Chapter Eleven
When the sun came up, my exhaustion had become a buzzing current of restlessness. My legs ached, and my toes and fingers stung as I silently served Julian his breakfast.
I glared a little.
He ignored it.
As I made my way out of his quarters, he called out softly: “Apprentice Haven.”
Pausing, I rested my hand against the freshly polished wooden door, which smelled piney. Everything here was old and new at once. “Yes?” I answered without looking back. I didn’t want to see the disappointment on his face.
“You are relieved of your duties today. I will head out on your rounds. You should rest.”
My shoulders tightened, but I nodded in acknowledgment. I’d be a fool to argue for more work, but I was still ashamed. I’d been punished by my Senior in less than a week at Frostbrook. I felt like a second year caught chasing mice out of the pantry with darts of radiance.
Which I’d done. Twice.
I should have gone to bed immediately. My body screamed for it. But I knew I’d only continue to twist myself up, ruminate on my faults, consider Julian’s perplexing kindness this morning and Ainsley’s keen gaze, and Ezra—
I blinked and looked around, reorienting myself. In an indecisive daze, I’d wandered out to the dock.
Crashing to my knees, I reached into the cold water and splashed my face, willing away the heat that rose in me when I thought about Ezra’s boyish laugh. He would certainly laugh at me right now if he knew I’d spent the whole night pondering my many faults.
For some reason, I still wanted to hear him do it.
I sat back heavily, my palms against the weathered, splintering dock.
The old wood was a testament to how long Frostbrook had functioned as a river trading post before the railway ever came.
Before it brought conduction cables and the promise of Industry.
What had life been like then? As wild as the river itself, as ever-changing as the clouds that whispered across the sky above?
Fatigue was making a poet out of me.
Too stubborn to return to the Mission and rest, I dragged myself up. There was no sense in prolonging what I knew I’d set out to do. It would do me no good to pretend I had any power over my impulses once they caught ahold of me.
I headed off looking for Ezra.
He, at least, believed there was something good in me. Something worthwhile. He, at least, was willing to teach me something.
The town wasn’t terribly big. Someone would know where he was.
I nearly stopped short on the path through the woods when it occurred to me that I had no idea where Ezra lived or who he lived with.
He’d mentioned the midwife, Beatrice, but nothing of living with her.
He certainly didn’t live with Ainsley and Henry in their tiny shack of a house. I’d never thought to ask.
He was right. I only knew what people told me.
My imagination ran away with me as I walked, the rhythm of my footsteps hypnotic in my exhausted state.
I pictured him building a house of leaves and sticks every night with his magic, and the absurdity of it drew a soft, tired giggle from my chest. I felt better in a way I couldn’t explain now that I’d walked away from the Mission.
No small amount of guilt accompanied that realization.
I heard voices in the woods and stilled.
Something about the timbre of them was different from the bustling drone of the workers’ camp.
Cocking my head, I tucked myself against a tall tree as if it would shield me.
Some of the people were shouting. A woman’s ringing voice rose above them, not frightened but chastising.
I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the hair on my forearms stood up.
She sounded far more intimidating than Julian—more like Cook, who didn’t hesitate to wallop us with her wooden spatula when we made off with fresh biscuits at the House of Industry.
“Josephine.”
The low voice at my ear nearly sent my spirit right out of my body. I wrenched my hand away from the tree I’d been holding on to and found it smoking faintly where I’d sparked radiance into the rough bark.
It was Ezra, his brow knit in a worried frown. For once, he didn’t comment on my lack of control. He didn’t even look at the smoke from my radiance. Instead, his gaze flicked in the direction of the shouting.
“What?” I started to ask, before he took my hand tightly and my voice broke into a hoarse garble.
“Be quiet,” he whispered sharply. “Come with me.”
He led me deeper into the woods like he had before, his feet falling surely as he wove between trees and mossy boulders.
“Shouldn’t you be working?” he asked in an impatient mutter, which made something in my chest crumble a little.
There were suspicious people shouting in the woods. What had I done wrong?
His coldness hurt more than Julian’s disapproval. “I was relieved of my duties today,” I said.
Ezra exhaled sharply through his nose, shaking his head. “Today,” he repeated, as if it bore some significance.
We reached a place where the boulders stacked high over our heads and formed a sort of wall around us on three sides. Feeling reasonably sheltered from whatever danger there was in the woods, I wrenched my hand from his. “You’re acting strange.”
“How would you know?” he snapped, looking up and around like he expected to see someone peering down on us from the towering trees.
“I wouldn’t, would I? I don’t know you.” My voice thinned with frustration. “I don’t even know where you live!”
His gaze turned back to me, eyes widening slightly, before he coughed out a quiet laugh and shook his head.
“I live in the barn behind Ainsley’s place, or at Beatrice’s when she’s expecting a birth at night.
Sometimes I camp in a hammock in the woods when the weather is warm.
Why, were you planning on mailing me a package? ”
My gaze scoured his face for signs that he was lying, and it was only then that I noticed the smudges of exhaustion under his brown eyes. There was something drawn about his features that likely mirrored my own.
“You didn’t sleep last night.”
His gaze shuttered for a split second before he grinned. “What are you insinuating, Apprentice?”
I punched his arm.
“Ow.” He recoiled, rubbing the spot where I’d likely hurt my knuckles more than I’d hurt him.
“Another baby?”
“What?” He tilted his head. “What baby?”
I rolled my eyes. “Did someone have another baby last night?”
He stared for a moment. “Oh. No. Not last night.”
“Are you going to tell me why you dragged me away from the people in the woods?”
“I was afraid they were bandits.”
“But the bandits don’t attack the town. They go after trains.”
“Who told you that?” he asked, his gaze once more searching the trees around us.
“Ainsley. When I was at her house.”
I wondered if I imagined a faint flush at Ezra’s neck or if it was a trick of the light dappling him through the canopy above. “Well, she should have warned you that sometimes they raid the work camp.”
She had. But that was beside the point. “We’re not at the work camp.”
Ezra let out an exasperated sigh and slid down the rock to sit in the bed of dry leaves that had gathered in the crevice between the boulders. “Would you rather I’d left you there to be discovered by them?”
“So you’re certain they were bandits.”
“Why are you so exhausting?”
“Why are you so exhausted?” I asked in return.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said, a sudden weariness in his voice that could only be sincere. “And you don’t look any better, by the way.”
I let myself sink beside him, delighted to find that the leaves formed a gentle, if slightly damp, cushion beneath me. “I was forbidden to sleep last night.”
His eyes widened. “Now that’s a House of Industry tradition I’ve never heard of.”
My fingers curled around a few dead leaves, but I resisted the urge to throw them at him. “It was a consequence. I was too candid with the Senior Conductor about my … concerns. Your concerns, I suppose.”
“You ought to know better than to repeat things you hear from a stranger in the woods,” Ezra said, too sober for my liking.
“Normally I would agree, but this particular stranger can make plants move.”
He let out a tiny laugh I found immensely comforting. “Is that how you’re evaluating one’s authority these days?”
“I have little else to evaluate you by. You live in a shack.”
“In a barn.”
“And in the woods.”
“In a hammock. A perfectly nice hammock I wove myself. And I’ll have you know that I can do far more than make plants move. It’s only that I’m so often surrounded by plants.”
I didn’t like the thought of him having no place of his own, no bed of his own. No one in particular to care for him. “Why do you live here? In Frostbrook?”
“It’s as good a place as any. Beatrice doesn’t mind that I haven’t had formal training at a house of healing. I can start my life here. A quiet, simple life helping people. Once I get good enough, I’ll travel as a healer.”
He sounded so wistful, and I wondered if his life could ever be quiet or simple if there were people in the world who wanted him extinguished.
A small frown formed at his brow, as if he could read my thoughts.
“Can you read my thoughts?” I asked, already succumbing to a feverish blush. I’d had more than a few thoughts I didn’t care for him to hear.
“No, but I know that sad look.” He flicked a twig at me. It missed. “Quit feeling sorry for me.”
It was my turn to smile. I’d nearly forgotten how we’d arrived here, that I’d heard voices in the woods. He bowed his head, fidgeting with some dead leaves that briefly rose and swirled between his hands as if blown by a tiny tempest.
“Who taught you how to do these things?” I asked.
“The trees did. The air did. My mother did, too.” He was murmuring, gaze on the leaves and his hands. There was something private about it that made me think I ought to look away.
But I didn’t.
“Can you talk to them?”