A Chalice of Wind
Cate Tiernan
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Clio
Thais
Connected by Fate
Clio
Thais
So Much Has Changed
Clio
Thais
Time Is Running Out
Thais
I Have Sinned
Clio
Thais
Clio
Thais
Clio
Life at the Golden Blossom
Thais
Clio
Thais
Clio
Thais
We Have a Full Treize
Salvation Being Snatched Away
Clio
A Messy Business
Thais
Clio
Thais
Clio
Thais
Clio
Thais
Clio
Thais
Epilogue
A shocking discovery . . .
Slowly I turned, finally face-to-face with the mysterious—
Me.
I blinked, and for one second I almost put up a hand to see if someone had slipped a mirror in front of me. My eyes widened, and identical green eyes widened simultaneously. My mouth opened a tiny bit, and a mouth shaped like mine but with slightly darker lip gloss also opened. I stepped back automatically and quickly scanned this other me, this Clio.
Our hair was different—hers was longer, I guessed, since it was in a messy knot on the back of her head. Mine was feathered in layers above my shoulders. She was wearing a white tank top and pink-and-red surfer shorts that laced up the front. She had a silver belly ring. We had the same long legs, the same arms. She had a slightly darker tan. We were the same height and looked like we were the same weight, or almost. And here was the really, really unbelievable part:
We had the exact same strawberry birthmark, shaped like a crushed flower. Only hers was on her left cheekbone, and mine was on the right. We were identical, two copies of the same person, peeled apart at some point to make mirror images of each other.
Even though my brain was screaming in confusion, one coherent thought surfaced: there was only one possible explanation.
Clio was my twin sister.
By Cate Tiernan
BALEFIRE
Book One: A Chalice of Wind
Book Two: A Circle of Ashes
Book Three: A Feather of Stone
Book Four: A Necklace of Water
SWEEP
Book One: Book of Shadows
Book Two: The Coven
Book Three: Blood Witch
Book Four: Dark Magick
Book Five: Awakening
Book Six: Spellbound
Book Seven: The Calling
Book Eight: Changeling
Book Nine: Strife
Book Ten: Seeker
Book Eleven: Origins
Book Twelve: Eclipse
Book Thirteen: Reckoning
Book Fourteen: Full Circle
Super Edition: Night’s Child
Balefire 1: A Chalice of Wind
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright 2005 © Gabrielle Charbonnet All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tiernan, Cate.
A chalice of wind / Cate Tiernan.
p. cm.—(Balefire ; 1)
Summary: Separated since birth, seventeen-year-old twins Thais and Clio unexpectedly meet in New Orleans where they seem to be pursued by a coven of witches who want to harness the twins’ magickal powers for its own ends.
eISBN : 978-1-101-11914-3
[1. Witchcraft—Fiction. 2. Twins—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction. 4. Immortality—Fiction. 5. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series.
PZ7.T437Cd 2005
[Fic]—dc22
2005008145
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To Barry Varela, King of the Back Story and
Plotman Extraordinaire. Thanks for everything.
Prologue
When the shades were down, you had to open the train compartment door to see who was inside. The last four minutes had taught us this as my friends Alison and Lynne and I raced through the train cars, looking for our trip supervisor.
“Not this one!” Alison said, checking out one compartment.
“Do you think it was something she ate?” Alison asked. “I mean, poor Anne. Yuck.”
We were only on day three of our junior-year trip to Europe—having done Belgium in a whirlwind, we were speeding through Germany and would end up in France in another four days. But if Anne was really sick, she would be flown home. Maybe it was just something she ate. Our supervisor, Ms. Polems, could decide.
“Thais, get that one!” Lynne called, pointing as she looked through a compartment window.
I cupped my hands around my eyes like a scuba mask and pressed them against the glass. Just as quickly I pulled away as four junior-class pinhead jocks started catcalling and whistling.
“Oh, I’m so sure,” I muttered in revulsion.
“Oops! Entschuld—entschuh—” Alison began in another doorway.
“Entschuldigung!” Lynne sang, pulling Alison back into the corridor.
I grinned at them. Despite Anne being sick, so far we were having a blast on this trip.
I seized the handle of the next compartment and yanked. Four tourists were inside—no Ms. Polems. “Oh, sorry,” I said, pulling back. Two of the men stared at me, and I groaned inwardly. I’d already dealt with some over-friendly natives, and I didn’t need more now.
“Clio?” one of the men said in a smooth, educated voice.
Yeah, right. Nice try. “Nope, sorry,” I said briskly, and slid the door shut. “Not here,” I told Alison.
Three doors up ahead, Lynne swung out into the corridor. “Found her!” she called, and I relaxed against the swaying train window, miles of stunning mountainy German landscape flashing by. Ms. Polems and Lynne hurried by me, and I slowly followed the
m, hoping Pats and Jess had tried to clean up our compartment a little.
Jules gazed silently at the compartment door that had just clicked loudly into place. That face . . .
He turned and looked at his companion, a friend he had known for more years than he cared to count. Daedalus looked as shocked as Jules felt.
“Surely that was Clio,” Daedalus said, speaking softly so their seatmates wouldn’t hear. He ran an elegant, long-fingered hand through hair graying at the temples, though still thick despite his age. “Wasn’t Clio her name? Or was it . . . Clémence?”
“Clémence was the mother,” Jules murmured. “The one who died. When was the last time you saw the child?”
Daedalus held his chin, thinking. Both men looked up as a small knot of students, led by an official-looking older woman, bobbed down the rocking corridor. He saw her again—that face—and then she was gone. “Maybe four years ago?” he guessed. “She was thirteen, and Petra was initiating her. I saw her only from a distance.”
“But of course, they’re unmistakable, that line,” Jules said in an undertone. “They always have been.”
“Yes.” Daedalus frowned: confronted with an impossibility, his brain spun with thoughts. “She had to be the child, yet she wasn’t,” he said at last. “She really wasn’t—there was nothing about her—”
“Nothing in her eyes,” Jules broke in, agreeing.
“Unmistakably the child, yet not the child.” Daedalus cataloged facts on his fingers. “Clearly not an older child, nor a younger.”
“No,” Jules said grimly.
The conclusion occurred to them at the same instant. Daedalus’s mouth actually dropped open, and Jules put his hand over his heart. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Twins. Two of them! Two!”
He hadn’t see Daedalus smile like that in . . . he didn’t know how long.
Clio
This was so effing frustrating. If I clenched my jaws any tighter, my face would snap.
My grandmother sat across from me, serenity emanating from her like perfume, a scent she dabbed behind her ears in the morning that carried her smoothly through her day.
Well, I had forgotten to dab on my freaking serenity this morning, and now I was holding this piece of copper in my left fist, my fingernails making angry half-moons in my palm. Another minute of this and I would throw the copper across the room, sweep the candle over with my hand, and just go.
But I wanted this so bad.
So bad I could taste it. And now, looking into my grandmother’s eyes, calm and blue over the candle’s flame, I felt like she was reading every thought that flitted through my brain. And that she was amused.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, all the way down to my belly ring. Then I released it slowly, willing it to take tension, doubt, ignorance, impatience with it.
Cuivre, orientez ma force. Copper, direct my power, I thought. Actually, not even thought—lighter than that. Expressing the idea so lightly that it wasn’t even a thought or words. Just pure feeling, as slight as a ribbon of smoke, weaving into the power of Bonne Magie.
Montrez-moi, I breathed. Show me.
You have to walk before you can run. You have to crawl before you can walk.
Montrez-moi.
Quartz crystals and rough chunks of emerald surrounded me and my grandmother in twelve points. A white candle burned on the ground between us. My butt had gone numb, like, yesterday. Breathe.
Montrez-moi.
It wasn’t working, it wasn’t working, je n’ai pas de la force, rien du tout. I opened my eyes, ready to scream.
And saw a huge cypress tree before me.
No grandmother. An enormous cypress tree almost blocked out the sky, the heavy gray clouds. I looked down: I still held the copper, hot now from my hand. I was in woods somewhere—I didn’t recognize where. Une cyprière. A woodsy swamp—cypress knees pushing up through still, brown-green water. But I was standing on land, something solid, moss-covered.
The clouds grew darker, roiling with an internal storm. Leaves whipped past me, landed on the water, brushed my face. I heard thunder, a deep rumbling that fluttered in my chest and filled my ears. Fat raindrops spattered the ground, ran down my cheeks like tears. Then an enormous crack! shook me where I stood, and a simultaneous stroke of lightning blinded me. Almost instantly, I heard a shuddering, splintering sound, like a wooden boat grinding against rocks. I blinked, trying to look through brilliant red-and-orange afterimages in my eyes. Right in front of me, the huge cypress tree was split in two, its halves bending precariously outward, already cracking, pulled down by their weight.
At the base, between two thick roots that were slowly being tugged from the earth, I saw a sudden upsurging of—what? I squinted. Was it water? Oil? It was dark like oil, thick—but the next lightning flash revealed the opaque dark red of blood. The rivulet of blood also split into two and ran across the ground, seeping slowly into the sodden moss, the red startling against the greenish gray. I looked down and saw the blood swelling, running faster, gushing heavily from between the tree roots. My feet! My feet were being splashed with blood, my shins flecked with it. I lost it then, covered my mouth and screamed into my tight palm, trying to move but finding myself more firmly rooted than the tree itself—
“Clio! Clio!”
A cool hand took my chin in a no-nonsense grip. I blinked rapidly, trying to clear rain out of my eyes. My grandmother was holding my chin in one hand and had her other under my elbow.
“Stand up, child,” Nan instructed calmly. The candle between us had been knocked over, its wax running on the wooden floor. My knees felt wobbly and I was gulping air, looking around wildly, orienting myself.
“Nan,” I gasped, swallowing air like a fish. “Nan, oh, déesse, that sucked.”
“Tell me what you saw,” she said, leading me out of the workroom and into our somewhat shabby kitchen.
I didn’t want to talk about it, as if the words would recall the vision, putting me back into it. “I saw a tree,” I said reluctantly. “A cypress. I was in a swamp kind of place. There was a storm, and then—the tree got hit by lightning. It got split in two. And then—blood gushed out of its roots.”
“Blood?” Her gaze was sharp.
I nodded, feeling shivery and kind of sick. “Blood, a river of blood. And it split in two and started running over my feet, and then I yelled. Yuck.” I trembled and couldn’t help looking at my bare feet. Not bloody. Tan feet, purple-painted toenails. Fine.
“A tree split by lightning,” my grandmother mused, pouring hot water into a pot. The steamy, wet smell of herbs filled the room, and my shivering eased. “A river of blood from its roots. And the river split in two.”
“Yeah,” I said, holding my mug in my cold hands, inhaling the steam. “That pretty much sums it up. Man.” I shook my head and sipped. “What?” I said, noticing that my grandmother was watching me.
“It’s interesting,” she said in that way that meant there were a thousand other words inside her that weren’t coming out. “Interesting vision. Looks like copper’s good for you. We’ll work on it again tomorrow.”
“Not if I see you first,” I muttered into my mug.
Thais
This isn’t happening.
I could tell myself that a thousand times, and a thousand times the cold reality of my life would ruthlessly sink in again.
Next to me, Mrs. Thompkins gave my hand a pat. We were sitting side by side in the Third District Civil Court of Welsford, Connecticut. Two weeks ago, I had been happily scarfing down a pâtisserie Anglaise in a little bakery in Tours. Today I was waiting to hear a judge discuss the terms of my father’s will.
Because my father was dead.
Two weeks ago, I’d had a dad, a home, a life. Then someone had had a stroke behind the wheel, and the out-of-control car had jumped a curb on Main Street and killed my dad. Things like that don’t happen to people, not really. They happen in movies, sometimes books. Not to real people, not to real dads. N
ot to me.
Yet here I was, listening to a judge read a will I’d never even known existed. Mrs. Thompkins, who’d been our neighbor my whole life, dabbed at my cheeks with a lavender-scented hankie, and I realized I’d been crying.
“The minor child, Thais Allard, has been granted in custody to a family friend.” The judge looked at me kindly. I glanced at Mrs. Thompkins next to me, thinking how strange it would be to go home to her house, right next door to my old life, to sleep in her guest room for the next four months until I turned eighteen.
If I had a boyfriend, I could move in with him. So I guessed breaking up with Chad Woolcott right before I went to Europe had been premature. I sighed, but the sigh turned into a sob, and I choked it back.
The judge began talking about probate and executors, and my mind got fuzzy.
I loved Bridget Thompkins—she’d been the grandmother I’d never had. When her husband had died three years ago, it was like losing a grandfather. Could I stay in my own house and just have her be my guardian, next door?
“And is the person named Axel Govin in the court-room?” Judge Dailey asked, looking over her glasses.
“Axelle Gau-vanh,” a voice behind me said, giving the name a crisp French pronunciation.
“Axelle Gauvin,” the judge repeated patiently.
Mrs. Thompkins and I frowned at each other.
“Ms. Gauvin, Michel Allard’s will clearly states that he wished you to become the guardian of his only minor child, Thais Allard. Is this your understanding?”
I blinked rapidly. Whaaat?
“Yes, it is, Your Honor,” said the voice behind me, and I whirled around. Axelle Gauvin, whom I’d never heard of in my life, looked like the head dominatrix of an expensive bordello. She had shining black hair cut in a perfect, swingy bell right above her shoulders. Black bangs framed black, heavily made-up eyes. Bright bloodred lips either pouted naturally or had been injected with collagen. The rest of her was a blur of shining black leather and silver buckles. In summer. Welsford, Connecticut, had never seen anything like this.
