Rhea was looking pissed.
And, for the first time, she didn’t just remind me of her mother. I could see her father in her, too, as she squared up with Agnes. Something in the set of the jaw, the mulish tilt of the chin, the fire in the eyes.
Although that last one was kind of true of both of them right now, and—
And I should probably be doing something to de-escalate this, shouldn’t I?
“Cassandra?” I heard my name called, and looked toward the door, where Gertie was standing eating a pear. “May I see you for a moment?”
Not really the time, I thought, but okay, that might do as a distraction. But Rhea wasn’t interested in distractions. “I’ll stay here,” she told me flatly.
“Um,” I said.
“Cassandra?” Gertie was sounding impatient. “Now, if you please.”
Damn it, Gertie! I thought. But I stomped over anyway. “What?”
“Pear?” She offered me one.
I looked at it blankly. It was fat and yellow, with a blushing bottom. It was a nice pear.
It also made no sense at all.
“What?”
“Yes, I have an apple,” Gertie said, and jerked me inside.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, because this was bizarre, even for her. But she just shushed me and turned me toward the crack in the door. It was still open maybe a quarter of the way, giving us a sliver of a view, although why we needed one, I didn’t know. I needed to get back—
“Watch,” Gertie said, and ate pear.
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I watched anyway. Don’t argue with teacher, I thought. Only I didn’t know what I was supposed to be watching.
The little girls were the easiest to see, still facing their wall. Or most of them were. One was playing with a doll she’d smuggled out, hidden in a fold of her dress, and another had squatted down to examine a fat green caterpillar. But most of the rest were dutifully reciting something, I didn’t know what, because it was in some other language.
“A test,” Gertie said, her voice low.
“For what?”
“To see if they can age a flower.”
I looked back at her. “How? They don’t have access to the Pythian power yet.”
“No, they don’t,” she agreed. “The question is, can any of them get its attention?”
I didn’t understand what she meant. And then I did, when one of the little girls, a brunette with scads of ringlets falling halfway down her back, managed . . . something. The flower didn’t change, but I felt a stirring anyway, a brief swirl in the air like the breeze fluttering her hair.
But there was no breeze in the courtyard; the walls were too high. And this one felt less like air than like the quicksilver energy of the Pythian power. I closed my eyes and almost saw it: a glittering stream, not thick and full, but scattered, like glitter on the breeze.
But there, nonetheless.
Called up by a little girl’s enchantment.
“One to watch,” Gertie said, even as the brief flutter petered out.
And then came roaring back, but not as a thin spread of particles this time, but thick and strong and purposeful, a torrent of power instead of a scattering, like a summer storm.
“What the—” I said, and then the door blew open, slamming back against the house as if caught in a gale.