Page 74 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
CHAPTER
24
Iexpected Steeler to spring back into my mind as soon as Lexington left.
He didn’t. It was only when afternoon brought a warm gush of rain over campus that I heard his voice in my head, but it had nothing to do with Lexington.
Bring Dazmine Temperton into the jungle tomorrow morning. Terrin’s keeping his word.
As his voice faded, I felt the first nips of agitation crawling through my veins.
All that talk about starting wars for me and he wasn’t even going to give me a “good job” when I succeeded at a dangerous task all on my own? Had he truly just loitered on campus long enough to make sure I was alive, then Walked away without asking me for any of the details? I had actually lied to an accomplished Mind Manipulator, for God’s sake! Surely, that was worth noting since I hadn’t even had a full week to develop my new power yet?
Whatever. I didn’t care, I didn’t care, I didn’tcare. I hadn’t been expecting him this morning anyway, so any kind of congratulations afterward would have just been excessive.
By Sunday, though, my teeth were still grinding together while I ran various errands on campus: washing my dresses and nightgowns in the house laundry room by the dining hall; sending a letter to Fabian and Don via crow, telling them to be prepared for any kind of emergency; leaving another note for Dazmine before I left to go forage in the jungle for seeds to refill Emelle’s birdfeeder for her.
It was just as I was rubbing the last of the seeds from the safflower heads that a chorus of low voices permeated the dense foliage.
I turned, pushing a branch aside and squinting through the murk of muggy air and swirling gnats.
Mr. Gleekle? Yes, that was definitely the institute president traipsing through the jungle, his glasses and cheeks sparkling with condensation and sweat while seven or eight students followed closely behind him.
What sector were they from? Did Mr. Gleekle even teach any classes? I’d always suspected he was an Element Wielder based on the way he sent an unnatural wind to carry his voice during ceremonies and games, but I couldn’t see why he’d be teaching on a weekend.
I stepped closer, my foot cracking through a half-disintegrated log…
“Rayna.”
A hand touched me on the back of my shoulder and I whirled, dropping my basket of seeds to brandish my knife.
A familiar pair of scornful eyes squinted at the tip of the blade near her nose.
“Dazmine,” I breathed out, slipping the knife back into its sheath immediately and cursing under my breath at all thespilled birdseed scattered around my feet on the jungle floor. “You shouldn’t just go around spooking people like that.”
Dazmine scoffed. “And you shouldn’t go around waving a murder weapon in someone’s face just because you’re apparently too deaf to hear them walk up to you.Youaskedmeto meet you here, remember?” She glanced over my shoulder. “What were you looking at, anyway?”
“I… I’m not sure.” I peered back through the gaps in the foliage, but Mr. Gleekle and his posse of students had moved on. “Probably nothing.”
Dazmine planted her hands on her hips, apparently uninterested inprobably nothing. “We never finished our conversation earlier this week. About Dyonisia giving Jenia a second brand after the incident.”
Right. Because one of our island’s villages had fallen prey to monstrous attacks that no one seemed to know anything about. Bending to scoop handfuls of the salvageable seeds and nuts back into the basket, I motioned for her to continue.
“I’ve been thinking back,” she said, “trying to remember details about little odd comments Jenia would make about this or that, hints that she might have dropped long before the incident itself.”
I straightened again to face her.
“And?”
It didn’t make sense. How could Jenia have possibly known about the possibility of her second Branding before it even happened?
Dazmine yanked in a deep breath. “And she mentioned that her sister… knew things. Secrets. About the Good Council. About the island itself. And aboutyou, Rayna.”
“Me? What secrets could Kimber Leake have known aboutme?”
Of course, I’d had plenty of secrets to snatch last year, from the sounds of it. But if the Good Council hadn’t become suspicious enough to investigate until the very end, I didn’t know why or how the princess of our house would have been prattling about my forbidden faerie blood to her younger sister.
“Jenia liked to… dangle information just out of people’s reach,” Dazmine admitted quietly. “Not to keep others safe, like you do, but to keep them constantly in… want of her.” A grimace twisted her face, but Dazmine hurried on. “So Jenia never specified what she was actually talking about. But she seemed to thinkyouwere a danger to the entire island. And that if she could help get rid of you, using Fergus’s wounded pride as a way to get him to do the dirty work for her, she’d be given the same special privileges as her sister.”
