The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (16 page)

Anouk was already in her plaid
night robe when I knocked on the door to her dormitory. Her pretty face held
the same taut lines of worry as everyone else.

“What brings you by so late?” Anouk
asked, holding a lantern to shine out into the street.

“Garland said to tell you goodbye.”

Her eyebrows twitched. She stood
aside and lifted the lantern out of the way. “Get in here. No sense in standing
out in the dark.”

“Actually, I was hoping you could
get me into the cathedral.”

Anouk squinted at me. “At this
hour?”

“I must get inside,” I said.
“Please.”

The young priestess took my plea
with a look of relenting skepticism. “But surely you could persuade the Door to
let you in if it’s urgent. What do you need me for?”

“The Door doesn’t like me,” I said.
It was the truth. The judgmental spirit who lived in the cathedral door had never
shown any fondness for me. What I didn’t add was that my personal list of
transgressions had gotten much longer over the past few days. If the Door had
given me a hard time before, it would certainly have just cause to now.

My prediction turned out to be
entirely accurate.

“Good gracious!” Anouk exclaimed as
The Door slammed shut behind us. We stood alone in the cathedral hall.

“Told you,” I said, avoiding eye
contact.

Anouk shook her head. “I’ve never
heard the Door carry on so. ‘Wrath, envy, corrupted virtue’…what did she mean
by all that?”

“Don’t get me started. I stand
guilty as accused. If she wants to rub it in—”

“Shhhhh!” Anouk said, looking over
her shoulder. “She just barely let us in. She can kick people out, too. I’ve
seen her do it.”

“I’ll try not to take too long,” I
promised, slipping out of my shoes. The stone floor was like ice under my feet.

“Do hurry,” Anouk said, bouncing
from one bare foot to the other.

I went down the barren hallway.
Pale lanterns flickered, barely warding off the gloom that billowed through the
place like smoke. There were many doors. All were shut, but I knew where to
look for the one I needed.

Now that I knew the truth, it would
be hard to speak to my Spirit Mentor without thinking of King Hugo. Linaeve was
his mother.
Was
I reminded myself. Linaeve had no memories of her life.
I had come to depend on her as a guiding force, somebody to keep my head clear
and my goals in focus. Hugo didn’t deserve her in the same way that his father
didn’t deserve Linaeve as a wife. Both men were frauds. It was just one more
thing that Linaeve and I had in common.

I arrived at the door I was looking
for. To my surprise, light glowed around its edges.

Something crinkled along my spine. Had
Linaeve been waiting for me? The spirit only appeared if I watered my Spirit
Tree with tears. I hadn’t been to the tree in days.

I entered the small room cautiously.
Somebody was there waiting for me and it wasn’t Linaeve.

Astonished, I stared into the
puckered old face of High Priestess Grimmoix. “What are you doing here?”

The high priestess looked haughty.
If she was enjoying herself, something must be terribly wrong.

“I knew you’d come tonight,” she
said as she placed herself squarely between me and the tree.

“How?”

She tapped the side of her head
with one of her long, wrinkled fingers. “I have a gift. An old Grimmoix
heirloom. It is the gift of prophecy.”

I knew she was a Prophet, but she’d
never breached the subject before around me. I suspected this was because her
most famous prophecy was about me—or at least, about a Flute Keeper. Since I
was the last one, that really narrowed down the field.

“Why were you waiting for me?” I
asked.

Priestess Grimmoix glanced over her
shoulder at the thin sapling where Linaeve usually appeared. A spiteful scowl
transformed her face, making her look more gargoyle than Fay. “You thought I
wouldn’t find out, didn’t you? Of all the spirits in the Twi-Realm, you had to
call
her
.”

I didn’t like the lethal looks that
she was giving the tree. “You know as well as I that spirit selection is
random. It’s just a coincidence that Linaeve is the one who came to me in the
Spirit Well.”

“THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES!” High Priestess
Grimmoix shouted.

I jumped. “What are you talking
about?”

The old woman grinned crazily. She
plucked a leaf from the tree and twisted it in her knobby hands. “Even in death
Linaeve defies me. She picked you, a worthless, wanton hybrid just like
herself. She had the gift. She could see the threads that intertwine everything
in existence. Even then, she tried to fight against them and tear her own path
through the fabric of destiny. She left behind a wake of chaos and you, Flute
Keeper, are just jetsam in that wake.”

My instincts warned me of danger.
If I had been paying better attention to them I would have run away.

“That’s not true!” I said. “None of
us are bound by fate. I’m here because of choices I made!”

“You really think you’re above it,
don’t you?” she said. “Such arrogance! You will take your proper place now. As
for Linaeve, she has no place here anymore. Time to send her back to the
Twi-Realm where she belongs!”

She snapped her fingers and the
tree burst into flames.

“No!” I screamed.

There was nothing I could do. The
Spirit Tree was Linaeve’s anchor to the living world. The leaves blackened and
curled. The branches turned gray and brittle. Acrid smoke curled towards the
ceiling.

High Priestess Grimmoix cackled
with glee. “No more Spirit Mentor for you, Flute Keeper.”

I trembled with rage. “How could
you? Linaeve was your niece!”

“Linaeve was a traitor!” High Priestess
Grimmoix countered. “I can’t have her influencing you, not if you’re going to
be a good little priestess. From now on your training will be a bit more…
rigorous.
”

I took a cautious step backwards.
“I don’t want to join the clergy anymore.”

“Too late,” High Priestess Grimmoix
said.

“Emma!” came a warning shout from
Anouk. It was quickly muffled.

I ran to the hall but the way was blocked.
Judge Kesper and Judge Nuckelvee stood there, flanked by their intimidating
personal guards. Anouk was being hauled away by cathedral security.

Kesper grinned. With his fat, round
body and his beady eyes he looked like a spider that had just found something
scrumptious caught in its web. “Well, well, Flute Keeper. Isn’t this
convenient?”

Every reflex in my body tensed to
react. The only thing stopping me was the fact that all these people were my
superiors. An attack on them was an attack on Ivywild.

“Watch her,” Kesper said sideways
to one of his guards.

“What is going on?” I asked in an
unsteady voice.

“Just a little re-organization,”
Kesper said. “Surely today’s events were proof enough that things need to
change around here. It’s time for a new order, starting with the clergy.”

My palms grew sweaty. I went to
take a step backwards into the room with the scorched Spirit Tree, but High
Priestess Grimmoix was behind me.

“I-I’m not in the clergy yet,” I
said.

“Of course not,” Kesper said, glaring
at the bare spot on my neck where a source crystal should be. “With accelerated
training, you should pass induction in no time.”

I knew a threat when I heard one. “But
I don’t want to become a priestess anymore,” I said, clenching my fists.

“You no longer have a choice in the
matter,” Judge Nuckelvee said. He was taller than Kesper so he was able to look
down his nose at me.

“Come with us,” Kesper said, reaching
his stumpy fingers for my shirtsleeve.

I drew on my energy to conjure a
barrier. It would buy me time to get around the judges and their guards.

“Block her!” Kesper shouted.

Just as I was about to unleash my
magic, one of the guards grabbed me by the shoulders and held me a locked grip.
My training kicked in and I butted him in the chest with my head. Stunned, the guard
let me loose and clutched his chest. Another guard tried to grab me, but I
twisted out of his reach and gave him a rapid jab in the stomach.

“Out of the way!” Kesper said, shoving
the injured guards aside. He had a handful of some kind of Enchanter’s powder.

“Fight back now,” he said, tossing
the whole handful of powder into my face.

It was as though someone had stolen
every bit of light from the room. I blinked furiously, trying to clear my eyes,
but the powder made me completely blind.

Panicking, I stumbled in the
darkness. I felt guards around me so I swung my fists. I only hit air.

Kesper, Nuckelvee and High
Priestess Grimmoix cackled.

“Not so brazen now, are you?”
Kesper taunted.

I turned towards his voice and gave
a mighty swing. I longed for the satisfaction of hitting him. Instead I pitched
forward from my own momentum and fell to the floor.

The laughter around me grew louder.

“Take her,” Kesper said.

The guards yanked me to my feet. I
braced myself, but they lifted me higher so that my toes dragged the floor.

Blind and overpowered, I realized
it was useless to waste any more of my strength. I wanted to scream.

The hallway scraped under my toes
as the guards took me away. I had prepared myself to fight the enemies outside
of Ivywild. I knew what lengths they would go to and even what some of their
weaknesses were. As for the judges and the priestess, I didn’t have a clue what
they’d do to me.

High Priestess Grimmoix was still cackling.
“One doesn’t need the gift of prophecy to see that this is going to end badly
for you, Flute Keeper,” she said.

CHAPTER NINE

The guards placed me alone in a
room with a cold, gritty stone floor. I could touch all four walls with my
limbs spread. There was a smelly chamber pot in one corner. My senses could
tell me little else.

The blindness that Kesper had cast
upon me seemed to last forever. I began to fear it was permanent. I did not
know whether it was night or day. 

One factor on my side was that in
their rush to put me away, they had forgotten to check me for weapons. I
thanked my lucky stars that I was still wearing my white funeral robe.
Underneath it, I wore my shortsword strapped to my thigh.

A million questions screamed in my head.
The loudest was “Why?” I was a prisoner, but I didn’t know the crime.

Wild hopes flitted through my mind.
Chloe was expecting me. If morning had already come and I wasn’t there, she
would order a search. She’d discover what the judges and the priestess had
done.

Hours crept by. Nobody came for me.

Eventually I fell asleep out of
pure exhaustion. There were no dreams, only a darkness heavier than my
blindness. When I awoke my body ached all over from lying on the hard floor. I
opened my eyes and was relieved to see hazy light. I still couldn’t make out
shapes, but it was an improvement. It calmed me enough that I could evaluate my
situation more clearly.

I started with what I knew for
certain. I knew I was still in the cathedral. As for where I was exactly, I had
no clue. The absolute silence meant nothing. Nearly every inch of the cathedral
was charmed to muffle sound.

Next, I recounted the things that
High Priestess Grimmoix and Judge Kesper had said. I mulled over the priestess
in particular. Delphi Grimmoix was a bitter, lonely old woman, but I felt no
sympathy for her. I would never forgive her for destroying Linaeve’s Spirit
Tree. How cruel did someone have to be to harbor a grudge against a family
member who had been dead for years? Maybe her prophetic gift made her that way.

Then something rang in my head like
the banging of a gong.

High Priestess Grimmoix was
Linaeve’s aunt. Linaeve was Hugo’s mother. I tried to think if Hugo had ever
shown signs of having magical ability. Maybe he didn’t have the gift since he
was mostly Slaugh. He had been able to enter Seraph’s Tear without suffering
the curse that drained all magical folk. Then again, I recalled, he had mostly
stayed close to me in Seraph’s Tear and I’d had the benefit of protection from
the curse. There was also his habit of always showing up at the right time. Was
it his well-tuned Slaugh senses or something else?

Thinking about Hugo made me feel sick
to my stomach. He had gotten me through a lot of rough patches. There were
times when he had stayed by my side when nobody else would. But it was all a
sham. He had merely used me. I was just as angry with him as I was at his
despised great-aunt. Linaeve was the only bright spot in a family tree full of
rotten apples. Now she was out of reach.

Judge Kesper was another bad apple.
He had finally put me in my place and Lord Finbarr wasn’t around to help me.
More disturbing than that was Kesper’s mention of a new order. It made me
nervous for Chloe.

Hours passed in silence. My vision
cleared enough that I could see the gray-black walls that imprisoned me. It was
a barren cell. There were no bars, just a door made of the same blank stone as
the walls. There was nothing for me to look at. I was just as well off being
blind.

There came a scraping noise near
the door. A small slot opened at the bottom and somebody shoved a plate of
fruit inside.

“Eat up,” said a gruff voice on the
other said of the door. “Special course just for you.”

I eyed the food suspiciously. The
shiny berries and fresh fruits looked delicious and I was starving, but I knew
better than to accept food from people who meant me harm.