When she was a kid, listening at her grandfather’s knee, she used to imagine herself as Jotham. That’s me, she would tell herself. We are one in the same. She was born with the same disease as he was, and wanted to save people’s lives as well. Because, the truth was, with her condition, she didn’t have much time to make an imprint on this world. And if she died young, trying to help people, it wouldn’t be much of a tragedy since she never had that much time to begin with.
In the quiet of the table, her voice came out as a mouse as she announced, “I’ll do it.”
At once Logan’s hand came down on the wood in frustration, but it was lost amid the friendly cheering of the other three.
“That’s our Norry!” Archer exclaimed, patting her on the back.
“You’ll be doing the whole kingdom a great favor,” Ashlin assured her.
The well-wishes of the first two went in and out of her ears quickly, for it was only Mason’s reaction she cared about. She held her breath as he caught her gaze across the table and nodded in appreciation. A look and a nod, and then he was gone, turning back to Ashlin to continue with the rest of the planning. It seemed nothing she did would ever earn her his attention.
*
When the team had left, leaving only Mason and Logan inside their house once more, Logan decided that it was time to give his brother a piece of his mind. Mason had gone back to his room, saying that he needed to retrieve some tools so that he could start working on cutting the grate, when Logan appeared in his doorway.
“You know you can’t treat her like this!” he exclaimed, his voice rising in anger.
Mason looked up from his tools, responding coolly, “It was her choice to take the job.”
Logan shook his head in disbelief. “You’re a blind idiot, you know that!” He pointed down the hallway to the front door, saying, “Can’t you see that something is wrong with her?! She is in trouble, and you’re too busy to notice!”
“Logan,” he snapped, throwing his tools down. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t talk to me about her.”
“Oh, that’s the solution!” he said incredulously. “Just don’t talk about her, don’t mention the past, don’t let any bowls into the house. Well let me tell you something; I’m sick of eating soup from a plate! You need to wake up, Mason! This isn’t working! You may put on a brave face for the team, but it doesn’t fool me. You’re a mess inside!”
“Logan, stop talking,” he warned, gripping his hand into a fist.
“What? Are you gonna hit me? Just because you’re hurt inside does not make it okay to start hurting others. And it certainly doesn’t make it okay to hurt her. Especially her,” he added, weakly pointing to the door once more. “Not after everything she’s done for you. You know she gave up going back home to live with her family for you. It wasn’t to stay and fight with the rebellion, to work as a Shadow because she just loved doing that so much. It was for you! And only you! Let me tell you, if someone did that for me, I would…”
“Logan please,” Mason begged, gripping his head in his hands so tightly his knuckles were turning white. “Please stop talking. Please just stop…just stop talking.”
He stopped and looked sympathetically at his brother who was curling into himself on the floor. “Mason,” he spoke, gentler now. “I miss them too.”
“Yeah, we all miss mom and dad a whole bunch, now can you please leave me alone now?”
Staring down at his younger brother, Logan knew he was hiding something from him. He knew that he was trying to battle a monster of a problem all by himself, but he didn’t have the heart to press the secret from him.
Going to the door, he closed it behind him, hearing the muffled sobs of his baby brother behind the wood.
Chapter 16
The next morning, Mason and Ashlin found Norabel and informed her that they had cut a hole in the grate last night, and that she could begin her reconnaissance mission whenever she was ready. So, that evening, Norabel found her stomach twisting into knots as she wondered how in the world she was going to do this. If she managed to make it through the water grate, then what? Maybe pose inside the castle as a maid. But what if someone recognized her? Or worse, what if they realized she didn’t belong? Logan was right; they would send her off to Arkadiak in an instant. Still, she had promised to do this, and she couldn’t back down on her word.
When the sun began to set, she started to head over to the stronghold, figuring that she should get back home before it got too late in case Fletcher decided to show up at her house. She was still a good block away from the stronghold, letting thoughts of imprisonment and death by hanging fill her mind, when suddenly a face in the crowd gave her hope. Standing off to the side of the road, laughing with a few other officers around him, was the young man Kade.
Norabel hurried ahead on the road, planning to catch his attention. Before she could raise her voice to call out to him, he spotted her, and his face alighted with recognition.
“Norabel!” he called out cheerfully, waving her over.
“Hello Kade! How are you?” she said, genuinely happy to see him.
Coming up to their group, Kade turned to the other officers, saying, “Boys, this is Norabel, the girl that taught us the wonders of Shadow Snapper.”
“Oh, this is Norabel!” one of them commented.
“I see why you played so many games now,” another remarked playfully.
Norabel smiled innocently at them and waited for Kade to give her the introductions. One of the officers, however, needed no introduction, for she instantly recognized him as Creason, Delia’s boyfriend. She had seen him on a number of occasions, standing outside the Potter’s Workhouse, waiting for Delia, though she doubted if he had ever seen her.
“So what are you boys doing outside of a dress shop?” Norabel inquired once the introductions had been made. She pointed a slender hand up to the sign behind them, and they seemed to grow embarrassed at that.
Kade punched Creason’s shoulder, answering, “Our buddy Creason here forgot to buy his girl a present for her birthday. And it’s tomorrow! So he’s enlisted our sorry backsides to go running all over the village to try and pick something!”
“Your girlfriend’s Delia, right?” she asked Creason.
“Yeah,” he replied, a look of hope growing on his face. “How did you know?”
“Oh, she works in the same building as me.”
“So you know her?” he asked eagerly. “I mean, you know what she likes and what she doesn’t.”
She smiled and tilted her head to look at the dress shop behind them. “Well, I know that she doesn’t like clothes that she hasn’t picked out herself.”
“I told you!” Kade exclaimed, bumping him in the arm again.
Before Creason’s spirits could sink any further, she quickly added, “And I know she has a bit of a sweet-tooth.”
“That’s brilliant!” Creason exclaimed. “I’ll just go to the bakery and get her…”
“The bakery’s closed, genius,” an officer named Sander pointed out.
“Well there goes that brilliant idea,” Kade said, kicking the dirt under his foot.
“Don’t you have access to a kitchen in the stronghold?” Norabel asked.
“Yeah,” Kade answered. “But us making something…we’re liable to set the whole place on fire!”
“Well I could help out…a little,” she said, knowing that it wasn’t strange for officers to take girls up to the stronghold.
“When you say a little,” Kade started to ask, “do you mean really doing the whole thing yourself, you’re just saying it like that so we don’t get our feelings hurt?”
She laughed at his question and nodded in response.
“Oh! You are truly the best, girl I met two minutes ago!” Creason said, grabbing ahold of her.
Norabel laughed cheerfully again, and Kade put a hand on Creason’s shoulder, forcing him back. “Yeah, alright, she’s the best. Now give her some space.”
With
Kade linking her arm through his, he led the way down the street, and their merry little party made its way towards the stronghold. As they were walking, relief flooded through her like a river, and she silently thanked her guardian Albatross for sending her a friend in Kade. Now if someone saw her inside the castle, she would be greeted as a friend instead of imprisoned as a treasonous spy.
When they went through the main stronghold doors, she was prepared to keep her eyes alert, ready to make note of every hallway and room they passed. However, as they strolled down the main hall, she soon found that it wasn’t necessary. Kade began to point out everything there was to see, and anything he missed, one of the other guys chimed in. It seemed as if the group of guys was proud to show off their home, and it became a sort of game to tell Norabel the next bit of information.
As they walked, Norabel learned that the main hall branched off into four sections. To the west was the mess hall, north of that was the stock rooms and kitchens. To the east was the stairwell that led directly up to one of the spires, which was where a lot of the senior officers lived. However, many of the officers lived at ground level or below, at least when they were starting out. Kade motioned to that door with a disgusted look, and then promptly whisked her away to the northern portion of the castle.
They passed through several corridors, meeting a handful of other officers on the way. Some of them even chose to join them, deciding that it might be interesting to watch a baker and candy-maker at work. With each new person that they passed, Norabel found herself holding her breath, wondering if Hunter might be one of them. Surely he had to be in the castle somewhere. But, if she came across him, what would she say? She could already picture it in her head. Kade would call him over, happily introducing her, and she would stand there mutely, not being able to speak. On second thought, maybe it was best if she didn’t see him.
When they finally made their way into the kitchens, Creason shooed away two of the workers that were idly chatting inside, and set Norabel in front of a bowl and a wooden spoon.
“Okay,” Norabel said, looking out to the guys that had gathered around her. “Well, I’m gonna need sugar and a fire.”
“Oh, I’ll get it!” several guys called out at once.
She stifled a smile, thinking how oddly pleasant it was to see them all so excited. A thought occurred to her that, although being given the job of a Pax official was considered an honor, it was also something that was forced on them, usually through familial ties. But what if they didn’t want it in the first place? They were never given the choice to be anything else. She was sure there must have been a few out there that thought about doing something else.
A moment later, a sack of sugar was placed in front of her, and two officers were over at the hearth, building up a strong fire.
She was about to open up the sack of sugar when Kade called out, “Ooh! I’ll be right back. I’m gonna go get Emmett and the others! They’ll want to watch as well.”
Before he could run out of there, she called out, “Ask Finn if he has any colored Snapper!”
The faces around her lit up at its mention.
“Colored Snapper!” Kade repeated, a grin spreading on his face.
She nodded. “We’ll need it before the night’s over.”
“Go!” several of the guys urged Kade.
“Raid Finn’s rooms if you have to!”
When he had gone, she turned to Creason, saying, “One of the neatest desserts my mom taught me to make was called Spinning Sugar. It’s an ordinary sweet bread, but with a pretty amazing surprise on top.”
“Sounds great,” Creason said, clapping his hands. “Let’s do this!”
With that, she got to work starting the sweet bread. Though she did most of the mixing and measuring, whenever she asked for something, a young man was always right there to see that she got it. Sometimes they tried to get it to her a little too fast, and ended up spilling some of the ingredients on the floor. The whole thing was done so quickly that, by the time Kade came back with the rest of the guys she had met by the stables, she had already placed the bread into the oven.
“We didn’t miss it, did we?” Emmett called out when he saw her placing something into the stone oven above the fire.
“Finn took forever trying to find every last ounce of colored Snapper he had,” Kade complained.
“I think I got it all,” Finn said, holding a lumpy bag up to his chest.
Norabel thanked him and then asked the guys to find several small, shallow cups. She got to work melting down sugar with a little water, and when it was ready, she brought the pot over to the cups. Holding the sugar-coated spoon over the cups, she drizzled the syrup on the inside, making an intricate crisscrossing design.
Handing the sugar to Creason, she asked, “Do you want to try?”
“What…I just,” he stuttered, clumsily taking the cup.
“Just like this,” she said, guiding his hand to drizzle the sugar in properly.
After that, nearly every guy wanted to try his hand at it, the mystery of what they were doing wide in their eyes. Soon more cups were brought over, and they had nearly a whole table full of them.
When there were no more cups to be had, Norabel announced, “Now here’s the really fun part.”
She took one of the cups and gently turned it upside-down. Then, lifting it back up, a small domed molding of spun sugar was left standing up. This elicited several exclamations from the boys, most unaware that sugar could even do that. Norabel instructed them on how to turn the cups over, and the guys took their turns trying it out. Some of them cracked, and some came out in strange shapes, but she assured those with looks of devastation on their faces that it was only natural for them to do that, and they would have more than enough good ones for Delia’s present.
Setting five of the best sugar domes aside for the sweet bread, she went back to the main table and picked five more domes to work with, placing them on a stone slab that had been normally set aside for grinding up wheat. She then asked Finn to pick five colors from his Snapper pile, and waited for him to line them up.
“This is what makes Spinning Sugar so cool,” she told them.
Taking each sugar dome, she lifted it up and dipped it into a pile of colored Snapper, making sure to sprinkle some at the very top. When each had been coated in a separate color, she asked four guys to volunteer to light them at the same time.
“It’s very important that you light them from the bottom,” she said, readying some Snapper in her fingers as well. “Otherwise they won’t spin.”
The guys nodded, pinching the Snapper in their hands as the rest of the officers around them craned their necks to see.
“On three,” she said. “Ready? One…two…three!”
At once they snapped their fingers, sending the bottoms of all five sugar domes alight with color. But the Snapper didn’t just make them shine with color, it made them pop and vibrate and spin, moving faster and faster as the sugar burned up. Colorful embers sizzled up the domes until they all burned up, leaving a rainbow design on the stone underneath.
The crowd of young men was astounded. The second that the show was over, they called for more sugar domes to be brought so they could do it again. As the sugars lit up a second, third, and fourth time, the guys cheered and picked a color to burn up the slowest, making fun of a color that might have burned up particularly fast.
Much like the time when she had been playing Shadow Snapper with them, Norabel found herself enjoying the whole situation immensely. It made her happy to fill others with such joy, and it gave her hope to realize that not all Pax officials were the evil, unfeeling creatures Mason made them out to be.
The guys were in the middle of lighting their six round of Spinning Sugar when suddenly the door to the kitchens opened, and a tall man stepped in.
“What is going on in here?” he boomed out.
Norabel’s eyes flew to the kitchen entrance, and she recognized the man as the tall officer that had
confiscated the Albatross Seed during the house raid on Iris’s home. Not only that, he was Fletcher’s boss, a man severe enough to even have a hard-hearted leacher afraid of him. Though she was hidden by the guys around her, she felt the urge to duck her head, hoping that he would not spot her in the crowd.
“Well?” he demanded. “Speak!”
A few of the officers in the group flinched as he yelled. It was clear that most of them were afraid of him. A heavy hand of guilt came down on Norabel’s shoulders, for it was her fault they were in this situation.
“We were just baking sir,” Kade announced bravely, taking a step away from the group.
“And does it require you to make such a ruckus, this baking?”
“Well, no sir,” Kade responded, glancing back to the group. “We were only…”
“Who is that you have with you?” the man asked abruptly, craning his neck to better see into their crowd.
Norabel instantly felt a hot wave of fear come over her. The man had seen her! What if he recognized her from before? What if he decided to red-flag her?
“She’s just a friend,” Kade said, turning back to the man to try and appease him. “She was helping us bake.”
“It’s my girl’s birthday to…” Creason started to volunteer, but trailed off when he saw the scathing look on the older man’s face.
“I don’t care if it’s wretching Guardian Amias’s birthday! You will have a sense of dignity and stop chittering about like a flock of gaggling chickens! Or I will have each one of you horse-whipped until you can no longer stand!” He angrily turned to the door, but then spun back around and pointed to the stone slab they were gathered around, yelling, “And clean that up!”
With that, the man was gone, slamming the door behind him and leaving the kitchen in silent sobriety. For a minute, a cold mist seemed to hang over the kitchen like a blanketing winter fog. The joyful spark of the Spinning Sugar seemed a whole season away.
However, the tension in the room didn’t last long as one of the officers commented, “He’s just mad cause he doesn’t have any real horses to whip anymore.”
Chasing Shadows (Saving Galerance, Book 1) Page 20