Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“Daredevil,” the stableboy speaks up, coming out of the stall with my mother and her horse. “I heard him referred to as Daredevil.”
“By whom?” I ask.
Sarah laughs. “By Brom, naturally. It’s his horse.”
But the stableboy doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he meets my eyes, and something blank passes over his expression before he turns and runs back into the stable.
I ponder that as I mount up on Snowdrop, feeling Brom’s eyes on my back. So he has a horse that he doesn’t remember, and it has a name that he didn’t give it. Who gave the horse the name? Whoever gave it the name gave him the horse.
I need time to talk to Brom alone. After Crane tried to read him after class, looking visibly shaken by whatever he said he didn’t see, this war inside of him, Sister Margaret showed up and gave Brom a tour much as she had done for me, and I had to hurry off to my next class, spells and chants, which I was already late for. The rest of the day, I was locked in a mix of magic and non-magic classes, and I didn’t get out until twenty minutes ago when my mother came for me to make sure I was riding back with her and Brom into town.
My mother takes the lead, clucking to her horse, and we follow single file with Brom behind me as we head down the path through the courtyard. The weather seems to have shifted since this morning, but then again, everything in my life has shifted since then. No longer are the students studying and conversing out in the grass. Now, the ground is covered in a layer of dew, and the flowers are drooping. The leaves on the maple, birch, and elm are still bold with color, but so much more has fallen to the ground in decaying piles. The mist is ever present, hovering above the black surface of the lake, and for a moment, it reminds me of Brom’s eyes. Black yet veiled. Him but different. Him…but not him.
I glance at him over my shoulder, wishing that Crane had taught me how to do that speaking-without-speaking thing so that I could talk to him. He’s looking around, a look of strange contentment on his face, as if he’s seeing his surroundings for the first time. I must admit, he looks good on that horse, his black hair and eyes matching the horse’s black coat and eyes, both of them strong, muscular, commanding. He looks good out here with the backdrop of the school behind him, like he belongs there, maybe even more than I do.
“So you’re a witch,” I say to him.
He meets my gaze, brows arched. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you wouldn’t be at the institute if you weren’t.”
“Katrina, don’t pester him,” my mother says from in front of me. “You know that Brom’s mother, Emilie, is a witch. It runs in the family.”
“I’m not pestering,” I tell her, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “And I know she’s a witch; it’s just that while growing up, I was the one who had a bit of magic, and Brom never did. I would do tricks for him, and he could never do it in return. We tried—remember, Brom?”
“I was a dud,” he admits. “Daffy had all the magic.”
My heart warms at the way he calls me Daffy. I hadn’t heard that nickname in a long time.
My mother twists around in her saddle to look at me sharply. “You performed magic for Brom?”
I remember my father’s words, and I immediately feel shame. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says quickly. “I just…I had no idea. You never showed any magic around me when you were little. I thought perhaps you barely had any, as if it skipped a generation.”
I’m about to tell her that Papa told me not to show it around her, but something stops me. Something that lets me know that my mother shouldn’t know of that conversation. Something in my father’s voice and eyes that had always seemed to say more than he was saying.
That my mother couldn’t be trusted.
She couldn’t be trusted around my magic.
“It wasn’t much,” I eventually say.
She stares at me for a moment, trying to read me. Then she looks back to the gates that rise up before us. “We all start small,” she says. “The small things add up with time.”
The gates open for us, and I wonder if Brom will lose his memories of earlier, if he even knows that it’s a side effect of the school. Did he take the tests at all? If so, when?
We ride through them, the pressure of the wards reaching into my skull and squeezing, the wash of cold, and then the pressure lifts, and we’re on the trail, riding through the dark woods.