“Nice acting back there,” he said, tipping his head to Odessa Hall. “But what about my name?” he imitated.
“Who says I was acting?” I trudged for the dandelion-flecked hills, putting the opulent palace behind me.
He gave me a long look. “Your face was completely still when I injected you with that sedative. You got hit by a tree and shrugged like you deserved it. You don’t react. Not like that. Maybe with your eyes a little, but . . .” His gaze dropped to my mouth. “Not with this. Not unless you’re pretending to be docile. Or aggrieved, apparently.”
Leland. Always paying attention.
“I wasn’t acting,” I said, and took another drink. “The gesturing — I might have jazzed it up a bit. But the question was real.” I twisted for a glance back at the palace and scrunched my face at it, feeling like I hated it there. There. Reacting.
“Before the prison,” I continued as we stepped off the bridge and began the trek uphill, “Jaxan said Arissa asked for Ember Rose BlackburnStray. In case you need me to spell it out for you, that happens to bemyname, plus Helen’s name, plus yours.”
Leland bit back a smile.
“It’s not funny, Leland! Why would I have your last name? Even Jaxan wanted to know. You heard him ask her!”
“Ember.” He was using his teaching voice again. “Do you knowwhyJaxan told me to leave you? Why he separated us? Why he said that to you when I wasn’t there?”
“No. No. And how wouldIknow?”
Based on the critical expression overtaking his face, those questions were supposed to be rhetorical.
“The whole time you were in there, he was giving you tests, looking for your weaknesses. The mural on his ceiling was one — wasn’t there yesterday, and I guarantee it won’t be there tomorrow. Your last name? Making us stand close together? Itwas all to rile you. To see if you’d care. The way he pretended not to care about the prophecy? The last time the Oracle had a new prophecy, Jaxan called the Council for an emergency meeting on it. Question everything Jaxan says. He’ll say anything to manipulate you. There’s no one better at it.”
I walked faster up the hill. “You could’ve warned me.”
“I did. A few times. You were” — Leland gazed westward to the edge of town, where storefronts with second-story apartments turned into quaint stone cottages with white-picket fences, sprinkled throughout the countryside — “not paying attention to me.”
Wrong. So wrong. I had been paying attention to him. I’d been payingtoo muchattention to him. I broke into a jog.
Running wasn’t easy in knit flats, but I didn’t plan on jogging long. Bumps in the ground prodded at my heels, the flask sloshing as I pumped my arms, racing for a portstop.
Leland jogged to keep up with me. “You’re actually upset about this?”
“Yes.” It felt childish to make him chase me in his work clothes, so I slowed to a walk, then pulled off the cobblestone path onto the hillside and lowered the flask to my hip, feeling defeated.
Why didn’t I feel like myself around him? One second, I was picturing myself in his bed. And in the next second, I hated him. And underneath all that was me, pounding at the walls of my skin, screaming.
I covered my face with my hand and shook my head into my palm, wanting to sink into the earth and hide until every out-of-control feeling left me.
“I feel crazy,” I said. “I feel crazy. I feel crazy.” Still hiding behind my hand, I peered at Leland through the narrow slats where my fingers were spread. “Why do I feel like this?”
“You’re not crazy,” Leland began. “You’re” — he tried meeting my eyes through the gaps in my hand, making me so self-conscious, I pulled it from my face — “deteriorating. It happens to every Seven. You asked for the unofficial reason for the Blessing? It’s this. We’re running out of magic, so the Echelons decided to dothis. Bless everyone so far ahead of Selection in the hopes that Allwitches, the witches who need the most magic to survive, will deteriorate while they wait for it.
“The only way to fully stop it is to graduate fifth year and become an Allwitch, if you can get into the program. But the Allwitches who don’t? At the end of fourth year, they’re Siphoned. Every drop of spellcasting magic gets removed from their blood, and it destroys them.” He pointed behind us, back at the prison. “The jailers in there were Aspirants who weren’t picked to be an Allwitch. That’s what’s happening to you. Most likely faster because you’re an Eight.”
I closed my eyes and breathed out. It was illogical, but somehow, I felt less crazy after hearing him say that’s what I was.
“I’m going to take care of it,” he promised. “Just get through the next couple of days while I work something out. You won’t feel like this forever.”
A few more breaths, and I was ready to return to our previous conversation. “What if Jaxan didn’t say the Ember Stray thing to rile me? What if the prophecy Arissa mentioned is real? And what if that’s where she heard it? It’s not personal. It’s just . . . I want to go back to the human realm. Not stay here and marry you.”
“I think,” Leland said lightly, “you’re interpreting this the wrong way.”
“Please, enlighten me then. With the correct interpretation.”
“I’m not the only Stray in Everden.”
Not the only Stray in Everden. I rolled my eyes. Who was the other? His father?
