Chapter 6
six
The next morning, I woke at the break of dawn. I hadn’t been able to sleep much. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt like I’d been drowning. Sucked beneath the powder-blue surface of the water into the blackness beneath. Feelings of hunger, tentacled limbs, lack of oxygen, total desperation.
Silas rose early with me, and after a quick breakfast of toast and coffee, we exited Wisteria Cottage together.
The glow of the morning warmed the edges of the earth gently, as the nightmare slipped away with the darkness.
It was hard to believe anything bad could happen on an island so beautiful, and yet, my time on this island had been peppered with harrowing experiences already.
“I’m going to return to Seer Goddard,” I said. “I don’t think anything will have changed, but Atlas said to be persistent, so...”
“I’ll walk you there.”
“No need. I think it will be better if I go alone.”
Silas gave a physical pause, like his body tensed up as he prepared to argue. But one look at my eyes, and he forced out a slow breath.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I am not going to argue.”
I grinned as I rose onto my toes. “I can see how hard it was for you to say that. I appreciate it.” I plunked a quick kiss on his lips.
Silas grabbed me by the waist, pulled me closer, pressed himself to me. He gave me a lingering, deep kiss that banished the nightmares to a distant realm. Beside Silas, it felt like nothing bad could happen. Moments like this felt like something close to happiness.
“What are you up to today?” I asked as we made our way beyond the rock wall that blocked off Wisteria Cottage. “Any big plans?”
“I’m heading to Ranger HQ. I need to check on the various investigations. See if they’ve made any progress figuring out where the kraken and the lycanthrope came from, and who placed them on our island.”
We parted ways with one last kiss, and I proceeded to make my way up the winding path to Seer Goddard’s small hut. I was barefoot this morning, so the walk took me longer.
I picked my way through the stony path with my bare feet, stubbornly trying to put into practice what both Liza and Atlas had told me. If I wanted to understand The Isle, I needed to listen to the people who had experience here.
Liza had raised the point that I needed to be more perceptive physically.
The moment she’d shown me the life left in the scorched earth, I’d felt a new burst of hope.
While I wouldn’t walk around barefoot for the rest of my life, for now, as I tried to earn Seer Goddard’s trust, I’d do just about anything to show him I was sincere.
When I arrived at the top of the hill, I stood outside the hut at a safe distance. I had no clue if I should call out or knock or simply wait, but my question was answered before I could decide.
“Dear girl.” The same dusty voice spoke from inside the hut as yesterday. “If all I needed you to do to prove your allegiance was walk barefoot, I would’ve told you to remove your shoes myself.”
I waited, my hands behind my back, trying not to let his words sting. I didn’t comment, just bowed my head and waited.
“That will be all.”
I turned at the dismissal, resigned but not upset. I’d expected as much. I truly hadn’t believed I could prove my intentions to Seer Goddard overnight, especially when it seemed like he had no desire to believe my intentions in the first place.
I turned and picked my way back down the mountainside, but instead of returning to Wisteria Cottage in defeat, I decided to return to The Forest to take another look at the scorched earth Liza had shown me yesterday.
I crossed the river in front of the castle, staring up at the bone-white beauty glistening beneath the early morning sun. The waters flowing beneath it sparkled like it’d been dusted with glitter, and the bougainvillea on either side of the river bloomed in fiery pinks and lush purples.
As I entered The Forest, a hush descended as though I’d entered a soundproof bubble. The canopy of trees had a way of masking any sounds except those right beside me: the occasional crack of a twig, rustle of the grasses, cheep of a bird.
I’d never walked through a forest barefoot before.
The thought of walking barefoot anywhere in New York City was thoroughly disgusting and was on par with licking a public toilet seat.
While my jaunt through The Forest barefoot wasn’t exactly pleasant since I didn’t have the hardened calluses of Liza’s soles, it did make me pay a lot closer attention to my surroundings.
I let out a sigh of relief when I stumbled upon a flat, grassy surface that felt like marshmallows beneath my toes. The scorched earth lay just behind the grassy meadow. Slowly, I made my way up to the intersection of life and death.
I kept my feet planted on the green grass, but as I knelt and rested my hand on the scarred remains of land, my heart thumped in my chest. This was the real reason I’d come back to The Forest today.
I was chasing the feel of magic. The electric zing of potential coursing through me.
The path to getting in touch with the powers that swirled inside me.
It was like an elixir, a drug, this feeling. The downside to accessing my magic was that I didn’t know how to access it when I wasn’t threatened for my life. Thus far, my magic had been directly tied to the level of fear and adrenaline in my body.
The closer I’d been to certain death, the harder my magic rebounded out of me as protection: the lycanthrope; the kraken; the Furies.
I struggled to understand how I could learn to use my magic successfully when it only surfaced in times of grave peril.
It wasn’t the best time to learn new spells when I was getting pulled beneath the water by a viscous creature.
But yesterday, for one of the first times, I’d been able to access that electric zing of magic when Liza had shown that there was life in this dead earth.
I’d felt that life, that undercurrent of power.
I’d identified it, felt the fissures of it radiate through my body.
It had felt calming and exhilarating, instead of desperate and wild. I already craved more of it.
I closed my eyes, splayed my hands on the ground. The ashen grass crumbled at my touch. My fingertips dug into the surface of the dirt. The harder I pressed down, the more I could feel the magic.
I took a deep breath and focused on the difference between the two opposing sides.
My bare feet could feel the subtle vibrations coursing beneath the green, vibrant grass.
Across the barrier, on the scorched earth, I could feel the remnants of something similar through my fingertips.
But the thrum of life was so thoroughly diminished it was no wonder the islanders had thought these lands permanently dead.
They were on death’s doorstep. But they weren’t gone yet.
I focused harder. I focused on bridging the gap between the two lands.
I basked in the vibrations of magic, willing my body to tug the bits of life up the damaged earth.
I funneled those bits of healthy magic through my very own body, then funneled it back out of me into the dead lands.
The skin of my forearms tingled as I felt the magic coursing through me into the earth.
I was under no illusion that this was my magic at work.
It wasn’t my magic at all; I was merely the conduit for the magic of The Isle.
I was replenishing the land with its own life force—the magic that kept this place running, the magic that fueled the wards, the magic that made this entire island different than anywhere else on earth.
I held on for as long as I physically could.
When my arms felt like they were about to rattle out of their sockets, I sat back on my heels, then collapsed to a seated position.
As my eyes flew open, I saw it—the small radius of land that had been a sooty black, now bursting in a shade of emerald green.
I’d done it. I had healed a tiny plot of land. A small section, a square foot or two at most. Doing this on a larger scale for all the charred land on The Isle wouldn’t be possible, but this was something—a start.
“I knew you could do it.” The little girl’s voice startled me.
I turned to find Liza perched about twenty feet high in a banana tree that did not seem to grow bananas, but instead these huge flowers the size of umbrellas in a shade of blue that matched the sky.
Liza swung down a few branches, then nimbly leapt to the ground. “I heard you coming from a mile away. I knew you’d be back. I knew you could do it.”
“It’s not much.”
“What do you mean? It’s everything! Now that you’ve done it once, you can prove to all the naysayers that you have Fae Queen magic.
” Liza’s eyes looked up at me. “I certainly can’t do anything of the sort; I’ve tried.
It’s Fae magic. You’ve set the wards, so you can help heal the injured parts of our land. ”
“I’m going to do my best, but Liza, I’ll be honest—I don’t know how to do it on a larger scale. This”—I gestured to the tiniest patch of green—“I’m thrilled, but it’s not enough. It took a lot out of me. There’s no way I can do it for acres and acres.”
“Not yet, but someday soon. Once you get ahold of your powers. Fae powers are really cool,” Liza said. “Like, the best you can have. Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“Thanks for your vote of confidence. Not a lot of people on this island believe in me. There are some, but certainly not everyone.”
“You don’t need anyone else to believe in you.” Liza shrugged, like it really was that simple. “Just believe in yourself, and you’ll prove everyone else wrong. Then they’ll have to believe in you, and they’ll all feel like idiots.”
Isn’t that almost exactly what Atlas told me yesterday, in slightly different terms?