Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“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.”

“And then there was you.”

Gertie nodded. Her hands stilled and she looked up, watching the storm clouds roll over the sky, hiding the watery sun. “This was the last day,” she told me. “The last one before they came, two of them, senior acolytes with no relationship to me at all, walking down the beach. I still remember seeing them from the window upstairs, the way their robes billowed out in the breeze. They still used those Grecian type things in those days, made of finely woven silk. They flowed like banners in the wind.”

“And they weren’t so easily fooled,” I guessed. Not that it took much of one.

She had become Pythia, after all.

“No,” Gertie said, watching the possibly brain damaged dog now. It was chasing its stumpy tale, very unsuccessfully, but it seemed happy. “They told grandmother that they’d let the family know the results soon, but she acted like it was a foregone conclusion as soon as they left. That’s why she made me this,” Gertie gestured about with the knife, “that very night, sitting at the table in the kitchen.”

“Made . . . what?” I asked, because I still didn’t understand.

But in typical Gertie fashion, she answered the question I hadn’t asked, not the one I had.

“It changes you, you see? This position, this throne.” She snorted. “Throne. It’s a servant’s job, Cassie, never let them tell you otherwise. And maybe those are the best bits, when you’re getting your hands dirty, when you’re on the chase, when you feel alive. Not when you’re sitting in some monstrosity of a chair, lecturing fools who ought to know better.”

It was my turn to sit back against the house, the tray of seafood on my lap, a rough stone wall behind my head, and stare up at the churning sky. I saw faces in the clouds, so many of them, all the people I’d met and loved and, in some cases, lost over the past summer. It felt like I’d lived a lifetime in half a year, the sum total of the time that I’d been Pythia, and maybe I had. I certainly didn’t feel like the old Cassie anymore, and I was still changing. Yesterday proved that.

But into what?

The breeze off the ocean was cool, and I felt a sudden shiver go down my spine. I got up, put the tray down, and walked over to the other side of the courtyard. The dog had stopped chasing its tail, and was now busy with a clam that it had somehow filched from the pail without us seeing. I watched its pink tongue work the white and black shell, and then squatted down to scratch it behind the ears.

You’re smarter than I am, I thought. Forget torturing yourself with metaphysical crap, and concentrate on the real issues, like dinner. My stomach grumbled as if in agreement, and I looked down at it in annoyance. You just ate! I reminded it.

It grumbled again in reply.

“Miss one meal and it gets jetlagged,” I told Fido. “Like it doesn’t know when mealtime is anymore, and thinks it’s supposed to eat constantly.”

Fido looked like he thought that was a good idea. He also looked, and felt, unbelievably real. I could see the individual hairs on his back standing up, whenever my hand got too close to his prize. Like I could feel the chill in the wind off the water, smell the sea, hear the soft sounds of breaking waves on the beach. Yet this place had an eerie quality to it as well, nothing I could put my finger on, more of a feeling . . .

As if, despite the softly moving leaves and churning sky, time stood still.

I blinked, and looked around again—with other senses this time. Not that it helped. The Pythian power was quiescent here, and my new, weird vampire abilities didn’t work at all. But something told me that I was right.

It felt like someone had done a Jim Croce, and trapped time in a bottle. Like this whole place was a dandelion caught in one of those little see-through paperweights, forever beautiful, forever unchanging. Or like the visions I sometimes received, when touching something very old, only those were usually—

I blinked again, light finally dawning.

“You’re a touch clairvoyant,” I said to Gertie, who had gone back to shucking dinner.

“Well, obviously.”

“And your grandmother?”

“Was as well. It runs in the family.”

I walked back over and sat down. The bench felt strong and solid, and I could feel the silky wood beneath my fingertips, any splinters having long since been worn down by the weather and a generation or two of butts. But it wasn’t just the realness here that was unusual; it was the peacefulness.