“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 asked 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.
“Are you guys a thing?” I asked, tapping the picture. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about David’s social life. He’d always hung out with the same handful of kids in school, all the same kids that were on the newspaper staff now. And since David and I had basically declared ourselves mortal enemies in preschool, our circles didn’t overlap often. But I never saw him at school dances or at the movies or anything. I’d certainly never seen him with a girl. But Chie had looked weirded out about him holding my hair when I puked at Homecoming.
“Huh?” he asked, squinting at the picture. “Oh, no. We’re friends. That was . . . goofing off with the camera in newspaper.”
“I think she likes you,” I said. He gave a noncommittal grunt in reply, shoving his laundry basket into the closet.
Since that was a dead-end street, I crouched down in front of the bookcase. Like mine, it was overstuffed, but whereas I’d at least made an attempt at organizing titles, David had books shoved in every which way and stacked on top of one another.
There were a bunch of fantasy novels, and classics, as well as several biographies of journalists. I picked up a book about Ernie Pyle and started thumbing through it. “So you’re really into this whole newspaper guy thing.”
David pushed the closet door closed. “Yeah. I always thought that’s what I’d do for a living one day.”
I put the book back and turned to face him. “You still can.”
He snorted, leaning back against his footboard. “Yeah, I’ll be one heck of a journalist. I can predict the stories before they happen.”
I wanted to say something encouraging. Something like, “Hey, you still can! So what if you might be a supernaturally powered crazy dude!”
But even I couldn’t fake that much pep. “We’ll work it out,” I said.
David looked at me, and there was that expression again, the one he usually got right before he wrote a terrible article about me. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
I walked over to his desk and sat in the chair. “The only alternative is to sit here and whine about it, and I don’t think that’s going to accomplish much. Now. What is it you want to try?”
David rubbed his hands up and down his thighs. “I want to try to have a prophecy.”
Confused, I sat up straighter. “Don’t we need Saylor for that? She’s your battery or whatever.”
David shook his head. “I don’t want her to know about this. And I think . . . I think just the two of us ought to be enough to get some kind of vision. It’s worth a shot, at least.”
I wasn’t exactly opposed to the idea. Some hint of what was coming could be helpful. But I still didn’t get why David was so set against telling Saylor.