“Yes. Think of how you summon your sun beam magic and start there.”
I frown, trying to translate the heat running through my veins to the flower in front of me. It’s difficult. I feel my magic surging in my own veins, begging to be freed, but I know that’s not what I’m looking for. I try to tweak my approach, instead thinking of how I relate to an object when casting my orbital magic.
The flower unfurls into my awareness, and I feel a spark of light.
“I think I see it,” I say, shutting my eyes to help me focus on the sensation. “It’s not quite a flame though, more like an ember.”
“That’s because it’s dying,” Gallis says, and I can hear the excitement in her voice. “Focus, Morgana, see if you can do more than sense the flame. Try to manipulate it.”
Slowly, I push my awareness toward the ember until I think I can feel the small amount of heat it’s giving off, like a coal still glowing from the fire. I swallow, knowing there’s one morestep in this test: attempting to actually charge the light with my own. I try to keep hold of the ember while calling on my magic, drawing it from my veins.
It rushes from me like a flood, completely engulfing the ember. I feel like I have no control, gasping in frustration as my power batters the flower’s inner flame. Gallis mutters something sharply, and I open my eyes to see the sunflower has become a blackened lump, still smoldering from the heat of my magic.
“I knew this wouldn’t work,” I say. “I can’treviveanything.”
“You’re mistaken, Morgana,” Gallis says. “This is incredible progress.”
I point at the singed mass that was once a sunflower. “That’sprogress? At least it still had petals before.”
“You just did something I’ve only read about in very old texts. You burned the flower with magic that came fromwithinthe plant. There was no visible sun beam, no external projection of your power. Which means your magic truly did tap into the flower’s inner flame.”
Okay, so maybe it is progress. But when I look at my handiwork, I shudder to think what would happen if I turned this power on someone I was trying to help. When I imagine it, all I can see is Bede’s smoking corpse—the last person who died when I didn’t have full control of my magic. Only rather than Bede’s hateful features, now his face is replaced by someone who looks a lot like Leon—like what I imagine his brother would look like.
Chapter 9
Morgana
By the time Gallis lets us break for lunch, I’ve managed to kill three more sunflowers. But the proctor seems encouraged, and even I have to admit it’s getting easier to find the inner flames of the plants and take hold of them. It’s what happens after that’s consistently a disaster.
But when I tell Tira as much over our food, she’s dismissive.
“It’s like you expected to get it right on the first try,” she says, waving the bit of chicken stuck to her fork to emphasize how ridiculous I’m being. “You only started using your magic a couple of months ago, and now you want to be some kind of prodigy at it? Bit big-headed, don’t you think?” She grins at me, and I smile back, comforted by her teasing.
“Second and third and fourth try didn’t go that much better,” I say.
She shrugs. “Sounds just like a regular learning curve to me. What are you so afraid of?”
The question is whether you’ll try.
Leon’s words still ring in my ears. I know he’d be devastated if I didn’t succeed in this, but I don’t think he’d blame me. Am I afraid of what will happen if I can’t master this magic? Or what will happen if I can? Because if Icanhelp Fairon, that means I have to make a choice about giving the man who hurt me so badly everything he wants from me.
And then I’ll be left with nothing.
Right now, I have my anger, and that at least offers me some sense of power. I might be able to use this arrangement as a bargaining chip, but frankly I’m more focused on the fact that as long as Leon wants something from me, I have the chance to hurt him like he hurt me. However, if I do the right thing and save Fairon, all of that collapses. I’ll just be the stupid princess he bedded and bent to his will. He’ll have used me, and I’ll have let him.
It would all be so much easier if healing is just something I can’t do. I guessthat’swhat I’m afraid of.
“Bad news.”
I almost flinch as the man in question appears beside our table. I look up into his face and wish—not for the first time—that it wasn’t so beautiful. If he looked like a monster, I’m sure I’d find it easier to hate him. But all the blood he’s spilled and all his misdeeds are hidden behind a sculpted jaw, perfect hair, and a set of bottomless gray eyes.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Alastor’s spoken to pretty much everyone in this place. The poor man’s nearly lost his voice. But none of them shared the news about you being here with anyone outside the Lyceum. On top of that, that fae who attacked you—Parvus was his name—arrived a week before us, and he really has been working in the Lyceum archives all this time.”
“He got here a week before? But we were only crossing the border then,” I say.
“Exactly. At that point, I’d sent a message to Proctor Gallis about our arrival, but she was the only one I told—and Alastor confirmed that at that point, she hadn’t told anyone else.”
