CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5

SLADE

Age 8

“Slade!”

I look down at Ryatt, his chubby legs scrabbling as he tries and fails to climb up the tree after me. I knew he was going to try to follow me up here. But every time he sees that he can’t, he starts whining like a baby, scaring all the birds away until I come down.

“Slade!”

Knowing I can’t keep ignoring him, I roll up the sleeves of my shirt and scratch at my arms. “I’ll be back,” I tell the little nestling.

It chirps at me.

When I hear Ryatt scrabbling again below, I lean over my branch, moving aside some of the brown, dead leaves. “You can’t come up here. You’re too little.”

His face rumples with anger as he stares up at me. “Am not.”

“You are,” I tell him. “Besides, you’re not allowed to climb trees yet.”

He drops his feet to the ground again, just so he can stomp one of them in a fit. His socks are rolled down unevenly, both of them covered in grass stains. Mother always clucks her tongue when we come in with our white socks streaked with grass, but tells us that it’s the same color as our eyes, so at least it matches.

I swipe some sweat off my forehead and sigh, abandoning my tree branch so I can jump down next to him. “Happy?”

He nods. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.” But now that he’s mentioned it, I’m hungry too. “Come on. I bet Cook will give us something.”

“It’s hot,” Ryatt whines.

“It’s summer, stupid,” I tell him with a snicker.

He shoots me an angry look. “I’m gonna tell.”

“No, you’re not.” I grin over at him, because Ryatt and I never tattle on each other. It’s our rule.

He shrugs.

The two of us head toward the estate. Now that I’m not under the shade of the tree anymore, I realize just how hot it really is. No wonder Ryatt’s face is all ruddy and his black hair is sticking up with sweat. I probably look the same.

I got done with my lessons earlier, and the nursemaid let Ryatt come outside for fresh air, so we’ve been out here for a while. I don’t know how long. I get distracted when I check on the bird nests.

“Let’s go to the pond!” Ryatt says out of the blue, just as we’re almost to the shrubs.

I shoot him a look. “You just said you’re starving.”

“Pond!”

“Fine,” I relent with a groan. “But just for a little. Then we’re going in to eat.”

Ryatt nods and starts racing down the hill. I run after him, pretending like he’s faster, and he laughs with a screech. We run around to the side of the estate, making it about halfway before Ryatt’s legs get tired and he has to stop.

“I’m thirsty,” he whines.

“I’ll dunk your head in the pond then.”

He scowls at me, but I laugh and nudge him right in the ribs where I know he’s ticklish. He tries to fight it for a second, but he loses in a fit of squirmy giggles.

Past the house are the stables, and just on the other side of that is the pond. We pass by the paddock where a couple of Father’s horses are standing around, grazing on the grass.

I think nothing of it at first.

Thwack.

It sounds like our stablemaster whenever he uses the riding crop on one of the horses. I hear the slap on the hindquarters, the swift whack of correction.

Thwack.

Ryatt doesn’t notice a thing either.

But I stop for some reason, my hand shooting out to my brother’s arm so I can stop him too. “Hold on.”

“Why?” he whines.

I scratch my arm. “Just stay here for a sec.”

He frowns, and I know he’s going to argue, but luckily, one of the horses comes over to the fence just then and distracts him. He climbs up on the fence and starts to pet it, and I immediately hurry forward. But when I pass the stable, there’s no one inside.

Thwack.

I whip my head to the right, my feet carrying me forward.

And then they jolt to a stop.

It’s not the stablemaster. It’s not a crop. It’s not a horse.

It’s my father, standing over my mother, the two of them against the outside wall of the stable. I can’t figure out what I’m seeing right away, so I just stand there and watch.

But then my father’s hand comes down, and he slaps my mother so hard that she falls down onto the ground. His mouth is moving, hissing out angry words, but I can’t hear them.

Shock freezes me in place.

There’s a loud sound in my ears. Or maybe the sound is in my blood, because I can hear it andfeel it at the same time. My back itches. My arms feel like ants are crawling all over them. My veins feel cold. Even my head feels weird.

For a second, I’m just standing there like a statue, feeling and hearing. My blood, my skin, it’s so loud I think I might pass out.

But then my father raises his hand again. My mother ducks her head. And I get so mad that it mixes with the noise and all of it just...bursts.

Before my father can bring his hand down again, I’m screaming at him. “Stop!”

I move faster than I can think, and then I’m shoving him with all my might. There’s a look of shock on his face as I push him, but I look at him with hate. So maybe hate is stronger than shock, and that’s why I’m able to make his body slam into the stable wall.

But…I didn’t think hate was strong enough to bring down a wall.

The wooden stable was built solid and strong, but somehow, the wall collapses as soon as he hits it.

The wall falls in, making my father fall with it, and I watch as the wood disintegrates, tiny splinters puffing up into the air like dust as he goes crashing to the ground in a heap. The noise in me is now the noise of part of the roof caving in, and the rest of the wall going with it, burying my father beneath the boards.

“Slade!” my mother calls, scrabbling backwards with fright.

I start to go to her, but my father’s fist punches through the scraps, and he snaps his fingers, making his power lash out, breaking the wood on top of him with a crack. It falls away from him as he gets to his feet, and the look on his face makes all the blood drain from mine.

“How dare you!”

He’s furious. Black eyes stuck in a netting of bloodshot veins that make him look even angrier. I know he’s going to strike me next, but I don’t care. I don’t care, so long as he doesn’t hit her again.

He steps toward me, and I brace myself, feeling like all the coldness in my veins drops right down through my feet, and my father lurches to a stop. He pauses, staring at the ground around me. “What the—”

I follow his gaze. The grass around my feet isn’t green anymore. It’s the pale, dead color of wheat. There are patches of dirt where I can see weird looking lines drawn through it, and those same black lines have spread up what’s left of the crooked stable like ugly roots. The wood itself looks like it’s been in hard weather for years and that a single exhale will knock the rest of it down.

“Slade…”

At my mother’s voice, I look over at where she’s still crouched on the ground, but the lines didn’t touch her. She’s on the only spot of ground where the grass is still alive and green. Her gaze isn’t on my face as she watches me with wide eyes. She’s studying my neck, my arms, my back.

Right then, it sinks in that I hurt. All over.

My father spins toward her, but I jump in front of her. I’m breathing way too fast and feeling way too short, but I’m not going to move. I’m not going to let him hit her again.

“No,” I tell him, and my voice is the last thing that’s loud, because everything I was hearing inside of me has gone quiet, and I’m suddenly really tired.

Behind me, I feel my mother grab my leg and try to push me away, but I ignore it. Father has taken the cane to me before, and I was fine. I can handle it again because I’m not a baby. I want to tell Mother this, but then Father strides to me and grips me by the shoulders, his eyes wide.

At first I think it’s a trick, but when the shock doesn’t leave his eyes, when his hand doesn’t come up to strike me, I finally look down to see what he’s looking at. To see what my mother was looking at before.

My arms are bleeding, which is probably why they hurt so bad. But it’s not the blood that makes my eyes go as big as saucers. No, it’s the black things sticking out of them, sharp little points that have driven through my skin like they pierced straight through me.

At first, I think maybe some of the splinters from the stable broke off and stabbed into me. But the longer I look, I see that’s not the case. The things are identical on both of my arms, and they didn’t stab into me. They came outof me.

I’m frozen in shock as my father reaches forward and presses against one of the black things. Both of us hiss in pain. I look up and notice that his thumb is now bloody, as if the black spike was so sharp that it cut him.

All the previous rage from his face is replaced with a strange grin as he looks at the blood for another second before he moves his attention to me. “My son.”

He quickly grips me by the shoulders again and makes me bend, and then I feel another jolt of pain when he presses a spot on my back, making my spine arch as I jerk upright again. “Ow!”

My father laughs as he releases me. “Look at you!” he says, his grin wider than I’ve ever seen it before. “Only eight years old, and look at this!”

“What is it?” I ask worriedly, staring at the bloody drips coming from the sharp black bumps. There are black veins stretching from the base of them, going down my arms like Ryatt took a quill to my skin and drew all over. I try to rub it off, but it won’t go away.

“You transformed,” Father says excitedly. “Your power came in.”

I feel myself go cold all over. “What?”

He grins and then yanks up my arm to show me. “See! You’ve already manifested.”

My eyes track from the veins in my arm to the veins in the ground that trail up the rotted outer boards of the stable wall. They’re the same.

“I knew my son would be powerful.”

I don’t feel powerful. I feel tired and everything hurts, and I’m so angry and so scared…

When I start to cry, I know it’s a mistake, but I can’t help it.

The pride instantly leaves his face, and he looks at me with disgust. “Stop that. I will not have a blabbering baby for a son,” he says coldly before his black eyes track to my mother. “Get him cleaned up and then send him to the gardens. I want to start testing what he can do,” he tells her, and then he adds, “and you, stay in your room. I don’t want to see you for the rest of the night.”

My mother’s grip on my leg tightens.

He turns and stalks away, and so many tears fall down my cheeks that I can’t even keep track of them all, but I’m glad he’s not here to count them. I try to stop, I really do, but everything hurts and I don’t understand, and my mother…

Just then, her face appears as she kneels in front of me, her eyes red-rimmed to match the mark on her cheek, the split in her lip.

“Am I…a Breaker?” I ask, and it makes me cry a little harder, because I don’t want to be anything like my father. But I somehow broke the stable wall, and I broke the ground, and these spikes broke through my skin…and I feel like a monster.

She shakes her head, gently tipping my chin up. “No, Slade. Not you. You don’t break things. You protect them.”

But when I look around the yard, this doesn’t look like protecting. This looks like ruin. My father ruins things too. Just looking at my mother’s face reminds me of that.

Even though my arm hurts a lot to move it, I lift my hand and softly touch her cheek. “Are you alright?”

Now she’s the one whose face crumples as tears start to run down her cheeks. Dropping my hand, I reach forward and carefully take hers and squeeze, trying to ignore all those black lines spreading to my fingertips.

“Don’t cry, Mother. I’ll protect you.”

This doesn’t make her feel better, because she just cries harder. My eyes drop, and I wish I was older, wish I could do something. Looking down, I see the grass stains on the hem of her white dress, from when Father hit her and she fell to the ground.

“Slade?”

We both turn to see Ryatt behind me, frowning and holding a bunch of strawberries in his shirt. He must’ve wandered off to the garden for a snack. I forgot he was out here. I’m so glad he didn’t see.

“Look, Ryatt,” I say, keeping his attention on me. His mouth drops open, and he whips a finger in my direction, making his strawberry hoard fall to the ground. “What’s that?”

“I got my magic,” I say, trying to sound happy, sniffing so that I can make myself stop crying.

Excitement flashes over his red-stained cheeks. “Can I touch it?”

“Sure.”

He hurries forward, his red-stained finger smoothing over one of the black spikes. “Does it hurt?”

I shrug. “A little.”

He grins, turning to our mother, but whatever he was going to say to her gets tossed away, and he frowns. “Mother?”

She has a pasted-on smile, and she’s already wiped off her cheeks, but she still looks all wrong. “Ryatt, those strawberries look very good.”

He’s not deterred. “You’re crying?”

“I’m alright, darling. Just took a tumble. See?” she says, motioning toward the bottom of her dress.

He nods and then slips his red sticky hand into her other hand. “That’s okay, I fell too,” he says, pointing to his soiled socks. “And know what?” he asks.

“What?”

“The grass stains match your eyes too.”

I don’t think I ever saw a smile that looked so sad.