Shatter the Earth Read online

  “Oh, no. No, no. We are not—”

  “But why not?” I forged on, before she started talking over me again. “You’re training me—”

  “You’re a Pythia fighting a war against an entire pantheon, all on your own! Whilst she is—”

  “Agnes’ daughter. With Jonas Marsden.”

  Gertie blinked. I saw her.

  “She has the skill,” I said, pressing my advantage. “And then some. And she’s true and loyal and kind and fierce and everything, everything she needs to be, except confident, because Agnes always treated her like a dirty little secret—”

  “I’m not listening to this.” Gertie stood up.

  “You started it,” I reminded her, getting in front of the door.

  “I can just shift out,” she told me, with another eyebrow. “Unlike certain other people.”

  “But you won’t. We haven’t finished talking yet, and you know I’m right—”

  “I know nothing of the kind!” Gertie looked at me in exasperation. “I have my own duties to perform. Am I expected to train your whole court?”

  “No. You’re not even expected to train Rhea. Agnes is—”

  “Agnes also has duties!”

  “Yes, one of which was not fucking up her daughter!”

  Gertie looked shocked, probably at my language, so I kept on talking. “She didn’t mean to do it; she was trying to protect her. But she just ended up making Rhea feel unimportant and useless and untalented—none of which is true. But now . . .” I spread my arms, and sloshed some tea around. Gertie didn’t seem to notice.

  “Now?” she demanded.

  “Now it’s destroying her. She can do the job, but she doesn’t believe she can and she’s terrified of letting me down. Hilde’s been working with her and so have I, but I don’t think we’re what she needs. I don’t even think you are. I think the only way she can work through this—”

  “If she does.”

  “—is being trained by her mother. Agnes made this mess; she needs to clean it up. And,” I added, because Gertie looked like she was going to interrupt again, “don’t you think she’d want to? If she knew the truth—”

  “She can’t,” Gertie said emphatically. “I have to memory charm all of this away, once you’re done training. The stronger the emotion, the harder it is to overwrite entirely. Things slip through, even subconsciously, as Dr. Freud would say—”

  “So, don’t tell her. Just see to it that Agnes trains her.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  Then I’m screwed, I thought, but didn’t say. I’d shocked her enough for one day. “Then I start looking for another heir. But that’s a long process, and I don’t have a lot of time—”

  “No. It’s the irony of our existence, that even we never seem to have enough.” We shared a look of mutual understanding, and brief though it was, it warmed me more than the tea. There were very few people who truly understood what this job was like, and what it required of you. But Gertie did.

  Which I guessed was why, after a brief pause, she nodded. “Very well. Leave her here with me when you return, and we shall see what she’s made of.”

  I felt a weight lift off my shoulders that I hadn’t even realized was there.

  And then slam straight back into place with her next words. “And now that that’s settled, you may give me your version of what happened last night.”

  I groaned inwardly, and almost outwardly. There were very few things I wanted to discuss less than last night. But I’d come here for advice, which she couldn’t provide if she didn’t know what was going on.

  I womaned up and told her, with a few exceptions—like the exact details of the attack in the tub. By the time I finished, I was hoarse and feeling crappy again, sitting on the bed and nursing a cup of by-now lukewarm tea. And Gertie was looking as unhappy as I’d ever seen her.

  Which was saying a lot.

  “Let me see if I understand,” she began heavily. “You’ve been in this house less than twelve hours and you have been attacked three times?”

  “Maybe attacked. I’m not completely sure about the second one.”

  “You were sure enough to go down to the basement in the middle of the night, without telling anyone!”

  “It’s a library, and I did tell—"

  “Not that you were going last night!” Gertie looked disgruntled. “I should have assigned a you a keeper!”

  “Wouldn’t have helped. Rhea was with me, and she only made it worse.”

  “Yes, which is interesting.”

  That was one word for it, I thought grimly, and drank tea.

  Gertie kept talking, and I tried to listen, I really did. But my head hurt and my stomach wasn’t much happier. The tea had settled the queasiness, but now it was busy reminding me that I hadn’t had breakfast—or dinner, either, since I’d skipped it, or lunch since I’d lost most of it.

  To make matters worse, some guy was down in the street, yelling at people about pies. I would like a pie, I thought longingly. Especially how they made them here, with pork and savory jelly, or a nice beef one, with tender chunks of meat in a rich gravy. I didn’t see how it could be called progress when, once upon a time, you had people who brought pies to your house, and society somehow decided people didn’t need that anymore? I mean, what the hell?

  But, yeah, a pie would be perfect right about—

  “Cassandra!”

  I blinked, and tore my eyes away from the window. “Yes?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  I can’t help it when you yell, I didn’t say, because things were bad enough. “Yes, of course.”

  “Good. Then we are agreed.”

  “Um. Yes?”

  Gertie narrowed her eyes at me. “We are agreed,” she said ponderously, “that there is a chance that at least two—the first and the third—of your attacks are directly attributable to the spell you are under, and possibly the second as well, for all I know. That’s the problem with old enchantments. If you don’t have a grimoire to tell you what they do, you can end up in a world of trouble!”

  “There’s no grimoire.”

  “I am aware. We shall therefore have to sort this out for ourselves. In fact, I think it shall serve admirably as your next lesson—”

  Shit.

  “—after you’ve eaten,” she added, as someone knocked on the door.

  I perked up.

  Breakfast was good, and even better, it was served to me in bed. So I didn’t have to get dressed before falling onto a tray of buttered toast—cold, because that was how they did things here—the widest bacon I’d ever seen—from super hogs, apparently—fried eggs with nice runny yolks to dip the toast in—what pieces I hadn’t already slathered with butter and jam—a couple of fried mushrooms that were okay, and a gristly piece of black pudding that wasn’t. I pushed it over to the side of my plate, so that it didn’t touch any of the good stuff.

  I also drank another gallon or so of hot tea that warmed me all the way to my toes. And then lay back against the pillows, full as a tick and pretty much unable to move. Which may have been the plan, I realized, as Gertie shut the door decisively behind the maid who’d just taken my empty tray away.

  And, damn, I was not ready for another lesson right now, I thought. Especially not of the type she seemed to prefer. The first one we’d ever had, she’d tossed me into an arena with the other acolytes and older initiates, and had told them to all attack me at once.

  Fun times.

  And they hadn’t gotten any better since.

  “Look,” I said. “Is there any way we could—” And that was as far as I got. Because she turned from the door and threw something at me, something I instinctively put out a hand to protect myself from and accidentally caught.

  And the world fell away.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Damn it! I thought, staring around.

  But at least it wasn’t horrible this time. There were no blood-splattered gladiators s
inking to their knees, no terrified mothers running with their babies, no monsters out of an ancient bestiary attacking anybody. No anything.

  I appeared to be entirely alone, in some sort of little courtyard.

  Damn it, Gertie! I thought again, feeling a surge of genuine anger. She always did this. Her straightforward conversation style was the exact opposite of her training methods, which were oblique as hell and often provided more riddles than answers.

  She said it was because a Pythia had to be able to figure things out for herself, and not just wait around for someone to give her a solution to her problems, which I totally agreed with—in theory. But in practice, it was absolutely maddening. Especially when I didn’t even have any clues to use!

  And there weren’t any around here.

  There was nothing here except for a floor of gray stones of all different shapes and sizes, which had been fitted together with the cheerful disregard of a toddler forcing a solution to a puzzle. And a round circle of the same stacked stone with a little wooden house on top, like a wishing well out of a fairy tale. There were some vines scrawling all over it and up the side of a house made out of—you guessed it—the same gray rocks.

  The vines provided some much-needed color, because the sky was gray, too, as was the ocean that I discovered when I rounded the house and found a beach so close that the incoming tide tickled my toes.

  There was nobody on the beach, but there was an indentation in the sand that looked like it had been dug out. The tide had filled it in and then retreated, leaving a bunch of tiny silver fish behind, trapped in a miniature sea. I walked over and watched them for a moment, their small bodies darting here and there, their skins flashing silver in the sunlight. The vines weren’t visible from here, so everything was completely gray: the silver fish, the pewter sky, the craggy, whiteish-gray cliffs in the distance, the darker, rolling tide, and the pearly foam on the ashen sand. It was beautiful, in a stark, monochromatic kind of way.

  I didn’t get it.

  “My grandmother’s home, when I was a girl,” someone said, and I looked behind me to find Gertie standing there. I knew it was her—the voice was the same—but the body definitely wasn’t.

  The purplish curls with their gray roots were gone, and in their place were bright red braids that stretched almost to her waist. The more-than-slightly-padded, grandmotherly figure I knew was also missing, replaced by a slender, boyish body in an old-fashioned outfit—but not a girl’s. Gertie had found some knee breeches somewhere, along with a white linen shirt that was far too big for her.

  She looked to be about eight, maybe nine, and had a pail full of clams in her hand, which explained the holes dug around the beach. Her feet were bare, her face was freckled, and her shanks were sandy, making her completely unrecognizable as the woman I knew, except for the voice. And the eyes.

  They were the same shrewd brown orbs, which looked a little odd in a child’s face, but I didn’t see them for long. She squatted down, the wet sand seeping up through her toes, to dig another hole with a trowel she’d fished out of the pail. I squatted down, too, not knowing what else to do.

  “My grandmother took me in,” she told me, as she worked. “After my father died. I had been close to him, you see, and didn’t take his passing well. Hilde was much better behaved. Not that she didn’t grieve, but she kept it to herself for the most part, and put on a brave face for our mother. I was . . . less inclined . . . to do likewise, and eventually mother decided that she needed a respite and sent me here.”

  Another clam hit the bucket, and a dog came loping up, with shaggy black fur covered with wet sand. He proceeded to shake it all over us, causing Gertie to yelp and me to end up on my ass, because the sand was slippery. And cold, I thought, feeling it ooze under my nightgown-clad butt.

  “A lot of help you are!” Gertie told the dog, who licked her face, unrepentant.

  She regarded him sternly. “You aren’t getting around me that way. You want clams for dinner, go help me find some.”

  She pointed down the beach, and the dog ran off enthusiastically, although how many clams it was going to find was debatable. Especially since it stopped halfway to chase a wave. Gertie sighed.

  “Utterly useless,” she informed me. But she said it fondly.

  “Is there a reason we’re here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Gertie said, and squat walked over to another little indentation in the sand, the tell-tale breathing hole of her next victim.

  “And that would be?”

  “So impatient,” she tsked. “Here, hold the bucket.”

  I did as I was told, since she was my only way out of whatever this was, and she dragged a long, tube shaped thing out of the sand with her bare hand. It looked nothing like a clam, and poked a white tongue—or something—out at us defiantly. But into the bucket it went anyway.

  “Razorfish,” she said. “Best type of clam there is. Makes a damned fine stew.”

  I didn’t answer. Gertie would get around to telling me what she wanted when she felt like it, and not before. I’d learned that much during our training sessions over the last month, many of which could have gone faster if she’d just explained what it was that she wanted to me to do. But that wasn’t her style. Or maybe she just like watching me fumble around.

  She also liked digging clams, I thought, after squatting after her for what felt like half an hour. But, finally, we had enough, or maybe her thighs had started to hurt, too. Because she stood up, and tried to take the by-now heavy pail.

  “I’ve got it,” I told her.

  “Very well. Come inside. It’s getting darker.”

  I didn’t know how she could tell with skies as overcast as these, but I didn’t argue. I followed her into the little stone house, and then stopped dead in the doorway. I hadn’t been able to tell from outside, but it was now clear: somebody was moving around in there.

  I couldn’t see them, but there were sounds of footfalls and metallic clinks and other indications that someone was inside. Not that I needed them. Because the dog ran through the open door behind me, almost knocking me down. And then sped ahead into what I guessed was a kitchen, judging by the smell of fresh baked bread filtering through the house.

  “Gertie!” A woman’s annoyed voice called. “Come get this animal. It’s filthy!”

  Gertie went off to get the animal, I presumed. I didn’t see, because I was too busy looking around at white plastered walls decorated with sturdy wooden shutters, a spinning wheel in a corner with a basket of wool at its side, and a couple of hard-backed wooden chairs by a fire. I would have expected rockers, it was that sort of place, but wasn’t sure whether they’d been invented yet.

  I also didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Gertie was back.

  “Come on, then! Why are you standing there?”

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the next room, which was a long one with a small dining area in front and a kitchen in back. And a tall, rawboned, elderly woman who bore no resemblance to Gertie at all and who was waiting for the clams. I handed them over, and she eyed me up and down without a smile.

  “Always dragging someone back for dinner,” she said. “Well, if ye’re going to eat, gel, you’re going to work for it, first.”

  She handed me a knife.

  I looked around the room, which was even more stark than the outer one, with just a wooden table, some shelves, and a fireplace with a deep vee of soot marking the path from the logs to the chimney. I wasn’t clear what I was supposed to do, having only woken up a little over an hour ago. Things usually didn’t get this weird until at least lunch.

  The woman’s pale blue eyes narrowed, and her high forehead developed a crease down the center. Okay, I could see a resemblance now, I thought. “Is she slow?” she asked Gertie, who sighed.

  “Only sometimes.” She grabbed me again. “Come on!”

  I came on. Out a side door, and back into the little courtyard with the vines, where I’d come in. The overly excitable dog
was running around the well, almost but not quite clipping an old bench as he passed, which had been shoved up against the side of the house. I hadn’t noticed it before because its weathered boards were almost the exact shade of the rocks.

  We sat on the bench and Gertie spent long minutes showing me how to shuck clams, including the long, weird looking ones.

  “You know, when I said I needed lessons, this wasn’t exactly what I meant,” I told her.

  “You should feel honored,” she said, jimmying open a stubborn shell. “I don’t bring many people here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “What did I say?” The clam came open and she handed me a wooden tray, where she put the lower shell with the pink and white flesh inside, and discarded the upper back into the pail. “This is my grandmother’s house. That,” she pointed at the figure just visible inside the window behind us. “Is my grandmother.”

  “I got that,” I said, balancing the tray on my knees. “But what are we doing here?”

  Gertie shucked another clam. “I knew my father’s death was a bad thing. I didn’t know it would change my life—and Hilde’s, too. He’d been rather good, you see, at hiding the fact of his daughters’ clairvoyance from the Pythian Court. We’d been tested; there’d been no getting around that as there’d been three acolytes in the family tree, making us prime candidates. But one of those acolytes was still serving, and she arranged to be at our testing.” Sharp brown eyes met mine for an instant. “We failed, of course.”

  “She let you off.”

  Gertie shrugged. “I assume so. I never asked her or father about it. But mother . . . mother certainly believed that, and was quite annoyed. She had several friends with daughters at court, and had assumed that she would have at least one to boast of herself, only to be told that we were both sight blind. Something that the nightly terrors we experienced would seem to contradict.”

  Yeah, remembered those, I thought grimly.

  “After father died, she had my sister retested, which was fairly easy as Hilde was younger than me by two years, and her test had been marked inconclusive to begin with, abilities often failing to show up in one so young. The second time, my cousin was not involved, at mother’s request. Hilde, of course, passed easily.”