Page 61 of By the Orchid and the Owl
It read:Do you know who I am?
I repeated the question to the hibiscus plant in its purple-painted ceramic pot, and closed my eyes to listen.
The hibiscus usually murmured its song with a steady tempo, like the monotonous ticking of a clock marching forward in time. But now it sped up like an excited heartbeat, a positive affirmation rather than an uncertain pause.
“Yes,” I told Mrs. Wildenberg, who was listening in to make sure I got the right answer. “The hibiscus knows who I am.”
Saying that out loud sent shivers twining around my bones. The hibiscus, its petals, its stems and leaves and roots and even the soil it grew in—it knew me. And since Mrs. Wildenberg had taught us that all the flora was connected, stemming from the heart of Eshol itself… that meant the island itself knew me, even though I knew very, very little about the island.
Jagaros’s words came back to me then:Perhaps you should ask them different questions.Why had I been so obsessed with asking the flowers and trees about myownpower when I should have been asking them about… well, themselves? Of course they hadn’t wanted to tell me anything when I hadn’t yet befriended them.
Sucking air through my teeth, I read aloud from the next card, directing this question to the passion flowers in their metal garden beds.
“Will you allow me to get to know you?”
The passion flowers usually sang a soft yet chaotic melody, like a million fluttering butterfly wings. As soon as the last sound of my question left my lips, however, that chaos split into absolute pandemonium, loud and fast and off-key.
“Yes,” I told Mrs. Wildenberg. “The passion flowers will allow me to get to know them.” I paused, then, listening to the screech of their song. “They are…desperatefor me to get to know them,” I dared add, even though I was only supposed to discern yes or no questions.
But I felt it in the very marrow of my still-shivering bones: that the plants before me wanted to tell me a secret, but couldn’t do so until I understood their essence on a deeper level than I did now.
“Very good,” Mrs. Wildenberg said, her eyes fluttering as if only halfway paying attention. I was, after all, her second-to-last test subject of what I was sure had been a very long and strenuous day for such an aging mind.
When her chin finally slumped down against the middle of her collarbone and I was sure she’d nodded off completely, I set the stack of cards down and leaned in close to the poinsettias—such vibrant, spirited things, who sang swaying tunes of success and cheer.
My lips nearly brushed their bright red leaves as I whispered, “Are the faeries truly extinct?”
Jagaros had said he wasn’t a faerie, not anymore, but I wanted to know what Eshol itself thought of that. If it truly considered him pure tiger and nothing more. Perhaps it was an invasion of his privacy, but…hewas the one who had told me to ask different questions, so I tucked away a whisper of guilt and listened closely.
The poinsettia’s swaying tune slowed, like a ship thudding against a shore.
No.The faeries are not yet extinct. Not all of them.
My blood dropped, but I asked, “There are more faeries out there? Besides Jagaros himself?”
At this, the poinsettias and passion flowers and hibiscus plants all swept into a song that, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand.
Mrs. Wildenberg ended up waking up with a violent hiccup two minutes later.
Blinking, she told me I had passed this portion of the test, took a large gulp of no-longer-steaming tea, and sent me on my way through the next door—to my last test for the Spiders, Worms & Insects portion.
In here, Ms. Pincette sat primly in a third and final bloodred velvet armchair.
I noticed two things in quick succession after I shut the door behind me, and neither did anything to settle my stomach after what the flowers had just revealed.
One: a rubber dummy stood upright on one side of Ms. Pincette.
Two: an enormous tank sat on her other side, its inside squirming with…
“Cockroaches,” Ms. Pincette said with a thin-lipped smile. “Your final test, Ms. Drey, will be to lower yourself into the tank of cockroaches and instruct them to leave you and swarm the dummy instead. This ability to instruct mass hordes of insects in times of distress is crucial to the Wild Whispering community.”
Worse. This was so much worse than anything else. Paper exams and solving riddles and reading questions to innocent little flowers—it was all glitter and rainbows compared tothis.
The cockroaches were black, as black as Fergus’s mold that might have billowed over me if I hadn’t moved fast enough, and I… I didn’t know how to release the panic skittering through my veins at the sight of something else that could drown me.
“Remember, Rayna,” Ms. Pincette said, her eyes narrowing on my face as the blood rushed down my neck, “roaches rarely bite humans. They can’t hurt you.”
“Of course.” I jolted into movement, toward the tank. A single stepstool, cracked and worn, sat before it, and I forced a step upward.
