When first she told me her name for them, I laughed. That was back when my family had recently been killed and I was drunk on freedom. For the first time in my life, when everyone around me felt anxious about the many new monsters on the loose, I felt gloriously, deliriously safe. My monsters were gone. They’d been trying to pry me from the abbey again, my mother evidencing a triumphant gleam in her eye at Sunday-supper-last, and I was certain she and Father had finally struck upon something Rowena wanted badly enough to give me up. For years, the diminutive Grand Mistress had commanded my blind devotion merely for standing bulwark between them and me.
IFPs are no longer a laughing matter. They never were. This one was discovered a week ago, heading straight for our abbey. We wasted days tracking its progress, trying to devise ways to divert it. Nothing worked. It is not as if an IFP can be blown off course with a giant fan. I am the leader of this enclave, yet I’m unable to do something so simple as protect it from being swallowed up by a fractured piece of Faery! The IFP is not even a sentient enemy. It is merely an accident of circumstance.
Then there are the sentient enemies I have to worry about. The thinking, coveting ones whose Upstairs never matches their Underneath, who are no doubt even now talking about the repository of endless knowledge and power the world now knows we have locked beneath our fortress, guarded by a snortingly inept 289 women ranging in age from seven all the way up to Tanty Anna, at one hundred and two.
These are my charges. Trusted to my care.
I see no end for them that does not involve their hapless slaughter!
I need more sidhe-seers. I need to strengthen our numbers.
Last night I gathered my girls around the IFP when it was a mere mile from the abbey. We’d plotted its course with ninety-nine percent certainty: it would enter our home. The only questions were how much of the south chapel next to Rowena’s chambers would it instantly engulf, and would it raze every square inch of our abbey or leave the occasional pile of rubble, perhaps a glowing, red-hot wall standing here and there?
Given its rate of locomotion, it would take nearly an hour for it to complete its passage from end to end. We were able to plot the time and trajectory of its destruction so accurately because it had already left hundreds of miles of fine, sooty ash in its wake. Dirt fields were emblazoned with deep ruts of scorched earth. Large buildings were reduced to small mountains of postapocalyptic embers.
A drifting crematorium, the IFP on a crash course with our abbey contained a fire-world fragment, a roaring inferno capable of instantly reducing concrete to cinders. Were it to enter our walls, it would leave us homeless. To say nothing of what such heat might do to a certain ice cube beneath our fortress.
We tried to spell it, divert it, destroy it, bind it into place. I’d spent the entire day scouring old books Rowena kept in her bedchamber library, although I was fairly certain it was useless. I have yet to find her real “library.” This is another thing I know, because I saw her carrying books at times of crisis that are nowhere to be found. Yet.
My girls wept at the end. We were hot and tired and soon to be homeless. We’d tried everything we knew.
Then a black Humvee drove up and three of Ryodan’s men got out.
With Margery.
The men bade us retreat to a safe perimeter. Using dark magic that mystified us, they tethered the IFP to the earth a mere twenty yards from our walls, where it has remained stationary since. Where, they assured me, it shall continue to remain stationary for all time.
“But I don’t want it there,” I told them. “What am I to do with it? Can we not move it?”
They looked at me as if I had five heads. “Woman, we saved you from certain destruction and you want to critique how we did it? Use the bloody thing as a trash compactor. Incinerate your dead and enemies. Boss’d love to have something like this near Chester’s. It’s a fire that will never go out.”
“Take it there, then!”
“Only way to get it there is cut the tether. Do that and it goes straight through your abbey. Be glad he hasn’t decided he wants it or this place would be forfeit. Dublin is on the other side of your walls. Keep your door open. Ryodan will be by in a few days to tell you what you owe him.”
After they left, Margery pumped her fist in the air and called for celebration that the danger was averted and we lived to fight another day. My girls rallied around her, jubilant, cheering. I stood jostled and forgotten in the melee.
Ryodan will be by in a few days.
To tell me what I owe him.
For years I have hidden behind these walls, trying to be as unimportant as possible. Unassuming. Overlooked. I was happy to walk the fields, daydreaming of Sean and the future we would have, studying sidhe-seer magic and occasionally guiding the girls with gentle wisdom, praising God for my blessings.
I love this abbey. I love these girls.
I turn and walk past the transparent vision of Cruce, who has been sitting on the divan in my dressing room watching me ever since the bells chimed the witching hour, four and a half hours ago, winged and naked as only he could be. I dab my brow with a handkerchief, blotting the sheen of perspiration that is constant of late. As Sean was unable to come last night, I have not slept in two days. Not to be deterred, Cruce found a waking way to torment me. Fortunately all he is capable of at the moment is a weak transmission of his appearance. He cannot speak or touch me. Or he surely would have. I slide my gaze over him with only the smallest hitch.
I begin to dress.
Last night my first cousin was a better leader than I.
Because I don’t know my world.
The time has come to change that.
The drive to Dublin is long and silent. There are no longer any radio stations to listen to and I don’t carry a phone or iPod.
The day was arduous, with Margery presiding over the abbey as if she were in charge, riding the wave of adulation for her lastminute save, peppering her salted commentary on my many failings with inflammatory phrases calculated to incite the girls and make them feel as if I am restricting them as Rowena did. I watch her and think: Am I to take less than three hundred children, young girls, and aging women to war? Later, I tell her. We must fight smart and hard, not fearlessly.
Smart and hard would have left us homeless, she retorted. Fearless is why the abbey stands today.
On that score she is correct, but here, between us and for the fate of my girls, is a deeper problem. She does not care. In order to gain control, Margery would lead the sidhe-seers to their deaths, because for her, leadership is not about their well-being, only hers. Ironically, her very self-engrossment makes her charismatic where I am not. On my way into the city I ponder the need for charm in my management of the girls. It is clear that a decision looms: I must either abdicate leadership or change in more ways than I am certain I can survive.