My laugh is hollow and derisive. “Sure. Fine.”
She presses on. “Therapy is only beneficial if the patient wants help with the ghosts that haunt them. And I think that during yesterday’s session, we touched on your ghost.”
“My ghost?” I repeat, bewildered.
“An emotional ghost is a moment, an event, even a person, that hovers over us no matter how far we run to escape it or them.”
“Sure,” I say reasonably. “I already know the answer to this quiz. It’s the moment that I found out my mom died. There, easy.”
“Not so fast,” she says with warm amusement. “Do you want to know how I locate a patient’s ghost, Bree?” An early morning breeze lifts up the edge of her shawl, blowing the material over her cheek in a soft billow.
I don’t, in fact, want to know.
Patricia presses forward anyway. “I listen for what they don’t talk about. Ghosts are invisible, after all.”
“Okay.”
“And you don’t talk about your mother.”
I open my mouth to say, Yes, I do. I just spoke about her. Right now—but Patricia raises a palm.
“You might talk about her death, but you don’t talk about her life. This is a symptom of the type of grief you’re experiencing too: an inability to process that a person is more than their absence. That love is about more than loss.”
“She isn’t lost,” I snap. “She didn’t just wander off and get lost somewhere. I hate it when people say that.”
“Well, what happened to her?”
“What do you mean what happened to her? She died! And someone is responsible for that!”
Her lips go thin. Behind her glasses, Patricia’s brown eyes have iron in them now. “Rootcraft is used for healing, protection, and self-knowledge. The same can be said for therapy. But you don’t want those things, do you, Bree?”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I turn away.
She speaks calmly, but her words are weighted stones dropping one after another, dragging my limbs down, pulling me into unknown depths. “Even if you succeed in your goal and find proof, revenge won’t bring her back. Why someone dies is not the same question as why they are gone.”
After-Bree simmers just below the surface of my skin. “I know that,” I say through gritted teeth, “but it will make me feel better.”
“Why is that exactly?”
I blink. “Isn’t it self-explanatory?”
Patricia narrows her eyes. “No. It’s not.” She turns toward the open quad and tugs her shawl tighter. “I’m going to go now. I apologize for surprising you here today.”
“That’s it?” I follow her as she descends down the steps. “You’re just going?”
“I’ll call your father next week to give him a referral to another therapist, someone who specializes in your condition.”
“What?” I sputter. “You’re just… getting rid of me? Why?”
She turns then, eyes more somber than I’ve ever seen them. “I thought that I could help ease you through grief by connecting you to your mother and our community, but I made a mistake. I brought the craft into our sessions when perhaps I shouldn’t have, particularly as your mother never brought you into the fold herself.”
“So you’re just abandoning me?” I say, my voice cracking with sudden emotion.
She sighs heavily. “There comes a time when even passive support turns to endorsement, and I won’t endorse what you’re doing with the Order. I can’t.”
My hands ball into fists. “And you won’t help me figure out what I am?”
When she speaks again, her voice is thick with sorrow. “I want you to figure out who you are. We all deserve that answer, and the journey it takes to find it. But I fear for you, Bree, and the path you have assigned yourself. I know that the Order, for what they’re worth, has worked for centuries to rid our plane of the creatures who cross over and take material form. They may fight monsters, but they aren’t protectors.”
“Because they’re Bloodcrafters and they’ve stolen their root,” I say.
“We borrow root because keeping it in our living bodies creates an imbalance of energy. We call Bloodcraft a curse because power taken and not returned incurs a debt, and the universe and the dead will always come to collect, one way or another. The Order has tied power to their bloodlines for hundreds of years. Tell me, Bree, how large do you think their debt is? Do you know how they pay it? The only currency that Bloodcraft accepts is suffering and death.”
My stomach bottoms out in horror. “Fifteen centuries.” That’s what Sel said in the tunnels. All of the lives and Oaths and heavy prices paid. And the Abatement. Hundreds of life spans, taken. Cut short.
Patricia reaches for my hand and gives it a final, brief squeeze before she leaves me standing in the grass behind her.
34
PATRICIA’S WARNING HAUNTS me for the rest of the day.
But it dissolves as soon as I walk into the training room, where excitement ripples through the five Pages waiting for Gillian and Owen. Something’s happened, but I don’t know what.
Greer and Whitty pull me aside to fill me in:
Yesterday afternoon William barred Sel from performing the Warrior’s Oath to bond Sar and Tor until he calmed down—which only made Sel even angrier. After that, Nick, Sel, and Lord Davis were overheard on a tense phone call that lasted late into the night. There’d been shouting. Even a scuffle. It ended with Sel smashing a chair and storming out the front door. No one’s seen Nick since.
Gillian walks in right as they finish talking, so I don’t get a chance to text Nick for answers. Between the sour taste in my mouth from my “breakup” with Patricia and my worry about Nick, the rest of the evening goes miserably.
Sel and Gillian demo the longsword, and face off to a draw. Again, Sel doesn’t speak to anyone and leaves as soon as they’re done.
Owen and Gillian introduce us to hard, custom-designed polypropylene practice swords. For me, it’s an utter disaster—even against the heavy wooden dummies we start with for the first hour.
On the second hour, they pair us up and that’s much, much worse.
Gillian drops her head into her hands every time Whitty disarms me. “It’s an extension of your arm, Matthews!” When I raise a hand to ask Whitty for a break three times in ten minutes, out of breath and hands clutching my knees, Gillian groans. “You have no stamina, Matthews! What if your Scion needed you? Do you think you can call time with a gwyllgi on your heels?” I want to scream at her that I have no idea what a gwyllgi is, but instead I stagger to standing, my heart thudding in my chest like a hammer, and start again.
When it’s over, I call Nick’s cell twice, but he doesn’t pick up.
Alice is studying when I get home. She notices my workout gear right away, and I’m ready with a lie: “Scavenger hunts and obstacle courses and team-building crap. Nothing dangerous, just ridiculous initiation stuff.” It takes everything in me to stay awake as we catch up. I tell her an abridged version of the “date” with Nick at the bar, and she gives me news about classmates from back home.