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.
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.