Chapter 1
CHAPTER
The sweet, earthy scent of black bamboo washed over me as I lay in the grove, closing my eyes and listening to the song of the jungle.
Wildflowers crooned around me. Shrubs and ferns sang in rougher, more bristly tones, while the bamboos themselves hummed excitedly, the pace of their synchronized voices matching the quick fluttering of their thousands of leaves.
This. This was the only place I could go to that seemed to calm the constant ache in my head where my memories had been wrenched from me against my will three months ago. Everywhere else just left me feeling cold and empty, but this grove of gracefully swooping plants…
Something tickled my senses, like the string of a spiderweb brushing over my closed eyes.
I grabbed the knife nestled in the grass beside my head and popped up to my feet in a single swift movement—
Just as a striped mass of muscle and fur pounced from the grove’s deepest shadows.
Two giant paws slammed me to the ground, knocking the knife from my hand and the air from my chest. The white tiger licked his maw above me now, two strings of saliva dripping from his canines as he kept me pinned.
As soon as I caught my next inhale, however, I exhaled a whistle meant for the jungle and stuck out my empty hand.
The nearest bamboo bowed over to scoop my knife from the ferns. With a violent flick, it hurled the weapon back in my direction. I caught it by the handle and lifted it to the white tiger’s throat before he could lower his head.
Jagaros chuffed and removed himself, padding backward with a flick of his tail.
“You’re getting better.”
The words should have come out as a growl, but the magic the Good Council had branded into my skin, into my very blood, made me hear them as if he’d spoken in my own human language. As if the faerie-derived bascite swimming in my veins acted as a magic translator.
“And you’re getting to be a pain in my ass.” I hoisted myself up off my back. “You could have at least said hello before attacking me.”
The thin strips of Jagaros’s pupils surveyed me. “You are the only human I would let talk to me like that without eating them alive.”
I laughed, although the sound was instantly swallowed in the thickness of the jungle’s hums and cheeps.
“I’d like to see you try to eat me alive after spending so much time training me how to avoid that.”
Indeed, I’d been meeting Jagaros in this exact same patch of black bamboo every day for the last few months, forcing both my hands to get familiar with the craft of the blade.
As soon as I’d let it slip to him that I had a weapon stowed beneath my bed, Jagaros had insisted I learn how to use it.
He made me twirl it, throw it, and wield it as if he’d actually turn feral one day and try to chomp my head off.
But I knew what the knife practice was really for, although Jagaros had refused to utter a single word about the pirate breach and what he knew about it since that day on the beach: as a Mind Manipulator himself, Coen Steeler would know all about my Wild Whisperer abilities and could simply command me not to use them.
If I came face to face with him, I wouldn’t stand a chance without the knife.
With the knife, I might be able to catch Steeler off guard—hopefully by the throat.
“Why don’t you try actually hitting a mark before you get too cocky?” Jagaros said now, sitting on his haunches beside me.
“Watch me,” I replied, and shifted myself into a throwing position, already pinching the tip of the ridged antler handle.
Elbow up. Wrist back. Eyes on the widest ebony stalk, which was still only about the diameter of a large fist.
With a snap of my wrist, the knife spiraled through the air—heavy handle over curved blade—and rooted itself into the stalk half a head lower than I had intended.
I hissed a curse under my breath, but while Jagaros tutted through his canines, the bamboo laughed.
That was another reason I’d chosen these practice sessions here. As a type of grass, black bamboo grew so rapidly that a blade in their wood merely tickled them, scratched an itch they couldn’t scratch themselves. A tree, on the other hand, would have been highly offended.
“Hey, you know what,” I said as I stomped forward to retrieve the knife. “At least I’ve been getting it to stick every time. Remember our first practice, when the blade just bounced right off?”
“Unfortunately,” Jagaros replied with a swish of his tail. “Now do it ten more times.”
“Can’t,” I replied, letting a bit of my smugness shine through the words.
While I appreciated Jagaros’s attempts to teach me how to cut through flesh and stop a heart, I wasn’t particularly fond of anything that involved ten tries in a row.
I knew he’d just sit and judge me with that tail flicking distastefully the whole time, then snarl at me about how disappointing I was.
“I told my friends I’d meet them at the Element Wielder lake to see if the giant octopus is real. ”
“You told your friends you’d meet them at the lake,” Jagaros repeated, staring at me as if he couldn’t believe such ludicrous words had come out of my mouth. “To see if the giant octopus is real.”
“Yeah.” I slipped my knife back into its leather sheath. “Wren and Rodhi have been debating about its existence for the last few weeks, so Emelle suggested we put it to the test and see if any of us can actually spot it.”
I knew it sounded stupid, knew it was ridiculous to try to have fun when murderous pirates were breaching the dome around our island and attacking seaside villages.
But I also knew I couldn’t skip out on too many things.
I’d built a wall of ice around myself since Dyonisia Reeve had given me orders to capture Steeler, but I couldn’t let Emelle or any of the others know about it.
If they suspected that anything was off with me, they’d try to get involved.
And as much as I hated Steeler for what he’d done to me, I feared what Dyonisia Reeve and her Good Council elites could do to my friends even more.
No, I wouldn’t drag them into this. Wouldn’t let them know that I could now wield a knife, or that I’d been tasked to catch a pirate, or that most smiles on my face were part of a well-cultivated mask.
Jagaros inclined his head ever so slightly.
“If it’s your wish to act like a half-brained monkey who just discovered a puddle, then go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Don’t let the monkeys hear you saying that,” I muttered, and gave Jagaros a swift pat on the neck before trudging away from the bamboo grove, toward the Esholian Institute campus, my knife in hand.
The lake sat directly behind the Element Wielder sector, several jutting columns of rock rising from the water like fingers.
Miniature waterfalls plunged down between the crevices in an endless cycle, spawned by elemental spells.
Thankfully, the Element Wielders weren’t picky about who liked to hang out on their turf, so there was almost always a group of Esholians lounging on its shore or island.
My friends were already there. I could hear their voices echoing from one of those crevices, but before I emerged from the tangle of jungle surrounding the lake, I sent a hum out to the trees.
Vines unraveled over my head and gently wrapped around the handle of the knife that I offered with outstretched hands.
I watched them tug the weapon up into the thickness of the canopies, where I knew the jungle would keep it safe for me until I could stuff it back into the drawer of my bedside table in my new room.
“Thanks,” I whispered to the trees, and touched the nearest trunk.
I could have sworn the limbs of the tree bowed in response.
Then I made my way toward the bridge of permanent ice that never melted, even with the current streaks of sunlight streaming down onto its path to the rocky island in the center of the lake.
They must not have heard my clacking footsteps over their own voices, because Wren and Rodhi’s argument didn’t falter as I drew near.
“I know that octopus exists, darling. I was at the Mind Manipulator house last night, and Penny Ickers said it groped her when she—”
“Penny Ickers,” Wren interrupted with what sounded like a scowl, “likes to blow stories out of her asshole. She was probably just pissed no one else wants to grope her and made it all up to feel better about herself.” I rounded the column of rock, and Wren’s gaze jerked toward me. “Oh, hey, Rayna! Where’ve you been?”
“Meditating,” I answered as truthfully as I could. During this three-month break at the peak of the dry season, it wasn’t uncommon for a Wild Whisperer to go out into the jungle on their own and practice. And I had been meditating—until Jagaros had so rudely interrupted me.
I felt that wall of ice forming around me again, though, that familiar pain beating a dull melody at the base of my skull now that I’d left the grove of black bamboo.
But my smiling mask was airtight as I turned to Emelle, Gileon, and Lander, and said, “Please tell me they haven’t been bickering the whole time. I think my ears are already bleeding.”
Oh yes, my mask was good.
Emelle rolled her eyes, a smile crinkling the edges of her face. “Trust me, I can’t wait to get this over with once and for all.” She turned to Lander, tucking a strand of loose brown hair behind one of her ears. “You ready, babe? Or do you need more time?”
Lander was flexing his fingers and bouncing on the balls of his feet nervously. When I cocked an eyebrow at him, he explained, “I think I can change all your clothes to wetsuits for as long as we’re in the lake, if I can just concentrate hard enough.”
“Really?”
As a Shape Shifter, Lander would eventually learn how to morph other people’s forms for longer periods of time, but right now he wasn’t too confident about changing any other corporeal thing besides himself. I was surprised he was willing to try Shifting all our clothes at once.
“Yeah,” Lander said, giving a shy smile. “I’ve been practicing on my own. Turns out the trick to Shifting multiple objects at the same time is to imagine juggling them. So.” He clapped his hands. “You all in?”
Actually, I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do less than, as Jagaros had so kindly put it, act like a half-brained monkey who’d just discovered a puddle.
But old Rayna would have been all in just for the hell of it—for the sake of belonging—and besides, I wasn’t a bad swimmer.
Back in my home village, my once-best friend Quinn and I had splashed through enough ponds and lakes around Alderwick for me to know the basics.
The thought of Quinn made something deep inside my chest wring itself into a tighter coil.
She’d been the only other one besides me to face interrogation in the Testing Center after the pirate breach.
From what I’d heard, they’d found her deep in the jungle, surrounded by walls of her own magic-made ice, after she’d lost her memory as thoroughly as I had.
Yet the few times I’d tried to knock on the Element Wielder house door to ask for her, the girls who answered always told me Quinn wasn’t available to talk. And that thing in my chest would just wring tighter.
Because despite our falling out, Quinn and I were both surrounded by our own ice, it seemed. Even though I doubted we’d ever be able to melt each other’s walls…
Well, it would have been nice to be walled in together.
“I’m in,” I said before I could overthink it.
Everyone else echoed the sentiment except for Gileon, who rubbed his arms and said, “I think I’ll sit this one out. I don’t like water.” He pressed a mournful look onto the surface of the lake. “It’s really wet.”
Rodhi choked on nothing but air, while Wren reached up to pat Gileon’s shoulder. “Okay, Gil. You stay here and guard us against any wandering Element Wielders who might want to come stir up the lake. I’m sure we won’t be long, considering there’s nothing to find.”
Rodhi recovered from his almost-burst of laughter and blew Wren a sloppy kiss. “Hope you like tentacles, darling.”
Lander rolled up his sleeves and fixed a look of utmost concentration onto his face. Like he was constipated.
Emelle giggled at me between her fingers.
A moment later, our clothes tightened in some places and melted away in others. The remaining fabric molted into a stretchy, waterproof material that reminded me of one of my silk dresses hanging in my new second-year closet back at the Wild Whisperer mansion.
I looked down and found a suit clinging to my body, its two-inch straps haltered around my neck and its bottom cutting off around my thighs.
The brand on my left shoulder shone in startling contrast. The opposite of silky, it was a rough red design of singed skin that formed a circle and a bulbed, five-pointed star.
The same as everyone else’s on the island of Eshol, although the Good Council themselves sported a bright red dot in the center to distinguish themselves as superior.
Everyone else besides Gileon wore similar suits, but Lander himself began to change from the head down, his ebony-colored skin slickening while his form became more tapered.
In the span of time it took for me to blink water from my eyes, he’d become an upright shark-like creature that dove headfirst into the water.
“Damn,” I said, watching the ripples where Lander had plunged through expand and shrink again when he didn’t resurface. “I think that might be the creepiest form he’s ever donned.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen him as a piranha,” Emelle said, then turned to Wren and Rodhi with a teasing glimmer dancing in her wide brown eyes. “May the best Wild Whisperer win.”
She jumped in after Lander.
And despite the pain unfurling in the back of my head, despite the sense that another cavity in my memory had just opened up, I followed.