Free Web NovelChapter 330: Chapter 330: Lessons
For a full week after the Mind Stone, the Hayes home was a hazard zone.
Pietro’s newly unlocked super-speed was spectacular, but his brakes were nonexistent. He overshot doorways. He reached for a glass of water and turned three of Eileen’s favourite antique plates to powder before his hand closed on the glass.
Winky trailed him from room to room with the infinite patience of an elf who had cleaned up after gods, mending each casualty with a flick of her fingers.
"That is the fourth one today," she observed, as the latest plate knitted itself back together in the air and drifted home to its shelf.
"I am trying," Pietro said. He stood frozen in the centre of the kitchen, arms pinned to his sides, afraid to touch anything that might break. Which, in the Hayes kitchen, was everything.
"Winky knows." She caught a teetering vase without looking. "Winky is only keeping score."
Elena documented all of it.
She kept a notebook titled "Pietro’s Oopsies," updated daily and fully illustrated. Day three was a Pietro-shaped hole in the living room wall, captioned "he tried to answer the phone." Day six was her masterpiece. Pietro waist-deep in the garden pond beside a deeply offended duck, captioned "he was trying to catch a football."
Pietro asked her nicely to stop. She did not.
When he finally lost patience and reached for the notebook, crossing the room faster than sound and entirely certain of victory, Winky was somehow already there. The book floated up out of his snatching fingers, drifted across the room in no hurry at all, and settled back into Elena’s waiting hands.
Pietro stood in the middle of his own home, the fastest man alive, outmanoeuvred by an elf and immortalised by an eight-year-old, both in the same afternoon.
He decided, with great dignity, to go for another run.
—
Wanda had a quieter time of it, and a harder one.
Her power had always answered feeling before thought. That made her the slower of the two to train and the more dangerous to rush. So Arthur taught her the mental disciplines of Kamar-Taj to help her anchor her mind. Chaos Magic was highly responsive to emotion. If she panicked, the magic would lash out defensively.
So she learned how to be still.
She spent hours sitting without moving, nudging the odds of a coin flip from a fair fifty-fifty to a guaranteed heads, once, then a hundred times in a row without a single miss.
The true breakthrough finally came on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.
A vase slipped off a shelf and broke on the floor, and Wanda raised one hand without thinking. Scarlet light curled around the pieces.
She did not mend the vase. She did not turn back the clock. She reached into the thread of the thing and persuaded reality, gently, that the vase had never broken at all.
The shards lifted. The cracks drew closed. And the vase stood whole and quiet on the floorboards as though falling had never once occurred to it.
Arthur watched, and understood the difference. Repair fixed what was. This unmade what had been. The distinction was vast, and quiet, and terrifying.
"Remarkable," he said. He meant it.
Wanda smiled. It was the first time she had smiled in a training session.
—
The home phase was only ever meant to be a beginning. A chaotic week of shattered plates and resurrected vases, of two young people finding a solid, reliable grip on gifts that had been buried in them since birth.
But a grip was all it was.
What the Stone had truly woken was still mostly asleep, and reaching the rest of it would take room the manor did not have, and force its walls could not survive.
They needed somewhere much bigger.
—
The island had no name and did not appear on any nautical chart.
Arthur had found it years ago on one of his silent flights across the continents, the kind he took when he needed quiet to think. It had been a bare scrap of rock then. He had warded it clean out of the world. Then he had coaxed soil and root and green from the stone over patient seasons, until what stood now was a curve of white-sand paradise that belonged to no one and nothing but his family.
For the past few weeks, they had come and gone through golden portals, and the isolated island had been the kids’s private training ground. Today was the last day of the training.
The twins had a firm grasp of their gifts now. True mastery was another, much longer road, and one they would eventually have to walk without him holding their hands. Arthur could open the door for them. He could not walk through it on their behalf.
Under a wide umbrella in the only patch of shade, Eileen lay back on a lounger with a cold drink sweating in one hand. Tristan sat happily at her feet, building a sandcastle with the grave focus.
Elena had appointed herself official commentator and climbed the cooler to do the job properly.
"Forty," she announced, binoculars up. "He’s gone around the island forty times."
She tracked the silver blur as it tore another lap along the shallows, throwing up a wall of spray that hung in the air long after he was gone.
"He’s definitely going to be sick," she decided.
However, Pietro was anything but sick.
He came in off the water in a long skidding arc, fired a fan of sand twenty feet into the air, and stopped dead in front of them without so much as a hard breath. He bounced on the balls of his feet. Every line of him hummed with energy that had nowhere left to go.
"Best day of my life," Pietro beamed, wiping a stray drop of water from his cheek. "I am not even tired. I could run to Tokyo and back before lunch."
"That is not much of a boast." Elena did not lower the binoculars. "When I grow up, I will blink across the whole world in a single heartbeat. And it will not even be hard." freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
"That is not the same thing."
"You are right," Elena smirked. "Mine is better."
Pietro opened his mouth, found no argument worth losing to his little sister, and went back to running.
—
Down the beach, Wanda was doing the opposite of everything her restless brother did.
She stood barefoot at the waterline, eyes shut, scarlet mist curling off her fingers in slow, heavy ribbons. Then she opened her eyes and fixed on a slab of grey driftwood fifty yards down the sand.
She did not grab for it. She let the red mist drift the way smoke finds a draught, and pictured the change instead of forcing it. The driftwood shivered. The weathered grain rippled like the skin of a pond. Then it came apart, not breaking, simply ceasing to be wood, and a hundred scarlet butterflies lifted off the sand and scattered on the sea wind.
"Good." Arthur came to stand beside her. "Now keep working the control. You hold a whole ocean in you, Wanda. The trick of the next year is learning how to pour out one single drop."
Wanda went back to her focus, and Arthur stayed close.
He kept careful watch as she worked. A minor mistake from her could accidentally unmake the entire island. Pietro he could leave alone. A young man who could only run was a threat to the furniture and his own dignity, and nothing worse. The day Pietro touched the speed of light, that would change. He was a long way from that threshold yet.
The young man in question was definitely not thinking about the speed of light. He was actively watching Arthur.
The wizard stood loose and easy with his hands tucked casually in his pockets, peacefully watching the ocean waves roll in.
A wicked grin spread across Pietro’s face.
More than a month of being the fastest thing on the planet had done a great deal for his confidence. He had the speed of a god. He was untouchable. Normal people were just frozen statues he strolled casually between. And Arthur was just standing there, looking out at the water, wide open.
Pietro did not announce his intentions. Announcing himself would have completely spoiled the element of surprise.
He vanished.
