Page 2 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Two giant paws slammed me to the ground, knocking the knife from my hand and the air from my chest. The white tiger licked his maw above me now, two strings of saliva dripping from his canines as he kept me pinned.
As soon as I caught my next inhale, however, I exhaled a whistle meant for the jungle and stuck out my empty hand.
The nearest bamboo bowed over to scoop my knife from the ferns. With a violent flick, it hurled the weapon back in my direction. I caught it by the handle and lifted it to the white tiger’s throat before he could lower his head.
Jagaros chuffed and removed himself, padding backward with a flick of his tail.
“You’re getting better.”
The words should have come out as a growl, but the magic the Good Council had branded into my skin, into my very blood, made me hear them as if he’d spoken in my own human language. As if the faerie-derived bascite swimming in my veins acted as a magic translator.
“And you’re getting to be a pain in my ass.” I hoisted myself up off my back. “You could have at least said hello before attacking me.”
The thin strips of Jagaros’s pupils surveyed me. “You are the only human I would let talk to me like that without eating them alive.”
I laughed, although the sound was instantly swallowed in the thickness of the jungle’s hums and cheeps.
“I’d like to see youtryto eat me alive after spending so much time training me how to avoid that.”
Indeed, I’d been meeting Jagaros in this exact same patch of black bamboo every day for the last few months, forcing both my hands to get familiar with the craft of the blade. As soon as I’d let it slip to him that I had a weapon stowed beneath my bed, Jagaros had insisted I learn how to use it. He made me twirl it,throw it, and wield it as if he’d actually turn feral one day and try to chomp my head off.
But I knew what the knife practice wasreallyfor, although Jagaros had refused to utter a single word about the pirate breach and what he knew about it since that day on the beach: as a Mind Manipulator himself, Coen Steeler would know all about my Wild Whisperer abilities and could simply command me not to use them. If I came face to face with him, I wouldn’t stand a chance without the knife.
Withthe knife, I might be able to catch Steeler off guard—hopefully by the throat.
“Why don’t you try actually hitting a mark before you get too cocky?” Jagaros said now, sitting on his haunches beside me.
“Watch me,” I replied, and shifted myself into a throwing position, already pinching the tip of the ridged antler handle.
Elbow up. Wrist back. Eyes on the widest ebony stalk, which was still only about the diameter of a large fist.
With a snap of my wrist, the knife spiraled through the air—heavy handle over curved blade—and rooted itself into the stalk half a head lower than I had intended.
I hissed a curse under my breath, but while Jagaros tutted through his canines, the bamboo laughed.
That was another reason I’d chosen these practice sessions here. As a type of grass, black bamboo grew so rapidly that a blade in their wood merely tickled them, scratched an itch they couldn’t scratch themselves. A tree, on the other hand, would have been highly offended.
“Hey, you know what,” I said as I stomped forward to retrieve the knife. “At least I’ve been getting it to stick every time. Remember our first practice, when the blade just bounced right off?”
“Unfortunately,” Jagaros replied with a swish of his tail. “Now do itten more times.”
“Can’t,” I replied, letting a bit of my smugness shine through the words. While I appreciated Jagaros’s attempts to teach me how to cut through flesh and stop a heart, I wasn’t particularly fond of anything that involved ten tries in a row. I knew he’d just sit and judge me with that tail flicking distastefully the whole time, then snarl at me about how disappointing I was. “I told my friends I’d meet them at the Element Wielder lake to see if the giant octopus is real.”
“You told your friends you’d meet them at the lake,” Jagaros repeated, staring at me as if he couldn’t believe such ludicrous words had come out of my mouth. “To see if the giant octopus is real.”
“Yeah.” I slipped my knife back into its leather sheath. “Wren and Rodhi have been debating about its existence for the last few weeks, so Emelle suggested we put it to the test and see if any of us can actually spot it.”
I knew it sounded stupid, knew it was ridiculous to try to have fun when murderous pirates were breaching the dome around our island and attacking seaside villages. But I also knew I couldn’t skip out on too many things. I’d built a wall of ice around myself since Dyonisia Reeve had given me orders to capture Steeler, but I couldn’t let Emelle or any of the others know about it. If they suspected that anything was off with me, they’d try to get involved.
And as much as I hated Steeler for what he’d done to me, I feared what Dyonisia Reeve and her Good Council elites could do to my friends even more.
No, I wouldn’t drag them into this. Wouldn’t let them know that I could now wield a knife, or that I’d been tasked to catch a pirate, or that most smiles on my face were part of a well-cultivated mask.
Jagaros inclined his head ever so slightly.
“If it’s your wish to act like a half-brained monkey who just discovered a puddle, then go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Don’t let the monkeys hear you saying that,” I muttered, and gave Jagaros a swift pat on the neck before trudging away from the bamboo grove, toward the Esholian Institute campus, my knife in hand.
