“Jesus.”

“But you’re right. We’ll make sure Rachel knows. We could walk over, talk to her now.”

“It’s a girl thing.” And he’d had more than enough girl-thing talk for the day. For the freaking year.

“Girl thing?” said the born feminist, with dripping derision.

“You’re a girl, and since you’re on it,” he added, “it can be a girl thing. Anyway, I’ve got that stupid essay.”

But when he went up to his room, Duncan flopped down on his bed to stare up at the ceiling. He thought of Cass’s breasts. He thought of Petra’s golden hair.

And he thought, as he often did, of the tall, slim girl with the short dark hair and storm cloud eyes.

He didn’t wonder if she was real. He’d seen her in his head, in his dreams too often to believe otherwise.

But he wondered where the hell she was.

CHAPTER TWELVE

By spring Fallon could hold her own with a sword. Mallick knocked her down, disarmed her, and metaphorically beheaded her more often than she liked, but she reminded herself he’d had centuries of practice to her handful of months.

Spring meant planting, and the farm girl found comfort in the familiar. She knew as she worked the earth her family did the same. She didn’t need the math lessons Mallick swamped her with to calculate she’d passed a quarter of her training time.

Mallick schooled her in the basics—math, history, literature, and the practicalities of tactics and strategies and mapping. When he expanded her lessons into engineering and mechanics, she took some pride at his surprise over what she already knew.

She had, after all, helped her father build, had learned how engines worked, how to repair them, even build them from scavenged parts.

He pushed her further and harder on magicks than her mother had done, and this she welcomed. The more she knew, the more she opened, the brighter the beat inside her.

And still the crystal he’d given her when she was a baby remained clouded.

Her archery improved—partly from her innate desire to match Mick’s skill, or even outpace it.

As the air warmed and the leaves greened, Mallick allowed her to visit the elf camp, the faerie bowers, the shifter den. She took gifts of food and charms and healing balms, considered the visits a kind of reward for her progress, a break from tasks and studies.

But she also learned, as Mallick intended, of other cultures, rites, beliefs, histories. Though she liked talking to the girls now and then, she found herself more drawn to the boys, with their contests and races, or to the elders who spoke of hunts and battles.

Once when she ran the woods with the young elves, practicing her tree scaling, a young elf, no older than Ethan, fell when a branch cracked beneath her.

She landed hard, her right arm cocked beneath her. Dazed, she whimpered, but when the others ran to her and turned her, she screamed in pain.

“Bagger, get her mom,” Mick ordered. “Fast! I think her arm’s broken. It’s okay, Twila. It’s going to be okay.” He smoothed back her dense black hair from a face gone pasty under brown skin. Blood trickled from scrapes on her forehead and cheekbone.

She just screamed again. “Mama!”

“I’m going to take you to your mom, okay? I’m just going to pick you up and—”

“No.” Though she understood the elves had their ways of healing, and that a child so young needed her mother, Fallon stepped forward. “Don’t move her. She may have hurt something else.”

Fallon knelt down, laid a hand on the sobbing girl’s shoulder.

Tears rolled like liquid glass down the girl’s cheeks. “I want my mama.”

“I know. She’s coming. Do you see me, Twila?”

She murmured it as she glided her hands just above the girl. Head, throat, heart, torso, limbs. “Do you see me?” she said again with her eyes on Twila’s. Those dark, pain-filled eyes that pulled at Fallon.

Slowly, she let what rose in her ease out. “Do you see me?” she repeated, and watched those dark eyes glaze with the trance.

“I see you.”

“Do you hear me, Twila? Do you hear my voice? Do you hear my heartbeat? Do you hear what lives in me stir and rise?”

“I hear you.”

Fallon ignored the sound of running feet, a cry of alarm, and kept what she was, all she was, focused on the girl.

Behind her, Mick’s father gripped Twila’s mother’s arm. “Wait. Wait. The One has her.”

“I will be in you, you will be in me. Your bones are soft still, and the break is clean. I’m in you, you’re in me. We share the pain, and it lessens. Here. See me, only me.”

Fallon laid her hand on the break, gave herself to the knowing. “With me, Twila. Quick.”

And gripping the snapped bone, squeezed. Her breath caught as the girl’s did in that shared moment of heat and pain. Twila’s eyes widened in shock, pupils going from saucers to pinpoints, then back again until her eyes closed on a whimpering sigh.

A new tear slipped out.

“You’re all right now. She’s all right.” With the power still bubbling in her, Fallon eased back. How could she feel so strong, she wondered, with that ghost ache in her arm, with her stomach shaking?

“It was her arm,” she managed as she rose. “The rest is just bumps and scrapes. She’s all right.”

On a cry, the mother leaped forward, gathered Twila up, rained kisses over her hair and face. Cuddling her daughter, she reached up for Fallon’s hand. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” She turned to Mick’s father. She thought of Thomas as a kind of scarecrow man because of his tall, thin build and the mass of corn-silk hair he wore in a bushy braid.

Just then he seemed a little blurry.

“The branch broke. It was the way her arm was bent when she fell on it.”

“Yes. Here.” He pushed a canteen on her. “Drink some water.”

Realizing her throat burned with thirst, she started to gulp, but he laid a hand on the canteen. “Slowly now. Slowly.”

She did as he said, found the world clearing, settling.

“We won’t forget your care for one of our children.” He touched her hand when she started to shrug off his gratitude. “Caring for another matters most of all. We’ll get Twila back to camp, and Mick will walk you home. Mick?”

“Yes, sir.”

Thomas turned, picked up Twila. “We won’t forget,” he vowed, and carried the girl away while her mother stroked her hair.

The others scurried after them.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

Neither did I, Fallon thought.

When Fallon got back to the cottage, she found Mallick harvesting honey, a chore he’d come to enjoy—despite the occasional sting.

He wore the big hat with the net, and gloves. She could see the last wisps of smoke he’d conjured to chase whatever bees weren’t out hunting from the combs as he slid out the rack, slipped in the spare they’d made.

With the rack in the bucket, he turned, saw her.

“Our bees have been productive.”

As she’d instructed him, he began to walk with the bucket toward the greenhouse—to get out of the open air because the scent of the honey would attract bees.

She walked with him and into the scents of the earth and growing things.

“Something happened.”

He gave her a quick, sharp look, but whatever he saw on her face had him relaxing again. He reached for a knife, warmed it, and began to uncap the comb.

“What happened?”

“One of the girls—her name’s Twila. She’s about five or six, I guess. She fell. She was tree-climbing and a branch broke. She hit really hard, and her arm … Anyway, she broke her arm.”

He paused, concern renewed. “Do they need our help?”

“No. I … I healed it. Her. The arm.”

He nodded, continued to work, separating the honey, the propolis, and the beeswax. All could be used. “How?”

Automatically, Fallon got a fresh jar for the propolis.

“I just knew. It was more than I’d done before. I’ve never healed a broken bone. And she was really scared and it hurt her. She was crying for her mother, so I had to calm her down first. I put her in a trance, a light one. I’ve never done that, Mallick, but I just knew. I didn’t have to think or wonder how.”