Chapter Six
Branches snapped as I fell, sharp thorns tearing at my hands and arms. I didn’t struggle so much as flail—desperately grasping for something to stop me from bashing my skull against the rocks far below.
It took me several long, gasping seconds to realize that the saplings were actually grabbing me.
That I was no longer falling.
A twisted hammock of straining branches cradled my trembling body.
I hardly dared to breathe. Clay and dirt rained from the roots along the bank as every plant that held me threatened to dislodge from the cliffside.
Panting wildly, I looked around as best I could without moving.
Above me, a flushed face peered over the edge of the bank.
“Hold still, Apprentice Haven,” Ezra said softly, his voice strained—as if he held me with his own strength. He swore under his breath and wiped his forehead, leaving a smudge of fresh dirt like a bruise across his brow.
He didn’t need to tell me to hold still. I knew without looking that I was high enough to break my back if I slipped out of the brush.
“Easy,” he whispered.
I started to tell him that I wasn’t going to struggle when the branches themselves began to move. He was talking to them. Bit by bit, the branches pulled me up the bank, vines and twigs gripping me like fingers to hoist me from one thorny bush to the next.
“You’re an Animator,” I blurted, feeling the vines wrap around my hips like a harness.
His eyes met mine for a moment, a flash of anguish running through them before his gaze hardened. “I’m an Animator who will drop you to your death if you don’t let me concentrate.”
I forced myself to freeze, but I could not quiet my mind.
Magic of this sort was not compatible with modern life, too wild and chaotic to coexist with Progress.
When the House had tried to regulate this dangerous power, the Animators had lashed out violently—only proving they could not remain among innocent people.
But Ezra …
Ezra wasn’t hurting me.
He was saving me.
I forgot to be silent. “You asked me if I could unlock latches with magic,” I said in a hissing sort of whisper. “You failed to mention you can talk to plants!”
“Do you want me to drop you?” The strain in his voice convinced me to hold my tongue until his hand gripped mine and he pulled me off the edge of the bank and onto the path, where I promptly sank to the soft bed of pine needles.
I dug my fingertips into the solid ground.
My body hurt, aching with panic and fear.
To my surprise, Ezra stumbled and fell to his knees beside me, breathing raggedly.
“Are you—” I started to ask.
“Don’t.”
The quiet pain in his voice silenced me. Trembling, I wiped my bloodied, filthy hands off on my skirt and scraped the tears from my eyes. My heart beat as if I’d been running for hours, and no amount of careful breathing would slow it down. Ezra was an Animator.
He’d saved my life.
I’d nearly died.
I would have been dead.
And he wasn’t supposed to exist.
“Does anyone know?” I finally asked.
He looked up, brow furrowed. The sweat in his hair and on his skin had turned the smudge of dirt on his forehead to mud. I reached to wipe it with the rag I kept at my belt, and he flinched away.
Something twisted in my chest.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“Are there more of you?”
He hesitated before letting out a sigh. “No.”
The melancholy sound of the word spoke volumes. “You’re the only one?”
His breathing was steadying. He shifted and sat with his back against a tree trunk, looking more like a boy shirking his work than a powerful Animator who’d just used wild, ungovernable magic to prevent my messy death. “I don’t know. If there were others, wouldn’t I feel it?”
He sounded lonely.
How could he not be?
I tried to imagine what it would have been like growing up with radiance in my soul and no one to teach me how to use it.
Then I shook off the warm haze of sympathy and grasped for the reasonable corners of my mind.
“How can this wild magic be? There’s no leadership, no …
regulations for you to follow. Surely you can’t do whatever you want … ”
Ezra gaped at me. “You’re worried about bureaucracy right now?”
“No. I mean. A little?” I swallowed hard, realizing he should have let me fall. It would have been prudent to let the river take my body away rather than expose himself. “It’s been so many years—”
“Since Animators were hunted down and killed?” he asked bitterly. “I suppose there’s no call for regulations anymore now that the House of Industry murdered everyone who tried to defy their control.”
That had happened long before either of our times, but I felt a gnawing pang of guilt anyway. Whatever I’d imagined a deadly Animator to be, it hadn’t been this. Not a boy with warm brown eyes and unruly brows and an air of defeat I wanted desperately to chase away.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said, startled to realize I meant it. I couldn’t sentence him to death after he’d saved my life. “I owe you that much. You didn’t have to do that.”
He laughed once, in an ugly sort of way. “Yes, I did.” His grip was strong yet careful as he hauled me to my feet. “Come on.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, he dragged me along the path, both our gaits rather unsteady. “You’ve got to continue with your errands before the day is lost,” he was saying, sounding winded. “Tell Julian you fell into brambles.”
“That’s the truth, more or less.” I shook my arm out of his grip. There was something strange about his tone.
He stared at his hand, as if unaware he’d been holding on to me. “How in the world did you fall like that?” he asked.
“A rude bee. And these damned skirts. I told you I need a tailor.”
He slowed, head bowed and shoulders shaking, and for a moment, I feared he’d lost his senses. Then his honeyed laugh erupted, and I punched his arm.
“I’m being serious. And it’s odd that you were following me!”
“It’s a good thing I was!” He was still laughing breathlessly. His normally flushed skin had taken on a pallor.
“Ezra.” Speaking his name plainly made me feel funny, as if I’d sipped wine on an empty stomach. “Are you all right?”
We reached a clearing, the landscape manicured here, with a stockyard and gravel roads leading up to the huge mill, where a waterwheel spun, gears creaking a steady complaint. Ezra hung back and leaned against a pine. “I don’t know. Yes.”
I knew I should hurry to the mill, finish my chores, and get back to Julian to explain away my foolishly injured hands. But I lingered, troubled by the way Ezra used the tree to prop himself up. “Did that hurt you? What you did?”
“It shouldn’t have. That never happened with …” He seemed to recall himself, expression shuttering. “It’s fine.”
My mind reeled with more questions than I could count.
If his magic was meant to be wild, yet he could control it, maybe I could learn that control from him.
Maybe I could tamp down the wildness and anger in me and feel more like a proper Conductor.
Maybe I’d stop reaching for violence at every frustration.
“Ezra, if I keep your secret, will you tell me more? Will you show me how you use your magic?”
“Why?” he asked, watching me with a wary frown. “Gathering evidence to drag me to the House Elders?”
“I said I wouldn’t tell, and I won’t. It’s only that you …
you’re nothing like I expected.” Everything I wanted to know blistered under my skin.
I couldn’t leave an opportunity like this alone.
An Animator—maybe the only Animator—had enough control over his magic to carefully lift me without hurting me.
With that kind of self-assurance, surely I could make myself into the powerful Conductor I needed to become if I ever wanted to be more than a tool.
And something was wrong with Ezra. Something he wasn’t telling me. Or worse, something he didn’t understand. I could see it in the way he held himself as if his whole body hurt. It hadn’t been like that until he’d helped me.
“All right,” he said, sounding unsure. “Find some trousers so you don’t damn near get yourself killed again, and I’ll meet you at the dock behind the Mission the day after tomorrow. In the morning.”
I nodded eagerly, extending my hand to shake on it, but he only stared at my fingers, something weary in his gaze.
“Go on,” he whispered. “Get moving.”
So I did.
Any other day, I would have lingered at the mill, mapping every bit of it with my fingers, learning how the river made it move.
But my palms stung from bleeding scratches, and my mind buzzed with unspoken questions, and no amount of work could numb my unease.
There was little I could do but verify the mechanical issues Julian had noted in his neat handwriting.
The mill’s workings were too archaic to ever be retrofitted with radiance.
I cursed him silently for sending me on such a far-flung errand to check something he already suspected.
Was he so eager to keep me out of sight?
The shadows were long by the time I made my way back to the Mission. Bloodied, starving, and nursing a pounding headache, I barreled into Julian in my desperate hunt for a bath.
He took me by the shoulders, eyes wide. We stood in the courtyard, the moon high above. “What in the name of Progress has happened to you?”
A thin bubble of laughter escaped me. “I was startled by a bee, and tripped over my skirts, and fell into brambles.”
Julian drew a breath like he wanted to say something other than what escaped his lips.
“The House should have warned me that you were impossibly clumsy.” He made a great show of dusting his hands off.
“Keep a better eye on where you’re walking.
We can’t have the people of Frostbrook thinking the House sent an incompetent child to their Mission. ”
All the hysterical mirth in me drained away. Being characterized that way made me feel as if I’d been slapped across the face. My eyes welled up with tears. Julian didn’t know me. He didn’t know anything.
“Oh.” Julian shuffled back, looking around in the dark as if expecting to find someone who knew how to handle an emotional girl. “Come, now. It’s late. Perhaps I was too harsh.”
Little did Julian know. I might not be an incompetent child, but I’d just promised to keep a grave secret. I’d promised to hide an Animator from my Senior, from the House. From the world Ezra didn’t belong in.
Somehow, it felt like the right thing to do. More than anything had ever felt right.
I dried my eyes on my sleeves. “That was rather harsh.” I sniffled, mustering a glare.
Julian blinked. His mouth quirked, but in the low light, I couldn’t tell if he’d nearly smiled or grimaced at me.
“But no matter. I won’t disappoint you again,” I said quietly. I needed to clear my head. Ezra and the secrets I was eager to learn from him—and willing to keep for him—had nothing to do with the march of Progress. I was part of something much bigger than my selfish desires.
Though, as I stood there with my dress torn and leaves in my hair, I couldn’t quite believe that anything was bigger than a boy who made plants do his bidding.
Julian studied me, frowning as if conflicted by whatever he saw. “You’re not,” he began, before halting. “You should clean yourself up. There’s salve in the cabinet in the washroom.”
“Of course. Thank you.” I hurried past, not eager to be scrutinized, not sure what Julian would see if he looked much closer. But he called my name.
When I turned back, he was still frowning. “It’s true the House didn’t warn me that you were clumsy. I was told that you were headstrong, curious, and quite brave. I admit I haven’t known you for long, but I hope I’ll see evidence of those qualities.”
Frustrated and tired, I struggled to understand his meaning. “Yes, Senior.”
“See to it you return earlier in the future. There are—there are dangers in the night.”
“I’ll be mindful,” I said bitterly. I didn’t need him to tell me that I’d likely trip and fall and die in the dark now that I’d already proven myself incapable of staying alive in broad daylight.
Before he could think of anything else to tell me, I scurried away, eager to be alone with the ache of my thoughts.