Chapter Twenty-One #2
We’d ported as far as the city district of Creatus when Leland made the call, after I’d passed out a second time in the portstop.
We had to go the rest of the way to the academy on foot.
That meant twenty minutes of ambling through the desert with him, in utter silence, except for the sound of Leland tapping out messages on his transmitter, when he wasn’t glaring at me to drink more from my water bottle.
Wind whistled through the sagebrush, and I watched the long stems of small, green leaves rustle, contemplating if it was worth starting a conversation with him.
I wanted to ask what kind of magic had lured me to the Allwitch temple, but Leland’s jaw was tight, and I wasn’t sure if hearing voices was up there with uprooting trees, if knowing something else was wrong with me would only make his job harder.
Maybe it had been some combination of mental and enchantment magic.
Mental magic to penetrate my mind. An enchantment like Command.
Though only an Allwitch could’ve manipulated two schools of magic like that, which led me back to thinking it was only mental magic, a simple Contact spell, and the impulse to go must have been my own destructiveness.
I opened my mouth to ask how he’d known I’d fainted, if he wasn’t the one Scrying, but then I thought better of it. I didn’t want to ask without Privacy.
Besides, if Leland did have more than one school of light magic, which was more than a fourth-year Aspirant was supposed to have, I doubted he would tell me.
I pretended like I’d only opened my mouth for water, and was taking a long sip from the bottle when Leland slipped his transmitter in his pocket and cast Privacy.
“Starvos wants to see you in his office,” he said.
“Starvos is here?” I checked the time on my transmitter. It was 6:15 a.m.
“He traveled here,” Leland said thickly. “To speak to you about your run to the Allwitch temple.”
I dropped my gaze to my feet. “Oh.”
For a while, we said nothing else. I’d been avoiding Leland so much that we still hadn’t spoken about the Shadowrealm taking the fourth-year Sevens.
There was also the fact that, when I was around him, the Shadowrealm was the last thing I was thinking about.
But now that my headache was gone, and I had twenty minutes to kill in the desert with him, I thought about the parchment rolled up in my sweatshirt pocket, and the someone who wrote it who wanted me to believe the missing Aspirants would be freed if I left Everden.
I suspected it was a prank — someone like Farrah who wanted to catch me at the Allwitch temple again.
I knew it wasn’t a message from the Shadowrealm.
The Shadowrealm was Jaxan, and he’d been pretty clear at my trial about wanting me in Everden.
My mind swung to Helen and how hard she’d been trying to raise her hand to vote for me to be Unfit.
But there was never any point in trying to understand her actions, so I shook her from my mind, and watched flickering, tri-pointed leaves of purple ivy jostle each other in the warm wind.
“Would you ever use your gift?” Leland asked, shaking me from my distant stare. We were nearing the end of the dirt path before the pedestal.
“No,” I answered. “There are too many butterflies that could happen.”
“Butterflies?”
“The butterfly effect?” I couldn’t tell if the flat expression he was giving me meant he’d never heard of it or if he was waiting for me to explain myself, so I went on, frequently needing to break eye contact as his eyes did everything in their power to throw me off balance.
They were green in the unfiltered sunlight, backlit with a warm, golden glow.
“Consequences. Problems I cause by changing outcomes. One bad lie and then someone else is making the wrong decision, getting hurt.”
“Ah.”
I had to look down at my shoes to hide my cheeks turning warm as we began the easy but long hike up the pedestal.
It felt like we’d been hiking in silence forever, my meeting with Starvos creeping closer and closer. Dust blew against the rock, and I itched my nose, careful to hold my sleeve down with my thumb so my wrist would stay covered.
“I’m not going to lie to Starvos about what happened,” I said, “if that’s why you wanted to know.”
“I was going to tell you not to,” he said, opening the hatch and letting me go ahead.
“I’m not sure how much Vyra saw.” He scanned ahead for anyone who might be lip reading our words, but the passage was clear.
“I lied once about whether someone was telling the truth. Echelons figured it out. It was . . . it wasn’t easy to cover up.
” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t want your gift exposed. ”
“It won’t be.”
I knew my gift could fail if the lie was implausible.
A bad lie worked, initially, then people pieced together inconsistencies and grew suspicious.
Once, I told Ash I wasn’t eavesdropping on her, but she could clearly see the tip of my nose under the crack of her door, my words breathed onto her carpet fibers.
She figured my gift out then, though she never said anything about it.
I missed her.
We entered the arcade, and I rubbed my eyes to adjust to the bright light pouring down from the skylight.
“Want me to go in with you?” asked Leland.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thank you for the water.”
Though it was more than water. It was electrolytes.
It was him waking up and running to Hartik’s Hollow, catching me in his arms in the portstop when I’d passed out.
But I walked off ahead of him, not turning back, not understanding why I was still getting warm around him when the cuffs were working, or why — when I withdrew to my mind then — I envisioned him, not Gray, and in my mind, Leland followed me into Starvos’s office anyway.
* * *
“There she is. The young Ms. Blackburn,” Starvos said warmly from behind his desk, his soft brown eyes charitable and glittering. “Have a seat right there in that chair.” He patted the top of his desk.
The crackly leather chair across from him groaned noisily as my weight sank into the worn softness of it.
His office was a small, unassuming anteroom with simple wood furnishings and a lush, patterned rug, tucked behind a stone door that blended seamlessly into the arcade’s curving light-red walls.
I took a deep breath and inhaled warm and sweet smells of cinnamon coming from the snickerdoodle cookies he was in the middle of eating.
Starvos had a quality in his eyes, or maybe in the set of his bushy, gray-streaked brows, that was both sad and proud, a fatherly look that made my heart pang for my dad.
“Am I . . . in trouble?” I asked. I’d expected as much, but what was throwing me off was his agreeableness, the plate of half-eaten cookies in front of him, and the crumbs sticking to the corner of his mouth.
He looked at me squarely, folding his hands. “I received a report from one of my fourth years this morning. You visited the Allwitch temple?”
“I — yes.” I said, straightening a little. “Not that I meant to. I looked up from my run and was there. It was like I’d been under some kind of trance. I didn’t — I didn’t go in it.”
“Oh, dear,” he said, frowning. “I had hoped there was a miscommunication.” He unclasped his hands, clasping them again as he studied me. “Has anyone told you why the Allwitch temple is forbidden?”
I shook my head in answer.
“No? What do you know of its history?”
“Not much. I know there were Allwitch wars.”
Starvos chuckled. “Wars, yes. Many of them, and the most recent one, we nearly lost, despite outnumbering them greatly. You see, a long time ago, a land dragon emerged from the temple’s well to challenge the Goddess, and the Allwitches encouraged it!
A new god, they claimed. Of course, it wasn’t, and they didn’t succeed.
I’ve proposed, numerous times, to put wards around the place, but I’ve never managed to convince my colleagues.
Keeping it open draws out the rebels. You wouldn’t happen to be one of them? ”
For a second, I was taken aback by the way he’d slid in the question so conversationally. “Am I a rebel?” I repeated.
Starvos nodded pleasantly.
“No? How would I be? I only talk to Skye and Leland.”
“Ah, well,” he said calmly. “That’s what I thought.
It might surprise you to know a few of us share the opinion.
But there was no way around it. The others, I’m afraid, take the temple far too seriously.
Your first strike has been given for trespassing.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you you’ll be sent home if you get two more? ”
“No,” I said abruptly. “And I won’t. I won’t go back there.”
“Wonderful, wonderful,” he said, lifting the plate. “Cookie?”
“Oh. Um. No, thank you,” I said, politely shaking my head. There wasn’t a single one he hadn’t already taken a bite out of. “Echelon Starvos . . .”
I needed to tell someone I’d heard Jaxan in the shadows at the Blacklight, which I didn’t do at my trial because I didn’t want to be accused of Libel. But I trusted Starvos would at least listen before calling a trial to punish me. Besides, there wasn’t anyone better I could tell.
“I think there’s something I need to report,” I said. “Something about the Shadowrealm.”
“A report about the Shadowrealm?” said Starvos, sounding surprised I’d bring it up.
“I’m afraid that sort of business must only be discussed at Odessa Hall.
Security reasons, you understand.” He consulted the clock on the wall behind me.
“As it happens, I’m on my way there now for some related business.
” He leaned in closer. “I have a meeting with an animal handler to see if a few Familiars can’t locate the missing Aspirants.
Why don’t you make your report tomorrow?
I have some office hours in the morning. ”
I started to open my mouth —