Down winding roads, past rows of candles, in the sea-soaked air Gabrielle ran. With a gale-force roar and a lightning aura, the spirit followed.
Gabrielle had a plan. Almost. The original plan had been to lure the spirit into the charmed crossroads circle she had set up and then use her bottlebell to beat it into submission until it vanished or the sun rose and it was banished. But the spirit was too strong for the candle circle, and Gabrielle had nowhere else to contain it. So the plan for now was to keep it distracted while she thought of a way to bind it.
But it was hard to think when your feet slammed against stone and your throat burned bloody and raw. Hard to focus when a creature beyond mortal ken kept calling out Lillian behind you.
Gabrielle whipped around a corner only to see people at the other end of the alley, dressed in oranges and yellows for the moon festival. Protecting them was her first priority, so she skidded to a halt and turned around. Eyes narrowed in concentration, Gabrielle whistled, the note shrill and loud. It was enough to stop the spirit, who gazed at her with a tilted head and midnight eyes. Gabrielle whistled again, three clear notes, and raised her bottlebell, which glowed with a ragged red light. She advanced towards the spirit slowly, who didn’t move as it watched her approach. Her senses were wide open, painfully so, but she focused and tried to block out the murmurs of the crowd behind her and search only for the three small sparks she was waiting for.
After a few seconds, her mice jumped onto her from the roofs, glowing and growing as they fed on her adrenaline and fear. The spirit tensed, as if to attack, and in that moment Gabrielle rang her bottlebell and commanded the first mouse to jump.
The mouse twisted in mid-air, riding the energy from the bottlebell and morphing into something predatory. The spirit cried out in a voice that tore the hood back from Gabrielle’s head and echoed in the alley. Undeterred, Gabrielle took a step forward and sent the second mouse lunging at the spirit. By her third attack, the spirit had become the pursued and Gabrielle the hunter. Her eyes glowing gold and her face twisted in a savage grin, Gabrielle ran.
There was a primal joy to the chase, with an edge of fear turned triumph. Her feet were fast, but so was her mind, racing to find a way to bind the spirit as she and her spirit-mice ran him down. She needed a vessel to bind him to, but she doubted she had time to find the traditional oil lamp or clay-sealed bottle. But what, then, could she use?
The answer was so absurd, that Gabrielle laughed high and hysterically when it occurred to her. She whistled again, and her mice, looking more like hunting hounds, helped her corral the spirit towards a side street where she knew the perfect vessel awaited.
But the thrill of the hunt was dissipating, and Gabrielle could feel exhaustion seeping into her limbs. Each step weighed down her legs more and more, and her bottlebell was becoming unbearably heavy. When she turned the corner and saw the vessel just a few paces away from the spirit, a final dose of frantic energy flared through her. She knew she only had a few minutes and no room for error. This was her first, last, and only chance.
***Later, as Gabrielle kneeled down by the river that cleft the city in two, her hands shook and she felt a sudden surge of all the fear she had ignored during her battle with the purple spirit. She shivered, and tears dropped onto the carved pumpkin in her hands. Through the stained glass in every orifice, violet light flickered from the angry spirit writhing within. She could still hear his screams echoing in her head, still feel the lashing winds scoring her face raw and red. The battle was over, and yet she still felt as if she were trapped in unceasing struggle against the spirit, or against some larger malignant force she couldn’t understand. The battle was over, but her heart was thudding as if it had just begun, as if this entire night had been just a prelude.
She was a Candlemaiden. This was her life, and it might not ever get easier. Gabrielle let the pumpkin be torn away from her hands by the river’s currents, then stood up and turned around to see a crowd of city folk staring at her and her ghostly mice with wide eyes. For a moment she saw in their faces the fear and distaste she had accustomed herself to, but then they broke into cheers and rushed towards her, gathering her up in their joy and dragged her towards the center of the city, where the songs and sweet smells of the Hallowed Moon festival filled the air instead of restless spirits.
***
The sudden rain had pattered itself away, but Gabrielle stayed under the beech tree, head tucked right beneath a low lengthy branch, feet splayed out over the tops of roots. With the squall gone, she could no longer call her shelter a refuge, but so it felt still.
She knew this tree, had climbed it as a girl. It was but an hour’s walk to the church from here. Perhaps that’s why Gabrielle was suddenly so weary. What was the point of traveling if the destination was as exhausting as the journey? What had she left in the little town she called home? Mother Hall was gone, and all responsibilities now fell to Gabrielle’s slight shoulders. She couldn’t just keep the candles; she had to attend all the births and sanctify all the deaths and deal with every spirit and shade and… In her absence, Upton had probably assumed all the non-spirit duties. In most towns, as untraditional as it was, a priest would do such things, and a Candlemaiden was called only if a shade or particularly vexing spirit appeared. It was the wrong way to go about things, of course. A priest could watch a birth, but could he tether the mother’s spirit to her flesh to make sure the child didn’t lose his mother? He could note a death and say his book’s needless words, but could he ease recalcitrant spirits away from haunting their loved ones, unseen but all the more sharply felt?
Her country was changing, she knew. Ramos was proof. But could she change with it? Let priests take over the sacred responsibilities of Candlemaidens? Perhaps she wouldn’t go back. She could become a wandering Candlemaiden, like in days of old. She’d need a divining lamp, though, to tell her where to go, and those were difficult to build.
She knew she would return to her old town, but she didn’t want to make the decision quite yet, so she took out Mother Hall’s carving knife, though truly it was now her own, and a battered turnip and set to whittling a Hallowed Moon festival face.
The rain had cooled down the day, and slowly hints of life were returning. Insects buzzed, and Gabrielle looked up to watch a dragonfly flit indecisively from grass to dandelion and back. In the sky a brilliant blue bird, its tail feathers trailing like pendants, circled and captured sunlight in its plumage.
There was something painfully beautiful in her bittersweet content, a tension to the moment because she knew it must end. Her senses were sharper and her flesh quivered, each scent and sight and sound striking an impossible idyllic harmony. Her breath sparkled in her lungs. Each falling leaf seemed poetic and momentous, each raindrop on grass a diamond. Up above, the bird trilled loud and high and sweet, and the notes resonated so completely in her marrow, that Gabrielle felt a pang of sorrow she could not so sweetly reply.
She sighed, and the angles of her voice recalled her to herself. The world again became mud and dying leaves. The mice, who had scampered up the tree, grumbled to be woken from their sleep. They scurried into Gabrielle’s cloth pack, which she slung on one shoulder as she continued her journey.
The miles were muddy and empty of the restless spirits that now seemed to populate the wide fields of Erinlin. Part of her rejoiced to not slip out her bottlebell, whose constant use had faded its biting rattle to a reprimanding ring weak and mild, but part of her dreaded how fast the miles fled her reluctant feet. The landscape was too familiar to feed her denial, so she thought not of the looming questions of home but of matters ambivalent and trivial, like cutting her heavy hair or sewing pockets on her deep-blue dress.