Destiny (18 page)

“She come back then?”

I spun around. An old woman in a shapeless blue coat was clutching a mop and bucket and nodding toward the painting. It seemed that I had disturbed one of the faithful who had come to do her cleaning duties.

“Who—what do you mean?”

“Her ladyship,” the woman said. “She’ll come one day. Come to save us.” Then she laughed quietly to herself. “She knows what folk do. She sees everything. More than the Reverend in his house yonder. He weren’t born in Wyldcliffe. But she were. Lady Agnes. She knows.”

“Yes,” I answered softly. “I think she does.”

“Aye.”

The woman put down the bucket with a satisfied clatter and started to mop the floor, and took no more notice of me as I left her to her task.

She sees everything.
I trusted that Agnes could see Cal riding over the hills, and that she would guide him to where Josh was lying in her healing arms. But I had to watch
over the rest of our sacred circle now. I had to get back to school to check on Sarah and Evie. I walked back down the lane as quickly as I could, my head bowed against the cold wind. Soon I was at the gates again. The old sign was still there, attached to the encircling walls with a couple of rusty nails:
WYLDCLIFFE ABBEY SCHOOL FOR YOUNG LADIES
. The harsh weather of the valley had peeled some of the paint, so that several letters were missing, like broken teeth, and it now read in a lopsided way:…
BE…COOL…OR YOU…DIE
. It had been like that since I had arrived at Wyldcliffe. It had been there long enough. I grabbed at it and pulled it easily from the wall, and tossed it into the ditch. No one was going to die, or to be hurt by this place; not my friends, not Celeste, not Velvet, not any of them, while I still drew breath and the spirit of Lady Agnes Templeton watched over the Abbey.

I skirted around the main house and made my way to the back of the building, where the old wing projected long and low, at a right angle to the terrace. This was where Miss Scratton’s classroom had been, and I peeped in at the arched windows. A Latin class was taking place, supervised by Miss Clarke, who was watching the students with unseeing, glassy eyes. The girls all bent over their work, methodical, well-mannered, and meaningless.
Any spark of life or individuality had been subdued by the Priestess’s spell. And this was just a warning, a foretaste of the horror that would come that very night, if I failed to stop it.

Eager to find Sarah and Evie, I crept round to one of the side doors of the building and stepped inside. I didn’t want to be seen by the coven. I thought they might leave me alone, confident that their mistress had trapped me with her desperate choices, but I couldn’t be sure. I was just near the locker rooms, and I remembered how I had nearly burst out of the air in front of Velvet’s friends, and only Velvet had seen me. Perhaps I could hide on the secret paths from the coven; perhaps their eyes, blind to so many things, would not see into the purity of the elemental mysteries.

I reached deep inside myself, to the swirling powers of air that seemed to wrap themselves around my heart. With a tremendous force of will I drew back from the solid world around me, and sought out the in-between places: change; transition; the passage from one dimension to another. I hovered in the secret gaps, neither leaving Wyldcliffe nor arriving elsewhere. Hidden in the secret currents of the air, I passed through the school unnoticed by Miss Dalrymple, Miss Schofield, and the other Dark Sisters who
patrolled the place for their mistress.

It was painful to watch two hundred girls gliding noiselessly through the day as though they were already dead. They were like ghosts, a twisted sham of youth and hope. They talked and studied and obeyed every bell that rang out in the dim corridors, and kept to every rule and tradition. But there was no life in their eyes.

By the time the morning had passed and the afternoon crept up on me, my only faint comfort was that I knew now that we had been right to trust Miss Hetherington, and Miss Clarke, too. They had both fallen under the Priestess’s deep spell, which proved that they couldn’t be part of her coven. And the cross little German professor was never a Dark Sister, nor the housekeeper, nor the woman in charge of the laundry, and others like them…they were all innocent, and all sleepwalking through the hushed house in a living nightmare.

Evie and Sarah were empty mockeries of themselves. I hovered near them unseen, but got no response from them when I tried to reach their minds. I even tried to wake Velvet in the hope that her fiery nature might have resisted the Priestess’s curse, but although her eyes widened for a second as I secretly whispered in her ear, she soon relapsed into a stupor, just as doll-like as the others.
The Priestess had been so clever to grant me twenty-four hours to make up my mind. This short day was giving me a bitter a taste of what it would be like if my friends, and all the Wyldcliffe students, really did become Bondsouls. For now they were simply hypnotized, but if once their souls were drained, if they were wandering beyond death in agony like Laura—it was too dreadful to imagine.

Retreating from the paths of the air and the corridors of the school, I headed for the grotto and hid there. I had been hopeful that morning when I had asked Cal to look for Josh at Fairfax Hall, but now I was beginning to panic. There was so little time left, and I still had no clear plan. Again, I went over the options I had. Should I try to attack the Priestess before she returned to Wyldcliffe? But I didn’t even know where she was hiding out, or how I would break down her defenses. At the very moment when I had finally opened the Seal and witnessed some of its powers, she had snatched it away from me—and without it, did I really have the power to defeat her in open conflict? Or should I do as the Priestess demanded and find some way to hand over our elemental powers to her, in the forlorn hope that then she would really go far away and leave my friends in peace? They both seemed like terrible options. Sarah and Evie couldn’t help me to decide, and Agnes,
Cal, and Josh were still at Fairfax Hall. The Priestess had stolen the Keys. Miss Scratton had departed. I didn’t even know where Lynton was, and how could a charming musician help me now? Who else—what else—could I turn to? What was left for me to connect with?

The Book. That was our link with Agnes and Sebastian. They had been hardly older than we were when they had stood on this very spot, in Lord Charles’s fantastical grotto, and searched its pages, looking for truths and powers and new ways of living. The Book. It was the storehouse of wisdom about the Mystic Way, and it had never failed us, not yet….

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I knew what I needed now, but I had no idea where to find it. Sarah usually kept the Book hidden in the stables, but she’d taken it to the caverns on the night of the new moon. Had Kundar been able to escape with it in the confusion that had followed the Priestess’s arrival? Or had he dropped it in those narrow, lightless tunnels, losing it forever?

If only I had more time! The evening would soon be closing in, and the Priestess would come back to carry out her threats. Even if I traveled through the air straight to the heart of the underground kingdom to question Kundar, I wasn’t sure whether he and his Kinsfolk would answer my
call in time. They were Sarah’s people, not mine. Again, I saw so clearly how we had all needed one another. We had different gifts, which together made a whole world of possibilities. We had crossed one another’s paths for a purpose, to defeat the evil that had festered for so long in Wyldcliffe. And we had come so far—we couldn’t fail now, not now—I just needed more time—

If I were ever in trouble—if ever I needed time—this is where I would come.
The voice rang in my head like the clear call of a bell. It was Lynton who had said that, so long ago it seemed now. Had he known something? Was it just a chance remark? I felt for the gold ring on my finger and twisted it around. If ever I needed time…I remembered our visit to the waterfall, on that perfect autumn day, and how in a quick flurry of confusion, he had saved me from falling. Was he trying to save me now? Now…and now…and now…what did I truly believe? Was Lynton just a student who had taken an interest in a lonely girl, or was there something more?

My heart was beating so hard that it seemed to be bursting out of my chest as I tried to decide what was best—to seek out Kundar, or Cal, or to take this last wild journey to the place that Lynton had wanted to show me.
You have to see the waterfall
, he had said.
It’s a perfect miracle.

I took a deep breath. I had made my choice. Crazy though it seemed, I would trust my beautiful stranger and go to see his miracle.

The next moment I drew the cold air of the grotto around me and sank into its embrace, then flew on the back of the wind far above Wyldcliffe, through time and space and stars. Dazzling light and speed threatened to overwhelm me, and just as I felt I would burn up in a vortex of boundless power and energy, I stepped out of the hidden paths and fell to my knees on the sweet damp earth of Thornton Moor.

Ahead of me, glimmering in the fading light, the waterfall poured itself down the face of the cliffs; ever changing, ever constant. I got up and ran over to it, slipping in my eagerness not to waste a second. The water fell noisily to the deep pool at the foot of the cliff, and on either side of the pool, dark rocks rose up like silent guards. I began to climb the rocks, scrambling up the rough steps, telling myself not to look down. Soon I was standing in the secret space that Lynton had showed me, on the slippery ledge between the curtain of water and the rock face. The ledge faced west, and the glitter of the setting sun was like a thousand fireflies on the sparkling water as it fell in front of my eyes, but I turned my back on its beauty
and cautiously began to explore. There was no one here to grab me if I stumbled now. I had to be careful, and I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I just knew I would recognize it when I saw it. I began to grope along the rock, feeling it with my fingers, like exploring a face in the dark…and then it was there. A perfect, tiny circle, a shallow groove in the ancient stone, without beginning or end, and it was waiting to be found, now, at this very moment. Without thinking I slipped Lynton’s ring from my finger and pressed it into the circle. The ring clicked into place, and with a rumbling, scraping sound, a door opened in the side of the cliff.

I stepped inside. In the heart of the rock was a shallow cave, and there on the ground was the Book, with a sheet of paper tucked loosely inside it. I snatched at the paper with trembling hands.
You are not alone
, it said, and the Book fell open for me. Forcing myself to concentrate, I read the following words:

It made sense to me. So Evie had been able to share in Agnes’s powers of fire because of the love between them as sisters, but the Priestess wouldn’t dare to attempt to wrench our powers from us, in case they were destroyed in the process. And I remembered something else: that she hadn’t been able even to touch the Talisman without feeling pain, in that first term when Evie had arrived and Mrs. Hartle had tried to steal her necklace and its powers. That was why the Priestess had to keep the Keys in that cage—because she couldn’t bear to touch them. That was why I had to give them freely in exchange for Evie’s and Sarah’s lives, and the lives of the other girls at the Abbey. But if I didn’t do this, they would all become victims of Wyldcliffe’s dark history. It was an impossible choice…. I needed to know more, so I read on, devouring every word.

And there it all was, step by step, the instructions for how to do what the Priestess had commanded. I was being
shown what to do. How to abandon the Keys and give our elemental powers to Celia Hartle. And then she would leave, and we would be safe. It was a sign, this finding of the Book. It was meant to be.

Feverishly, I began to memorize the instructions, going through them again and again in my head, practicing the incantations. I tried to ignore the little voice of doubt that whispered that even if the Priestess took her poisoned powers far away from Wyldcliffe, there would always be someone else suffering because of her. But it wouldn’t be my friends, I argued with myself, it wouldn’t be Sarah, or Evie…and besides, this was the only chance I had. Someone had left the Book here. Someone had wanted me to see these pages, these instructions. And so I crouched over the crabbed writing and the strange symbols until I had memorized every word.

Finally I sat up and stretched my aching limbs. I realized that I was light-headed with hunger and lack of sleep, but all that would have to wait. I had to hurry back to Wyldcliffe and face her—the woman who had been my mother—for the last time.

I closed the Book, pressing it shut. I would never look at it again, I thought. After tonight, my mystic powers would have left me. This part of my life would be over. But
as my hand touched the shabby green cover, it left some kind of imprint on the worn leather binding. I quickly drew my hand away as though I had been burned, and stared at the strange X-ray-like image on the outside of the Book. The image faded, and in its place, wavering lines of writing appeared on the surface of the leather:
Mysteriorum liber libri…sigillum magnum…signum dei vivi…
I began to read, and understand.
The Book of Mysteries…the Great Seal…the sign of the Living One…
Then I heard a voice speaking to me: