A WEEK WENT BY, then two. Neel avoided Tomik, because he couldn’t bear the thought that he had made a terrible mistake in giving his friend the globes. Tomik was gifted, but would he really be able to do what he planned with the glass spheres inside the globes?
As for Petra … Neel didn’t avoid her. But she was elusive. Sometimes he saw her shadow slip around a corner of the palace. Sometimes he’d meet her silver eyes across a distance and be surprised, as he always was, by their unusual color. He’d think that they looked like something precious, like moonlight, maybe, and by the time he’d finished that thought she’d glance away again. Then she was gone.
Petra unsettled him. He wasn’t sure why. He supposed it was because everything unsettled him these days.
One day, he caught a glimpse of her dark brown braid as she crossed the wooden bridge over the river Neel had plunged into the very first time they’d entered the palace. Her figure dwindled as she headed toward the doors that would take her down to the city.
Neel bunched the hem of his blue silk jacket into a fist, then let it go. He stopped a servant and demanded they exchange shirts.
He had to wear something a lot less flashy if he was going to follow her.
* * *
WHEN NEEL SAW HER disappear into the Metis’ cave, he ducked behind a natural pillar of rock that served to hitch several hardy beach ponies. Neel waited for hours as the horses whickered and nudged at him with their velvety noses.
Petra emerged from the cave as the sun was setting, her face distant and thoughtful. Astrophil bounced on her shoulder, trying to get her attention.
Well, Neel thought. He would get her attention.
His ghostly fingers unfurled and stretched, reaching their very limit. The tips of his flesh and blood fingers ached a little, feeling the tug of the ghosts. Just as the pain began to sear him, and it felt like the ghosts might rip away, Neel touched the tip of Petra’s nose with one invisible finger.
She whirled around, and he chuckled. “Neel!” she cried.
“Who, me?” He stepped out from behind the pillar.
She smirked as he walked toward her. “Good thing you didn’t try staying hidden. I would have found you.”
“Nah. Don’t think so.”
“Truly.” Astrophil pointed one leg at him. “She would have. Had she tried.”
The smug looks on their faces made Neel realize that there would have been something special in the way Petra might have ferreted out his hiding place. He glanced back at the mouth of the Metis’ cave. “Petali,” he said slowly, “what have you been up to?”
Her smile grew wider.
Neel slipped his hand into hers—his real hand. He felt her skin with his skin and thought about how different that felt. He could touch things with the Gift of Danior’s Fingers, of course, but this … felt different. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
* * *
THEY CLIMBED A TREE that grew out of a cliff and sat in its branches, looking at the wide green sea.
“You go there every day, all day, don’t you, Pet?” Neel said.
She nodded. The wind pulled a dark lock of her hair from its braid and danced it on a breeze.
Neel caught it, then let it fly again. “Tell me your secret.”
“It’s not a secret. It’s just … Fiala Broshek must have the answer to my father’s cure. I need to talk with her. And I can’t stand waiting.”
“Petra, we have been over this before,” said Astrophil. “Which is better? To leave right away with a boat and make our way slowly to Bohemia, or to give Tomik some time to work on the globes? If he succeeds, we can travel home almost instantly. Be reasonable.”
“Maybe Tomik won’t succeed,” Petra said in a dark voice. “Maybe he doesn’t really want to.”
“That’s silly.” Neel was startled. “Why would he…? Oh. To keep you here.” He shook his head, trying to dislodge an instant doubt. “No. Tom wouldn’t do that.”
Petra was silent.
“Well, then we’d go,” Neel said. “You and me.”
“And me,” Astrophil squeaked indignantly. “Do not forget me.”
“Course. Astro, too. We’ll sail the choppy seas. You want a ship, Pet? I’ll give you one.”
“You’d really come with me?”
“A swashbuckling adventurer like myself? You couldn’t stop me. But … what’s all this got to do with the Metis? Why’re you lurking around them? They’re kind of creepy.”
Astrophil shuddered. He agreed.
“I used to be … afraid of what I am,” Petra said. “A chimera. Someone with two magical gifts. I’m strange. An oddity. A…”
“An anomaly,” Astrophil said helpfully. “An aberration.”
“Yes.” Petra rolled her eyes. “Thank you for the vocabulary lesson. Now I have several ways to describe my weirdness.”
“It’s not weird,” Neel said. “It’s nifty. Two gifts are better than one, right?”
She shrugged, her shoulder brushing against the bark of the tree. “Not if I don’t make the most of them. Before I came to the Vatra, I’d practiced my first gift—I mean, the one I think of as my first gift. My magic over metal. I like that one, because it’s my father’s. It makes me feel close to him. But I hadn’t done anything with my mind-magic, aside from when Dee gave me lessons in London. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to those lessons, because I didn’t want my second gift to get stronger. I don’t want to see what my mother saw…”
“The future,” said Neel.
“The future scares me. What if the people I love aren’t in it?”
Astrophil looked solemn. Neel slowly nodded.
“But I can’t help my father unless I’m the strongest person I can be,” Petra said. “So I’m practicing my gifts. Both of them. And mind-magic isn’t as bad as I thought. The Metis say mind-magic is like a cloud. You know how clouds take shape? When someone’s born with mind-magic and it’s strong, it takes shape. It becomes the ability to see the future, or read someone’s thoughts, or sense hidden things. But me … the weakness of my gift means that it’s a cloud with no form. So I can do a little bit of all kinds of mind-magic.”