Chapter 27

Akeelay

Chapter 27

I woke up and glanced around. Kaolin was awake, sitting against the wall across from the door, and Maybelle seemed to still be asleep. It was probably about dawn, I figured.

I walked over to where Kaolin was and sat down next to him.

“What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “I’ve just been thinking…what if Maybelle’s powers aren’t as strong as she thinks they are? We’ll be stuck here for a long time, probably.” He sighed. “I don’t know, there’s just a pessimistic voice in my head that keeps telling me the worst cast scenarios.” He looked at the ground, despairing.

     “Hey,” I said. He looked up. “It’ll be okay. Even if we are stuck here, at least we’re together.”

     “You do realize how stereotypical that sounds, right?” he asked, smiling.

     “I don’t care,” I said, and reached up to kiss him.

     “Maybelle’s going to wake up,” he said after a moment.

     “I don’t care about that, either,” I replied.

     After a few moments had passed, Maybelle did wake up, yawning and rolling over. Kaolin and I pulled apart.

     “So you think we’re all good?” I asked, pretending we had been immersed in conversation.

     “I hope so,” he said. “What do you think?”

     I didn’t answer for a moment, then sighed happily. “The truth spell’s gone,” I said. My relief was genuine, not faked for Maybelle’s sake. “But yeah, I hope everything will be fine. Or maybe I don’t…you don’t know anymore.” I grinned.

     “I’m pretty sure Lymlock was convinced,” Maybelle said, joining the conversation as Kaolin laughed at what I had said. “He really seemed confused about what he wanted to do.”

     “If you can convince Lymlock to let us go, knowing him, then you could convince almost anyone to do almost anything. That’s actually a little scary,” Kaolin said.

     “Maybe…” Maybelle agreed. “I could persuade you to like me instead of Akeelay, if I wanted to.” She laughed.

     “Hey!” I protested. “Do you even like him?”

     “No, not really,” she replied. “I mean, yes, but not like that. But the point is, I could.”

     “Probably not, actually,” Kaolin said. “If emotions are impossible to affect with spells, then they’ll probably be impossible to affect even with a gift.”

     “Well, what was she affecting then? If she can convince Lymlock to let us go, wouldn’t that be messing with his emotions?” This was confusing me.

     “We should do an experiment,” Kaolin said. “Try to convince me to do something.”

     “What? Like what?” Maybelle asked, taken off guard.

     “I don’t know, just…something,” he responded.

     I smiled mischievously. “Convince him to do a backflip or something.”

     “I can’t even do a backflip,” he protested quickly, backing away. “I don’t want to end up with something broken.”

     Maybelle laughed. “Kaolin, you should do a backflip.”

     “Why?” he asked. “I don’t think…I should…”

     “Why not? I really think you should,” she said, trying to suppress laughter.

     “Fine,” he said. He did a really nice backflip, going halfway across the room. Maybelle and I burst out laughing.

     “Shut up,” he muttered, returning to where we were standing. “That was weird. It wasn’t really my emotions. It was more like I couldn’t really think straight. I couldn’t get the logic to think of a single reason I shouldn’t do it. I would feel sorry for Lymlock, except, you know, he’s Lymlock.”

     “True,” I said, still laughing. “But that was beautiful.”

     “You should try it,” he grumbled jokingly. “Actually, you really should. You too, Maybelle. You should see what you’re imposing on your victims.”

     “I hope we don’t have any arguments about anything from now on,” I said. “Maybelle will win them all.”

     “What can I say?” she asked, holding her hands out in a not-my-fault way. “I’m just talented.” All of us laughed again.

     At that moment, there was a knock on the door. We exchanged looks, confused. The only people who would be there were sorcerers, and they didn’t normally knock.

     “Come in,” Maybelle said, making it sound almost like a question.

     The door was unlocked, and Lymlock came in.

     “I don’t know if I should really let you go,” he said, looking at Maybelle. “Give me one good reason I should, and I might let you go.”

     “Us being here is costing you money,” she said calmly, acting as though it wasn’t strange at all that he was there. “You’ll have to feed us eventually, if you don’t want us dying, and food costs money. Wouldn’t it just be easier if you released us?”

     “I guess so,” he said.

I had never seen him so unsure. Normally Lymlock knew exactly what he was doing, which was typically trying to kill me or something like that.

     “I don’t know, though. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

     He seemed to be harder to convince than Kaolin had been. I theorized that this was because Kaolin had wanted to be persuaded to do something, and Maybelle was trying to convince Lymlock to do something that he would never have wanted to do otherwise.

     “You really should,” Maybelle said, stressing every word.

     “All right,” he sighed. “Come with me.”

Maybelle, Kaolin and I looked at each other, grinning. None of us had really, truly believed it would work.

     “You should give us our stuff back too,” Maybelle added.

      “We can get it on the way,” he said.

     “Okay,” Kaolin said. “Let’s go.”

     Lymlock walked out the door and held it open for the rest of us.

     I was amazed by how different he was.

     “Thank you, Maybelle,” I whispered to her as Lymlock led us down the hallway.

     She nodded in response. “And if something goes wrong, I still have magyk. No caerthin around.”

     “Good,” Kaolin said. “Because I don’t have that much right now.”

     Lymlock shoved open the door to a small closet. On the shelves was all three of our packs, and my knife. We grabbed them and walked back out to the hallway. I was so relieved to have my knife back.

     The sorcerer led us up a flight of stairs to a trapdoor. “Go,” he said, opening it and gesturing us out. “And don’t come back!”

     We looked at each other and raced out into the bright sunlight before he could come to his senses.

     We were free.