Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan Page B

during the long, shocked, shrieking tumble. I had barely hit the icy, disgusting water, which felt like chilled oil, when the river itself began forming steps up the wall for me to follow. I felt only an instant of black panic as the waters closed over me.
    I wouldn’t let myself panic. I climbed doggedly up the steps, concentrating on them, refusing to let the river become liquid and flow away until I was back on the bridge. Once I was there, my clothes hung impossibly wet and heavy on me, trying to drag me down as if I could drown on dry land.
    The night streets were, depending on where I looked, blazing with lights, or shadowy and still. I saw strangers’ faces passing me, a brief sympathetic glance, a wolf whistle from a car at the soaking-wet girl. No help was to be found anywhere: the city at night moved pitilessly on.
    Carwyn, of course, was long gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    I spent the next day viciously angry with myself for being so stupid.
    I stayed home from school because Dad woke up a little at sea, not frantic anymore, but with the look of a child lost in a confusing world, and I knew it made him feel better to have me there. The pressing need for me to always be there—always with the right thing to say to Dad, ready to touch his hand reassuringly or stay a safe distance away so he did not feel crowded—let me not think about the disaster I had single-handedly created. I was tired from a long night, body worn from spent adrenaline and using too much magic, but his needs came first.
    “I’m not a child!” he said once, and I swallowed and said, “Yes, of course,” and went to make him something he would like to eat.
    I stroked his hair as he cried, for a long, wrenching half hour, and then he was quieter, listening to the stories I told. I tried to make them sound cheerful—all about Ethan and the holiday we’d had, and not how we had come home. I used the stories as comfort for myself as much as for my father, as if the gold curve of pears and leaves in the sunlight, the curve of Ethan’s mouth under mine as we lay together in the long grass, could be made bright enough to blot away all that had followed.
    “I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” Dad said at last, his voice quiet and more even than it had been. He was so calm and reasonable sometimes, and then everything would go wrong. “It should be you causing trouble for me.”
    I shuddered, thinking of what would happen to him if the trouble I had caused last night came back to us both. I kept stroking his hair, and the reflected light from my rings trembled against the wall.
    “You’re no trouble at all,” I lied.
    Eventually Dad went to sleep, exhausted from the outbursts, just before Marie came back from school. She dropped her school bag, with its weird pattern of monstrous half-pony, half-kitten creatures with Light-jeweled eyes, on the floor and danced in.
    “You’re so lucky you got to stay home,” she said, grumbling. “I’m so tired. And I’m so hungry. ”
    “From working so hard, no doubt.”
    Marie grinned at me, sly and carefree at once, so I was able to grin back. I got up and went into the kitchen to make us grilled-cheese sandwiches, and when Marie asked how my day had been I said “boring,” so she launched into a long story about her day. She was apparently having a feud with some guy in her class, and it had culminated in a game of kiss-chase, during which he’d grabbed her and she’d bitten him.
    “But, like, it wasn’t assault,” Marie explained. “Because it was a protest for feminism, my teacher said, and establishing my autonomy over my body.”
    She pronounced the word “autonomy” with extreme care.
    “I like your teacher, kid,” I said. I vaguely thought that I should tell her not to bite people, no matter what the provocation, but that would be massively hypocritical coming from the girl who’d established her own right to bodily autonomy by threatening to send shocks through a boy’s collar to