By the Orchid and the Owl: The Esholian Institute Book 1

Chapter 21

The room had completely transformed since our History test mere hours ago.

Rather than desks and papers, it now overflowed with various animal prisons situated throughout the room in meandering patterns, like a snake’s lair. And there were snakes in here, writhing together in a tank to my left, eyeing the young capybaras in the cage next to them. There were terrariums of buzzing crickets, wire cages of frantic mice, aquariums of fish and frogs and snails. There was even an entire coop of plumed peahens nesting in straw.

On a perch above this conglomeration, watching everything, sat a spectacled owl.

I blinked at it. The owl didn’t blink back. Even though my entire sector was named after it, I had only seen two or three of its kind my entire life. They were as rare as white tigers and usually kept to themselves even at night.

“Um.” I looked up at Mr. Conine, who’d settled himself into that bloodred velvet armchair at the head of the room—perhaps the only unchanged thing about this place. I could barely hear my own voice over the din of all the animals, though.

“It looks so good,” rasped a snake.

“Don’t make eye contact,” said a capybara to another.

“Where are you, oh glorious moon?” sang a cricket.

“Let us out! Let us out!” cried the mice, reminding me painfully of Willa, while the fish and frogs and snails rambled meaninglessly.

The peahens, on the other hand, were gossiping amongst themselves, something about a peacock who’d cheated on one of them with a heron.

“Your first Predators Prey test,” Mr. Conine said over this jumble of conversation, “is to find out what our owl friend here would like for dinner. If you can unleash the appropriate quarry for him to feast on, you pass.”

“What?” I said, sounding dumb to even my own ears.

Calmly, Mr. Conine reworded himself.

“A huge part of being a Wild Whisperer is the ability to correctly interpret animal desires based on their unique form of communication. This owl,” he said with an upward nod, “is hungry, and wishes for a specific meal. Your task is to figure out which meal, out of all the ones before you, he would like you to release so he can hunt.”

My stomach actually flopped at the thought of that—of lifting any of these lids or opening any of these cage doors, just to watch the owl dive and tear through whatever animal I had just forced out into danger. It was cruel, but brilliant.

Because owls, Mr. Conine had taught us, never spoke in a straightforward manner. With any other animal, I could simply ask which of these scurrying or slithering options they wanted, but owls only spoke in riddles and timeless wisdom. I’d have to navigate metaphors and life lessons to get to the root of his desires.

“Begin,” Mr. Conine said.

I looked up at the owl, trying to drown out the cacophony of all the other animals. “Hello!”

The owl’s head quirked toward mine. “Pleasantries are on the horizon,” it hooted, “but so is danger.”

“Right.” I swept a hand toward the hubbub of the room. “Would you like me to get you something to eat?”

“I wouldn’t be a fool to say yes.”

“Okay.” I paused, sorting out that phrase and flipping it around. Yes, he wanted me to get him something to eat. “What would you like?” I was reminding myself of a waitress, but… this was it. The first real test that didn’t involve paper and pen.

The owl fluffed its wings. “I’m craving something crunchy, but without bones.”

Crunchy, but without bones? My eyes strayed around the room, until they landed on the aquarium of snails. Snails didn’t have bones, did they? Just those swirling shells? And I wouldn’t feel too guilty about feeding a snail to an owl, to be honest.

Not like how I’d feel if I opened that mouse cage.

I started toward the aquarium, but the owl added, “Something that would one day become something else if left unharmed. Perhaps a flying beauty.”

My footsteps faltered. A flying beauty? Obviously, snails didn’t fly, so I’d have to scratch that option out.

Transformation had to be the key. The first thought that came to mind regarding that was a caterpillar, but… I stooped low to examine a single jar of the squirming creatures on a spindly table.

They wouldn’t be crunchy. A cocoon might have fit the bill for both requests, but nothing like a cocoon hung among the makeshift branches and leaves in the jar.

The owl’s neck snapped this way and that before his orange-sharp eyes landed on me again. “It’s something that needs eternal warmth, but lives in darkness.”

Just like that, Fergus’s black mold bloomed in my mind’s eye again: a creeping toxicity that savored warmth and moisture and dark things like Fergus’s own heart.

I shook my head. No. Owls didn’t eat mold. I had to push what Fergus had done far away again, focus on my task at hand.

Warmth and darkness. That sounded like the perfect habitat for worms, which definitely didn’t have bones but also couldn’t fly or give the owl a nice crunch.

God, I was going to fail my first Predators Prey test. Why couldn’t it just give me a straight answer or point or something, the lousy bird? Maybe if I followed his eye contact…

No, the owl was staring at me unblinkingly, not any of the cages.

Think, Rayna, think.

I circled the mass of prisons again, hunting for any hints or signs I’d missed the first time.

Something crunchy, but without bones. Something that would one day become something else—perhaps a flying beauty—if left unharmed. Something that needs eternal warmth, but lives in darkness. They all seemed to contradict each other.

“Any more qualifications?” I threw up at the owl weakly.

“The answer lies beneath.”

I couldn’t look Mr. Conine in the eye. Had it been this hard for everyone else, too? Should I just open a cage at random and hope it happened to be right?

In that moment, my ears perked up at the peahens’ gossiping conversation.

“—he wouldn’t even fertilize it, the bastard.”

“No! That’s just immature, honestly, even if he’s mad at you.”

“Well, he did later, but only after we’d made up.”

The answer lay beneath: beneath the peahens who were… nesting.

My eyes flew wide as I realized what the owl wanted.

Eggs. Crunchy, warm eggs living in the darkness beneath their mothers’ breasts. If they were early enough in the fertilization process, there wouldn’t be any spindly bones in the yolks yet, but if they were fertilized, they’d turn into flying beauties—as long as the owl left them alone. Left them untouched.

Which he wouldn’t.

“Do I really have to do this?” I asked Mr. Conine.

Mr. Conine’s eyes seemed to gutter.

“The test is the test, and the cycle is the cycle. Part of being a Wild Whisperer is bearing the pain of that cycle, of balancing the love and suffering of predators and prey alike.”

I nodded, even as my heart cracked in as many pieces as those eggs would.

Feeling it, embracing it, hating it anyway, I walked forward and unlatched the wired door of the coop.

The mother hens, realizing what was about to happen, began to scream.

The owl swooped down.

The next test was indeed through the other door—which I rushed through as soon as Mr. Conine gave me a pass, if only to get away from the screaming.

Mrs. Wildenberg sat in this room, in an identical bloodred velvet sofa, but this time with a pleasant rustic table before her. An array of potted plants spread across this table, along with some steaming cups of what smelled like hibiscus tea.

“Rayna, right? Rayna Grey?” Mrs. Wildenberg squinted at me through the steam of her tea.

“Oh, it’s actually Drey.”

“Right, right.” She nodded and gestured weakly. “Please sit down.”

I sat opposite her, in a wooden chair that clashed rigidly against my spine.

“Okay, Ms. Grey. Here are some—oh, I forgot. Would you like some tea?”

I almost said yes, because the smell of it made my mouth water and surely it was dinnertime. But I remembered what Coen had said: don’t drink random shit at a party when you don’t know what might trigger your condition. Perhaps the same applied to a testing room. And since I didn’t know which instructors would report to the Good Council if they witnessed any slice of superfluous power…

“No, thanks,” I said, folding my hands neatly over the desk.

“Okay, okay, no problem.” Mrs. Wildenberg’s ash-white hands shook as they picked up a pile of cards before her and handed them over to me. “Here are some questions that I would like you to ask the hibiscus and passion flowers and poinsettias. Listen well, and tell me what you think they are saying back to you. You should be looking for simple yes or no answers for now, dear, nothing more.”

“Got it,” I said, looking down at the first card.

It read: Do you know who I am?

I repeated the question to the hibiscus plant in its purple-painted ceramic pot, and closed my eyes to listen.

The hibiscus usually murmured its song with a steady tempo, like the monotonous ticking of a clock marching forward in time. But now it sped up like an excited heartbeat, a positive affirmation rather than an uncertain pause.

“Yes,” I told Mrs. Wildenberg, who was listening in to make sure I got the right answer. “The hibiscus knows who I am.”

Saying that out loud sent shivers twining around my bones. The hibiscus, its petals, its stems and leaves and roots and even the soil it grew in—it knew me. And since Mrs. Wildenberg had taught us that all the flora was connected, stemming from the heart of Eshol itself… that meant the island itself knew me, even though I knew very, very little about the island.

Jagaros’s words came back to me then: Perhaps you should ask them different questions. Why had I been so obsessed with asking the flowers and trees about my own power when I should have been asking them about… well, themselves? Of course they hadn’t wanted to tell me anything when I hadn’t yet befriended them.

Sucking air through my teeth, I read aloud from the next card, directing this question to the passion flowers in their metal garden beds.

“Will you allow me to get to know you?”

The passion flowers usually sang a soft yet chaotic melody, like a million fluttering butterfly wings. As soon as the last sound of my question left my lips, however, that chaos split into absolute pandemonium, loud and fast and off-key.

“Yes,” I told Mrs. Wildenberg. “The passion flowers will allow me to get to know them.” I paused, then, listening to the screech of their song. “They are… desperate for me to get to know them,” I dared add, even though I was only supposed to discern yes or no questions.

But I felt it in the very marrow of my still-shivering bones: that the plants before me wanted to tell me a secret, but couldn’t do so until I understood their essence on a deeper level than I did now.

“Very good,” Mrs. Wildenberg said, her eyes fluttering as if only halfway paying attention. I was, after all, her second-to-last test subject of what I was sure had been a very long and strenuous day for such an aging mind.

When her chin finally slumped down against the middle of her collarbone and I was sure she’d nodded off completely, I set the stack of cards down and leaned in close to the poinsettias—such vibrant, spirited things, who sang swaying tunes of success and cheer.

My lips nearly brushed their bright red leaves as I whispered, “Are the faeries truly extinct?”

Jagaros had said he wasn’t a faerie, not anymore, but I wanted to know what Eshol itself thought of that. If it truly considered him pure tiger and nothing more. Perhaps it was an invasion of his privacy, but… he was the one who had told me to ask different questions, so I tucked away a whisper of guilt and listened closely.

The poinsettia’s swaying tune slowed, like a ship thudding against a shore.

No. The faeries are not yet extinct. Not all of them.

My blood dropped, but I asked, “There are more faeries out there? Besides Jagaros himself?”

At this, the poinsettias and passion flowers and hibiscus plants all swept into a song that, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand.

Mrs. Wildenberg ended up waking up with a violent hiccup two minutes later.

Blinking, she told me I had passed this portion of the test, took a large gulp of no-longer-steaming tea, and sent me on my way through the next door—to my last test for the Spiders, Worms Insects portion.

In here, Ms. Pincette sat primly in a third and final bloodred velvet armchair.

I noticed two things in quick succession after I shut the door behind me, and neither did anything to settle my stomach after what the flowers had just revealed.

One: a rubber dummy stood upright on one side of Ms. Pincette.

Two: an enormous tank sat on her other side, its inside squirming with…

“Cockroaches,” Ms. Pincette said with a thin-lipped smile. “Your final test, Ms. Drey, will be to lower yourself into the tank of cockroaches and instruct them to leave you and swarm the dummy instead. This ability to instruct mass hordes of insects in times of distress is crucial to the Wild Whispering community.”

Worse. This was so much worse than anything else. Paper exams and solving riddles and reading questions to innocent little flowers—it was all glitter and rainbows compared to this.

The cockroaches were black, as black as Fergus’s mold that might have billowed over me if I hadn’t moved fast enough, and I… I didn’t know how to release the panic skittering through my veins at the sight of something else that could drown me.

“Remember, Rayna,” Ms. Pincette said, her eyes narrowing on my face as the blood rushed down my neck, “roaches rarely bite humans. They can’t hurt you.”

“Of course.” I jolted into movement, toward the tank. A single stepstool, cracked and worn, sat before it, and I forced a step upward.

The cockroaches hissed and chirped words I could barely understand, as if they were speaking with a foreign accent full of harsh, jagged inflections.

I forced another step upward, until all of me was standing on that little stepstool, and my fingers were curling around the top edge of that tank. How could I do this? How could I plunge myself headfirst into this scuttling, hissing abyss?

Coen had told me he’d stay out of my head during my entire time in the Testing Center so as to avoid breaking any rules, but… I craved his snarky, cocky tone more than anything right now. I needed the heat of his presence to combat the cold dread of what I was about to do. Or maybe I needed Jagaros’s silk-soft fur, or Fabian’s comforting voice telling me it was going to be okay, or Emelle’s familiar, timid smile.

Ms. Pincette cleared her throat.

No, I realized, glancing at her pincer-sharp eyes. I needed myself right now. I needed to gather this panic fraying the edges of my vision and bundle it up deep inside my core. Cockroaches didn’t bite, and neither would fear unless I let it.

Exhaling, I swung my leg up and toppled over the edge of the tank.