Torn: Bound Trilogy Book Two (6 page)

My odds of success were slim at best. I wouldn’t endanger the people of Belleisle by hiding—not until I knew I’d drawn the danger away.

I mounted the horse again and reached into my pocket to touch the smooth pebble of purple glass, my small reminder of everything I wished to return safely to when my journey was over.

The sun cast the horse’s shadow and mine long on the road as we headed west into Tyrea.

D
awn came
with brightness that seemed cruel in its cheerfulness and beauty. I kept my eyes closed against the sunbeams that streamed through the window and wrapped my arms tighter around the feather pillow next to me. I wasn’t ready to face the day.

“Rowan?” The end of my mattress sank as Celean settled there.

I buried my face in the pillow and inhaled deeply. I’d taken it when I left Aren’s room, and it smelled like him. My memories stirred, bringing back sensations and images of the previous night, opening an aching crevasse in my chest. Being with him in real life was far better than any dream, but every moment had been marred by the invisible clock ticking in my mind, counting down the time until he was gone.

Gone
, my mind echoed, snapping me to full consciousness.

Celean waited as I struggled to lift my heavy eyelids. My exhausted muscles refused to obey orders to sit up, and I settled for rolling over onto my back. Emptiness settled onto my chest like a contented cat.

Celean poured me a glass of water.

“Thanks,” I whispered.

Celean was a quiet person, wise and practical beyond her years. She often made me think of my cousin Felicia. They looked nothing alike, and in their mannerisms and attitudes they couldn’t have been more different, but they were both the best friends I’d ever had and exactly the people I needed at different times in my life. I thought about Lecia a lot, and about my family. Not knowing what might be happening at home tore at my heart, but it wasn’t something I talked to Aren about. He had little enough reason to care about my family, and too many problems with his own for me to want to trouble him.

A lump formed in my throat, and I took a sip of water to soothe the ache. Once again I wondered what was happening. Did everyone in town know my secret? Were my parents suffering for it? Endless questions, always circling, never answered.

Celean had been teaching me to quiet my racing thoughts in those lonely times, to focus on nothing—or if I couldn’t manage that, at least to pray for my family’s well-being, then set it aside and focus on the present. It was good advice, but as of sunrise, the present offered just as many worries as my past.

“You okay?” she asked, and rubbed my leg through the blankets. “You were out longer than I expected last night. How did you get back in?”

“Kitchen door. Dora was up making bread, but I don’t think she’ll say anything to anyone. Thanks for letting me sleep.”

“I told Emalda you weren’t feeling well this morning. I think she thinks you’re just sad about...you know.” Celean was three years younger than me, but in this it felt like the age gap between us was far larger, as though the weeks I'd spent searching for a cure for my binding had been a lifetime. She understood that I was sad, and she was sad for me because she was my friend, but she couldn’t truly understand what I’d lost.

Just sad
couldn’t describe the dark pit inside of me.

“I’m going to stay in bed for a while, if no one minds.”

Celean’s heavy brows pushed together over her dark eyes. “You can’t mope for too long. Sadness becomes a habit. I don’t want to see you give up on everything you’ve gained here because—” She pressed her lips together, cutting the thought off. “You care for him, I understand that, and you’re probably worried about him. But this is for the best, and life will go on as it’s meant to. You’ll see that someday.”

“He’s going to come back.”

“I’m sure he will.”

Was that pity in her eyes, in her voice? I’d have been angry had I not understood that she didn’t know him like I did.

For all they talked, no one at the school knew him. There would be more gossip now if I let anyone see how Aren’s leaving affected me. I thought about getting up and going to class, and the idea exhausted me. Better to let them think I was ill, or even to draw their own conclusions, than to have to hold back my raw emotions in front of them.

“Give me one day,” I said. “Let me be until tomorrow morning.”

I couldn’t ask for longer. Ernis and Emalda were allowing me to work instead of paying tuition because they saw potential in me and wanted me as a student. I was there to learn, not to grieve. I also had no desire to have anyone pity me. I got enough of that over my background and my struggles with magic.

Celean gave my leg one more pat, then stood. “Take what time you need, but there’s a beautiful day waiting outside. Florizel is allowing us to take the horses into the woods if we wish, after classes are done.”

“I’ll think about it.”

After she left, I got out of bed to use the toilet down the hall, but couldn’t find the energy to clean my teeth or brush my hair. I pulled the bedroom curtains closed against the bright sun, burrowed under the blankets, and cried.

One day,
I told myself. One day to nurse my aching heart, and then I would do what I came to the island for.

I
made
myself comfortable in sleep, nested there for the day and much of the night. I dreamed of Aren, and wished I were dreaming
with
him. When wakefulness threatened I forced myself back into the lighter realms of sleep, where dreams were under my control and reality was no concern. I woke each time Celean came in the room, then slept again.

I knew it was cowardice. Surely Aren wasn’t out on the road tucked into his bedroll, heartbroken over leaving me. He might even have been glad to be away from this place. But I had lost much in the previous months, and never properly grieved any of it.

Celean came in well after midnight, likely having done her evening’s schoolwork in the library instead of our room. After she got into bed and closed off the lamp, I lay awake and thought about the sleeping princesses in the stories I’d once loved.

Is this how they slept, those princesses?
I’d always imagined that their sleep looked like death, that they were either unaware of what was happening or trapped in their own minds as I had once been. Perhaps it was more like this. Maybe they kept waking and discovering that their prince hadn’t showed up yet, so they forced themselves back down, preserving themselves in sleep until he came to make their lives complete and show them the way to happily ever after.

Ugh.

Certainly not the fate I’d choose. I would figure out who I was without my prince, find my magic and stand on my own.

I sat up on the edge of the bed and reached for my clothes, trying to be quiet for Celean as she’d been for me. Still, when I turned around, I found her watching me. “Where are you going?”

“Library. I think I’ve slept enough.”

She closed her eyes again.

I wondered what she dreamed about. As far as I could tell, Celean had few troubles. Good student, gifted in magic and skilled in its use, a highborn young lady who had never had to work for much, but who was kind and calm and had many friends. Nothing ever seemed to bother her, but there had to be things I didn’t see below the surface. After all, my own life had seemed nearly perfect, once.

I slipped out of the room and made it to the library without running into anyone. We weren’t strictly forbidden to wander the halls late at night, but it would have raised questions if anyone had seen me heading in to work in the dead of night.

Entering the library felt like going home. The air seemed to tremble under the weight of accumulated knowledge, and I took a moment to enjoy it. The smell of dust and aging leather were as much a part of the place as the books were, or the paper and ink lined up on shelves near the door. It was like every library I’d grown up with—my uncle’s, the one in my hometown where I’d once worked—and yet not. This one felt deeper. More solemn. More consequential.

I lit a lamp and carried it with me as I wandered between the tall shelves, not certain what I was looking for. Albion had already found anything relevant to my situation, and had helped me when the books were written in languages I had never seen before. I thought about looking for children’s stories to see how different those of Belleisle were from those in Darmid, but decided against it. Similarities would make me think of home, and differences would only remind me of how far away I was.

I settled on
Magical Theory for Beginners
. My lessons had already taken me beyond the basics, but it would help focus my mind on the one problem I had any control over.

I set the lamp and the heavy, leather-bound book on a round table and sat with my eyes closed, feeling my magic. Its energy burned warm within my core, a feeling like elation, though more subtle.

It frightened me a little when I let myself feel it. So much potential, and so many ways I could mess it up. In the stories I wasn’t supposed to read back home, people wielded magic as if it were an extension of themselves. Orphan boys who learned they had great magic in them found it easy to use it to complete whatever quests they were given. I thought it should be the same for me, but it wasn’t even close.

A few pages in the center of the book reminded me how lucky I was to have my magic at all. I’d expected a section called “magical maladies” to concern itself with curses, but it turned out to be about ways a person might lose magic. Breaking bindings wasn’t listed, but over-use and draining of magic were.

Think of magic as a flame
, the book suggested.
When a flame burns low due to lack of fuel, it might be brought back if more is provided. Once burned out, the flame is gone unless one finds a way to re-ignite it. Even a tiny flame may be brought back, but left on its own, a small flame will burn out, and a large one may well burn out of control. We are indeed fortunate to have an ample supply of fuel, but over-use of magic has on rare occasions led to its loss.

My flame had nearly burned out. Emalda brought it back with some brilliant potions, but according to Albion, it had been a close thing. And now I found myself closer to the wildfire side of that spectrum.

I paged through the book as the night went on. As I reached the final pages, the red sunrise at the windows brightened to yellow, illuminating the dancing dust motes that thrived in the library no matter how often we cleaned. I was about to close the book when an entry caught my eye.

Acceptance
, listed under “Cures and Concerns.”

Magic does not tolerate those who do not accept it, and will rebel against rejection and disrespect.

I smiled to myself. No one truly believed that magic was an entity, that it was self-aware any more than life itself was, or the energy in a lightning strike. Still, folk spoke as though it were, the way one might accuse a stuck wagon wheel of being ornery. These older books were especially taken with phrasing things that way.

I had accepted my magic. I knew what I was. I spent my days struggling with my power and trying to keep it from hurting anyone, trying to become more like the other students. More like Aren.

But are you happy about it?

Of course,
I answered myself, and shoved away the idea that it might be otherwise.
Who wouldn’t be? This is what I always dreamed of. I just need time, that’s all.

I closed the book and turned my thoughts to other things as I re-shelved it. I’d need to hurry if I wanted to be dressed and ready for breakfast before classes. They started early at Albion’s school.

I’d heard a rumor that we’d have a new professor soon, someone who stayed at the school when not on missions to Tyrea and other lands. Whether the trips were diplomacy or spying or something else, I didn’t know, but I had been interested to hear that this Beaumage person was an illusionist, among other things. It wasn’t something I’d seen or tried myself, and books made it sound like an interesting type of magic. I’d have to ask about that.

The school was quiet when I entered the hallway, and I shook my head as I remembered that today was what they referred to on Belleisle as Seventh-day. Most of the students would be attending a brief time of reflection and prayer this morning, after a decent sleep-in. I’d gone a few times, but was under no obligation. It was never exactly free time for me, though—any time I sneaked out of the building, another student or a staff member would find they had business near wherever I headed.

I needed company, needed to talk things out. But who could I go to? Grateful as I was to Emalda for agreeing to let Aren stay, her insistence on our near-constant separation chafed me like rough cloth, and had led to me keeping my distance from her. Even when Aren was leaving in order to protect us, she wouldn’t have let me be with him for the night before he went. Albion would be asleep, or already deep in his meditations.

I couldn’t think of anyone else I could talk to, even if they were available.

At least, no human.

I hurried back to my room to grab my coat and headed toward the kitchen door. A few early-rising and bleary-eyed students gave me strange looks as I passed. I must have been quite a sight with my un-brushed hair and wrinkled clothes, but it didn’t matter. Florizel wouldn’t notice. I grabbed a couple of apples as I passed through the kitchen and stepped into the cold.