The vatnavera stays still, eyeing me warily, a puffy white snowpetal half sticking out of its mouth. I creep carefully forward. If I don’t startle it, it just might let me grab some—
“Hey!” a loud voice yells. “Get away from my snowpetals!”
Johann charges out from the brush to my left, heading straight toward the vatnavera.
“No, don’t—” I say, but it’s too late.
Everything happens fast. One second, Johann is charging toward the vatnavera and its flowers, reaching out to grab a fistful of the snowpetals. The next second, the vatnavera is shooting upward, its body elongating and enlarging simultaneously in a burst of speed. I blink, and its body is as wide as I am, rising a good five feet out of the water, its tail thrashing. Its head aims for Johann, its massive horns gleaming, its mouth open to reveal rows of newly grown teeth. Johann screams as the suddenly monstrous-looking creature lashes toward him. I reach out with my magic on instinct, wanting to intervene somehow, but it all happens too quickly. In his panic, Johann lunges away from the vatnavera and falls headfirst into the pond. Which is the absolute last place he should go, because the now-massive vatnavera is thrashing around wildly within it.
“Johann!” I yell, but I can’t see him through all of the churning, spraying water. The vatnavera is frantic now—it wanted Johann to turn away, not to plunge headfirst into its home.
I do the only thing I can think of and reach for my gift, pushing everything I have toward the lake. I find Johann’s life force easily and grab hold, trying to tug him forward. Humans can’t be manipulated by sheer magic quite so easily as animals or plants can, but if Johann’s smart, he’ll cooperate with my magic instead of fighting it. As my gift pulls Johann upward, it simultaneously sinks into the water around him, forming a current to buffer him up. With the very last vestiges of my gift remaining, I try to nudge the vatnavera’s life spark in the opposite direction of Johann’s, encouraging it to move across the pond.
“Bryn!” a voice shouts. Ari crashes through the trees, his eyes wide.
“Calm it down!” I yell, my voice straining as much as my magic as I try to haul Johann out of the water.
I don’t have the energy to explain further, but Ari takes one look at the panicking vatnavera and understands. His hands glow with the yellow warmth of his gift, and within moments the vatnavera’s thrashing slows, its body calming. It reacts to the tug of my magic now too, gliding closer to Ari.
Johann resurfaces, gasping, and I lean toward the edge of the pond, offering him a hand up. He shudders for breath, then ignores my hand and hauls himself onto the embankment. The vatnavera, meanwhile, is shrinking back down, calmed both by Ari’s gift and Johann’s retreat from the pond.
“Are you okay?” I ask Johann.
“ ’Course I am,” he says gruffly. “I did that on purpose. I wanted to tackle that thing and scare it away so I could get the stupid flowers.”
“That ‘thing’ is a vatnavera,” I say, “and there’s no need to tackle it. It won’t hurt you.”
“Are you kidding me? Did you see how big it got? It nearly gored me with its horns and its teeth! If I didn’t have such a strong warrior gift, I couldn’t have fended it off.”
I roll my eyes. “It wouldn’t have done anything to you if you hadn’t scared it, and your warrior gift didn’t do anything.”
Johann opens his mouth to argue further, but Ari interrupts. “Bryn,” he says quietly, “maybe a little less arguing and a little more winning the competition? Come help me with these.”
Johann and I glance down at the snowpetals at Ari’s feet. Several of them are in pieces, having been torn by all the movement of the vatnavera or else eaten by it. And Seeker Agnar said they have to be intact.
Only two perfect snowpetals remain.
All three of us reach this conclusion at exactly the same time.
Johann and Ari both lunge forward—Johann reaching for the flowers and Ari trying to block him. It’s a fight I’m not sure Ari can win. Johann has a warrior gift, and I suspect he’s about to use it on Ari regardless of what the rules say. I have to do something. But I can’t grab the flowers myself, not with the boys in the way.
I reach for my gift. But my magic is too drained from the encounter with the forest and pulling Johann from the water. There’s nothing but a few sparks left. I’m empty.
I can barely summon enough energy to reach out to the plants around me. I seek out the nearest life source, a tiny spark, and draw on it. My magic blooms a little, but it’s not nearly enough to do anything. I need more.
I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, the way Ari showed me. The rhythm of magic flows around me, alerting me to all the little sparks of life here. I draw on them one by one, pulling on the grass at my feet and letting its energy feed my own. At the same time, Johann collides with Ari, knocking him to the ground and throwing a punch. Ari fights back, pulling Johann onto the ground too, and within seconds they’re a blur of fists and flailing limbs.
Some of my energy restored, I cast around for something, anything I can use to…
The snowpetals are bright spots of light, infused with magic that pulses through their life forces. Nearby, the vatnavera’s head, considerably smaller than it was the last time I saw it, pops out of the water, watching the boys fight with wide eyes.
Which gives me an idea.
Ari and Johann are between me and snowpetals on land. But not in the water.
I kick off my boots and slip into the pond, the icy water making goose bumps rise on my skin. It’s shallow here, coming just under my shoulders. A few feet away from me, the vatnavera has frozen in alarm. I’m an intruder in his home, and he’s trying to figure out how best to get me to leave. For a split second, I wish I had Ari’s empathy gift so that I could soothe the vatnavera’s emotions.
But I’m not an empath. I’m a naturalist. I’m a good one. And it’s time to prove it.
“Hello,” I say quietly, letting my gift brush softly against the vatnavera once more. “I’m not going to hurt you.” The vatnavera still looks wary, but he isn’t growing in size, so I take that as a good sign and keep talking, letting my magic interact with his as I do. “This is a pretty nice pond you have here. Sorry to disturb it. I just need to walk right over there, okay?”
I step sideways, moving in the direction of the snowpetals while keeping the same amount of distance between myself and the vatnavera. It blinks, uncertain, as I take another step.
“You’re doing great,” I tell it. “Just let me come right over here.…”
The vatnavera blinks again and disappears, shrinking back into the water. I can’t see it, but I can sense its energy retreating to the other side of the pond. It’s clearly decided I’m not a threat that needs to be scared away, but it also doesn’t want to risk being near me. Which is fine, because it’s not what I need right now.
My wet clothes weigh me down as I rush the last few steps, reaching the far embankment just below the snowpetals. The puffy white flowers are anchored deep in the earth, and I’m afraid ripping them out might tear the roots too badly. Seeker Agnar said they needed to be intact. So I yank my pocketknife out and use it to dig up the plant. Its stark white roots stick out among all the dirt, making it easy enough to avoid cutting them as I free them from the earth.
The first intact snowpetal is in my hands when Johann breaks away from Ari and stumbles toward me. “Get away, Bryn!” Johann yells. “Those are mine!”
I don’t have time to dig the second snowpetal up properly before Johann gets to it, but trying to yank it up might damage it. I could just take my prize and leave, but then I won’t have anything to trade with Ari for the gyrpuff feather. I look at the other snowpetals, just to make sure that there isn’t another whole one, but they’ve all been munched by the vatnavera—
But thinking about the vatnavera gives me another idea.
Just as Johann lunges forward to yank the snowpetal out of the ground, I flood it with my magic. Please wo
rk, please work, please work.…
Usually, when I use my gift on plants, it’s in order to make them grow. I’ve never tried to do the opposite—to make them shrink. I don’t know if I can do it. But I have to try.
And it works. Instead of strengthening and enlarging the plant’s life force, I compress it, making it into a tighter, smaller mass.
Right before Johann’s eyes, the snowpetal seems to disappear. His hands, reaching out for it, grasp nothing but air.
It hasn’t disappeared, of course. It’s just very, very small, too tiny to be seen among all the other plants growing up along the embankment. Like the vatnavera, it’s hiding from its enemy. Or in this case, my enemy.
“Where’d it go?” Johann spins around, looking this way and that, as if the snowpetal will somehow materialize behind him. When it doesn’t, he turns back to me. “What’d you do, Bryn?”
I don’t answer; I’m too busy shrinking the snowpetal already in my hand so that it will fit snugly inside my palm, where I can keep it away from Johann.
He lets out a frustrated yell and kicks the dirt, sending it spraying into the water. Red light bursts abruptly around his hands as he calls on his warrior gift, but it won’t do him any good. Warrior gifts can’t detect the subtleties in life forces. His magic can’t tell the difference between a miniaturized snowpetal and a blade of grass.
But naturalist gifts can, and I know exactly where the snowpetal is, even without being able to see it.
Tucking the other snowpetal and my knife into the safety of my pocket, I scramble out of the pond as Johann drops to his knees and runs his hands over the ground, trying to feel the flower. He cries out as a sharp bramble stings his hand. I use the moment of his distraction to swoop down and carefully pluck the snowpetal from the ground. The entire flower is no larger than my fingernail.
As I step away from Johann, I notice something else lying in the grass, right at the edge of the water. A single vatnavera scale, gleaming in the sun.
It’s not one of the items we’re supposed to be looking for, but a real Seeker would never just leave a magical object lying around. I scoop it up and tuck it into my pocket next to the second snowpetal.
I run up the side of the embankment, leaving Johann to yell angrily at the dirt. Ari is sitting a few feet away, pinching his nose. Blood is smeared along his upper lip. “Are you okay?” I ask.
He shrugs, lowering his hand. “Nothing that won’t heal. Did you get it?”
I grin. With a nudge of encouragement from my gift, the snowpetal explodes, growing rapidly back to its original size in the palm of my hand. Ari’s eyes widen. “You shrank it? That’s so cool!”
“The way you calmed down the vatnavera was pretty cool too,” I say, but my cheeks flush with pride. I’ve never shrunk a plant before. I hope the Seekers were watching. I hope the whole village was watching.
I hand Ari the snowpetal, and he gazes at it in wonder. “You got one too, right?” he says.
“Yep. It’s in my pocket.”
“I have something for you,” Ari says, reaching into his own pocket and withdrawing two large black feathers. He drops one of them into my palm.
“How’d you find these so fast?”
“From what you taught me.” He grins. “After I narrowed it down to this region, based on the amount of magic here, I looked for rock formations like the cliffs where gyrpuffs would make nests, just like that time we tracked them. Knowing what to look for, the tall rocks weren’t hard to find. There weren’t any actual gyrpuffs, but there was a little cave with some feathers inside.”
“Brilliant,” I say. The tips of Ari’s ears turn red, and I smile. “Ready to win this competition?”
Ari grins. “Let’s do it.”
“Not so fast,” says a loud and increasingly familiar voice from behind us.
Ari and I whirl around. Johann has composed himself and is trudging toward us up the embankment. His hands are glowing bright red with the strength of his warrior gift.
“Only one of us is going to take those snowpetals back to the Seekers,” he says. “And it’s going to be me.”
SEVENTEEN
I don’t think so,” Ari says. His tone is calm and even, but his jaw is tight. “We got to them first.”
Johann sneers at him. “How’s your nose, empath?” He raises his hands. “You think I can’t make you give them to me?”
I glare at him. “This is against the rules. You can’t threaten us.”
“What are you going to do about it, little girl? Go crying to the Seekers and tell them I was too mean to you? Tell them you couldn’t handle competing with the big, bad boys?”
My jaw clenches. “No. I’m going to tell them you’re a cheat.”
“And so will I,” Ari says evenly. “It’ll be your word against both of ours.”
But Johann just rolls his eyes. “The word of an empath and a girl? I’ll take that chance.”
I glance at Ari. I’m not sure that either of us can fight Johann directly right now. Ari’s still bleeding from their last encounter, and my magic is almost depleted. And besides, neither of us is a warrior.
But Ari doesn’t look afraid. He just looks angry. Turning to me and speaking quickly under his breath, he says, “I could use my gift to calm him down, make him less aggressive. But using my gift on another competitor is against the rules. And I don’t know if the Seekers can see us right now or not.”
I nod. “We’ll just have to outsmart him, then.”
Thinking fast, I pretend to reach into my pocket and draw something out. I pinch my thumb and forefinger together like I’m holding something very small. Johann didn’t see me grow the snowpetal back to its original size. For all he knows, it’s still shrunken.
“Here it is,” I say boldly, waving my hand around so Johann can’t get too close a look. “If you think you can grow it back to size, you can have it.”
“Hand it over,” Johann growls.
I wind my arm back and make a throwing motion, acting like I’m tossing the snowpetal out into the pond. “Go fetch,” I say.
Johann turns, scanning the water, and Ari and I take advantage of his distraction. We run for it.
Johann isn’t fooled for long and races after us. My wet clothes weigh me down, and Ari’s nose is still bleeding. We’re going to need help to outrun Johann.
Quickly I push my gift into the plants surrounding us. I repeat the trick I learned earlier, nurturing the plants, and they clear a path through the woods ahead so that we can run faster. My gift is still depleted from using it so much, but the life forces in all the plants around us give me enough strength to manage it. And Ari helps—he learned the same trick while trying to find the lake, and much to my annoyance, the trees respond to his empathy gift just as well as they do to my nature gift.
I cut straight for the nearest edge of the arena, and within a minute we break free of the woods and reach the stands. Ari points out where the Seekers are sitting near the top of the arena, easily identifiable in their forest-green cloaks, and we race up the stairs toward them.
The Council of Seekers sits in a row: Larus, Freyr, Ludvik, and Agnar. Seeker Larus is the first to speak when we both stop before them, trying to catch our breath. “Have you completed the task?”
“Yes,” Ari says, wiping self-consciously at the blood under his nose.
“Both of you?” says Seeker Agnar, his eyebrows rising.
“Yes,” I say firmly, reaching into my pocket. Ari and I both produce the snowpetals and feathers. I hand mine to Seeker Larus, and Ari hands his to Seeker Freyr. The Seekers examine them carefully for a moment and exchange glances with each other.
“Congratulations,” Seeker Larus says. “Both of you have passed.”
“Though of course we must wait until the other competitors have finished before determining if you will move on to the next trial,” Seeker Agnar adds.
“Can you tell us how many other competitors have finished so far?” I ask.
The
Seekers exchange glances again. “Only one,” says Seeker Larus. “You may wait in the arena if you wish to observe more of the competition, or you may go home and find out the results later.”
Ari nods, and Seeker Ludvik tilts his head. “What happened to your nose, young man?”
Ari glances at me. This is our opening to tell them about Johann. About how he started the fight with Ari and how he threatened us both. But Johann’s words are echoing in my head.
I don’t want the Seekers to think I couldn’t handle myself, that I let Johann get the best of me, that I have to tattle on him in order to win. Besides, it’s not like Ari and I can complain about others cheating when we’ve been secretly hiding a dragon and flew into the Realm once. From the look in Ari’s eyes, he seems to be thinking the same.
“I tripped while climbing the rocks to the get the gyrpuff feathers,” Ari says. “Just scraped myself up a little.”
Seeker Larus nods and raises his hand. The blue light of his gift glows, and within seconds Ari’s nose stops bleeding. “That should do the trick,” he says.
“Thank you,” Ari stammers.
Seeker Larus looks like he’s about to dismiss us, so I quickly reach into my pocket and withdraw the vatnavera scale. “There’s one more thing,” I say, holding it out to him. “I know this wasn’t on the list of items we were supposed to find, but I happened to grab a vatnavera scale while getting the snowpetals.”
Seeker Larus and Seeker Freyr both raise their eyebrows, and Ari gapes at me for a second before collecting himself. Seeker Larus examines the scale. “An excellent find,” he says, and the smallest of smiles crosses his face. “Well done.”
I grin. “Thank you.”
Seeker Larus dismisses us, and Ari and I slip into the stands, finding an empty row near the top.
“Should we try to find our parents?” Ari asks, gazing around the arena.
We probably should—I’m not sure if they’ve seen anything that’s happened and know that I passed or not—but I’m too tired to move. “Let’s watch from up here for a minute,” I say. “It’s a pretty good vantage point.”
Seekers of the Wild Realm Page 15