He looked up, brow furrowed. The sweat in his hair and on his skin had turned the smudge of dirt on his forehead to mud. I reached to wipe it with the rag I kept at my belt, and he flinched away.
Something twisted in my chest.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“Are there more of you?”
He hesitated before letting out a sigh. “No.”
The melancholy sound of the word spoke volumes. “You’re the only one?”
His breathing was steadying. He shifted and sat with his back against a tree trunk, looking more like a boy shirking his work than a powerful Animator who’d just used wild, ungovernable magic to prevent my messy death. “I don’t know. If there were others, wouldn’t I feel it?”
He sounded lonely.
How could he not be?
I tried to imagine what it would have been like growing up with radiance in my soul and no one to teach me how to use it. Then I shook off the warm haze of sympathy and grasped for the reasonable corners of my mind. “How can this wild magic be? There’s no leadership, no … regulations for you to follow. Surely you can’t do whatever you want …”
Ezra gaped at me. “You’re worried about bureaucracy right now?”
“No. I mean. A little?” I swallowed hard, realizing he should have let me fall. It would have been prudent to let the river take my body away rather than expose himself. “It’s been so many years—”
“Since Animators were hunted down and killed?” he asked bitterly. “I suppose there’s no call forregulationsanymore now that the House of Industry murdered everyone who tried to defy their control.”
That had happened long before either of our times, but I felt a gnawing pang of guilt anyway. Whatever I’d imagined a deadly Animator to be, it hadn’t been this. Not a boy with warm brown eyes and unruly brows and an air of defeat I wanted desperately to chase away.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said, startled to realize I meant it. I couldn’t sentence him to death after he’d saved my life. “I owe you that much. You didn’t have to do that.”
He laughed once, in an ugly sort of way. “Yes, I did.” His grip was strong yet careful as he hauled me to my feet. “Come on.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, he dragged me along the path, both our gaits rather unsteady. “You’ve got to continue with your errands before the day is lost,” he was saying, sounding winded. “Tell Julian you fell into brambles.”
“That’s the truth, more or less.” I shook my arm out of his grip. There was something strange about his tone.
He stared at his hand, as if unaware he’d been holding on to me. “How in the world did you fall like that?” he asked.
“A rude bee. And these damned skirts. I told you I need a tailor.”
He slowed, head bowed and shoulders shaking, and for a moment, I feared he’d lost his senses. Then his honeyed laugh erupted, and I punched his arm.
“I’m being serious. And it’s odd that you were following me!”
“It’s a good thing I was!” He was still laughing breathlessly. His normally flushed skin had taken on a pallor.
“Ezra.” Speaking his name plainly made me feel funny, as if I’d sipped wine on an empty stomach. “Are you all right?”
We reached a clearing, the landscape manicured here, with a stockyard and gravel roads leading up to the huge mill, where a waterwheelspun, gears creaking a steady complaint. Ezra hung back and leaned against a pine. “I don’t know. Yes.”
I knew I should hurry to the mill, finish my chores, and get back to Julian to explain away my foolishly injured hands. But I lingered, troubled by the way Ezra used the tree to prop himself up. “Did that hurt you? What you did?”
“It shouldn’t have. That never happened with …” He seemed to recall himself, expression shuttering. “It’s fine.”
My mind reeled with more questions than I could count. If his magic was meant to be wild, yet he could control it, maybe I could learn that control from him. Maybe I could tamp down the wildness and anger in me and feel more like a proper Conductor. Maybe I’d stop reaching for violence at every frustration. “Ezra, if I keep your secret, will you tell me more? Will you show me how you use your magic?”
“Why?” he asked, watching me with a wary frown. “Gathering evidence to drag me to the House Elders?”
“I said I wouldn’t tell, and I won’t. It’s only that you … you’re nothing like I expected.” Everything I wanted to know blistered under my skin. I couldn’t leave an opportunity like this alone. An Animator—maybe theonlyAnimator—had enough control over his magic to carefully lift me without hurting me. With that kind of self-assurance, surely I could make myself into the powerful Conductor I needed to become if I ever wanted to be more than a tool.
