Page 139 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Lie.
Of course, she was lying. What else had I expected? I let myself cling to those outermost thoughts and dug deeper, searching for the truth.
Dazmine has no right to be here right now,she was thinking beneath her hardened exterior.
But I’m surprised she didn’t confront me sooner,she was thinking beneath that. And—
Rayna will never forgive me,she was thinking beneath that.
I tumbled into her mind.
When I straightened, it was to find a wall of ice so similar to mine that for a second, I thought I’d sunk backward into my own instead.
I squinted at the ice again and realized it was… opaque. Frozen walls of water drooped with icicles, their borders etched with frost. The scope of it was chillingly beautiful, but without a single sign of the raging flames I’d always associated Quinn with.
I hadn’t realized until just now how dark and thick my own ice was, as if something more solid lurked beneath its frigid surface. This… this was bare and fragile and glittering with raw menace. Even the moon, the tiniest slice of light I’d ever seen, looked like an icicle in the shape of a sickle above my head.
Quinn’s consciousness stood by her gate, so focused on her conversation with Dazmine that she was completely unaware of my presence as I tiptoed around her and nudged open the door.
It wasn’t hard to find her memories. Her maze was made of short, angular pathways, and the things she was trying to keep secret were already at the forefront of her mind.
“It’s insane here, huh?”
A misty version of first-year Quinn was walking next to Jenia on Bascite Boulevard during what looked like the first hour of our arrival. I crept toward the memory in order to analyze every detail of it.
“Oh—” Jenia flipped a partial curtain of hair over her shoulder. “—I’m from Belliview, so I’m used to all this.”
Quinn stared at her.
“So you’re like, right next to Bascite Mountain!”
“Well, yeah.” Jenia passed an amused smile to Quinn, but there was something keen and hungry beneath the curve of her mouth. “You must be from one of the smaller villages?”
“Yeah, Alderwick.” Quinn said the name of our home as if it were a centipede or something else she might squash easily underfoot. “It’s kind of stupid there. Everyone knows everyone, and we’re all assigned the lamest jobs after our Final Tests. No one ever dances or sings or… does anything else unless it’s a special occasion.”
Jenia snickered. “God, thatdoessound stupid. My older sister and I—back before she left for the Institute, at least—we would go to these performances on the weekends, where Wild Whisperers would get the flowers to dance and Element Wielders would juggle balls of live fire and Object Summoners would fly you around the room.”
Quinn gasped. “Just forfun?”
“Well,yeah.”
Their conversation continued as they pressed further down Bascite Boulevard, but I studied Jenia’s eyes, how they swept over Quinn with that same keen hunger as before, and I finally understood: in Belliview, she’d never been seen as anything special surrounded by all that fantastic magic, but here, Quinn slathered her in attention and admiration and awe.
And when I’d showed up a little later that day and Quinn had called me her best friend from home, Jenia had fought tooth andnail to keep that feeling all to herself. Even when she and Quinn ended up in different sectors, Jenia must have viewed me as the wrong person to have been given the same power as her. I’d never looked at Jenia with attention, admiration, or awe. I’d only looked at her with confusion and wariness and—later, when they were attacking Gileon for fun—disgust.
I moved to another memory.
This time, Jenia had cornered Quinn between two Element Wielder classrooms that glimmered with uncut rubies embedded into the alabaster.
“Do you remember what I told you about Kimber? How she’s on track to join the Good Council after her Final Test?”
Quinn glanced around nervously. “Yeah? What about it?”
“Well, she found out that one of our classmates isn’t what they pretend to be,” Jenia said, a cold glitter in her eye. “And if we get her to confess, Dyonisia Reeve might let us join the Good Council, too.” She grabbed Quinn’s hands. “Daz was too scared, but she doesn’t know what we’d getrewardedwith. She’s never been interested in moving up in life like you have.”
A flicker of desire stuffed out the nerves written in every line of Quinn’s face. She closed her fingers around Jenia’s hands.
“Whoisn’t who they pretend to be?”
