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My eyes flickered to his mouth—I couldn’t help myself—and he noticed. The corners of his lips twitched.
“You say the mist is everywhere?”
I blinked and stepped backward, nearly toppling over the stone bench. After waving my arms about like an idiot, I answered. “Yes. Thick, swirling mist. Everywhere.”
“Is there any variation in it. Say, around me?” His amused expression darkened as he waited for me to answer.
A little ashamed of how eager I was to stare at him without fear of getting caught, I took this opportunity to study him. My cheeks burned as I traced up and down his frame. “No. It’s swirling around you the same as around the trees and everything else.”
His mouth flickered with what might have been satisfaction, but he quickly turned away and lifted his arms. I took this moment to stare at him from this angle.
“Okay, Vera,” he said over his shoulder, “you can see magic. Your own magic extends out of you, like it’s something you’re trying to cast off rather than harness. That might be another reason you’ve struggled to access it on demand. Try to reel it in, concentrate it within yourself instead of letting it leak out and…” He flinched. “Just try to contain it, okay? If you do that, you might have a better idea of what the magic looks like.”
For a moment, I stared blankly at the blueish mist. I imagined myself inhaling the magic I’d let out, though I wasn’t sure if this was how it was done. Until a moment ago, I’d had no idea magic leeched from me like water from a cracked vase. My eyes widened as the blue and silver mist separated, silver droplets trickling toward me as the blue mist continued to dance in the air.
Ash licked his lips and rubbed his beard with his hand. He must be able to taste the shift in the magic in the air. “Now, when I try to enter your mind, focus on the mist. Watch what it does. Follow it. Predict it.”
It was difficult to watch the mist instead of him, but I did. The sparkling blue swirls didn’t simply curl into little whirlpools, but they stood upright and zigzagged and splintered like lightning bolts. There was nothing predictable about the way it moved.
I stared at each little eddy of movement, but I soon became dizzy flicking my eyes toward every notable change in the mist.
“Try to see it as a whole,” Ash said. He’d turned back around and was watching me.
My eyesight fuzzed a little. I tried to look for patterns, anything at all that might stand out. Within seconds, I’d found it. My attention flitted right, then left, then right, then left. I even swayed on my feet to the rhythm. It wasn’t so much a pattern in the movement of the mist, which was how I’d missed it before, but a pattern in what part of it moved most notably.
A smile formed on my lips as the pattern struck me. I counted in my head, one, two, one, two. Then I pointed with my finger.
“There. Then there.” I pointed back and forth several times, each time predicting where the next strange whorl of movement would be. “There!”
Triumph rang through my tone.
But Ash’s expression stole my feeling of victory. His brow had pinched, and his mouth had hardened into a scowl.
“What?” I asked, confused at his disapproving look. “I think I figured it out. It’s pointing to you. I just never noticed it before.”
His face dropped. “This is when I normally leave. As soon as someone starts to uncover who I am, I slip away.”
My heart stuttered. “Leave?” I stepped forward. “Leave with me. Ash, I can unlock spells. I can get us out.”
A heaviness weighed on his expression when he looked up at me. “The Labyrinth has no exits, Vera. Key or not, there’s no escaping. I made sure of that.”
He stalked off toward the crumbling abbey. I hobbled after him, my feet still sore despite the new boots. In my mind, I saw the padlocked door once again, tempted to shove all my pain away again. I longed to put aside my discomfort once more, but Ash had warned me not to.
“Ash! Wait. You’re not leaving, are you?”
He hesitated before a vine-curtained doorway. “There’s something you should know, but I locked these memories within my own mind a long time ago, so no one could ever pull them from me or alter them. I can’t tell you unless you break that spell, and you’ve got to get a lot better at magic before I willingly let you start unlocking things inside my own mind.”
Desperation flowed out of me, but I didn’t care. I’d never been a mage until this moment—all the other small flashes of my magic had been chance, unpredictable and unrepeatable. But all this time, I’d had magic right at my fingertips. I was exhausted and exhilarated, and I couldn’t bear the thought that I’d already disappointed someone with my new skill.
I ignored thoughts of the door that could lock away my pain and fear and stomped after Ash. Inside the ruined abbey, there was nothing but creeping dead vines, a cracked altar, and swirling blue mist.
Ash was gone.
13
Asmall puff of shock escaped my lips, pulling with it every scrap of confidence I’d felt a moment ago. I was now empty—squeezed like a lemon. All my exhaustion and fear rushed back now that I was alone again.
“Ash?”
