“He can’t take away a title that belongs to you,” Silas said. “Keep that top of mind. Live what you know to be true and ignore the vocal idiots.”
Millie snickered. “Mr. Silas is right, you know. It’s best to just keep to yourself for the time being and let this blow over. Keep going to your trainings, focusing on yourself, and ignoring anything else that could be a distraction. When you’re the all-powerful Fae Queen ruler, and they can’t ignore it any longer because they’re begging you for help, they’ll realize they were the vocal idiots this whole time.”
“By the way,” Silas said, his eyes flashing darkly, “I have something that belongs to you.”
Silas stood and made his way over to the door where he grabbed something from a satchel. He strode back to me and gently deposited my missing Fae textbook on the table before me. I didn’t ask how he’d obtained it from Fenlon; I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Thank you.” I clasped it to my chest. “I appreciate it.”
“And these are for you.” Silas pulled a bouquet of flowers out from the same satchel.
Millie looked shocked as Silas extended them to her. “You seem to like flowers. I’m sorry I blamed you for not setting the wards of Wisteria Cottage. You did set them, and Fenlon lifted them. I should have believed you, or at least investigated more thoroughly. I’m sorry.”
Millie looked like she wanted to burst into tears. I gave her a moment, then I hugged the two goodbye, giving Silas a kiss on the lips, my heart feeling full as I’d watched him apologize toMillie for his error.There are good men out there,I thought. I’d finally found one.
I grabbed an apple for the road and headed up the hill as the sun peeked over the horizon for another full day of training. If Seer Goddard had heard anything about my run-in with Fenlon and the ensuing chaos with the elements, he didn’t say anything about it. He sat me down, told me to breathe, and left me alone until dusk.
The following days continued in a similar pattern. I found myself slipping into a routine that wasn’t exactly thrilling, but it wasn’t boring either. There was a lot of sameness to my days: at dawn I trudged uphill, to the little enclosed circle of rocky gravel-like stones where I’d sit in the center, usually cross-legged, and await instructions.
Seer Goddard would have me practice my breathing. He’d have me stare at rocks. Balance a droplet of water on my palm for hours. Some days he watched the whole painful process; other days he disappeared midway through. Even on those days he left me alone, I was not allowed to leave before dusk.
Life down on The Isle continued without me. I had no energy to even ask about what was happening with the investigation into the kraken and lycanthrope and missing fishermen. Unless someone was in immediate danger, my focus was mastering these powers that flared so recklessly whenever my emotions ran high.
Weeks passed without much to mark them except the very passage of time itself. As my lessons droned on, I felt like Ishouldbe improving, I must be, but when I looked at the activities I was working on, it seemed I was only marginally better at accessing my powers than before. At the rate I was currently excelling, it would take centuries before I gained any real control—the sort of control that would be needed to help save lives on this island.
As I climbed the hill and settled into my morning meditation for what felt like the trillionth day in a row, I wracked my brain for new thoughts. At this point, I wasn’t even sure this qualified as meditation any longer. All of my thoughts had been thunk. My body had sat bent in this position for thousands of minutes. I’d listened to the sounds around me until I knew them like my own heartbeat.
Yet I settled in again, grudgingly willing to admit that something about this practice of stillness was calming and peaceful. I sat in the circle of stones as I normally did now without bothering to knock on the hut door. I would feel Seer Goddard’s presence when he emerged, which was at a different time every day.
I breathed in and out, in and out. I stretched gently as I breathed, working out the kinks in my neck and legs. When a person spent an entire day breathing in silence, nature grew louder. I heard the grasshoppers’ breaths, the bees landing on petals. The crash of the waves miles below.
Even though Seer Goddard moved quietly, I sensed when he came from his hut to study me these days. I hadn’t been able to sense his movements early on, but I was so in tune with my surroundings now that I felt like I could discern the heartbeat of a fox a mile away.
“Lift a rock,” Seer Goddard said. “A small stone.”
The Seer’s voice sounded hoarse, raspy. I quickly calculated that it had been at least three days since he’d spoken to me. I doubted he’d spoken to anyone else in the meantime; he didn’t seem the type to chat with birds or whisper to plants, and I never saw him in the village. His voice sounded as unused as the stones around us.
I took a deep breath, then sent out my tendrils of power as I’d been practicing. Small, tentative proddings until I isolated amarble-sized pebble. I wrapped my energy around it, coaxing it upward until it hovered mid-air before me.
“Now do the same with water.”
“Water?” The stone slipped from my tentative grasp and fell to the dusty ground. “What do you mean, do the same with water?”
“I didn’t say to drop the rock.”
“You just told me to work on water.” I opened my eyes to look at him. “I was going to work on water.”
“On a tripod, does only one leg work at a time?”
That man loved a good tripod analogy. “No, but all the legs on a tripod have equal experience. All my legs aren’t the same strength yet.”
“Pick up the rock, then add water.”
Eyes now closed, I lifted the pebble again, a little surer this time. Maybe all this sitting had accomplished something after all. A few weeks ago, the idea of hovering a pebble in midair would have been completely ludicrous. Now it was somewhat routine.
“Water,” he prompted.
We were high above the sea, and no streams ran nearby. I bit back the sarcastic question of, “What water?” and tried to sense the nearest source. It hadn’t even rained last night, so there were no puddles or standing water.
