Leland slid down to my feet. Everything he did, he made it look easy. His arms moved like paddles skimming a lake. His hands fell on the toes of my shoes, his fingers cupping them. “I can’t even tell your hair is gold anymore, there’s so much dirt in it, and you’re worried about your shoes?”
I guess he’d noticed me frowning at them.
Lifting his hand off the first one — now as clean as it had come in its shoebox — he moved to the next. The sweatshirt I was wearing had been restored to its original condition as well, though he didn’t need to touch it to manage that, since it was his. I caught him studying my pants — tasks to kill time and avoidanswering my question.
“Leland.” I held a hand up to stop him. “You don’t seem to enjoy being around me, yet you do all this. Someone told you to get me. Someone told you to watch me. Someone told you I wasdangerous. So, if there’s something wrong with me, and you know about it, I think I have a right to know what it is.”
His jaw worked, and he didn’t answer for several minutes. “I’m still figuring out what the Echelons are interested in. As far as why I’mhelpingyou, it’s because I made a Dark Deal when I was a kid. I needed protection. Jaxan offered it, but I had to make a Deal with him. See that you make it to Selection — that’s what it is. And no. I don’t know why it’s important to him.”
So he was here because of a bargain.
Because he’d promised to look after me. A promise that, if he broke it, meant he’d owe Jaxan a debt. He had to look after me until Selection, for three more weeks, and then I would be free of him. Every kindness he’d shown me — the protein bar, the shoes, the flask. Any time concern had crept into his voice, and he wasn’t hostile for a second. It was the Deal. An obligation.
Leland’s fingers twitched against his knee, and my eyes dropped to his hand where his ring finger had aVon it.
“You don’t want to be here,” I realized aloud, and something about the way I said it, or perhaps the way I was shutting down, set him off again.
“No, Ember, I don’t,” he said. “I had no idea — at the age of five — how much it would seem I don’t enjoy being your babysitter.” He stood, ready to go. “I’m here because I have to be.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
EMBER
When performing the Memory Extraction spell, the Mentalist must be absolute in the removal of all sensory details.
— Helen Blackburn, Echelon to the
School of Mental Magic
We left the forest in silence.
Downtown Hartik’s Hollow was slowly waking up when we ported into Conventicles Crossing. A door would open, and my senses would flood with smells of cinnamon-sweet pastries and freshly baked bread, the scents so wonderful I could almost ignore the iron spelltracks hanging over us as more and more witches left their homes to travel to work.
I’d been staring too long at a windowfront, when, out of nowhere, Leland decided he was talking to me again.
“Do you like pepperoni?” he asked.
My answer resulted in him ducking into a bakery, and insisting I take one of the two pepperoni calzones he came back out with. Not wanting to offend the baker, who was staring expectantly at us from behind a wide, glass window, I grabbed the calzone by its brown paper wrappings, ignored the dirt on my hands, anddug into it.
I knew the reason for Leland’s gesture. He didn’t want me to starve to death before Selection, before he fulfilled his end of the Dark Deal he’d made with Jaxan. What I didn’t know was whathewas getting from it. Why a five-year-old would need to go to an Echelon for protection. It seemed too personal to ask.
“Want to sit?” he asked.
I nodded, chewing, and he steered us to a wooden bench where we sat as far as humanly possible from each other. To stop myself from looking at him, I gazed out at a tiered fountain, concentrating on its gentle bubbling, wishing I knew if it was a weird thing to do to go up to it and rinse my hands.
My ears popped.
I clapped my hands over them and frowned at Leland for taking away the cathartic noise of the fountain.
“Privacy,” he said. “It’s a Creation spell.”
“I know what Privacy is,” I informed him, though I’d thought a Creator could only cast it indoors, in a defined space, like a room. Then again, this was Leland — and Leland wasn’t regular.
“I’m not trying to talk down to you,” he said. “I don’t know how much you know yet.”
Under the intensity of his stare, something came over me. I stopped inhaling my calzone, and just nibbled the corner.
