“Would you ever use your gift?” Leland asked, shaking mefrom 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 eavesdroppingon 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 envisionedhim, 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 whatwas 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 youwhythe 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 opendraws 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.
