Chapter 39
CHAPTER
Unfortunately, Quinn wasn’t much of a talker.
Dazmine learned this the hard way when she tried knocking on the Element Wielder house door after class the next day. And the next day. And the next.
Each time, the person who answered the door simply told her that Quinn wasn’t available. Just like they’d always told me.
“We’re going to get her to talk,” Dazmine seethed during a Language of Plants lesson where Mrs. Wildenberg had paired us up once again. “One way or another, she’s going to tell us what she knows.”
Last year, I might have been just as determined as Dazmine after what we’d seen, but my nerves could only seem to be directed at one thing right now: those pills.
After that fireball incident, I’d retrieved my satchel from the jungle.
Steeler had arrived that night to pick up the ingredients for Nara, but apparently, she would still need four more weeks to mix and brew the poison until it was strong enough to kill a faerie.
Four whole weeks of torture for me as I went to class after class, playing the part of an innocent Esholian student and trying not to wonder if Dyonisia's death would create a level of chaos that the island wasn’t prepared to deal with.
I climbed sun bears in Mr. Conine’s class, helped caddisflies gather sticks and stones in Ms. Pincette’s, listened to Mrs. Smetlar’s scowling lectures in History, and, one Sunday, found myself sitting on the beach outside the lighthouse with Garvis, finally learning the Mind Manipulating art of commands.
“So, this is what your mind is like, huh?”
I stood up outside the gate of Garvis’s mind for the first time, gazing around me in awe.
His walls weren’t walls at all. They were more like curtains, hung up by pillars and rods of stone but flowing back and forth with strips of what looked like cashmere. The result was a constant fluttering of white, as if Garvis’s thoughts were wisps of the gentlest clouds.
“This is me.” Garvis’s consciousness turned to face me. “No need to get through someone’s gate for this lesson, though. All you need to do is give me a command with as much force as you can muster.”
“Oh. Okay.” I tore my eyes away from the mesmerizing flow of those curtains. “Jump up and down?”
Garvis shook his head. “Not enough force. When you make a true command, you’ll feel it in the form of a mist leaking out of you and latching onto your victim.”
Victim. I didn’t like the sounds of that, but it was accurate, and something I needed to learn about even if I decided to never use it on someone else.
Clenching my fists, I filled my voice with as much force as I could muster. “Jump up and down.”
Like tendrils of smoke, my command flowed out of my mental body in little wiggling strings and drifted to Garvis’s consciousness. Right as they tried to latch onto him, he gave a great, violent shudder… and they dissipated.
In the background film of the real world, I saw Garvis remain sitting from where we faced each other, cross-legged. “Try again,” his inner self said. “Really push the command out.”
“Okay.” I flexed my mental fingers. “Jump up and down.”
This time, the tendrils of mist floated out of me and latched onto Garvis’s consciousness like squirming puppet strings before he could shake them off. In the real world, he scrambled to a stand and jumped twice before sitting back down.
“Oh, good!” He sounded surprised that I had caught on so quickly. “Can you do that again?”
“I don’t know.” I hadn’t liked the feeling of those strings of mist connecting me to him, but I gave another command anyway. “Scratch your nose.”
Again, that mist flowed out of me and latched onto Garvis’s consciousness. Again, he heeded my command and scratched his nose.
“Tap your head,” I commanded.
Garvis tapped his head.
“Wiggle your fingers.”
Garvis wiggled his fingers, but frowned.
“I don’t think these commands are really testing your abilities, Rayna. I have no reason to resist them. You need to tell me to do something I wouldn’t want to do.”
Inexplicably, my thoughts drifted to Quinn again, and how often her Mind Manipulating mother used to tell her to do something she didn’t want to do.
No matter what kind of person she’d turned into since our childhood, I should have stood up for her more in the face of that. I folded my arms at Garvis.
“Sorry. There’s no way I’m doing that to you.”
Garvis stroked his mustache with a soft smile.
“While I appreciate the thoughtfulness, Rayna, this wouldn’t exactly be my first time.
In our very first year as Mind Manipulators, our instructors made us command each other to do unwanted things.
I’m pretty sure one of my classmates actually made me shit myself during my first quarterly test.”
I gaped at him, unfolding my arms. “That’s horrible!
” Now my thoughts drifted to Steeler in the lighthouse behind us.
If that had been everyone’s experience in the Mind Manipulating sector, I could only imagine what manner of classes and tests he’d had to endure over the last five years.
No wonder he’d developed such a commanding presence—this power required you to control or be controlled. No alternatives.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “How about this? What’s something you’ve always secretly wanted to do that you haven’t had the courage to?”
Garvis stopped stroking his mustache to peer at me.
“That’s an interesting question.”
I shrugged. “Seems more humane than telling you to shit your pants.”
Something in Garvis’s expression reminded me of a cat raising its head after a long afternoon nap. He glanced at the foundation of his mind and said, “I would want just that—to have courage.”
“What?”
He sighed and looked back up.
“All my life, I’ve felt that I just drift wherever the tide takes me. And while that’s how I prefer to go about things, I also wish, just sometimes, that I could throw myself into it. Meet new people, go to new places, discover new things.” He smiled. “To have the courage to try something new.”
I stared at him. Garvis—a Mind Manipulating pirate, one of Steeler’s best friends who had been giving up his time to teach me about this power with everlasting patience—he felt that he lacked courage?
The look on his face was already darkening into embarrassment, so I made a quick decision before he could regret telling me.
“Jump into the ocean,” I commanded. “Right now.”
Those strings of mist shot out from me harder and faster than before, latching onto Garvis with shocking force. I snapped out of his mind just in time to see him begin sprinting toward the water’s edge.
Laughing, I ran after him, feeling the heavy presence of a pair of watchful eyes from the lighthouse window but not looking over my shoulder to meet them. If I was going to make a friend throw himself into something like this, I was sure as hell going to join him.
We both crashed into an oncoming wave at the same time.
The biting cold of it wrapped around my ankles, and Garvis gasped beside me.
I could feel the puppet strings of my command withdrawing from him, but he only shot me a rare laugh and threw himself deeper.
I waded forward, too, letting the waves soak the bottom of my dress and the seaweed wrap around my ankle, until we were both chest-deep in the water, rocking back and forth with the waves.
“And to think,” Garvis called over the roaring sound of it all, “that our captain always warned us against even touching the water lest a sea monster got us!”
I whipped my head toward him with a squint, my smile plastered on my face.
“Captain?”
“Yeah!” We bobbed up with a particularly large wave, and a splash of water salted my mouth as Garvis said, “The captain of our ship.”
“Oh.” Had I been mistaken about the female faerie with the tattoo on her back in Steeler’s memory? Was she, perhaps, not the Fated General, but merely the captain? I didn’t ask Garvis, though, not when he laughed again in the face of a wave as if he’d never truly laughed before.
We were both completely soaked by the time we trudged back up to the lighthouse to dry off.
“Well, how does it feel to have made your first official command as a Mind Manipulator?” Garvis asked.
I hesitated on the doorstop, thinking about that question while I wrung out my hair.
The idea of controlling someone like that on a daily basis made actual bile pool in the base of my throat—it felt as if the more I did it, the more I’d feel those strings of mist wiggling around inside me, begging to be released.
“I don’t think I want to go around making commands,” I said honestly, “unless it’s a life-or-death situation.
” Those spiders back at Ms. Pincette’s swam in my mind.
I wouldn’t have had any problem combining my powers to tell them to get off me.
Lexington, too. If he ever tried to touch one of my friends like he’d used his commands to harm me, I wouldn’t think twice before shooting that mist at every inch of his consciousness I could latch onto.
But other than that? No. The Cardina jeweler’s wince back in her green-striped tent was enough of a reason to stay away from this type of Mind Manipulating as much as possible. I never wanted to see anyone look at me in fear like that again.
“I think that’s a good idea,” said Garvis.
I nodded and pushed open the door to find that Felicity was chatting away to Dazmine and Terrin in the kitchen, despite the former looking as if she wanted to claw her ears out and the latter staring at the monkey with an utterly blank expression.
The two of them had begun trying to create a blueprint of the prison at the top of Bascite Mountain based on information they’d been able to gather from the birds and the wind, but so far, that blueprint only consisted of a sad little rectangle surrounded by an iron gate crowned with spikes.
Nobody who’d gone in, it seemed, ever came out—much like the Uninhabitable Zone.