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“Rayna, meet the original Wild Whisperer, Agathea Temberlein. The one our sector gets our magic from.”
The fireflies flickered overhead.
Aggie smiled wider than ever.
I stared and stared and stared, trying to process this new piece of reality and jam it into place next to all the other moving parts.
Finally, my lips moved. “The original…”
“Wild Whisperer, uh huh,” Aggie said with a happy nod.
“One of the five that Dyonisia locked up on Bascite Mountain?”
“That’s me!” Aggie said happily.
God of the Cosmos. I swiveled my gawk to Rodhi just as he said, “My spiders and I broke her out right before this year’s Branding, and she’s been living here ever since. But now Dyonisia’s tightened security on the mountain, and I haven’t been able to free anyone else since then. And Batshit over here doesn’t remember any relevant info about the prison to help me.”
He stamped an accusatory look on Aggie, who just shrugged.
“Hard to know the whole layout when I was kept in one singular cell for five hundred years, am I right? Hmmm…” She’d taken so many steps toward me that I could see the wiry hairs growing from her nose. “You don’t look like a Reeve, do you? Except for—ahh, you have Chrysanthia’s spirit. I can see it in the eyes.”
I wanted to tell her that my eyes were green, the same as Fabian’s, but the words wouldn’t come out. My head whirled.
This… this was why there hadn’t been any new Wild Whisperers this year. Because the source of our sector’s magic had escaped. No wonder Dyonisia Reeve hadn’t attended the Branding, why she’d appeared on edge, her control fraying when she’d showed up at the Esholian Institute to deliver Fabian to me, and—
I shook my head, replaying Aggie’s words.
“You knew my mother? Chrysanthia?”
“Of course I did!” For the first time, the original Wild Whisperer sounded rather snappish. “I am thirteen hundred years old. Or is it fourteen hundred? Fifteen hundred? Oh, it doesn’t matter. The point is, I was once part of the Sorronian royal council, and Princess Chrysanthia is how we got into this mess.”
“What?”
Aggie huffed with exasperation and snapped her bony fingers. “The girl’s going to faint. Get her something to sit on, you t—”
“What did we talk about?” Rodhi stepped between us. Scrunching my brows, I looked back and forth several times before I realized Aggie had been talking to none other than Felicity and Willa. Both monkey and mouse appeared to be stuck in some kind of trance, ogling at the original Wild Whisperer with reverence bordering on worship. “When it comes to our animal friends…”
Aggie’s mouth twisted like she was in pain. “We don’t treat them like servants.”
“Very good.” As Rodhi turned to grab me a wooden stool beneath the lopsided table, he added, “Her innate power is the ability to imbue certain groups of animals or insects with a fabricated hive mind, where she’s the queen bee. Not quite the same as what we’ve been taught in all our Wild Whispering classes, huh?”
I sat down, my leg shaky. No, it wasn’t quite the same at all. Like Kanuk and Jagaros had said, Dyonisia Reeve had expanded but also dissipated her five faerie’s powers. In Agathea’s case, the magic had morphed into something that allowed us to communicate with all animals, plants, and insects—but we couldn’t connect and command them the same way Aggie seemed to.
Not that I’d want to. I was thankful Rodhi had stopped her from controlling Felicity and Willa, who still seemed to be stuck in that reverent stupor.
I shivered, starting to understand his attitude toward the original Wild Whisperer a little bit more. Still, she’d wanted to meet me, and I had plenty of questions for her before I got my friends out of here.
“What do you mean my mother was the one who got us into this mess?”
“Well, she went and disappeared on us, didn’t she?” Aggie jumped onto her bed, but rather than sit, she crouched with her knees jutting up near her chest. Again, those too-bright eyes roved over me with rather feral glee. “The queendom’s beloved princess with that sweet but wild temperament. Just like you.”
Her gaze raised to a point above my head. I followed it, then did a double take to find each of my knives still floating around me, the tips of their blades pointed toward Aggie as if prepared to slice her open at any moment.
Sheepishly, I made them drift down to the soil on either side of me, but I didn’t put them back in their sheath yet. A fact that made Aggie’s grin widen.
“Clever girl. You get that from your mother, too, I’m willing to bet. Which is why the entire queendom went berserk at her disappearance, Dyonisia Reeve more than anyone else.”
“She thought Queen Mydusia was responsible, right?” I asked. Coen had once told me the story of the three Sorronian princesses, a story that ended with Dyonisia challenging her oldest sister to a duel and losing abysmally. Then getting exiled and stealing the queen’s Good Council in retaliation.
