“You tell me. What do you feel?”
“Besides feeling like an idiot for sitting in a burned-down house at five-freaking-a.m., holding out my hand like it’s some sort of deformed claw . . . not a whole lot.”
I grit my teeth, but I refuse to let him get to me again. “Then maybe you should try actually paying attention. Close your eyes.”
He heaves a heavy sigh but does as I ask.
“You should be able to detect any movement in the wind within at least a twenty-mile radius—and be able to tell where it’s coming from. Focus on the way the air hits your skin. You’ll feel something like an itch wherever the wind stirs.”
He opens his mouth—probably to complain again. But then his hand twitches and his jaw falls slack. “My thumb itches. Like . . . something moving across my nerves, tugging at me.”
I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. His senses are strong. Really strong. That draft barely tickles the base of my thumbnail, and it’s at least thirty miles away.
Maybe this task won’t be as impossible as I thought.
“There’s a weak Easterly stirring over there,” I explain. “That’s what your thumb is telling you.”
He drops his hand, shaking his fingers hard. “That’s really freaky. I don’t like it.”
“Well, get used to it. It’s part of who you are. And it’s an amazing thing. Groundlings would kill to do the things we can do. Maybe you should try being grateful for your gifts.”
“Groundlings?”
“Humans. We can have a vocabulary lesson another time. Right now I’m trying to teach you how to call the wind—another one of those ‘freaky’ things Windwalkers do, so brace yourself. We’ll start with the most basic call. It’s one you heard me use yesterday, and it will be the one you use most often. Repeat after me. ‘Come to me swiftly.’ ”
He shakes his head like he doesn’t understand, and I know he’s struggling with the language shift. I switched to the Easterly tongue. I repeat the phrase, waiting for his mind to translate.
“Come to me swiftly,” he finally says, his tongue fumbling with the swirling intonations of the words.
I grab the windslicer and point it at his throat. “I told you to whisper—it’s a good thing the wind needs a complete command to respond, otherwise you could’ve just given away our exact location.”
“Hey—you didn’t whisper!”
“I was testing you to see how well you were paying attention earlier. You failed.”
“Because you set me up for it.” His hands clench into fists and he looks like he wants to pummel me. But his gaze settles on the windslicer. I have him right where I want him—and he knows it.
“Try it again. Focus on the draft you’re feeling—and whisper this time,” I order, setting the blade back on the ground between us. “Come to me swiftly.”
“Come to me swiftly.”
It’s actually quite impressive the amount of disdain he slipped into his whisper.
I smile at his pettiness. “Carry no trace.”
“Carry no trace.”
“Lift me softly.”
“Lift me softly.”
“Then flow and race.”
“Then flow and race.”
The Easterly rushes through the half room, stirring the leaves and cooling the sweat pooling at my hairline before it whisks away.
Vane’s eyes widen. “Cool.”
“Memorize those four phrases. They will save your life a thousand times over.”
He doesn’t say anything, too busy staring at the giant grasshopper that jumped onto the flat edge of the windslicer.
I snatch the disgusting insect and toss it at his head. “Pay attention, Vane. What did I just tell you?”
He shrieks, waving the now flying creature away from his face. “Memorize the spell. Got it—no need to get psycho with the bugs.”
The grasshopper lands on his shoulder and he flails to shoo it away, fixing me with a glare that would’ve been evil if he weren’t blushing so bright red. It distracts me from what he said, but only for a second.
“Wait, did you say ‘spell’?”
“Spell. Command. Whatever you want to call this crap.”
My mind spins with the implications of his words.
“I’ll ignore for a second that you just referred to the single most valuable element of our heritage as ‘crap’—though you can bet we’ll get back to that. Do you think I’m teaching you . . . magic?”
I feel crazy even saying the word.
“You control the wind. What else am I supposed to think?”
He has a point—from a human standpoint, at least. But he’s still wrong.
“We control the wind through words, Vane. We ask the gust to do what we want and convince it to obey. It’s a simple communication—no different from what you and I are doing right now.”
“We talk to the wind? Like it’s alive?”