Chapter 39: Terra

I follow him over and watch as he puts a few small weights on a bar. “You should lie here.” He points to a bench, and I lie down. He hands me the bar and our fingers brush. It feels as though the world shifts for a moment. I almost drop the bar when he pulls his hand away.

It’s much heavier than he made it look, picking it up as if it was nothing.

“Now.” Am I imagining it, or does his voice sound wobbly? “You need to lift the bar straight up and down. He places his hands carefully outside of mine and helps me find the right placement.

“Okay,” I huff. After ten or so repetitions, I feel like my chest might burst.

He makes me do it two more times, and I can’t quite lift the last one. He has to help. Then we change positions, and I use different weights to work muscles in my arms, my back, and my legs.

It sucks.

“Can I ask something?” My legs feel like the water felt. As if, without my skin to hold them together, they'd spill out and run all over the floor.

“Sure.”

“What's the point of this?”

“What do you mean?”

I gesture around at the weights. “I get why you might do this, or you know, Jesse. You could build up enough muscle to hurt someone. But me?” I squeeze my pitifully skinny arms. “This is clearly not my forte.”

Kahn sits on the bench next to me. “Right now it's not, but you can improve, just as I have. In a month, or in two, you never know what your strengths may be.”

My voice sounds embarrassingly vulnerable when I ask, “Do we have a month?”

His face falls.

I wonder whether he'll lie to me.

“I don't know what the future holds and neither do you. I do think that people with great power sometimes ignore the things that could save them in the end. I don't intend to let you do that.”

I don't argue.

“Now that we’ve done all of it, it’s time to exhaust you. Your dad wants me to drain your power down as low as I possibly can, to see what you can really do. So think of what we did with the sand, the steel balls, and the feathers. We're about to do the same, but with these.” He gestures to the walls of weights, which weigh dramatically more than the small items. I realize after a moment that he isn't kidding.

Alright.

I close my eyes again and feel for each of the weights in the room. They're heavy, and there are a lot of them, but I think I can do it. I breathe in deeply and then Lift. They all slide off their racks and rise into the air. Once they're up, hundreds of weights of different sizes, I want to Bind them into place. I'm exhausted. My hands shake, my knees bounce, and even my lip trembles. But I don’t. Instead I shift them, weaving them up and down, in and out, around and around.

Kahn stands completely still, and I wonder what he's thinking.

“You okay?” I ask.

He shakes his head, but doesn't articulate.

I slowly lower each weight back onto the rack and breathe a heavy sigh of relief when the last one is released. “What’s next?”

“I have no idea,” he says. “Are you still not wiped out?”

I smile. “I doubt I can do much more. I'm pretty tired.”

“Good. I was getting nervous. I have a new rule. When you're tired, let's not float things up above our heads. Sound okay?”

I sit down on the weight bench. “Probably a good idea.”

“How close were we to being squashed just then?”

I hold out one shaking hand. “Pretty close.”

“Your hand could be shaking from physically lifting weights, though.” He takes my hand with his own, his huge fingers sliding past my small ones.

The tremble in my lips, the shaking of my hands, it travels, up to my heart, my chest, and my stomach.

All of me quivers.

With anticipation.

I should pull away.

I should reaffirm that this is not what I want.

But what if I do want it?

I want him.

My hand shifts, our fingers interlacing, and he glances up at me with wonder in his eyes.

I look back down at our hands. I can’t figure out the physics of it, but somehow, my small, slender fingers just fit in between his large, strong ones. His skin is rough, calloused. I think of him lying on his back on the weight bench, shifting weights up and down, up and down, and my face heats. My breathing comes faster.

I close my eyes.

I shouldn’t have closed my eyes, because I’m drowning in feelings and they grow when I shut out the world. The yearning in my bones, the rhythmic pounding of my heart, and a soaring in my chest, like I could fly.

Like I could crash.

Like I don’t care which happens, as long as I do something.

Kahn shifts, leaning closer. I angle toward the heat rolling off of his body, like a daisy turns toward the sunlight, like a freezing woman cups her hands toward the fire. “I—”

Kahn presses his free hand to my lips, and I want to shove it out of the way.

“I know. You don’t want this. I haven’t forgotten.” His tone is churlish, annoyed.

I want to cover his mouth with mine and drown out his complaints forever. I want to listen to his voice in my ear for even longer.

“Duncan said you’d be hungry,” a woman’s voice says from the doorway. I spring away from Kahn so quickly that I fall to my backside on the floor.

“Are you alright?” Kahn leans toward me and offers his hand.

I scoot away from him like he’s trying to kill me, and maybe he is, unintentionally. I stand up on my own. We each grab food from the tray and stuff our mouths in silence until it’s gone. Neither of us makes eye contact. Too dangerous.

But finally, he asks, “Do you have enough strength left to practice blocks?”

“I don't know what that means.”

“Throw that knife at me, right at my chest,” he says.

“No way,” I say.

“Trust me. Throw it as hard as you can, right here.” He taps the place on his chest over his heart.

I don't want to, but he stares at me. “You can do it. Just like we practiced. Pretend it's not me. Pretend I'm a black table.”

I close my eyes.

“You have to keep your eyes open. It's important for you to see what happens.”

“Fine.” I imagine a black table in his place. It doesn't help much, but finally, I bring my arm up to my cheek like he showed me and whip the knife through the air toward his chest. It's less than an inch from penetrating his body when it shivers as though it hit something and clatters to the ground.

Kahn pushed it back. Simple. Efficient.

“It’s different than Lifting or Binding something in place. It’s a small push of power that stops or slows something. You can do it, even when you’re tired. Now you try.”

“Do not throw a knife at me,” I say.

He laughs. “We can start with a few metal balls.”

I glance back at the table and lift one eyebrow.

He smiles again. “I won't throw them very hard. For someone who got stabbed yesterday without a whimper, you're a real baby today.”

We spend the rest of the afternoon working on blocks, and I do improve. By the end, I'm blocking dozens of separate balls at once. I'm better with my eyes closed, which Kahn does not understand.

“I don’t comprehend it, but perhaps that’s okay.”

“A large part of my act with the troupe took place with a blindfold.”

Kahn taps his lip, thinking. “We should incorporate that into our normal training routine.”

“Since I'll be teaching balance, we could start there.”

He smiles at me. “Might not be a bad idea.” He glances at the windows. “But right now, it's time for dinner.”

“Right,” I say. “Did you want to come with me, and eat back at the castle?”

The smile rolls over his face.

“I’m not asking you to spend more time with me.”

His smile widens.

“I’m just offering because I wanted to show you that I appreciate your help.”

His grin is almost too big for his face.

“You know what? Never mind.”

“No, I'd like to come.”

I should not have offered. But I’m buoyant at the prospect of more time with him. My feet practically skip over the newly repaired cobblestones.

Consider him.

That’s what he asked. He wants me to make my own choices, on my own timetable, but not rule him out because the universe likes him.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

We aren't more than a dozen feet from the front gate when I hear the pounding of hooves. Dozens of riders are running straight up the steps toward the main gate. Kahn pulls me aside just in time and the horses run past me. We jog toward the men who are now dismounting and trying to calm their winded horses.

“What's going on?” Kahn asks.

“They're here,” the closest man says. “Close the gates!”

As I run toward the gates, I see thousands of grim-faced men climbing up the road toward the Castle. At the front, one of the scariest-looking men I've ever seen sits atop a massive black horse. His hulking muscles, black hair, and shaggy black beard would be scary enough, but his bright eyes glow with an eerie champagne light and I realize he's Lifting something. It must be something bad, too. It makes no sense because I've never seen him before, but I hate him deep down in my bones. I can sense that he's evil. I scrounge up every bit of strength I can muster and Lift the wheel to raise the drawbridge. It flies up and slams shut only a hundred feet in front of the terrifying man I assume is Devlin Rochester.

The man leading the army that has come to kill me.

“Why did you do that?” Kahn asks. “Your eyes lit up like a torch. Now he knows exactly who you are.”

“He already knew I was here,” I say. “He may as well know what I look like.”

Because I’m not sure how I know this, but I do, deep down in my marrow, in the same place I can sense that he’s evil.

I’m going to kill Devlin Rochester if it’s the last thing I do.