Page 117 of Monster and Apprentice

“Evaine,” Rolan said, “your apprentice is bullying me again. Are you just gonna let her get away with it?”

Evaine snorted. “I’llgrind the toadroot and hand it to her myself.”

Rolan tugged Supper’s leash and took the lead, keeping a wary eye on the trees. As the day wound on, their path traced uphill until they reached a bald jut of rock that gave them one final view of Crisanth. They paused to drink water and eat the baguette Evaine had packed.

“Hey, Evaine,” Rolan said as he chewed, “this isn’t one of Finkface’s breads, is it?”

“The man does bake a divine loaf,” she replied.

He chuckled, picking crumbs off his shirt to eat and remembering too late the Cryptic slobber smeared on his clothes. Gagging and retching, he spit the bread out into the bushes while Anaya rolled her eyes.

After he caught his breath and rinsed his mouth with water, he gazed back at Crisanth, wondering if this would be the last time he saw his birthplace. His pa was somewhere in that city, probably holed up for a while. Rolan had broken with his pa once and for all, and there would be no going back to him now. Whatever the future held for Rolan, Rabb Strider would not be in it.

Rolan searched himself, gingerly probing his own heart for any lingering regret.

He found none.

After the battle with the Cryptic, Luc had gone off on his own to scour the city for Rabb, Hoff, or any of their cohorts. He’d found none of them, and Rolan knew the Arcanist was worried. Rolan suspected this had something to do with the way his pa’s crew had usedArcana, eating the relics to draw on their power. But Luc would speak no more of it, saying only that he needed to consult with someone who knew more of the subject.

“Who do you think will be the next duke?” Rolan asked.

“The king will send someone,” said Evaine with a shrug.

“I still think it should have been Luc,” said Anaya.

“An Arcanist can’t be a duke,” said Rolan. “It’s part of our oaths, you know. We can’t hold any kind of office.”

Our. We.The words still felt strange on his tongue. At night he lay and whispered the truth into the dark, trying to make itfeeltrue:I am an Arcanist.

Technically, Luc had pointed out, Rolan wasn’t an Arcanist yet. Though his oaths bound him, he hadn’t officially graduated from his apprenticeship or taken some sort of test the Arcane Council made all apprentices take. If Luc had any say in the matter, which of course he did, Rolan wouldn’t be a full-fledged Arcanist for many years to come. As Luc liked to remind him in his customary growl, “Oaths alone do not make an Arcanist.”

Barely visible in the distance, like a fleck of black against the green hills, stood Luc’s old house. Rolan felt a pang. Crisanth he could leave behind without regrets, but the crooked little house had come to feel like home to him. He resented whatever Arcanist the Council would send to live there next, even as he pitied them. They would not be welcomed to Crisanth, that was for sure.

Despite the duke’s abdication, and Luc and Rolan’s heroic battle against the giant Cryptic, the truth was no match for the city’s rumor mill. By the time night had fallen and the dust had settled, half the city believed Luc had lured the Cryptic to the palace to dethrone the duke, while the other half believed Luc hadbeenthe Cryptic and haddestroyed half the city to punish the people for their secrets. Hoff and Rabb Strider’s attempts to discredit Luc had been thorough and effective, and there was no love for the Arcanist in Crisanth, nor for his apprentice.

The decision to leave Crisanth for good had been an easy one for them all.

Evaine and Anaya were headed to Sylvet to enroll Anaya in apothecary school. And Luc had heard the city was in need of an Arcanist. It made sense for them to go together. And it put them closer to the Arcane Council’s mysterious headquarters, where Luc wanted to consult with the Council about Rabb and Hoff. Whatever it was they’d done, Rolan knew it worried Luc even more than the man would let on. As much as Rolan wanted to leave that terrible day in the past, he feared it would not be as simple as that. He could only hope some other Arcanist would deal with Hoff, Rabb, and the rest, and leave him and Luc out of it.

And the Council headquarters was where Rolan would need to go if he wanted to pass the Arcane Trials—the tests that determined whether an apprentice was ready to advance in his training. He felt uneasy about that, wondering if the tests might includemath.

But he also suspected that this wasn’t the only reason Luc had decided to leave Crisanth.

When Rolan had asked his master if his decision had anything to do with going wherever Evaine went, the man had turned red and growled at him to go muck out Apple’s stall one last time. The look on the man’s face had been entirely worth the extra chore, in Rolan’s opinion.

“Do you think we’ll stay in Sylvet forever?” he asked, staring offtoward the east. The opposite direction of Crisanth, a land as strange and mysterious to him as the stars.

“Maybe,” said Luc. “Maybe not. Arcanists often wander from post to post.”

“Because they get driven out, like we did?”

“Because wherever there are people, there are secrets,” Luc replied.

Rolan nodded, knowing where that led.

Where humans kept secrets, Cryptics grew legs.

Andsomebodyhad to stop them.