But it was one night. And we only had two more weeks of this left before Cotillion.

I could do this. I would do this.

I drifted into sleep, David’s jacket still wrapped around me.

Chapter 30

“Again,” Saylor said, her tone of voice exactly the same as it was during Cotillion practice. But this time, instead of walking down a flight of stairs in heels, I was practicing sword fighting. Also in heels.

To tell the truth, whacking things with a sword felt really good today. Ryan hadn’t called on Sunday, and then at lunch, Amanda and Abigail had been talking about The Promise and how good it was. “I still can’t believe you missed it to see something called Hard Fists,” Abi had said to Mary Beth.

Mary Beth had darted a glance at me as Amanda elbowed her twin, and I pretended to ignore all of them. I also ignored the stab of guilt that pierced my chest when I saw David in the halls. I had not almost kissed him, I reminded myself. He had almost kissed me, and if he had, I would have pushed him away and made all sorts of shocked sounds, and not kissed him back, even a little bit. I was positive of that.

Then, when I got to Saylor’s, I’d been treated to a lecture on how possibly chasing Blythe had been foolish and irresponsible. So yes. Smacking things with sharp metal felt good. Or it had for the first hour at least.

“I don’t see why I have to practice so much,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. It was a chilly day, but the sun still beat down on me, and I’d been getting quite a workout. The sword was heavy in my hand, and my muscles ached. Still, the dummy I’d been slicing looked a heck of a lot worse.

“Practice makes perfect, Miss Price,” Saylor trilled.

“I know that. Heck, I practically invented that. In fact, if I decided to do something so low-class as get a tattoo, it would probably be that. What I mean is—” I took another swing at the dummy—“is that I don’t have to practice this. You said that when Mr. Hall passed his powers on to me, he also passed on his knowledge. And the knowledge of every Paladin before him.”

I swung the sword in an arc over my head, going in to slice the dummy up under the ribs. “I don’t have to practice. I can . . . I don’t know, do this.”

Saylor gave a long suffering sigh and took another sip of sweet tea. “And all of that is true. But practice never hurt anyone. And while your brain knows all of these things, your body is still unused to them.” She nodded at the dummy. “Hence the practice. Now again.”

“Why swords anyway?” I asked even as I did what she said. Spinning, I hit the dummy in the neck, then pulled the sword out and dropped into a low spin, whacking the flat of the blade against its legs. “They’re not exactly the most convenient weapons. Shouldn’t I have—” I grunted as I brought the sword down with both hands—“a gun?”

Saylor poked at the ice in her glass with a bright pink straw. “Modernized weapons won’t work for Paladins.”

I swung around, sword making a slight zing in the air. “Like, we’re not supposed to use them or—”

“The original magic that created Paladins didn’t take things like guns, or grenades, or—or rocket launchers into account. Therefore, you can’t work with those nearly as well as you can with a sword.”

I took that in, turning the hilt of the sword over in my hands. “Okay. But a rocket launcher sounds a lot more useful than a sword.”

It took another fifteen minutes, and my thighs and calves had joined my shoulders in screaming, before Saylor said I could quit. I wanted to fling the sword to the ground and sink into a lawn chair next to her, but instead, I put the sword back in the house and wheeled the dummy back onto the patio.

When I did sit down, Saylor rewarded me with one of her rare grins. “Good girl.”

She handed me a bottle of water, and I gulped half of it down. “You’re doing well,” Saylor said as I drank. She frowned, her eyes narrowing behind her sunglasses. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure that it’ll be enough.”

I lowered the bottle. “What do you mean?”

“You’re learning quickly,” she acknowledged. “But what the Ephors are intending . . . I never thought I’d face something like that with an untrained Paladin at my side.”

“I didn’t exactly expect to spend my Cotillion battling the forces of evil, either,” I reminded her, and the frown deepened.

“I understand that, Harper. But . . .” She sighed. “As successful as you’ve been, to be honest, I have no idea how to . . . to train a Paladin. I never had to before. We all have our roles. David is the Oracle, I’m the Mage, and Christopher was the Paladin.”

“We’ll be okay,” I said, wondering how I managed to get the words out without choking. “We’ll get through Cotillion and then . . .” I trailed off.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about what came after Cotillion. Whatever this big prophecy was, it would be settled. But David would still be an Oracle (or dead). I would still be a Paladin (or dead). Right?

Saylor was watching me. “Harper, do you fully comprehend what being a Paladin means?”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “Right now, it means making sure crazy Blythe doesn’t kill David and inadvertently make a crater where our town used to be.”

“But do you understand what that means giving up?”

Now I really didn’t want to look at her. I got up out of the chair and started doing the stretches she’d shown me. “Once Cotillion is over, I won’t have to give up anything,” I said. “Blythe will be gone—dead—the spell won’t have worked, and I can get back to normal life.”

“Harper, this is your normal life now. No matter what happens at Cotillion, you are a Paladin, linked to me, linked to David. Forever. And that means that eventually, you’ll sacrifice everything,” Saylor said. She didn’t insist it. Didn’t say it with force, like she was trying to make me believe it. It was a fact.

I faltered, nearly losing my balance. Taking a deep breath, I moved into another stretch. “I don’t believe that,” I said. Overhead, the sun was so bright, the sky a steely blue.

Suddenly Saylor was standing in front of me. We were nearly the same height, so she was looking right into my eyes. “I don’t have a family,” she told me evenly. “Or a home. Even my name isn’t real. That’s what I gave up to keep David safe. Myself. It’s what Christopher gave up, too. And it’s what you’ll give up as well, whether you want to admit it or not. My every waking moment is dedicated to keeping that boy alive.”

My arm was very heavy as I lowered it. Everything in me felt heavy. “I don’t want that,” I said, hating how . . . petulant I sounded. But I couldn’t help it. “After Cotillion, what will he even need protecting from? The Ephors want to kill me, not him.”

“Harper, remember what I said about the Paladins protecting Alaric from himself.”

As though I’d forgotten about that. “That’s not going to—”

“Hey,” David called, and Saylor and I both jumped. He was standing inside the back door, watching us. “Did I miss the sword show again?”

He said it jokingly, but somehow I knew he’d overheard us.

I hadn’t seen David since Saturday night, and I gave a small sigh of relief. Standing in Saylor’s backyard, wearing a sweater that was two sizes too big and jeans that were a size too small, he just looked like David. I wasn’t noticing his hair or his eyes or his hands. Whatever that had been between us had clearly been a fluke of the hug and the lamplight and him actually acting like a decent human being.

Still, when he said, “Pres, you wanna come upstairs and work on that thing with me?”

Saylor’s eyes narrowed a bit. “What thing?”

“Project for the newspaper,” I said. “Can’t let major supernatural happenings get in the way of journalism, right, David?”

“Yup,” he said with a little nod.

“I thought you weren’t on the paper, Harper,” Saylor said, sounding unconvinced.

“I’m not,” I told her, grabbing my coat from the back of a lawn chair. “But David and I are trying to work together more at school. You know, so no one gets suspicious of us hanging out.”

Saylor’s blue eyes moved from David to me and back again. “All right,” she said. “Don’t be too long. I still have a few more things to go over with you before we’re done for today, Harper.”

“Aye aye,” I replied, giving her a tiny salute.

David headed for the stairs, and I followed. We were about halfway up when he stopped and turned back to me, lifting his eyebrows. “‘Aye aye?’” he whispered, his mouth lifting in a crooked grin, and . . . oh.

Suddenly, the fluke felt a lot less fluke-y.

Hoping the light was dim enough to hide my blush, I muttered, “Shut up,” and pushed past him up the stairs.

Chapter 31

David’s room was a lot like I’d pictured. I mean, not like I’d ever spent a huge amount of time thinking about David Stark’s room, but if you’d ask me to describe it, I think I would’ve been pretty dead on. There was the totally sensible wooden-framed bed, complete with a blue comforter. There was a matching desk piled high with notebooks and computer stuff, and not much on the walls except for a few maps. I paused in front of one of them.

“Where is this?” I asked. It wasn’t a continent I recognized. David looked up from gathering a pile of laundry. “Oh. Um, that’s Middle Earth.”

I could’ve sworn he was blushing, but in the interest of working together, I decided not to give him a hard time about it. Instead, I nodded and moved over to the bookshelf. There was a corkboard posted above it with a few newspaper articles pinned to it, and three photographs. Two were nature shots—a tree that I thought was the oak in Forrest Park, and the pond behind Grove Academy—but one showed David sitting on a stool in front of a blue backdrop. There were three other kids in the photo. I recognized all of them from the newspaper staff. Chie, the pretty Asian girl I’d seen hanging around David, was leaning on his shoulder.