Chapter Eleven: A Very Influential Fairy
Guardians of the Twilight Lands -- The Sixth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment
The night was cold, with no hearth fires or salamanders to warm the dorms. Rachel lay shivering even with her comforter. She pulled Mistletoe under the blanket and tucked it close around them, trying to build up some heat. Finally, she had to slip out of bed and find a pair of sweatpants to put on under her flannel nightgown.
That worked, a little.
The next day was dreary and icy. The majority of the Kalends activities were canceled, though some intrepid souls did bundle up and go out in the sleet to wait for the Vestal Virgins. Rachel spent the morning reading and drawing pictures. She had been keeping up with her drawing during her classes, whenever the tutors reviewed material she had already memorized, and she was pleased with her progress. There were things she could not seem to master; however, she resolved to speak to her Art tutor about them at her next opportunity.
Around noon, just when she was thinking of going out for lunch, a lockdown sounded. She caught only the briefest glimpse of four Agents in their Inverness cloaks squaring off against a giant winged and tailed frog before the shutters slammed closed. Rachel sighed.
Really, they had to do something about all these fey.
If the Agents could not solve the problem, the students would have to take up the matter themselves. Despite her vow the night she was nearly staked and her conversation with Jariel, Rachel had been secretly hoping the Wisecraft would solve the problem without help from her, but, alas, that had not yet happened. She made up her mind, as soon as the lockdown ended, she would go to the library and see what she could learn about Covenants with the fey.
* * *
Late that afternoon, the Vestal finally came. Despite the driving sleet, Rachel joined the crowd gathered on the commons. She had seen Vestals many times. The Duke of Devon was responsible for distributing the newly kindled fire to one-eighth of Great Britain, and, thus, Gryphon-on-Dart was a stop on the Vestals’ procession. In the past, however, she had not known that her grandmother had been a Vestal Virgin before Amelia Abney-Hastings quit the order to marry Rachel’s grandfather. The event now held more significance to her.
The Vestal Virgin floated upon a flying umbrella platform held up by two white umbrellas, the rims of which gave off a faint golden glow. She wore a long white pleated stola, her hair covered by a white shoulder-length shawl with a fringe of red tassels—the same garments sacred virgins had worn since time immemorial—and held before her a simple Roman terracotta lamp that burned with the gold-tinged white fire of the Eternal Flame.
Rachel eyed the small, flattish lamp with interest. There were two such lamps in her house. One was carved in the shape of a dragon with a duck on its back; the other bore the image of a man riding a gryphon. As children, she and Peter had pretended these were Aladdin’s lamp and rubbed them in hopes of producing genies. One time, her grandmother had caught them at it, snatched the lamps away, and chased them from the drawing room. Only now did Rachel realize these objects must have been keepsakes from her grandmother’s previous life.
As she shivered in the rain, she imagined being a grandmother—once the children she and Gaius would have grew up to have children of their own—and finding her grandchildren playing with the souvenirs of her life as an adventurer librarian of the Library of All Worlds, or whatever her future held. She liked to think that she would be kinder to her future progeny.
Beside the Vestal on the floating platform, an acolyte carried a second earthen pot with coals from the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta that the Vestals had extinguished during Candle Dark in December. It had been relit the next morning using a specially shaped brass pot that gathered and magnified sunlight, focusing it on a single spot where dry kindling could be laid—by law, the Vestals were not allowed to relight their fires from ordinary burning flames but must use pure flame, lit anew from sunlight. This brass pot, or one like it, had been used to rekindle the sacred fires for nearly three thousand years.
Around the floating platform marched bodyguards, four fighting monks of the Temple of Mars, their spears gleaming. Over their Roman armor, the Flamen Martialis wore wolf skin cowls, the upper scalps of the wolves resting upon the crowns of their heads, forming eyed and eared hoods with fangs.
The procession made its way to the Warding Tower in the hemlock forest, north of DeVere Hall. Master Warder Nighthawk and his assistant, Urd Odinson, escorted them to the primary hearth of Roanoke, on the ground floor of that tower. The Vestal circled the tower with the Eternal Flame, with Rachel and the rest of the shivering crowd behind her, and then joined her acolyte in relighting the hearth flame from the coals they had brought from Rome.
Once the new fire grew into a blaze, students from DeVere gathered brands and coals and ran them to primary hearths in other campus buildings. After this, the Vestal and her entourage departed. To Siggy’s disappointment, none of the monks of Mars turned out to be this year’s pilgrims.
Once the primary hearth fires were lit, Flora Towers Skaife, the Mistress of the Beast, and Umberto Sarpento, the custodian, led a second procession returning the salamanders to their hearths. Slowly, the drafty old buildings began to grow warm again.
* * *
Once the formalities ended, Rachel darted across the freezing commons toward the library. As she entered Roanoke Hall, she encountered her Language tutor, Mr. Tuck. He was a large heavyset man with a short brown beard, dressed in the black and green robes of a Canticler. A green tassel hung from his square, black scholar’s cap.
“Miss Griffin,” he said mildly, “I believe I never properly apologized to you for not believing you back in September— about the wraith.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Roanoke Glass to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.