Antebellum Awakening (The Network Series #2)(28)

“Deal,” I said.

“I’ll show you how to do it,” he said. “Watch.”

He grabbed a log, lifted the ax above his head, and brought it down with a mighty swing of his arm. The wood broke into equal parts and fell to different sides of the stump. I laughed under my breath.

“Easy,” I said. Merrick’s eyebrows lifted innocently as he bent over to gather the pieces. He took a few skinny shards that had split off to keep for kindling.

“You think so?” he asked.

“Indeed. You better get to work,” I said, spinning on my heel toward another splitting stump. “You wouldn’t want a girl to beat you.”

Sanna chuckled and moved into her house with all the confidence of someone with perfect sight. Papa used to split firewood for us all the time. When he wasn’t around Mama used an incantation her father had found in a family grimoire, and the logs simply fell apart into perfect pieces. How difficult could it be?

Extremely, it turned out.

Aiming the ax correctly was the first hurdle. Most of the time I missed the wood completely and shaved the side or hit the stump, or even the dirt. One poor attempt embedded the first inch of my axe into the wood. No matter how many times I pounded the log onto the stump, it wouldn’t budge.

“Jikes,” I muttered, wiping a bead of sweat from my forehead. I had nothing to show for my sweat. Merrick had stopped chopping to watch my struggle, his modest, neat pile mocking me.

“Need help?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure if it was the magic that felt hot inside or the sting of my pride. The heat crept into my cheeks.

“No! Well . . . not help, exactly,” I corrected. “I can do it! The ax just won’t work right.”

“So you can’t do it?”

The heat from my chest turned into an ugly glare his direction. He abandoned his ax with an effortless grin and grabbed mine. “You want to use momentum to break the log,” he said. “Not just your arms.”

He adjusted my grip on the ax handle, taught me how to keep my dominant hand fluid, and walked me through my first attempts at swinging it above my head and down.

“Use your back,” he said, observing my first pathetic attempts. “Good.”

The first three strokes missed the wood. I reset my grip, and the fourth hit true.

“Ha!” I cried, abandoning the ax and stacking the three pieces into a little pile with no small amount of pride. “Take that.”

My victory, however strong, was short lived.

Within twenty minutes my arms trembled violently. I could lift the ax, but each swing grew weaker. Merrick’s rapidly-growing pile dwarfed mine. I envied his fluid, synchronized movements. Set the log, step back, swing the ax, pick up the wood.

“I’m losing my grip on the ax,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him. “My hands aren’t strong enough to hold it.”

“You can quit if you want,” he said unsympathetically.

I eyed the depressing difference between our piles. Running home had already been decided. I’d never win. Why waste the energy chopping wood if I’d just have to run anyway? Merrick wiped the sweat from his eyes and looked right at me.

“Since you’re too weak to keep going, of course. In that case, you should probably take a break. Maybe go check on Sanna. Drink some tea. Or you can just do it with magic since you’re not strong enough physically.”

He was baiting me; I knew it. I recognized the sarcasm in his voice, and I couldn’t help but feel rankled. The idea of not following through on the task made the magic come alive inside me with a little jolt of anger. I wasn’t so weak that I had to use magic. I straightened so tall I thought my spine would snap. I didn’t want to face ghosts while I ran, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t capable.

“I can do it!” I growled, and set back to work. Twenty minutes later the blisters on my palms burst. Merrick, still hard at work, didn’t see me stop to tear off the bottom of my shirt. I wrapped the scrap of fabric around my hand and used my teeth to pull the knot tight. I started again, hoping he hadn’t noticed.

I’m not weak.

Amidst the grueling, repetitive motions, my mind wandered. The swirling magic in my chest pulled me back to Miss Mabel, the High Priest, and my Inheritance Curse. Too tired to push the thoughts away, to focus on not focusing on Miss Mabel, I let the thoughts flutter through my mind in random bursts.

Your task is to kill the High Priest.

The thought brought my defenses down for half a second, letting the magic slip from my heart in a quick pulse. A familiar tingling sensation shot through my arms when I brought the ax down on the log. The wood flew apart with a violent crack, shooting four separate pieces into the yard. I jumped with a yelp, narrowly avoiding the thickest piece. One hit the side of the cabin and clattered to the dirt, while another broke a branch off a tree several paces away. I looked down to find that the ax had bitten into the stump all the way to its top.

“Blessed be,” I muttered, tugging on the handle. The stump had swallowed the ax head whole. My head swirled as I tried to understand it, and I finally used an incantation to work the ax head free. Merrick, realizing I’d stopped, threw an armful of logs onto his pile and wiped his palms off.

“What happened?”

I thought about telling him that I’d accidentally used magic to chop the log and didn’t know how, but decided that I might sound even more out of control.