.
“Full cooperation?” Kat pressed.
Rowena studied the gathered assembly in silence. I knew the precise moment she acknowledged that she’d lost too much ground with her flock to gain it back here and now. Either the two of us would pull the cart together, or the cart was going to leave us behind. “Yes,” she said tightly.
“Great.” I shot to my feet. “So, where was the Book being kept, how was it being contained, and how in the world did you lose it?”
The roar in the hall was deafening, as I’d expected it to be. This, after all, was the question that had been bandied about these walls in whispers and secrecy for more than twenty years.
I dropped back to my seat, curious to see how she would extricate herself. I had no doubt she would.
“Wicked cool, Mac,” said Dani, grinning. “I think we’ve got her now.”
I knew we didn’t. Rowena was too clever to be trapped that easily.
When the crowd finally quieted, she informed us with humble gravity that unfortunately such matters were not within her span of authority to discuss. That although I seemed to believe she was solely in charge, the abbey had always been run as a democracy, governed by the Haven, and all her actions and choices had to be approved or rejected by them, particularly in matters of such delicacy and danger. She must meet with the High Council, present our questions, and obey their dictates. Unfortunately (and conveniently for her, I noted dryly), some of them were not in-house at the moment. But as soon as they were …
“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” I muttered. “By the time she gets around to telling us anything, the Unseelie will have killed a billion more humans.” No matter. I was back in the walls of the abbey. It was time to go to work on plan A. This meeting had been plan B.
I looked at Dani. “You said you’d been trying to get into the Forbidden Libraries. Do you know where all twenty-one of them are?”
Her eyes sparkled.
Dani knew her way around the abbey’s endless maze of stone corridors as well as any sidhe-seer in the first five circles of ascension, she told me proudly. There were seven circles of ascension in total, with the seventh being the Haven itself. Kat and her crew were in only the third. She herself was subject to no such limits, Dani confided smugly. Rowena had set her apart from such matters, as her own personal charge.
“So Rowena told you where all the libraries are?” That just didn’t sound like the GM I knew.
Well, no, Dani hedged, not exactly. So, okay, maybe she’d learned most of what she knew about the abbey before Rowena and the other women figured out that a soft breeze meant she was near, when she’d still been able to snoop freely. What did it matter? She knew, and that was more than any of the others knew! It had taken her years to track down the libraries, and she still wasn’t certain of a couple because she couldn’t get down those corridors, but the way she figured it, they had to be libraries, because what else would Rowena be hiding?
“Place is huge and deadly weird, Mac,” she told me. “There’s parts of the abbey don’t make sense. Wasted space where you think something should be but ain’t.”
I wanted to see all those places, but right now I needed to focus on the libraries. I’d barely slept last night. The conversation I overheard between my parents had played like a stuck record in my head. Baby, I’m sorry to tell you this, but according to some ancient prophecy, there’s something wrong with you and you’re going to doom the whole world. …
I’d been anxious to get my hands on the prophecy before. Now that it was supposedly about me, I was desperate. I wouldn’t believe it was about me until I saw it with my own eyes, and even then I probably still wouldn’t, unless it spelled out my entire name and said something as indubitably incriminating as: Beware of that evil MacKayla Lane; she’s a piece of work. Gonna doom the whole world, that wench.
I snorted. Absurd. Had Alina learned any of this? Was that why she’d kept me so far away? Not just for my own good but because she’d learned something about me that made her afraid to get me involved, for the world’s sake?
“Nah,” I said derisively.
“Is, too,” Dani defended. “I can show you ‘em.”
I snapped back to the present. “Sorry, I was thinking out loud. I believe you, and I want to see those places. But first the libraries.”
We wound down one corridor after the next. They all looked the same to me. The abbey was huge. Without Dani, I might have wandered for days, trying to find my way around. Before I came to the abbey the first time, I’d researched it and learned that the enormous stone fortress had been constructed on consecrated ground in the seventh century, when a church originally built by St. Patrick in 441 A.D. had burned down. That church had been built to replace a crumbling stone circle some claimed had, long ago, been sacred to an ancient pagan sisterhood. The stone circle had been predated by a shian, or fairy mound, that had allegedly concealed within it an entrance to the Otherworld.
Translation: This specific spot of earth, this precise longitude and latitude, had been a place of great importance, sacred and protected, as far back as records went and—I had no doubt—even further. Why? Because a book of unspeakable power had been trapped beneath it for thousands and thousands of years?
The abbey was plundered in 913, rebuilt in 1022, burned in 1123, rebuilt in 1218, burned in 1393, and rebuilt in 1414. It was expanded and fortified each time.
It was added on to in the sixteenth century and again extensively in the seventeenth, sponsored by an anonymous wealthy donor who completed the rectangle of stone buildings, enclosing the inner courtyard and adding housing—much to the astonishment of the locals—for up to a thousand residents.