And he fell again.
He thought of the itch on his elbow.
And he fell again.
He heard Supper bleat and hoped the goat wasn’t eating the carrots. It was Rolan’s job to be sure Supper did not eat the carrots. He inched one eye open to check, and fell again. At least hisstartled shout frightened off the goat, who scampered toward the barn with a half-grown carrot dangling from his teeth.
Rolan dragged himself up inch by inch out of the mud, and with a weary sigh, he hauled himself onto the pole. This time it took a few attempts to even climb atop it. His leg was trembling with fatigue.
Where was Luc, anyway? The Arcanist no longer watched as Rolan struggled to master the balancing pole. He’d probably given up all hope that Rolan had a chance, and was no doubt cozied up by the fire in the house, warm and smug as a dog with a bone.
The next time Rolan fell, his jaw slammed the ground first, and his ears rang and his vision blurred. He scraped mud from his eyes, punched the ground, then clambered up the pole again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
For the thousandth time Rolan forced himself to make the short jump to the top of the pole. He landed on the ball of his left foot and slowly, slowly straightened. Weariness made his eyes water. Fatigue wrapped heavy hands around his ankles, threatening to pull him down to the ground yet again.
What waits at the center of the world?
If you can find the answer… he heard Luc’s rumbling voice. It shifted into Hoff’s.If you ever straighten yourself out… Then Evaine.If you would just go to school… Anaya.If you would stop being an idiot for five minutes…
His pa.If you could make yourself useful, boy, maybe I’d finally have a use for you!
But you can’t. You can’t. You can’t.
“SHUT UP!” Rolan roared.
Rolan pressed his eyes shut and pushed away all the voices, the doubts, and accusations from the people he hated and the people he loved. He spread his arms wide and tilted his face toward the pouring rain, eyes shut and jaw tight.Cut the ropes. So he did, snipping each one until finally, finally, all went quiet and still inside his head.
Rolan sank.
Slow and gentle, resisting any thought that tried to snag his attention. He slipped down into the quiet dark andbreathed, in and out, feeling soft and warm silence spread through his body. Whenever a word or image floated into his brain, he made his thoughts go blank, refusing to let anything take hold of his mind. Before long those stray thoughts grew less and less, as if he really were sinking into water so deep, no sound or light could reach him.
He began to feel weightless, as if he were floating, not falling. Without even noticing it, he’d lost all sense of his physical body. No longer could he feel the rain on his face, or the heaviness of his soaked clothes hanging off his frame, or the pressure on his foot where it balanced atop the pole. It was like falling asleep.
He had the sense of hanging in midair, suspended in a vast, infinite space of pitch black. But instead of being afraid, he felt safer than he’d ever been before, as if he’d found some hidden back door inside his mind and had escaped through it to a place where no one could find him or hurt him or demand anything from him. In this quiet, absolute dark, he simply was.
And then he saw…something.
In his periphery, suspended just out of sight, there was a form—a shadow darker than the dark all around it. Slowly, Rolan nudged hisconsciousness, trying to bring the thing into focus. As it drifted into the view of his mind’s eye, it grew brighter, taking on color and texture.
Anapple.
Red, shining, and round, with splotches of brown and green. He marveled at it, how it seemed more real than any apple he’d ever seen, its color brighter and its surface more textured. It didn’t occur to him to wonder where it came from or why it was there. It just was, the same as him. He stared at it and felt certainty settle deep in his chest.
Rolan’s eyes flew open.
He gasped, feeling as if he’d woken from a deep sleep. His body was relaxed, from his jaw to his toes, and he was still standing atop the pole, steady and straight as a tree with its roots anchored deep in the earth.
Luc stood ten paces away, watching him with a strange look on his face, his eyes intent and his mouth curled at one corner in a half smile. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. When had that happened?
How long had Rolan been standing on that pole?
He let out a laugh and lost his balance at last, slipping sideways and landing on his hip. But he barely noticed the flash of pain that signaled a new bruise, as he scrambled up and laughed some more, hands on his knees.
