Chapter 41
Chapter
Forty-One
Tall grass sweeps against my legs as I fight my way through an open field. I try to follow in Rylan’s footsteps, to step in the places where he has flattened the grass in front of me, but it springs back up before I can get there.
“Magic is not the same for every user,” Rylan says over his shoulder as he keeps walking through the grass.
I haven’t been in this part of Sylvan before. I’m not even sure if we have passed the boundary lines. We rode down the path to Lenthara before Rylan led us down a hidden trail, one I'd never noticed before, hiding in between the tall trees lining the main path.
We left our horses hidden in the trees and have been wandering on foot through fields of grass since then. This one is littered with wildflowers, and it looks untouched. Like a sanctuary tucked away from the rest of the world.
“It doesn’t work in the same way for everyone, so today we will simply work on your channelling, see how far we can get before you exhaust yourself.”
I notice a small cabin ahead of us where the long grass gives way, as if a space was cut out perfectly for it. It looks old, like a gust of wind might blow it away. “Rylan, that might be someone’s house,” I say. “Where are we going?”
“It’s my house.”
I stop. He turns to look at me with a small smile. “You live all the way out here?” I ask.
He shrugs his shoulders. “I like my privacy.” Oh, it’s private all right. It almost looks abandoned. “Besides which, this is the perfect place for us to work without the fear of being seen. Who knows how many shields are watching your place after what happened.”
It’s been two days since Hazel’s execution, and it still doesn’t feel real. I keep expecting her to walk through my front door asking for more willow bark, but that will never happen again.
I couldn’t sleep last night. Images of scorching flames flashed behind my eyes every time I closed them. I swear I could almost hear the sound of Hazel’s screams echoing off my walls.
But I could also feel something, something changed within me, almost like a sudden awareness that I can’t explain.
I was sick multiple times in the night, my body exhausting itself as I heaved up everything within me. It almost felt as if I was extricating every rotten emotion that I held in my belly. Every scream of pain, every morsel of hurt, everything I’ve felt in the last few months came up.
But the longer I lay in my dark room, sleep eluding me, all of those feeling seeped back into my bones. As if they were hidden in the mattress just waiting to absorb back into my skin.
“Are you certain you want to do this today?” Rylan says, stopping once he escapes the long grass.
I tumble out into the smooth clearing. “Yes.” There is no time to wait, to spend more time wondering. I need to know what is inside me.
“Okay,” he tips his head. “Sit down.”
I do as he says, and he sits across from me, my skirts flaring around me. “The first thing that my mother taught me is that we don’t hold magic within ourselves,” he says. “We only hold the ability to wield it.”
Rylan places his hands flat on the ground beside him. “All the magic comes straight from the earth. It’s our power source.” He meets my stare. “And now that you have flourished—”
“Now that I have what?” I interrupt. That word…
“Flourished,” he repeats. “It’s what happened yesterday. The flourishing is the moment when you accept your power, or in your case, when your power claims you.”
I have hope, just as the gods did, that one day everything can be restored. But only if you flourish. My mother’s words echo in my mind once again.
She wanted me to do this.
“My power claimed me?” I mutter, almost to myself.
“You’ve potentially been fighting it for years without even knowing it,” Rylan says. “If you don’t accept your own power, if you don’t flourish, the power will force you to accept it one way or another.”
I think of the day I thought I saw gold shining at my fingertips, but I dismissed it as my imagination, I did the same thing at the lake that day. Was all of that my power manifesting?
I think back on my connection to the earth, the way I’ve always felt tied to it in a way I couldn’t explain, in a way other people weren’t.
This ability has always been there, hidden away, I just didn’t recognise it.
“Are you okay?” Rylan says. “It’s a lot, I know,” he raises a brow. “I remember when I flourished, I was only seven, and it felt like in an instant, everything had changed.”
He was seven.
I can’t help but find myself envious, even resentful, about the way this all happened for him. He was young, he grew up with this…gift. He spent hours learning and honing the skill, his mother guiding him with every misstep.
But this is my life, this is my reality, and if I want any chance of being able to control my power the way Rylan did yesterday, I can’t focus on the past. I can’t focus on what I didn’t have.
“I’m okay,” I say.
His eyes search mine, as if he doesn’t quite believe me, but he nods anyway. “The first thing you need to learn is how to draw from the earth. How to call on that power.”
The land that shared its power with all of them.
I dig into my mind to find the words written in the fable, the story of how the people of Arizaya took from the land until there was nothing left.
With every word from Rylan’s mouth, things begin to make sense, pieces of the puzzle coming together in my mind.
“Close your eyes,” he says, and I do before placing my hands on either side of me, mirroring him.
“Imagine right at the core of the earth, under all the layers of leaves and dirt and rock, there is magic, just simmering deep in the centre.”
I think of it like a sphere, a mass of that golden shimmer slowly spinning somewhere deep underneath us.
“Can you see it?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Now imagine your hands as a siphon, pulling at a small piece of that magic, just a sliver that makes its way through every single layer of the earth, your hands a guiding light, the place where that magic is called to.”
I try to picture it—a small segment of that sphere breaking off—as if I am pulling on a thread that snakes its way up and up and up until it’s right below me.
“Now grab it, take it.”
I feel my brows pull together as I concentrate on pulling that power through the cracks in the soil. The tips of my fingers tingle in a vaguely familiar way, almost itching to dig into the soil and grab onto what is lying beneath, but then it slips away.
I let out a defeated sigh as I open my eyes and see Rylan’s hands glowing, the shimmer floating all around him.
“How did you do that?” I ask.
“Years and years of practice.” I pull my bottom lip between my teeth. I can’t wait that long. “You’ll get it,” he says. “Try again.”
I set my shoulders back and lay my palms back on the soil. I take a few deep breaths, trying to settle my mind first, to clear it.
“This time, try searching for it,” Rylan says. “It won’t have dropped all the way down already, but you’re going to have to find it.”
My eyes pop open. “How?”
“Retrace your steps, follow the same path that you used to draw it towards you except this time try to follow it down,” he says. “It’s all about visualisation.”
I close my eyes again, doing as he says. I visualise the same path, the same crack in the soil, letting my mind wind down the labyrinth of roots beneath us before I catch a glimpse of it. I take a deep breath, steadying myself, because if I try to reach out and take it, I fear it will disappear.
So I do as Rylan said earlier, I try to use my hands as the light at the end of the tunnel, pulling the power up the track my mind just took until it is weaving through the roots and shoots of grass that live just under the soil.
I feel that tingling in my fingers again, which I now understand to be the presence of the magic beneath me.
“Now,” Rylan says quietly. “Let it come to you.”
I try to open my mind, to open my body, letting the magic know that there is space for it. I still use my mind to guide it gently, to help it break through the last layer.
Then I feel it.
That tingling sensation spreads through my entire body, like a glimmer spreading through my veins. I let out a shuddering breath before I open my eyes to see Rylan smiling over at me.
I look down to see my hands shimmering, and I nearly gasp. I’ve never seen anything like it—not until yesterday. I lift my hand up, the glow following as I turn my palm over.
“See?” Rylan breathes. “Wasn’t too hard. You’re a natural.”
I exhale a laugh, my mind still coming to terms with the reality in front of me. That I’m not dreaming all of this. “I don’t think so.”
“You were born to do this, Everleigh,” he says. “That ability runs through your veins.”
I feel my cheeks heat. I feel like a fraud, but he is right. My mother gifted me this ability when I was born. I simply didn’t know I had it, and it makes me wonder why she never told me about it.
“Now that I know how to draw from it, how do I use it?” I ask.
“Easy now,” Rylan says, letting the magic slip away from his fingers, the glimmer sinking back into the ground around him. “Now you need to do that again, and again, and again, until it’s second nature.”
I let out a sigh.
“Come on,” he says. “If you’re lucky, I might make you a mint tea when we are done.”
My legs feel weak as I step through the door into Rylan’s cabin. I watch as he kicks aside leaves that have slipped in under the door. His footsteps are heavy on the wooden floor, as if one of them could crack at any moment.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s not the warmest out here.”
I just smile, finding a small comfort in watching him here in his own space, his energy almost twitchy. I’m so used to seeing him up a tree or lurking in the forest that seeing him wander through the small cabin, piling chunks of wood into the small hearth, is somewhat amusing.