Page 114 of By the Orchid and the Owl
“Hello,” I said, that coldness finally seeping out. “We need to talk.”
CHAPTER
43
“Leave us,” Ms. Pincette told the spiders.
She waited until they’d scuttled further into the foundation of the Testing Center before swiveling her attention back on me, a single eyebrow tilted.
“You’re not even going to try?”
The question was prim, her mouth still puckered like plucked roses. She had laced her fingers together in her lap.
“No,” I said. “There’s no point. I can talk to worms and spiders just fine, but insects themselves don’t want anything to do with me.”
I still didn’t know why—perhaps me being faerie had something to do with it? I’d been poring over that map every few nights for answers, sneaking the thing in and out of the space behind the cuckoo clock after everyone else had gone to bed. But there was nothing in it to hint that faeries would have more trouble talking to insects than humans did. Especially since most faeries couldn’t talk to animals at all. It was a unique gift that only developed naturally in a few.
And besides, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about now.
“You work for the Good Council,” I said instead, so coldly it sounded like the words might chip off before they left my mouth.
A space of a breath. Ms. Pincette’s eyes flickered.
“Not directly. I’m notonthe Good Council, Ms. Drey.”
“But you report to them. You give them a list of failed students, right?”
Yet for some reason, you’re protecting me.
Another flicker in her eyes, this one like smoke drifting over ashes.
“They expect some failures every year. I can’t spare everyone.”
I waited for her to continue. Those damn vines were going to choke me from the inside-out…but I couldn’t ache for Coen right now. Not when I was determined to pick apart all the answers he refused to give me. Not when my instructor was admitting to me that she handed over her own pupils like fish on a platter.
“Why do you do this for them?” I breathed out. “If you know they’re taking your students to Bascite Mountain and… and experimenting on them—torturing them—why do you even work for them? Wouldn’t it be better, more humane, to get some silly little job in a silly little village and never think about them again?”
Except part of me knew it would be impossible to forget about the Good Council even in the smallest, most faraway village.
All it takes is one person breaking the law, one person using magic on the streets in an inappropriate manner, one execution in every village, for people to obey,Coen had said…Coen, who’d watched them string up his childhood friend and lash him until his skin was in bloody strips.
Still, though, Ms. Pincette could have removed herself from any involvement.
For the first time since I’d laid eyes on her, my sharp-eyed instructor melted into a distinctive softness, as if each of her features were cowering rather than slicing.
Behind me, the swarm of locusts continued their chorus of rattling screeches.
“I failed my Final Test,” Ms. Pincette whispered finally, her eyes anchoring onto mine. “I wasn’t one of the strong ones. I was one of the weak ones. I could pass every History exam and talk to every animal and befriend every spider, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand what those damn trees were singing. So I failed.”
I waited, still cold, still trying to push down my vines of ice. I had never felt so far removed from my childhood self, from the girl my fathers had raised.
“They took me to the mountain.” Ms. Pincette’s voice was merely a whimper. “They… did things to me.”
Slowly, her eyes still embedded in mine, she lifted a corner of her tunic and revealed a flash of her bare stomach.
I didn’t even have enough breath to gasp.
How many times had Rodhi rattled on about how much he’d like to see what lay beneath Ms. Pincette’s clothes? So many times, I had blocked it out. But I was certain now, more than I’d ever been certain before, that Ms. Pincette would never show him. Not because of the age gap or inappropriate power dynamics, but because what lay beneath her clothes was an absolutetangleof scars, crisscrossing ropes of raised flesh that wrapped around her ribcage and rose up to her armpits and…
