Chapter 4
CHAPTER
The carriages came the next day at midmorning.
Emelle, Wren, and I watched from a balcony, lounging on wicker-woven chairs and sipping on coffee. Cook had made mine with all the spices I liked—cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg—so I let the heat prick my throat with all the warmth the sun couldn’t give me.
“Oh, I bet you anything that one’s from my village,” Wren said, pointing at a wooden carriage that swept over the nearby jungle canopies on a supernatural wind, aiming for the courtyard beyond the estuary.
“You can tell because it’s the shittiest-looking one.
Wyndrip always gets the shit end of the stick. ”
We were all carefully avoiding the topic of Jenia’s exile as much as the rest of campus was talking about it.
In part because she was a fellow Wild Whisperer in our year no matter what she’d been like, but also because…
well, I prided myself in having a group of friends that didn’t pick out joy from other people’s pain like vultures feasting on a fresh carcass.
Beside me, Emelle sucked in a breath, probably to tell Wren that the new carriage flying in wasn’t as shitty as she claimed—then snapped her mouth shut again when one of the wheels popped off in midair.
There came a resounding shout from beyond our line of vision, but I knew the Element Wielding coachmen would have landed the carriage safely with or without all of the wheels intact.
“See?” Wren said, sipping her coffee undisturbed. “Told you. Shit end of the stick. Hey, buzz off. I already told the monkeys to scat.”
She swatted at a parakeet that had fluttered to the balcony’s edge, tilting its head at us and letting its beady black eyes rove over each of our figures. It wasn’t until those eyes tacked onto mine that I recognized it and sat up a little straighter in my chair.
“You’re Kimber Leake’s… friend,” I told it.
Kimber as in Jenia’s older sister. Last year’s princess of our house who’d been assigned a seat on the Good Council after she’d passed her Final Test months ago.
I’d probably never forget the patched yellow bill fluffing up her bird’s neck, or the way it had looked at last year’s inductees from its perch on her shoulder as if we were dirt between its talons.
Was Kimber here? Did she know what had befallen her sister? Had she come to oversee tomorrow’s Branding or investigate Jenia’s exile?
The parakeet, however, only coughed out a single word. “Slut.”
Then it flapped away, sweeping up and over the Wild Whisperer rooftop, before I could respond.
“What was that about?” Emelle asked, her eyebrows pinched.
“I don’t—”
Again, my response was cut short by the flood of voices surging toward us from the courtyard.
The last carriage must have arrived during the parakeet’s little one-word speech, which meant the newest inductees were heading this way, led by our new princes and princesses who had been chosen during last night’s elections.
A flash of yellow wings caught my attention just as the first of them flowed over the bridge onto Bascite Boulevard.
Kimber’s parakeet flew against the tide, heading for campus.
“Rayna, where are you—?”
“I’ll be right back!”
I was already up, my coffee mug almost cracking from how hard I slammed it down onto the chiseled balcony floor. I barged through the doors behind it—into Wren’s four-person dormitory—and back downstairs until I was out on the street, sprinting in the parakeet’s direction.
Slut. The bird had spoken with such an air of judgment that I knew it knew something—probably the vision Kitterfol Lexington had shown me at the end of last year.
The way I’d been chained up and spread wide open for Coen to feast on.
The way I’d had bruises lining my arms and neck.
Whatever the pirate in disguise had done to me, it didn’t qualify me as a slut, I knew…
but that bird wouldn’t have called me such a thing if it didn’t know something.
I was almost at the bridge when the hundreds of new, sweating bodies converged on me.
Elbows and hips and hair lashed at me. The scent of anxiety and giddiness and desperation stung in my nose like acid, but I kept plunging against the flow of it all until—
“Rayna?”
My head jerked sideways at the familiar image of golden-brown hair and a pair of thick, knitted eyebrows.
“Wilder.”
For a half second, my gaze tugged between the boy from my home village and the last flashes of the parakeet’s wings.
Then Kimber’s bird became nothing but a bobbing speck, and I knew it was a lost cause. But Wilder… he’d rooted himself to a standstill amongst the sea of his peers, watching me with those swirled hazel eyes I’d completely forgotten about until now.
“You’ve grown,” I said, moving to the side of Bascite Boulevard to avoid that push of bodies. Wilder trailed after me without a second glance at the class royal he was supposed to be following, his hands slipping into his trouser pockets.
Indeed, I was squinting against the glare of sunlight as I peered ever so slightly up at him.
Back in Alderwick, where we’d both grown up, he’d always been on the shorter, stouter side—I remembered that regarding the times we’d snuck into his uncle’s shed to explore each other’s mouths and tongues—but now he was just stout.
Wilder smiled slightly and toed the cobblestone. “Yeah, I guess I have. Meanwhile, you look the same.” His eyes lifted to mine. Searching and assessing. “Except I heard you can talk to animals now.”
“What? How did you—?”
Nobody at the Esholian Institute—save for the Good Council elites themselves—were supposed to have contact with the outside world.
I’d certainly never written home about my new gift…
or—had I? A too-familiar pounding behind my eyes told me there was yet another forgotten memory that might answer that question, but I ignored it, pushed the pain down and down.
“A crow told my uncle that he’d talked to you, apparently,” Wilder said now, his half-smile freezing over his teeth. “My whole family’s got the Whispering magic, remember?”
Yes, I had known that, but it was another tidbit of Wilder’s life that hadn’t crossed my throbbing mind until this moment.
He’d even been named after the magic, for God’s sake.
After his eldest cousin, twenty-five years his senior, had come home from the Institute as an Object Summoner, his mother and father had named him Wilder in the hopes that it would spur the magic to take their desired shape in his blood.
Purely superstition. The Branding activation had no rhyme or reason. The fact that most of his family had the Wild Whispering power was just a testament to how the sectors stuck together, maintained friendships, and married each other long after the Final Test.
I couldn’t help the frown from creeping onto my face, though.
“A crow?” I couldn’t remember ever meeting a specific crow. Owls and kingfishers and toucans, yes, but never crows. They liked to keep to themselves.
Wilder inhaled to respond. Inhaled—and then stopped.
A shadow fell over the space between us, and an oily, slithering quiet filled the buzzing in my head. As if the shadow had muted the world both inside and outside of me.
I turned to find Kitterfol Lexington’s grin in my face.
“Catching up with old friends, are we now, Ms. Drey?”
Lexington’s voice was as slimy and invasive as I knew his mind was, from the times I’d felt it probing my own. My stomach swooped in response, as if he’d placed me on the edge of that cliff behind the Testing Center and forced me to look down.
I pulled what I hoped was a neutral look over my face.
“He’s not a friend.”
I saw a moment of hurt flash across Wilder’s face from my periphery, but I didn’t let that neutral mask budge.
No way in hell was I going to let Kitterfol Lexington, the most lethal Mind Manipulator on the Good Council and my personal tormenter, get his claws into Wilder.
It was why I’d downplayed my friendship with Emelle, Lander, and the others around him, too, why I’d avoided thinking about my own fathers.
To keep his attention away from the people I loved.
But as Lexington’s eyes inched from me to Wilder, I knew he knew the truth. Knew he was penetrating the memories Wilder and I had shared in that shed so long ago, from both of our perspectives. He always pursued the most private, intimate ones that held his interest.
Which was why he’d never dug further into my mental images of those pearls. What use did he have in thoughts about jewelry pieces?
Now, Lexington’s grin cracked wide open.
“Well, I trust your not-friend can make his way to the arena by himself.” Lexington faced me fully with that cruel mirth swimming in his eyes. “Your presence is requested in the Testing Center.”
“In the Testing Center?” I repeated, momentarily taken aback.
Of all the times Lexington had flown in to get me to report on my progress, he’d only ever cornered me in random places on campus, never taken me to the Testing Center for another official interrogation.
Lexington was already turning on his heels, his stringy braids flying.
“Dyonisia Reeve has arrived for the Branding,” he said over his shoulder. “She would like a word with her… favorite student.”
Every one of my muscles tightened at the mention of her name. Normal. I had to act normal, for the sake of Wilder and my friends and my two fathers, who were still back in Alderwick, unaware of the threats dangling over their heads from both the pirates and Dyonisia herself.
I would not want you to have to witness your fathers’ bodies, broken and mangled and wrecked like this spider’s, knowing their death was stretched out by the man who had you chained.
I’d managed to avoid thinking about that so far, but now, with Dyonisia Reeve returned, I’d have to face it again: the fact that my actions here could have consequences for Fabian and Don across the island.
I’d have to spin Steeler’s presence in my mind as something that made me look like I had things under control. Because I did. I did.
“Coming, sir,” I intoned, and made my way after Lexington without glancing at Wilder again.