“One might also argue ignorance is safety.”
“Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, than live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.”
“You sound so certain of that. Were it put to the test, I wonder where you would truly stand.”
“Illusion is no substitute for life,” I said.
“Allow them their sacred history,” Rowena said.
“What if it’s not so sacred?” I said.
“Tell us,” Clare demanded. “We have the right to know.”
Rowena turned her head away and looked at me from the side, down her nose, as if I were too distasteful to regard directly. “I knew from the moment I saw you that you would try to destroy us, MacKayla—or whoever you are. I should have put you down then.”
Kat inhaled sharply. “She’s a person, not an animal, Rowena. We don’t put people down.”
“Right, Ro,” Dani said tightly, “we don’t put peeps down.”
I glanced at Dani. She was staring at Rowena, eyes narrowed and filled with hatred. Oh, yes, it was long past time for truth in these walls, whether we liked those truths or not. Maybe Darroc was wrong. Maybe what he’d written was mere conjecture. But we couldn’t question something we refused to face. And unquestioned suspicions had a nasty tendency to grow. Didn’t I know; One was expanding exponentially in my head, in my heart, even now.
“Rowena has a point,” I conceded. “I don’t know whether or not Darroc was right. But you should know that Barrons suspects it, too.”
“Tell us,” Kat demanded.
I drew a deep breath. I knew how this had affected me, and I hadn’t spent my entire life indoctrinated into the sidhe-seer credo. I’d skimmed Darroc’s notes again before I’d brought them. Farther into the pages, he’d written it not as a bulleted supposition but as a fact: The Unseelie King created the sidhe-seers. “Darroc believed it was the Unseelie King himself who trapped the Sinsar Dubh and created a prison for it, here, on our world. He believed the king also created prison guards.” I hesitated, then added grimly, “Sidhe-seers. According to Darroc, it was the last caste of Unseelie the dark king created.”
You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.
Now that that was out, I turned my attention to Rowena. I had no doubt she knew what I needed to know. “Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena.”
She sniffed and turned away.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
“Ballocks, child. We won’t be doing this at all.”
“Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena,” I said again, and this time I used Voice to command her. It resonated, echoing back at me off the abbey’s stone walls. Sidhe-seers rustled and murmured.
Eyes bulging, hands fisted, Rowena began to spit out words in a language I didn’t understand.
I was about to order her to speak in English, when Kat cleared her throat and moved forward. Her face was pale, but her voice was calm and determined when she said, “Don’t do this, Mac. You needn’t coerce her. We found the book containing the prophecies in the Forbidden Library you opened. We can tell you all you need to know.” She held out her hand for the papers I’d brought. “May I?”
I gave them to her.
She searched my gaze. “Do you believe Darroc was right?”
“I don’t know. I could Voice Rowena and see what she knows. I could interrogate her thoroughly.”
Kat looked back at Rowena, who was still speaking. “It’s Old Irish Gaelic,” she told me. “Took a bit of time, but we’ve translated it. Come with us. But hush her, will you?” She shivered. “It’s not right, Mac. It’s like what you did to Nana. Our wills must be our own.”
“You can say that, knowing she’s probably been using coercion on all of you for years?”
“Her power doesn’t begin to compare to yours. There is seduction and there is rape. Some of us suspected she had … compelling leadership abilities. Still, she made wise and fair decisions.”
“She lies to you,” I said. Kat was far more forgiving than I was.
“Withholds. A small but important difference, Mac. She was right about faith. Had we been told as children we might be Unseelie, we may have walked a very different path. Release her. I’m asking you.”
I looked at Kat a long moment. I wondered if she had something besides emotional telepathy, a kind of emotional balm she could apply if she chose. As I looked into her eyes, my anger at Rowena seemed to diminish. And I could see a grain of truth in what Kat had said. Alina and Christian had called them “necessary lies.” I wondered if someone had told me when I was, say, nine or ten that I was Unseelie, if I would have thought I was destined to be bad and never even tried to be good. Would I have thought: What’s the point?
I sighed. Life was so complicated. “Forget the prophecy, Rowena,” I commanded.
Instantly, she stopped speaking.
Kat raised a brow and looked amused. “Is that truly what you wished her to do?”
I winced. “Don’t forget it! Just stop talking about it!”
But it was too late. I’d Voiced her to forget it, and I could tell by the look of disdain on the old woman’s face that every word of it had been wiped from her mind.
“You are a danger to us all,” she said haughtily.
I raked my hands through my hair. Voice was tricky.
“My daughters will tell you of the prophecy I no longer recall thanks to your ineptitude at Druid arts. They will tell you freely, without coercion. But you will consent to my terms: You work with our order and no one else. If I recall the shape of it, we know what we need. You will track it. We will do the rest, with …” She trailed off, rubbing her forehead.
“The five Druids and the stones,” Kat supplied.
“You found the prophecy and it actually tells us what to do?” I said.
Kat nodded.
“I want to see it.”
We gathered in the Forbidden Library, a small, windowless room that had failed to impress me when I’d first found it, spoiled as I was by Barrons Books and Baubles. Dozens of lamps were positioned around the low-ceilinged stone room, bathing it in a soft amber glow, bright enough to keep Shades at bay but diffuse enough to minimize damage to ancient fading pages.