“It hasn’t been too muchyet,” Silas corrected. “It will be. The wards are breaking. The curse is strengthening. Pretty soon, it will be too much for you and Lily. We need to focus on the root of the problem, not continue to throw bandages at it.”
“Before, when we were patching the wards, you never answered my question.”
“Which one?”
“Why me?”
The question hung here, on the top of the world, dangling between us like a carrot that neither of us wantedto touch. But there was no Ranger X appearing this time, no wards in desperate need of patching.
Silas looked at me. “I’ve already told you how much power runs through you, and that isn’t something that can be learned or taught. You bleed magic. You see magic. Youaremagic.”
My shoulders fell forward in a bit of a slump. “I hate that.”
“Which part?”
I looked into Silas’s eyes. “I was born into a privileged life. I had a silver rattle worth more than most babies’ entire nurseries. I attended Harvard because my parents wanted me to, and they could just write a check for it. It’s not fair to everyone else. Now, it’s happening all over again. I feel like I won the magic lottery.”
Silas considered, and I appreciated that he didn’t just reach for the lowest hanging fruit and tell me none of that was my fault. I already knew that. It didn’t help my guilt that came with it.
“We can’t help the way we’re born, and trust me, having the sort of magic you do is both a blessing and a curse. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Silas said. “But that’s not the point here.”
“Oh, yeah? Then what is the point?”
“The point is the opposite. The privilege you experienced in your mortal life…it’s different in the magical world. The type of magic you have is not given to an unworthy individual. What matters, Alessia, is what’s in here.”
Silas reached out, pressed a hand gently over my heart.
“What you did today required the use of no magic at all.” Silas’s eyes were dark, searching. “You helped others out of the kindness of your heart. You sat, completely exhausted and new to this world, and listened to people bear their worries to you.”
“I don’t know about bearing their worries,” I said. “It was a lot of foot fungus and weird bruises, to be honest.”
A twitch of a smile. “People weren’t looking for a cure. They were looking for patience and kindness and trust and understanding. They wanted someone to listen, to believe them, to give them hope. You did that because you’reyou.Not because you were born wealthy or born with special magical abilities.”
My throat was dry. No one had ever said anything like that before. Anytime I’d expressed a desire to help people before, there had been an angle to it. My father had frowned upon my choice of family medicine. When I’d looked into volunteering in a third world country, he’d wondered if there was some sort of tax write-off. My parents wereincapableof seeing life as anything but a series of transactions.
“Yes, you are powerful,” Silas said. “Beyond powerful, but the power is inside of you because your heart is deserving of it. Your spirit is deserving. The kind ofmagic you have is special and rare, and it isn’t given by the universe freely.”
Silas paused, pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. I probably looked like I’d been through a wind tunnel.
“You are special for the purest of reasons,” he continued quietly. “That is why you are powerful—not because you are skilled and wonderful, which you are. But because you don’t want the magic in the first place. That, in and of itself, is your greatest strength.”
I shivered. I felt brittle and raw and exposed. A dry leaf, trembling on a branch as winter crept closer.
“If I do have some sort of special curse-breaking power,” I said. “I want to help. How do we find this power source?”
“We’re actively looking, and if I knew, I’d tell you,” Silas said. “What we do know is that the curse isn’t new. It’s been around for a long, long time.”
“Are we talking years?”
“At the minimum. Possibly centuries.”
“How long have people been fighting the curse?”
“That’s the thing. Nobody can tell when the curse actually began. The Ranger Program monitors everything. If a curse was suddenly targeted at the island, they’d know about it.” He paused. “Which leads us to wonder if the curse has been around since before the inception of the Ranger Program.”
“How long ago was that?”
“The Ranger Program is relatively new in the scheme of things,” Silas said. “If this curse truly has been around for a while, there have just been wisps of it baked into the magic of this island. So much that it had never set off alarm bells until about eight months ago. Since then, it’s been growing exponentially in strength. We’ve been aware of it, frantically searching for a solution.”
