Page 3 of By the Orchid and the Owl
Without lifting a finger, without blinking or so much as glancing in the hallway’s direction, Fabian used his Summoning magic. I could feel it in the slight stirring of the air, in the way the dust motes picked up around us, in the way my skin prickled.
A faint rattling sound later and something came swooping toward us from the hallway closet, flying past all the shelves with their cinnamon and clove candles to land neatly in Fabian’s outstretched hands.
He lifted it up and offered it to me.
A knife that rested in his palms like a metal corpse.
CHAPTER
2
“What is that?” I breathed, eyeing the weapon but not touching it.
Of course, that was about the stupidest question I could ask. It was a knife, obviously, but…why had it been in Fabian’s closet? And why was he offering it to me now?
“It was your mother’s,” Fabian said gently, still holding it out to me. “It’s all I ever kept from her. And not that I think you’ll need it,” he added with a sharp note of warning in his voice, though the flash in his pupils told me that might not be quite true, “but maybe it’ll remind you that you are not powerless, Rayna. You do have a bit of your mother’s… fight.”
God of the Cosmos. This was by far the most Fabian had ever talked about my mother, a topic he usually avoided at all costs. The only reminder that I’d evenhadone—that I wasn’t some female clone of Fabian himself, down to the heavy tangle of blonde curls, the upturned jade-green eyes, and the dusting of freckles on our noses—was my complexion: a few shades darker than Fabian’s delicate cream-colored skin.
I finally reached out to take the knife’s handle, rubbing my fingers along the ridges engraved there.
Bone. It had to be made of bone. And the sheath…
Some kind of leather I couldn’t place.
As if my hands were acting of their own accord, I slipped off the sheath and took in the blade beneath it. It wasn’t quite rusted, but tarnished with gray, and curved in the shape of a sharp and cruel quarter-moon.
As much as I appreciated the gesture to give me something of my mother’s, revulsion settled heavily on my skin. I couldn’t imagine using this on anything, not even to gut a fish. But the blade sang of… of something far worse than defense.
Who had my motherbeen? I only knew of a few villagers with knives like this, and they were all used for hunting. Red brocket deer and crocodiles and the occasional boar.
The question hesitated on my lips, but Fabian abruptly said, “I’ll put it in an inside-pocket of your bag.”
Instantly, the leather sheath flew back over the blade and the knife soared across the room, nestling itself deep into one of my three bags that rested on the sofa. I’d been packing all day: clothes and toiletries and all the little coppers I’d been saving for the Esholian Institute. Now the knife would join my possessions.
I could only hope I’d never have to use it.
“You’re gonna do great, kid,” Don grunted heavily. “No matter which magic you get, you’ll smash your test and get to come back so I can bug you for the rest of my life.”
I swung my head back toward my fathers, wanting so badly to ask them what their Final Tests had been like. But I knew they wouldn’t tell me. I’d asked a hundred times, and they’d never yielded, although sometimes Don’s mustache would twitch as if he was about to.The Good Council forbids us from talking about it for a reason, Fabian would always tell me.
Well, if their Final Tests had been anything like what Mrs. Pixton’s son had endured—locked in a trunk and thrown to the bottom of a lake—I couldn’t blame them fornotwanting to relive that.
“Can you play for me?” I whispered instead, sinking into the sofa between all my bags.
Don and Fabian exchanged looks. Then nodded.
Their twin lyres picked themselves up from against the wall by the front door and rose in the air, hovering overhead. I stared at them—not the lyres, but my fathers. My best friends. Their nightgowns hid the brands mottling their left shoulders, but I knew those marks better than the lines of my own palm by now: circles of scarred flesh filled with the imprint of the Esholian crest, a bulbed, five-pointed star. That same brand would mark my own shoulder in two nights. It would infuse my blood with magic that I didn’t want, had never asked for.
And then my five years of training would begin.
Iwillpass the test, I told myself.I have to pass.
Leaning my head back against the sofa, I let my eyes close as the lyres began strumming themselves in midair. My fathers’ harmonies ebbed and flowed over each other like two twining streams, and soon I felt the magic scoop me up and carry me gently to my own bed for the last time.
“Eat something,” Fabian ordered me the next morning, when pink-tinged sunlight gushed through the shutters. My assigned Good Council elite would arrive any minute to take me away.
“Not hungry,” I chimed, but the platter of wobbling pancakes clattered in front of me at the kitchen table anyway.
