My eyes, sensitive to the excruciating brightness of her green micro-shorts, wouldn’t focus. She didn’t seem to care that I was swaying and about to throw up.
“Now. I personally don’t care how you get yourself killed. But when you drag Leland into it? That complicates things. He doesn’t havetime, understand? He has work. He has me. He has — other friends. I haven’t even seen him in a combat gym since — since he started eatingbacon. He doesn’t have time to wake up at four a.m. to catch you breaking into the Allwitch temple. Or to get caughtnot catchingyou, which makes him look bad.” A notification buzzed her transmitter, the sound and the light rattling my head. “I reported you. I expect the Echelons will get back to you shortly.”
My head was heavy, so heavy.
I forgot where I was, how I got there —
And I fainted.
* * *
“I’ve got you,” said a familiar voice.
My head fell back against something strong, and my eyes drew open. “Leland?”
He brushed my hair away from the back of my neck, the cool air hitting it just right. “Yes?”
“You were Scrying,” I said.
My eyelids were drooping, drooping . . .
Closed.
Leland pressed something cool into my hand and forced me to wrap my fingers around it. I lifted an eyelid.
Water bottle. With a straw in it.
“Drink,” he said.
I tried to shake my head, but it barely moved. Feeling hadn’t returned to my legs.
“But the scrying orb,” I insisted.
“Just drink it, Ember.”
* * *
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 hewasn’t the one Scrying, but then I thought better of it. I didn’t want to ask without Privacy.
Besides, if Lelanddidhave 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 Iwasaround 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.
