Page 55 of Her Dreadful Will
“Now you’re delving much deeper into the psyche and motivation of adults. And you’re doing it for a larger number of individuals. You’re trying to make them into one big happy town, but you don’t have the power or the mental resources to do it effectively, all by yourself.”
“One big happysymphony,” she corrected, sighing. “That’s what I want. I guess I’m a failure.”
“Not at all! You just graduated, Sol! Like with any career, there’s a learning curve, an adjustment period. Give yourself some time to grow.”
She looked at him, surprised. “You really believe I can do this?”
“Not the way you’re going about it now, no. But with a little tweak to the method, maybe.”
Carebear ended his investigation of a tree stump frilled with fungi, and he launched himself up the trail again, clambering over rocks and hardened ridges of dirt in a frenzy of motion. Soleil clutched her sore shoulder and groaned. “I don’t like using magic on him, but—” She extended the hand with the ouroboros ring. With it, she could create a small orb of light, a tiny illusion that would float in front of Carebear and keep him beside her.
“Wait!” Achan caught her wrist. “You’re too spent as it is. Allow me.”
He stretched out his hand, and she noticed the angular thinness of his wrists, the fragility of his long fingers. The inked leaves and sigils burned black against the white of his skin.
Achan arranged his fingertips along the side of Carebear’s neck and bowed his head. After a moment, the tension in the leash slackened, easing the pain in Soleil’s shoulder. Carebear’s quivering body relaxed a little, and he nosed around Achan’s feet—still happy, but less agitated.
“What did you do?” Soleil asked.
Achan kept his head angled away from her for a moment or two before straightening. “I absorbed some of the chaos in him. It will help, for a while.”
“Chaos,” she repeated, her cautionary instincts flaring again. “You keep using that word. Why?”
“Uh-uh.” He waggled a finger at her. “We’re not done talking about you and your subjects.”
She sighed. “You were saying that I’m making their lives too simple. Too cut and dry. Taking out the excitement. But how is eliminating negative drama a bad thing?”
“Think about the Christian myth of the fall of man, for a second.” Soleil’s eyebrows soared, but he shook his head, grinning. “I know, I know. Just bear with me, okay? So the story goes that God put the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil into the Garden of Eden, and told Adam and Eve not to touch it. Some people hate that concept. They can’t understand why God would do such a thing, knowing what would happen and what the humans would choose.
“Some theologians defend the placement of the tree, though. They claim that God never wanted a troupe of obedient little automatons. There’s no glory in choiceless obedience, and God is all about his own glory. So he let Adam and Eve have free will, and a choice. Of course he wanted his creations to choosehim, and when they didn’t, they were punished—that’s a whole other thing. But there’s a raw truth in the tale—the point being that humansneedchoice. They need to believe they have some control over their own destiny. When you mess with their will power, you take that choice away, and there are consequences.”
“But when they are given a choice, what do they do with it?” Soleil hauled herself up a steep slope by gripping branches along the way. She halted on a flat rock, wiping her wrist across her damp forehead. “They ruin everything, that’s what. They almost never choose what’s good for them.”
“You’re absolutely right. Humans, like nature, will always tend to ruin. They are corrupt, full of the creeping fungus of self-destruction.”
“That’s why they need me.”
“So you can be their benevolent god, a replacement for the One who has left them?” He stood on the rock beside her, palms upturned, pleading with her to understand. “They don’t deserve you. Why should you spend your life, your energy, to make sure thattheirlives are smooth and uncomplicated? Look at you. You’ve worn yourself to a wraith already, doing this. Your face is so much thinner, and there are shadows under your eyes.” His voice lowered to a breath as he touched her cheek. “You will kill yourself trying to be their savior.”
Soleil rewrapped Carebear’s leash around her hand with shaking fingers. If this was a test of her commitment to her thesis, she wasn’t sure she could pass it. “What are you trying to say? That I should give up?”
“Not at all. I’m merely suggesting a change in perspective, and in method. If you would allow yourself to be open to new ideas, new kinds of magic. Please, Soleil.”
Why did his eyes have to be so luminously wide and eager? He looked young and eager and desperately worried. Worried forher.
“You care,” she said softly. “You really care about me. Why?”
She waited for him to explain who and what he was—a rogue witch with paid connections to the Convocation? An emissary of the Institute Levels Board, here to observe? A mentor assigned to instruct her? She wasn’t sure which one made sense anymore.
But he only scuffed his feet and said, “I can’t explain it.”
“Fine.” She turned and urged Carebear on, up the path. The rush of water over rocks was growing stronger. Through the thatch of tall oaks, lacy hornbeam, and fan-shaped rhododendron, she glimpsed sparkling white veils of water gliding over dark rock.
Hatter’s Fall.
The trail dipped into a muddy nook, then climbed again, opening onto sun-baked earth studded with scrubby bushes. Above, so high Soleil had to crane her neck, the spring emerged from the hillside. The black rock shone slick under the glass-thin flow of water. Lower down, the water pooled hesitantly between stony ridges before falling in frothy tiers, rushing down to join the river that slithered away into the trees.
A tumble of dry brown rock beside the falls provided handholds for anyone who wanted to venture all the way to the top. But a sign nearby warned that people had died from the climb. Soleil wasn’t sure she wanted to risk it, especially not with Carebear in tow.
