*
“Why is there a chicken in this room?” I cry as I step into my foul lodging.
A chicken runs around the room, bird feed scattered in a messy pile, droppings littering the floor.
Ariel glares at me with a look of seething hatred, scoops up the chicken and hugs it protectively to her chest.
“Get the chicken out of here now!” I demand.
Ariel springs up, the chicken in her arms. “No! You come near Faiga, Black Witch, and I will set your belongings on fire!”
“It has a name? You named the chicken? You stole it from the dining hall poultry yard, didn’t you?” I take a threatening step toward her.
“I’m warning you, Gardnerian! Get away from my chicken, or your bed goes up in flames!”
“Go ahead, try it,” I challenge her. “You’ll be expelled!”
Ariel steps toward me, threatening in turn. “I’ll be expelled if I set you on fire,” she rages, “not your things!” A slow, evil grin forms on her face. “And believe me, Black Witch, that’s the only thing keeping me from setting you on fire.”
I know I should continue the fight. To keep the upper hand, no matter what threats I have to make. But I suddenly feel overwhelmingly tired and beaten down. “Fine!” I relent, shooting her a look of disgust. “Keep your stupid chicken. This room couldn’t get any more disgusting anyway. It’s like living in a barn.”
“With a Gardnerian pig!” Ariel snarls.
“Shut up, Icaral.”
Wynter winces at the word, her wide, silver eyes now peeking out above her wing wrapping. Shame pricks at me as I watch Wynter cowering, but anger and fatigue override my conscience.
I’ll find a way to bring Ariel down. All I need is a few solid nights of sleep.
*
I’m awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of singing. I open my eyes just enough to see.
It’s Ariel.
She’s sitting on her bed, singing softly to the chicken and murmuring to it in turn. Gone is her usual evil, slit-eyed look. Her whole face is open, like a child’s. The chicken is staring back at her, making a contented, low clucking sound, almost as if it’s murmuring back to her.
It’s an oddly gentle scene, and it makes me feel unsettled and slightly embarrassed to witness.
Wynter is sitting at the foot of the bed, a large piece of white parchment laid on a thin wooden board in front of her. She’s sketching Ariel and the chicken, her thin black wings folded neatly behind her. She has a shiny white stylus in her hand and holds it at angles as she works. Her picture is oddly beautiful, the unusual art tool not only able to draw in multiple colors, but also able to capture the firelight so that it actually flickers on the page. I remember Lukas mentioning that Wynter is an artist.
Stop, I caution myself.
I force myself to remember the terror of my first night here, how Ariel attacked me, how I cowered in the closet, how Wynter never tried to stop her. How the Icarals in Valgard almost killed me.
I push all my thoughts aside and drift back to sleep.
*
She comes to me again in a dream that night.
The Selkie.
She’s following me in the woods, trying to keep up with my relentless pace. Autumn leaves crackle beneath me with each step.
I look the part of the Black Witch, my long, elegant cloak billowing out behind me.
The Selkie is trying, desperately, to tell me something in a language I don’t understand, that I have no interest in understanding. She runs up beside me, only to fall back again as I refuse to slow down for her, refuse to acknowledge her, seeing her only as a flicker in and out of my peripheral vision. Ignoring when she trips and falls back yet again.
As the dream fades to black, I’m left with an uncomfortable gnawing sensation that by refusing to slow down and look at her, really look at her, I’m missing something.
Something of vital importance.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Spiraling Down
My world spirals down into an ever-worsening ordeal of endless work, extreme sleep deprivation and relentless abuse.
Fallon freezes my ink every Metallurgie class, so I take to carrying a few sharpened pencils. I forget them one day, and Curran Dell quietly slides a pencil to me with a surreptitious look of sympathy, his dislike of Fallon Bane covert but palpable.
No longer able to prevent me from taking notes, Fallon soon decides to move on from freezing inkwells. Instead, she freezes my chair to the floor so I have to struggle to get out of my desk, freezes the back of my cloak to the chair and frequently snuffs out the flames I kindle for my laboratory experiments. She keeps the abuse subtle enough that our professor doesn’t notice, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
And she grins all the while, like it’s one big, fun game.
*
The workload for an ordinary apothecary apprentice is staggering in and of itself, with countless hours of rote memorization and preparation of medicines. I have the added burden of laboring in the hostile kitchen, enduring Yvan Guriel’s green-eyed glare, as well as the extra tasks piled on daily by Fallon’s cousin.
“I’m staying away from Lukas,” I blearily tell Gesine one afternoon as she watches me scrub down charcoal-encrusted vials.
She looks up from her papers, unimpressed, and narrows her eyes at me. “Well, we’ll just have to keep you busy, to make absolutely sure of that.”
*
On top of everything else, my Icaral roommates continue to be a trial to live with.
Every night Ariel hovers protectively about her chicken. If I even get near the animal, she screams something unintelligible about cages and setting me on fire. Under her bed, she keeps a stash of foul-smelling black berries. They’re foreign to me, and I make a mental note to find out what they are once I have the time. Ariel chews them for hours on end, staring at the ceiling apathetically. At other times, she seems to lose herself in studying thick animal husbandry texts, most of them detailing how to care for birds.
Wynter remains an unsettling ghost, often perched on the windowsill, hiding in her wings. She never says a word in my presence, and I’m beginning to wonder if she’ll ever speak to me at all.
The two of them don’t seem to get cold and never bother to make a fire. Even being as frozen as I am, I avoid going over to the filthy fireplace, since it’s on their side of the room and I don’t want to provoke Ariel’s wrath. But as fall settles in, the room grows colder and colder, and I’m running out of layers of winter clothes to wear under my quilt.
Almost every night the Selkie from Valgard haunts my dreams, and I wake up in a cold sweat, feeling lost and alone and scared. At such times the only thing that can calm down my racing heart is the warmth of my quilt and the memory of being wrapped safe in my mother’s arms.
And the wand. The white wand.
I’ve hidden it in my pillowcase, and I’m strangely compelled by it. It’s become like a talisman, my hands drawn to it through the fabric. Initially a blank page, the wand is gradually revealing its source wood to me more and more. Every night now, I surrender and let the wood of the wand send snow-white branches into the back of my mind. They unfold within, smoothing out my worry and fear, lulling me as white birds nestle deep in the wand’s secret hollows.
And sometimes I fancifully muse—what if this truly is the White Wand of legend?
*
A letter from Aunt Vyvian comes.
To my niece,
I received your correspondence, and it has become clear to me that you are in a situation that is quite horrifying.