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I have to bite my lip when I catch wind of those. Bite my lip and dig my fingernails into my palms and think about how starved to the spine I get when I oversleep and miss breakfast and how much worse a day exiled from the dining hall for fighting would be.
Smashing faces isn’t worth that kind of torment. And it’s not worth disappointing Da.
I’m his son. I’m supposed to lead by example.
I think about that a lot.
I also think about other things… Like the fact that Clara didn’t rise from the waves. She fell from the sky.
Or at least, it looked that way. I was watching that big bird fly in, and the next thing I knew, there was Clara tumbling into the ocean. Maybe she was tossed up by a rough wave, or my eyes were just playing tricks. The flash of the wards is blinding; it could have interfered with my perception.
I told Da about the activated ward as soon as I remembered it, and he sent a boat out to explore, but they didn’t find any sign of a witch or any other nightmare creature. He figured whatever set off the ward must have flown away.
Or sunk to the bottom of the sea, dead from his magic.
I asked the search party to keep an eye open for Clara’s birds. They sailed an extra mile or more out to sea as a favor, but they didn’t find anything. When I told Clara, I expected she’d be sad, but she looked more relieved than anything else.
I can tell she hates it here, but surely she’d rather have her birds alive and trapped with the rest of us than adrift and starving to death or drowned.
Then again, who can be sure what Clara wants?
She doesn’t say much lately, even to me. She just sits in the stuffed chair in Da’s room, staring out the window at the place where the waves strike the shore. I catch a glimpse of her through the window on my way to and from class. I see her face getting thinner by the day and her bow lips drooping like a Christmas present nobody bothered to open, and I feel that same urge I felt on the platform when I first laid eyes on her.
I want to help her. I need to help her.
But saving a girl drowning in a chair is even harder than saving a girl drowning in the sea. I don’t know how to make things right, how to bring her back.
I only know that I’d do anything to see her smile again.
Anything.
Chapter Five
Foxglove
Rain.
It seems it’s always raining.
Declan tells me rain comes rarely to the island, but to me the world is one continuous sheet of gray.
I sit in his da’s soft chair—so much softer than any place I’ve ever slept, but not as torturously soft as the bed—and stare out the window at the gray sky above and the gray ocean below and the gray fish the boys in scratchy gray sweaters and coarse gray caps pull from the water and I think gray thoughts.
At the washbasin, I stand and study myself in the tiny shaving mirror—my midnight hair and gloomy blue eyes—and wonder who I am now. What I am without my magic, without my mission. I watch my skin wrinkle and crease as my frown grows deeper, and I know that something fundamental within me is changing.
But I don’t know why or what to do about it.
I should do something.
I know I should.
But one gray day becomes a starless night and then another gray day and another and another until I find myself more in the chair and less at the mirror. Less at the chess table or on a church pew with Declan. Less on the windswept paths we used to walk, where he would tell me stories of growing up on the coast of England and I would tell him pretty lies about a cottage in a peaceful wood where the birds and rabbits and field mice were my friends.
Those lies didn’t taste sour. Because he loved them. And because I wanted so badly for them to be true.
I’ve started to wish I had a story like that.
An easy story. A human story.
But instead I have gray and a head full of buzzing bees that make it hard to remember what it was like to have magic that kept me lively.
My world narrows.
I eat when Declan or his da bring me food. I use the privy behind the house, something that’s necessary considerably more often than when I spent so much time in other forms. I wash my body and hair in a deep basin I fill with water warmed on the stove; I clean the simple dress the priest gave me and hang it to dry by the fire in my room.
