The Skylighter (The Keepers' Chronicles Book 2) by Becky Wallace

Author:Becky Wallace [Wallace, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2016-03-22T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 45

* * *

Leão

As a child Leão had had horrific nightmares—as many children with a strong Spirit affinity often did. To help him sleep, his grandmother had once given him a handful of acorns. Her voice was soft, her hands tender as she pressed them into his palm.

“Can you keep a secret, Leão?”

Still shaking from his most recent dream, he blinked away his tears and frowned at the fistful of nuts.

“Do you know how we light the streets of Olinda?”

“No.”

She harrumphed and pressed her finger to one of the acorns. “Certain items—naturally occurring things like pebbles and pinecones, things that haven’t been changed by our hands—can hold a small amount of essência.”

With a tap of her finger, an acorn began to glow a dull red.

“H-how did you do that?”

Her face creased with a smile—one of the warm ones she reserved for moments when they were alone. Then she taught him the complicated and secret process of imbuing the acorn with the proper amounts of Fire, for light, and Air, to keep the magic from expanding beyond the shell.

Johanna’s necklace must have been created through a much more difficult sort of spell to be able to transmit images to the glass. And the collars . . . the metal was heated and shaped, taken from its natural form and turned into something else. According to his grandmother, that should have made it impossible for the beryllium to hold essência, let alone drain and transfer it. He guessed it was some property peculiar to the metal.

For two days he stayed far away from the pulsing sense of power, and anyone else whose essência he could feel, by sticking to the poorest parts of town and the very edges of the city. Many homes on the farthest northern border of Cruzamento, the ones closest to Roraima, were abandoned. It was considered bad luck to live so close to what had once been the kingdom’s seat, and many people complained about the snakes that seemed to find a way into the homes and businesses, closets and beds.

During those days he poured every ounce of his essência into small, unnoticeable items and let his energy recover overnight.

On the third day he snuck into the city—creeping past the dozens of soldiers who tried to mix with the merchants and salespeople—drawing closer to the center of the power. He blended in, another fighting man visiting one of the pubs during his off-duty hours. And he hoped that with all the flitting notes of essência from the Keepers and slaves, the addition of his would go unnoticed.

It was part luck and part miracle that he saw Pira, stumbling and dirty, leave the blacksmith’s shop at dawn. His first impulse was to rush to her side, but he kept his distance, watching from an upper room of an inn as she staggered to the well and dumped a bucket of water over her head. She dropped to the well’s edge, head down in an unfamiliar posture of exhaustion and despair.

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