12

Studious

The worst part of leaving was mostly behind me—telling the kids I was leaving again. Surprisingly, Hanna took it the best, but she understood that I’d be back. Emma started wailing, and then Niko and Lissa joined in.

It had been a rough morning, and it wasn’t even eight-thirty A.M. We’d thought it would be better to do it before Finn left for work. By the time I went up to the room to finish getting ready to go, everyone had stopped crying, except for Emma, but she spent twenty percent of her days crying. I was doing one last sweep around the room to make sure

I wasn’t leaving anything behind, and someone knocked on the bedroom door.

“Come in,” I said, assuming it was Mia or Finn, because none of the others would’ve knocked.

Instead, it was Sunniva Kroner, smiling thinly at me. She was more casually dressed than when I had seen her last—a striped crop top and skinny jeans, with her long curly hair pulled up into a messy bun. Gold hoop earrings hung in her ears and bangles sparkled on her wrists.

“Oh, alai!” I said in surprise, and then remembered in dismay that she was a high-ranking Marksinna, and I wasn’t, so I attempted a hasty bow.

Sunniva waved her hand quickly to stop me. “No, no. Don’t do that.” She surveyed the room from under her thick lashes, and her eyes landed on my bag. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Yeah, I’m visiting a friend for a few days, maybe a week. But I’ll be back.”

“Good.” She admired the handcrafted Dala horse on the twins’ dresser. “Are these handmade?”

“Yeah, at the Trylle Toy Shoppe, the owner makes them. Every kid in town has one.”

“Oh.” She set it back on the dresser. “I didn’t grow up here, so I never had one. I’m a changeling.”

“I never had one either,” I said, unsure of how else to respond.

Most of the Marksinna and Markis around her age had been changelings, meaning they had been switched at birth with children from wealthy human families and raised far away from Förening in human cities. Because of that, and the class differences, I didn’t interact with any of them very often, so I didn’t really know how any of them felt about the process.

“Anyway.” Sunniva looked back at me, her dark eyes studying me. “I didn’t come here to talk to you about toys.”

“What did you come here to talk about?” I asked.

She went back to looking around the room, and she paced slowly between the cribs as she spoke. “I’ve been training with my mother. Aurora. I don’t know if you know her.”

“I know of her,” I clarified. The Kroners were a powerful and wealthy family with strong ties to the royal family. Everyone knew of them.

Sunniva shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Aurora’s a great healer. Was.” She paused. “Is. The powerful abilities run in my family—Tove moves things with his mind, Aurora can heal even deadly wounds, Noah has flashes of precognition. They’re all very draining and dangerous. They age you.”

“If you don’t want to do this, I understand,” I replied carefully.

“No, it’s not that. It’s the opposite of that, really.” She faced me. “It’s taking longer to get the hang of because of the amount of energy it takes. But I know I can do it. I will be able to. And I wanted to make sure you understood that you don’t have to do this. Aural healing is a volatile thing—auras don’t like being manipulated by outside sources.”

“Most things don’t,” I said.

She smiled faintly. “You should be aware of the risks.”

I considered what she was saying and then asked, “If I say that I don’t want to do this again, would you keep training and practicing your aural healing?”

“Yes, I would,” she answered without hesitation.

“Why?”

“When I found out I was a changeling, I didn’t want to come here,” she explained. “But what changed my mind was that I wanted to get a handle on the intense, superhuman things my body can do, and the only way I could find out my full potential was to come to a place where everyone understood what I am.

“That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m learning this,” Sunniva said. “And if I can help you or others along the way, even better.”

“I can respect that,” I said. “And I’m up for it if you are.”

Sunniva smiled, deeply this time. “Excellent. I’ll keep working with Aurora and Tove while you’re gone, and when you get back, hopefully, we can meet up.”

I nodded. “I’ll see you then.”