“So that’s why you don’t like me. Some idea of me as too bold.”
“Stop searching for reasons. I am Areifen, fickle chaos. I need none.”
“Then let’s just go back to the lessons. I mean, it’s not like I relish talking to you, anyway,” she said, more sour sounding than she intended. As if she was actually enjoying the conversation or wanted to know about his deep-down feelings. Instead of seeming as normal and furious at him as she wanted to be.
Though if he noticed, he didn’t let it show.
He just folded his arms across his chest. Leaned back against the rickety stage behind him. It groaned in protest at his enormous body, but it held. “Fine,” he said. “You’re gathering wrong.”
“And you think I’m not aware of that fact.”
“I think you’re aware of it. I don’t think you know why you’re fucking up.”
“Well, maybe somebody here should give lectures on that, before they give lectures on the entire life story of a man who didn’t even discover the Underneath, was a terrible magic wielder, and eventually got eaten by a goblin that had replaced his son.”
They were on part three of the same story so far. Cobble wasa kind professor—he was sweeter and more approachable than Hargreaves, or Yates who supposedly taught Horticulture but spent lectures screaming at everyone for being useless, or even the elusive headmaster, who everyone just referred to asthe overseer.But he was also a rambler.
She had gotten more from one book than she had from hours of his lessons.
Hell, she was getting more from Harker, even though he’d yet to really teach her a thing. “They don’t have to for everyone else. Everyone else has already been told,” he said, and all she could think wasat least he’s willing to admit it. Even if she kept her response sharp.
“Yes, I’m aware of what money and station and access to inner circles affords people. And what that means for someone like me. Or even for the things that magic is used for. That doesn’t change the fact that theyshoulddo things differently. That they should start with how to make a fucking shield, before a deranged vampire burns your fucking face off.”
“I told you. I didn’t aim for your face.”
“Maybe not. But other people could.”
He went to say something after that. Something exasperated and contemptuous, she figured. Only for some reason, he stopped midway through making the words. The eyes he was almost rolling went to her instead. And for just a second, she thought she saw something flash across them.
Before he glanced away, in a manner that said it hadn’t.
He looked almost bored suddenly. And he sounded it, too.
“Was it that third year? Sebastian something or other?” he asked, as offhandedly as he’d mentioned the forest thing. The trick he had said some student she didn’t even know had wantedto play. They hadn’t, so she had wondered ever since if he had been lying. If he had just tried to scare her.
But something about this said otherwise.
It made her think of the sandy-haired boy she had seen in the dining hall the other day, glaring at her over his soup. And hadn’t he shoved by her in the hall once?Maybe, she thought. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody ever offers their names, when they’re busy being rude over my charity shop clothes, or the hair I can’t even spell dry. Never mind style into anything they’d approve of.”
“So it’s just insults. No one is physically hurting you.”
“Not as of yet, no. I just mean that they could.”
“And you’re telling the truth there. You’re not lying to me.”
“Why would I lie about something like that? It’s hardly a risk for me to tell you that you have a rival for your murderous intentions. Worst-case scenario is you let him do what he was going to do anyway. Best-case scenario, you kill him to secure first dibs on my beating heart. Or have I got which is worse and which is best the wrong way around?” She gave him a little faux-musing. “I suppose it depends on which way he wants to go about ending my life. Dismembering sounds more horrible than being drained of blood, after all.”
“Don’t say dismem—” he started to tell her. But then he seemed to cut himself off, before he could get the whole word out. He pinched his lips together; she saw the muscles in his jaw clench. Like he knew he was getting too frustrated, over something he shouldn’t have been frustrated over at all.
What did it matter if someone decided to remove her arms? It was a strange thing for him to seethe about.
But he did it all the same, for a second.
And then he seemed to wrestle himself back under control.I bet that countdown clock to extreme thirst is spinning like a top thanks to all your taunting, she thought, and that seemed to fit. He turned his back, and when he looked at her again, there was something steely in his expression. Resolved.
Ready to get this over with.
“You think gathering is about getting hand placement exactly right; it’s not. Like all the basic forms, it’s just a way to help you get into the right frame of mind. Then the others focus on whatever you manage to call to you. Like a pen—once you pick it up, you know what’s going to happen, and you can then decide what you want to flow out of the tip and onto the page. But first, before you do, you have to do whatever it is that fills it with ink,” he said, all in a big burst. He even did hand gestures of the kind you might expect to see from a swimming instructor trying to explain how to breaststroke, while someone drowns right in front of them. Spread, hitting the air over and over, full of impatience.
