Page 52 of Grim and Oro
I leave for a while to change and complete my duties for the day, then return that evening. She seems surprised to find me back in her room. If only she knew that her room is more familiar than my own, lately.
“If you are going to insist on keeping my device to portal anywhere you wish, I will teach you how not to be an idiot.”
She glares at me, her anger like an iron grip around me. “Or what?”
Stubborn hearteater. Her defiance is as alluring as it is irritating. I step close to her, towering over her, so she’s forced to look up at me. “Or I will take it back,” I say, looking at the place I know she keeps it.
Fear. She swallows. “Fine. When are you going to teach me?”
“Now.” I grab her arm and portal her away.
She blinks. I watch, fascinated, as she takes in her surroundings. I care about where her eyes linger. Where they don’t. “This ... this is in your palace.”
“It’s a training room.”
“I didn’t bring anything.”
With a flick of my wrist, the device she callsstarstickfalls from the sky. Her look of amazement sends a warm rush coursing through me.
“How did you—”
“The first thing you should know is that your device is unreliable. I did not pour much power into it.” I remember that day, going to the blacksmith with her father, like it was yesterday. The process had been painful. “Around other portaling ability, it won’t always work. Portaling power is all about visualization. That is why you believe you can’t go anywhere you haven’t already been.”
It’s strange, explaining my own power to someone else. It’s one of my most coveted secrets. One of my most personal attributes.
Stranger still that she ended up in my palace in the first place. It was almost like she—or my own power, within the device—was pulled toward me.
“So how do I go somewhere I can’t visualize?”
“Maps help,” I say. “It’s easier to go places when you have a sense of the distance and relation to other locations. Now. About the short distances.”
I portal right behind her, close enough that I can smell her.
And herscent...
Her scent is just like her feelings—the most potent poison and also, maybe, a cure. I wonder if there is an antidote. I wonder if I would take one, even if there was.
I speak to take myself out of my own dangerous thoughts. “It requires far more control. And control is developed through practice.” Clearly, she’s been using this relic for years. Still, she hasn’t mastered it. I motion toward her device. “Try to portal across the room.”
She shifts her stance, and her eyes narrow in focus. She draws her puddle.
I follow her—
To dark volcanic sand.
To the same place I first portaled.
Suddenly, I’m thrust back centuries. I’m a child, clutching sand. Panic ripples around me—
It isn’t my own. It’s hers now too.
What are the chances of her portalinghere, of all places? As if she could know? As if ... we are even more similar than I thought.
She can’t know. She can’t know what she’s doing to me.
“You overshot by a bit,” I say, mind racing.
I portal her back.
