Now, as I glanced around, it affected me differently than it had the first time. In my absence, sidhe-seers had organized the dusty chaos, dug old tomes out of trunks, carried in bookcases, and arranged things for easy access and cataloging.
I love books, they’re in my blood. I wandered the dry stone room, stopping here and there to pass my hands over fragile covers I longed to touch but wasn’t willing to risk harming.
“We’re copying and updating everything,” Kat said. “For millennia, only the Haven was permitted access to these histories and records. In a few more centuries many of them would have been dust.” She gave Rowena a look of gentle rebuke. “Some of them already are.”
“Och, and if you one day carry the scepter of my position, Katrina,” Rowena said sternly, “you’ll come to appreciate the limits of a single lifetime and the difficult choices that must be made.”
“The prophecy,” I said impatiently.
Kat motioned us all to a large oval table. We pulled out chairs and tucked in around it.
“We translated as best we can.”
“Some of the words aren’t Old Irish Gaelic,” Jo said, “but appear to have been invented by a person self-schooled.”
“Jo’s our translator,” Dani said, with equal measures of pride and disdain. “She thinks research is fun. As fecking if.”
“Language!” Rowena snapped.
I blinked at her. She was still on that kick? I’d gotten so inured to “fecking” that it hardly even seemed like a cussword to me anymore.
“Ain’t your problem no more. You ain’t the boss of me.” Dani gave Rowena a hard stare.
“Och, and you’re so happy on your own, are you, Danielle O’Malley? Your mam would rise from her grave were she to ken her daughter left the abbey, consorts with a Fae prince and others of dubious blood, and takes orders from none at the tender age of ten and three.”
“Don’t give me no tender-age bunk,” Dani growled. “ ’Sides, I’m gonna be ten and four soon.” She beamed around the table. “February twentieth, don’t forget. I like chocolate cake. Not yellow. Hate fruit in my cakes. Chocolate on chocolate, the more the better.”
“If you two can’t be quiet, leave,” I said.
The book Kat opened was surprisingly small, thin, clad in dull brown leather, and tied with a worn leather cord. “Moreena Bean lived in these walls a bit over a thousand years ago.”
“A sidhe-seer whose gift was vision?” I guessed.
Kat shook her head. “No, a washerwoman for the abbess. They called her Mad Morry for her ramblings, ridiculed her insistence that dreams were as real as those events we lived. Mad Morry believed life was not a thing shaped of past or present but possibles. She believed that every moment was a new stone tossed into a loch, causing ripples that those ‘revered among women’ for whom she toiled were too dull of mind to see. She claimed to behold the entire loch, each and every stone. She said she was not mad, merely overwhelmed.” Kat smiled faintly. “Much of what she’s written makes no sense whatsoever. If it has come to pass, we can’t tie it to current times or understand her signs. If all she penned in these pages is supposed to pass in order, we are only at the beginning of her predictions. A mere twenty pages in, she tells of the escape of the Sinsar Dubh.”
“She actually calls it that?”
“Nothing in here is ever that clear. She writes of a great evil that slumbers beneath our abbey, that will escape, aided by ‘one in the highest circle.’ ”
“A washerwoman knew of the Haven?” I exclaimed.
“Like as not, she eavesdropped on her betters,” Rowena pronounced.
I rolled my eyes. “Elitist to the core, aren’t you?”
Kat removed a sheet of yellow legal pad upon which Jo had scribbled a translation and handed it to me.
“There’s a great deal of rambling before she gets to the point,” Jo told me. “This was a washerwoman circa 1000 A.D., who’d never seen a car, a plane, a cell phone, an earthquake, and had no words to describe things. She goes on and on about ‘in the day of,’ in an effort to define when this event would take place. I focused on translating only what pertained to the Sinsar Dubh itself. I’m still working on the rest of her predictions, but it’s slow going.”
I scanned it, eager to find proof of my heroic role, or at least no proof of a villainous one.
The Beast will break free and scourge the earth. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot be damaged. An unholy tree, it will grow new leaves. It must be woven. (Walled? Caged?) From the mightiest bloodlines come two: If the one dies young, the other who longs for death will hunt it. Jewels from icy cliffs laid to the east, west, north, and south will make the three faces one. Five of the hidden barrier will chant as the jewels are laid, and one who burns pure (burned on a pyre?) will return it to the place from which it escaped. If the inhabited … possessed (not sure of this word … transformed?) seals it in the heart of darkness, it will slumber, with one eye open.
“Dude—sucky! Who writes that kinda drivel?” Dani exclaimed over my shoulder.
Jo sniffed. “I did the best I could what with the woman not spelling a single word the same way twice.”
“Would it’ve killed her to be a little more specific?” Dani groused.
“She probably thought she was being specific,” I said. The nuances of language changed constantly, especially dialect and lingo. “Really, Dani, who’d be able to translate ‘dude—sucky’ a thousand years from now?”
But it wasn’t only language that compounded things. Communicating a dream was difficult. I’d been so troubled by my Cold Place dreams in middle school that I’d finally told Daddy I was having a recurring nightmare. He’d encouraged me to write it down, and together we’d tried to decide what it meant.
Logical, pragmatic Jack Lane believed the brain was like a vast computer, and dreams were the conscious mind’s way of backing up and storing the day’s events in the subconscious, filing away memories and organizing lessons. But he’d also believed that if a dream kept recurring, it suggested the mind or heart was having a problem dealing with something.
He’d proposed that my dream reflected a child’s natural fear of losing her mother, but even at ten, that hadn’t quite rung true for me. Now I wondered if Daddy had secretly worried that the recurring dream had something to do with the biological mother I’d lost, that perhaps I’d been trapped somewhere cold, forced to watch her die.