Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (28 page)

Or someone who loved me.

It was hard—it was
very hard—not to think of
Nonny
and Meg, but every time I did, despair
grabbed
me so hard that tears would come, no matter how furious I got with myself about it. Tears are like the stupidest things in the world. They solve nothing, they
don’t
make you feel better, and while you’re weeping and feeling sorry for yourself you’re not accomplishing squat.

And if you happen to be locked in a tube cell in the forest, tea
rs leave streaks on your dusty, dirty face and make you feel even grubbier than you alre
ady do. I tried to scrub at my face
with my forearms, since my
hands were filthy, and wipe the tears
with the lining of
Tres’s
jacket, but I had the distinct impression that my captors always knew when I’d been crying. My face must’ve been a sight, but I didn’t have a mirror so there wasn’t much I could do to fix this.
At first I used my powers, weakened as they were, to lift the worst of the dust off my skin and smooth the wrinkles in my dress. But it didn’t work very well, and as time went on the dirt became ingrained in the silk and it all became rather hopeless.

Rune spent a lot of time with me. Pearl, despite her vivacious energy, tired easily and although I saw her
a couple of
times a
day, she never stayed long
. Amber came once, but Rune disliked
keeping an eye on her as well as me
—to prevent unauthorized violence, I imagine—
so
he told her not to come anymore.
Some of the others didn’t bother to tell me their names. They just came to look at me, as if I were a museum exhibit.
One odd-looking woman
called
Nedra
had eyes just like mine. It gave me a jolt to look into her pale, sharp-featured face and see my own violet
eyes looking back at me.
It was a vivid reminder that these people are my kin.

A depressing thought, since there wasn’t a friendly face among them.

Rune’s was the closest to friendly. It didn’t take me long to realize that his conflicted emotions were part of the reason why he never saw me alone. Whichever
spellspinner
came with
him to visit me kept
an eye on Rune, making sure he didn’
t grow attached to me.

Pearl was sharp. Whenever she was around, I could feel her mind tapping at mine like Lance does, trying to find a way in. It was hard work to keep her shut out
and concentrate on Rune’s lesson
s at the same time. I managed it only because it was important—both to keep her out
and
to hear the
spellspinner
legend
s
and lore
. If Pearl had been younger, it might have been impossible, but fortunately
I wore her out. She
was always a little testy with me by the time she packed it in, and
no wonder
. Must be tough to be old.

One day she got disgusted and left earlier than usual, waving off Rune’s offer to escort her back to wherever she was coming from. “No, no,” she said crossly. “I can
skatch
if I get too tired. You stay here and finish your
little
story.”

We watched her stump off through the bracken and down the path. “Story,” muttered Rune. I could see he was offended.

I grinned. “It’s a good story,” I said. He’d been telling me about a warrior
spellspinner
named Zachariah way back when, who had singlehandedly taken, by force or cunning, all the power stones then in existence. This had weakened the other
spellspinners
so much that he basically is credited with finally ending the
spellspinner
wars and making the formation of the Council possible.
“How much of it is true, do you reckon?”

Rune’s lips twitched. “Most of it,” he said.

“Not all?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? Probably some bits are garbled, some bits are embellished, and other bits are missing entirely. That’s the thing about oral history. It muddies as time goes on and stories are retold, over and over.”

I lay back on my folded army blanket, arms crossed behind my head, and stared up into the treetops. “Do you ever wish you could go back in time and see what really happened?”

My heart had started to race. I forced myself to be calm. Blanked my mind.
Blankblankblankblank
.
We were heading into dangerous territory now. Pearl was gone and I was jolly well going to take advantage.

I didn’t dare let Rune guess the direction of my thoughts.

So far, he didn’t seem suspicious. “Are you kidding?” I couldn’t look at him, but I heard him chuckle. “A history buff like me? I’d love it.”

Blankblankblankblankblank
…
“Why don’t you go?” I asked. Oh, that was good. My voice sounded lazy. Almost sleepy.
Just idle curiosity
, I thought.
Perfectly innocent question,
I thought
—willing Rune to believe that.

“Because I can’t,” he answered promptly. “We can do a lot of things, but ti
me travel isn’t one of them.
Spellspinner
powers
are limited
, Zara. We can alter the properties of—”

I didn’t feel like hearing a lecture on alchemy, so I broke in with another question.
“Have you ever tried?”

He sighed. “Yep. Nothing happened. I knew nothing would happen, but I tried anyway. I was just a kid.”

“Maybe you could do it now,” I suggested. “Our powers increase as we get older, right?”

“Powers we
have
get stronger,” he said firmly. “We don’t suddenly acquire random powers. Sorry. I’d love to time travel, and probably
so would you, but it’s not going to
happen.”

“My friend Meg says it’s possible. Unlikely, but possible. She told me Einstein said so.”

“For sticks,” Rune said.

Startled, I
turned my head to look
at him. “What?”

“It’s possible for sticks,” he repeated. His expression
was a mixture of rueful and glum
.
“We don’t know whether it’s ever been done, but yeah.
We
know for a fact that this planet is riddled with wormholes. An ungifted person could—in theory—stumble across one and get shot backward in time. Or forward, for that matter. But they don’t work for us.”

I was so astonished, I sat up and stared at him. “There’s something they can do that we can’t?”

He nodded. “It’s just one of those things, Zara
.
Bugs don’t bi
te us, the sun doesn’t burn us, and
wormholes don’t
pull
us in. The sticks don’t even know where the time tunnels are, but we know at least a few locations. Thing is, when we go there, we
can walk right through ‘
em
. We
don’
t get sucked in.
”

“But a stick would.” My brain was working feverishly. “Would they have to
intend
it, for that to happen? Or could it happen accidentally?”

Rune shrugged. “Beats me. Why?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. “No reason. Just curious.”

Blankblankblankblank
blank
.

…

That night, my army blanket wrapped around me like a cocoon, I must have fallen asleep—because I dreamed.

I
dreamed I
had somehow climbed the redwood tree
and was sitting
on a branch high above the earth, clinging tightly
as the tree rocked and swayed in the
night
wind. I
knew I was in danger. I could fall to my death at any moment. But in my dream, a bright star overhead was watching over me, keeping me safe. As long as I held fast to the tree and kept my eyes on the star, I would not fall. The bark dug into my thighs and hurt my hands, but I hung on. Clouds scudded past the star, sometimes hiding it from me, and when that happened I was frightened. But every time the clouds broke the star was still there, shining down at me
.

I didn’t think about it in the dream, but after I woke up I realized
there had been something odd about
that star
.

It was
peridot
green.

It was dangerous to ask
Rune
any more questions about time travel. I had to drop the subject. It nearly killed me to drop the subject. But, lord knows,
I had
plenty of other
questions
—things I couldn’t ask just anyone. And Rune was the closest thing I had to an ally.

I couldn’t push him, for fear I would push him away. But
I was
constantly
on the lookout for another chance
to talk privately with him
.

Two
days
passed before another chance
came.

Nedra
was there
this time
, but she had brought along a camp stool and a Kindle and wasn’t
paying attention to us at all. Run
e was
sitting on the ground, leaned back against a nearby tree,
and I was facing him, sitting on
my folded blanket, with
Tres’s
now-utterly-ruined jacket
draped across my knees
. It was midafternoon, and the closest
Spellhaven
gets to warm. Rune was
in the midst of another tale about the Great War—
spellspinner
history seems to consist of
a bunch of disconnected
, heavily-embroidered
legends
, if you ask me—
when I interrupted him.

“Rune,” I said
softly
. “Why are you bothering to teach me all this stuff, if the Council is just going to destroy me in the end?”

He
stopped. Glanced back at
Nedra
. Then looked at me. His eyes were piercing; his expression troubled.
“Well,
” he said. “Th
at’s not a done deal.”

“But it’s likely.”

I waited, hoping he would contradict me. Instead, he gave me a sad little smile. “
There’s always hope.”

I could tell there wasn’t much
.

I
lowered
my voice, hoping
Nedra
wouldn’t hear us. “
You don’t want that to happen,” I
said. I sounded more confident than I felt. “
You don’t think it’s right.
Help me.
” I sensed his refusal forming and interrupted it.
“I’m not askin
g you to go out on a limb
for me
. I know you’ll go with the Council, whatever they decide.
I understand that.
Just
give me some advice. T
ell me what to do.
How can I convince them, Rune? What can I do
,
to make them see I’m not a threat?”

His voice dropped, too—an encouraging sign, if it meant he also didn’t want
Nedra
to hear. “I’m doing my best to make you one of us,” he said. “If you appreciate who you are and where you came from, what you are a part of,
maybe you can convince them
to let you in
. We’re not a warlike people anymore, Zara. We haven’t been,
for a long time now
. We’re out of practice—killing our own kind.”

I shivered, and only partly because I was c
old. His words were chilling
. “Why
kill
me?
It seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it?
The idea of only having forty-nine
spellspinners
is just a whim, as far as I can tell. It’s not like the race is destroyed when there’s fifty, or anything like that.”

“Well, it’s a little more than a whim, Zara.” His lips thinned disapprovingly. “Did you really think we’d
be in such an uproar over a
whim
? No, it’s a little more important than that. Our world’s been out of whack for sixteen years. And when Lance
discovered
you, we
knew
why.”

This was news to me. And not good news, since I wanted to convince them I was harmless.

Rune leaned forward. “I am trying to make the case,” he said earnestly, “that we could allow you to live, and then, when the next
spellspinner
passes, let you into our ranks.
No one likes to say it in so many words, but in the natural order of things we are going to lose a Council member or two fairly soon. We’ve lived with diminished power this long; living this way for another year, or two, or three would be—to many of us—preferable to having your blood on our heads.”