Page 55 of By the Orchid and the Owl
“You got stung?”
Gileon nodded slowly at one of her arms mottled with burns. Out of all of us, Wren was definitely his favorite, what with her dedication to teaching him new combat techniques every night—to ensure he never got picked on again, she’d told me in private.
“Oh, it’s nothing I can’t handle, I guess. Got into a bit of an argument with a bee, that’s all. Political differences,” she added at Emelle’s arched eyebrow.
“What? No fair!” Rodhi exclaimed. “Iwant to have a nice little debate with a bee!Do you or do you not believe that honeycombs should be taxable? Oh, look! I think we’re going in.”
Indeed, everyone around us shifted on their feet, and the next second, the crowd was shuffling toward the doors.
“Good luck,” Wren muttered to all of us.
By the battered expression on her face, it looked like I might need it.
CHAPTER
20
The inside of the Testing Center spread into a lobby with multiple archways leading to different floors.
Mr. Gleekle stood in the center of it all, greeting everyone with jovial waves and quick bounces on the balls of his feet. I hadn’t seen him since the Branding, and the sight of his shiny pink cheeks stretched in a smile that Jagaros had warned me not to trust… it only made the tangled nerves in my stomach tighten. But as president, the man was bound to show up now and again, and besides—the lobby was in way too much disarray for him to make true eye contact with anyone, let alone me.
Everyone pushed and shoved each other toward their sector’s archway, where spindly engravings marked the gold semi-circles above each of them—not, to my surprise, labeled with the type of magic, but rather the phrase each sector swore by:
BY THE ORCHID AND THE OWL
BY THE MOONBEAM AND THE MIST
BY THE LOCKPICK AND THE LYRE
BY THE FEATHER AND THE FANG
BY THE TEMPEST AND THE TIDE
I fought my way toward my sector’s archway, already having lost Emelle, Rodhi, and Gileon, and came face-to-face with a narrow staircase shooting upward into darkness.
Dragging in a deep breath, I started up… and thankfully only had to suffer the ink-dense shadows for a minute of labored breathing, because cheery sunlight flooded over my shoes when I came to the top.
Here, a row of windows surrounding a vast waiting room and half our year’s sector already sat in plush gray seats.
I found the others, sat beside them, and waited. The room bloomed with whispers until a door on the far end opened and Mr. Fenway said, “If you could follow me, class, you will be taking your History portion as one.”
We jumped up and followed his hobbling figure through the door, where a testing room much cleaner than his usual classroom sat in perfect condition, each desk already sporting packets of paper and skinny fountain pens.
I chose a desk and plopped down. Around me, everyone else did the same. Mr. Fenway sat in a bloodred velvet armchair at the head and rasped, “No talking, please. No looking at your neighbor’s answers. No distracting your neighbors by fidgeting.” His aged blue eyes strayed toward Rodhi at that. “Begin.”
The first question had my heart calming down immediately:In 329 AF, a hurricane ravaged the island and left Esholian crops in ruins before Element Wielders could temper it. How did Wild Whisperers of the time react?
Easy. Much too easy. We’d learned this in the first few days of class. The Wild Whisperers in each village had coaxed the seedlings out of hiding and prompted them to grow faster by singing them special lullabies day in and day out. They’d had to take shifts with each other, to continue that rapid rate of growth, but had managed to replace all the crops within a week.
Smiling down at the paper, I began to write.
An hour later, we were all back in the waiting room. A few people were asking each other about their answers on the test, but Emelle, Gileon, Rodhi, and I chose to pass the time by bouncing a rubber ball back and forth between each of us. Leave it to Rodhi to pull a random rubber ball out of his pocket when we most needed it.
As much as I felt confident about the History portion, I didn’t want to push my nerve’s luck by talking about it, and the others seemed to think the same.
It wasn’t long, anyway, before Mr. Conine emerged from the same doorway and read a name off a scroll flowing from his grip.
“Pierson Kadder. You’re first, bud.”
