Page 117 of By the Orchid and the Owl
I was too tired to jump through more mental hoops today, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, as the spider backed back into its nest of shadows, that such an explanation didn’t quite fit. Didn’t quite make sense in regards to mortality.
Neither caterpillars nor butterflies lived forever, after all.
The spider came to me three days later, during Mr. Conine’s class.
Or, rather,Iwent toit.
But not of my own accord.
We were deeper into the jungle than ever before, although rather than it being all shade and gloom as I’d expected, we’d trudged to the top of one of the humps on the mountainside, where dried mud caked the bald patches between trees.
Here, Mr. Conine had said, a pack of wild boars claimed territory, and we had been invited by their leader to sunbathe with them, of all things.
“Here’s the tricky part,” Mr. Conine said now. I watched his bushy sideburns moving up and down with his mouth as if through the end of a long tunnel, focusing so hard on not thinking about Coen or faeries or caterpillars that I ended up having trouble focusing onanything. “Even when boars try to rile you up for a fight—because theywilltry to rile you—you must remain calm and peaceful and perfectly poised, and insist you’d just like to sunbathe.”
Here, Mr. Conine passed a half-glance at Fergus, as if expecting him to argue. Or to ask why the hell we’d been invited over if the boars just wanted to fight.
Fergus didn’t say a word, though. He simply caught Mr. Conine’s stare and tightened his arm around the back of Jenia’s neck. His silence unnerved me more than his usual whining attitude, but it seemed to relieve our instructor, whose brows relaxed slightly.
“Right, then.” Mr. Conine rubbed his hands together. “Ready?”
Nobody responded besides Rodhi, who flexed his fingers. “Bring out the boars, baby.”
Mr. Conine put two looped fingers in his mouth and whistled.
They came instantly, a herd of tusked, stringy-haired pigs nudging through the bushes around us and stomping their way into the clearing.
I caught the eye of the nearest boar against my will, and—yep. It was definitely glaring at me, beady auburn eyes scrunched up tight in the folds of its wrinkles.
“Uh, hi,” I said, trying to shake myself out of my tunnel.
Around me, everyone else had burst into whispered conversation, as if afraid that loud voices would trigger the herd’s anger. I was no exception. Even my head and shoulders dropped slightly, instinctively shriveling up in the face of such… wrath.
I decided right then and there that just because I was a Wild Whisperer didn’t mean I had to like every animal I talked to. I could respect this swine without enjoying its company.
“What areyoulookin’ at?” the boar huffed, nudging the dirt beneath him with a hoof. “My nose? My ears? You’re not the best looker yourself, you know.”
I swallowed the sting of that insult and resisted folding my arms.
“I think your nose and ears are lovely, and I’d… I’d just like to sunbathe.”
Truthfully, I didn’t want to be here at all. Knowing that this was all an experiment in a bubble made all the classes not only seem pointless, butmocking.
Barely three paces away, Emelle and Gileon were already laying down with their boars, angling their faces toward the sun in peaceful companionship. Rodhi was placing his hand tentatively on a snout. Even Fergus had managed to get closer to a boar than I was to this one now.
My boar pawed the ground again.
“You want a piece of this, huh?”
“N-no.”
I took a step back without thinking, pressing into the shadows. Nobody had noticed that I wasn’t doing well over here. All my friends had their eyes closed already, and Mr. Conine was busy helping Norman ease into a truce with a particularly brutish pig with black patches all over its body.
I had been avoiding Mr. Conine’s eye lately, anyway. I didn’t know what would be worse: finding out he’d been tortured into his position here at the Institute just as Ms. Pincette had, or finding out that he’d volunteered to be here. To hand Dyonisia fellow human beings as if they were forged bits of metal she could dip back into the fire.
“I don’t want to fight.” I raised my hands, but my voice sounded insincere even to my own ears. Ididwant to fight—not this boar, butsomething… anything to help me punch away the vines of ice and the tunnel of darkness and the invisible threats swirling about my head like pesky gnats always out of reach, and—
The boar charged.
