“Do you wish to poison an enemy?”
“What?” Her brow furrowed as she looked up. “No.” Then she looked down at the clearly marked bottle in her hand. “Oh.” She put the bottle back and, after a moment—too long a moment to Mallick’s mind—chose the bergamot. “So I made a mistake.”
He objected nearly as much to the dismissal of her carelessness as to the carelessness itself.
Both were unacceptable, but the dismissal showed weakness.
“A mistake with belladonna can kill. As a mistake with an incantation can have far-reaching and disastrous consequences. Your words and actions, the precision of them, matter.”
“Maybe if you didn’t expect me to remember everything, and stand around watching me all the time, I wouldn’t make a mistake.”
“Perhaps my mistake is believing you’d progressed enough to know the properties and uses of extracts, oils, and powders. Sit then, and we’ll start at the beginning.”
“I know the stupid properties, okay?” Because it shook, the snap in her voice lost most of its sting. “I just picked up the wrong bottle. And ingredients like belladonna and foxglove and other deadlies should be separated out into their section instead of everything together in alphabetical order.”
He inclined his head. “That is a fair point. You may begin that task now.”
“There are hundreds! It’ll take half the day.”
“Then you should begin. The task should help calm and focus your mind.”
“I don’t want to spend all day cooped up in here doing something you should’ve done in the first place. I want to go outside. I want some air. I don’t feel good.”
Clearly, he thought, she didn’t. The misery in her eyes, the sheen of tears in them unnerved him more than a little.
Why had he, a man who knew so little of children, and less about female children, been tasked with the care and training of a girl child?
For despite her power, she was still a child.
A female child, he remembered, and cleared his throat.
“Ah. Have you begun your monthly courses?”
“My …” It took her a minute, then misery flashed into disgust. Disgust edged right over into contempt.
“God!” Pulling at her hair, turning in a circle, she inadvertently had the candles flaming. “My mother was right. She was right! The minute a woman’s out of sorts or upset, men think or are even stupid enough to say something about her period.”
“I … am at a loss.”
“And until men start cramping and bleeding every month, they should just shut up about it.”
“Done.”
Fallon dropped her hands, then lifted them again to press her fingers to her eyes. “I’m just tired. I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep very well.”
“You made a fine charm for quiet sleep. Take it, use it. I’ll help you reorganize our ingredients, as you’re right about the separation. Then we’ll make a sleep potion, a fresh one, for you. And you’ll take a ride later, in the air.”
He stopped because while the fire had gone out of her eyes, those potent gray eyes, the misery only increased.
More than a sleepless night, he thought. And he was a fool, bungling her care as surely as she had the incantation.
“You long for your family, and I am not your family. You wish for your mother’s comfort, your father’s shoulder. I can’t be that for you. But will you not trust me enough to tell me what troubles you?”
“I had dreams.”
“Dreams or visions?” He put up a hand when those eyes filled. Yes, he was a fool and a bungler. “No matter just yet. Come, sit. Sit,” he repeated. “I’ll make you tea.”
“I don’t want—”
“Only to soothe,” he assured her as he moved to choose herbs to steep. “I’ll have some as well. I can teach you and train you, I can guide and defend you. But I know little of young girls and their needs beyond the training. You must give me time to learn, to practice. Your dreams disturbed you.”
“I—I unpacked. I hung up Colin’s wind chime and put out Ethan’s flower. I put out the picture my parents had made for me, of the whole family. So the room is more like mine.”
She knuckled at her eyes, not at tears, Mallick noted, but at fatigue.
“I found Taibhse, and that was—it was the best. And, like I told you, I met Mick. He’s kind of a jerk, but …” She shrugged. “And I thought about tracking the wolf with the golden collar, and that would be fun. So if I have to do this, at least after I study and train and practice, I have Grace and now Taibhse, and jerky Mick. So maybe I can learn enough. Like building the beehive. It’s one step, one piece at a time. Like Dad says, you do this, then you do that, then the next thing.
“I felt happy.”
He brought the tea to the table, sat across from her. “Then you dreamed. Will you tell me?”
“The first was a place. It’s stupid.”
“The place is stupid?”
“No, no. I’ve never been there. This is the farthest I’ve ever been from the farm, so I’ve never been there, but I felt I knew the place. With the stones in a circle, coming up out of the fog, and the empty fields, the woods dark and close. Then a man walked through the fog to the stones. I know I’ve never seen him before, but there was something, and I felt … I felt something. He had dark hair, and a sword. And green eyes. Dark green like the shadows in faerie-land.”
“ ‘Faerie-land.’ ”
She flushed just a little, lifted her tea. “It’s what I call the glade where I found Taibhse. I know the color of his eyes because even though I wasn’t in the dream like you sometimes are, I wasn’t in it, he turned his head and he looked right at me. Like through a window or a mirror. And he spoke to me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said my name, and he said how the circle was the first of seven shields, and how the blood of the gods—the blood of our ancestors, his and mine—was shed there, and how it was poisoned and destroyed the shield and started the plague. And he took out his sword and lifted it. Lightning hit it and it went to fire. White fire. He asked me if I’d answer the call, if I’d take up the sword and the shield, if I’d fight and be strong, if I’d, like … come to be. He told me to choose.
“I don’t know if it was a dream or a vision.”
“It can be both.”
“Mom has visions, and sometimes … Sometimes I know where the boys are hiding or if they’re going to play a trick on me. I see it in my head. Not every time, but sometimes. Once a man stopped at the farm. He had scars on his arms, and on his face. I saw him in a fire, screaming, and running, and falling in the dark outside where they left him for dead. Raiders. I saw it.”
“It frightened you.”
She nodded, sipped her tea.
“You said ‘the first.’ You had other dreams.”
“One other. Longer, and it wasn’t clear like the first. It was blurry. Mostly. Like the glass was dirty, and the voices were far away. I could hear some, but not all. It was a different place. Like that place we rode through with all the big houses, all together?”
“Yes. They called them developments. A kind of community.”
“Okay, it was a place like that. Really big houses. Purity Warriors lived there. I know who they are.”
Some of the misery burned off in anger.
“They hunt us, kill us, just because we’re not like them.”
“They fear us, and any who are different.”
“They have slaves,” Fallon told him. “They make slaves out of people who don’t believe like they do. Even kids. And they keep magickal people locked away. They do terrible things to them. There was a boy, and I could see into his head. A little. Pieces of his thoughts, so I know the terrible things. They were going to hang him, and the woman with him, a witch. Her name … I lost it.”