Page 22 of Slouch Witch
‘Make it twelve.’
‘Hey!’
He shrugged. ‘Every time you complain, I’m going to add more.’
‘Well, that sucks,’ I muttered. At least I’d deflected his attention from the weights.
‘Be careful with your breathing,’ Winter instructed.
‘Mm’kay,’ I heaved, trying to look as if I were really struggling.
‘Those weights aren’t that heavy. You’re not that weak.’
He was right; the weights weren’t heavy at all. ‘Says the man with muscles that Popeye would envy,’ I muttered. I had to be careful not to overdo the straining or he’d get suspicious.
‘Keep up remarks like that,’ Winter told me, ‘and all you’ll get for lunch is boiled spinach. I got these muscles by working for them. You can do the same.’
Yeah, yeah. I glared; I also shut up. With the facial expression of someone in pain, I lifted ten times, clenching my jaw and holding my breath to make sure my cheeks stayed red. It might have looked as if I were giving it everything I’d got but it felt like I was lifting air. Ha! Take that, Mr Smarty Pants.
I couldn’t cheat on every exercise. Some of the strange contortions he made me do were impossible to fake and sometimes he didn’t look away long enough for me to cast a spell. All in all, though, it was a successful venture. Winter wasn’t stupid; if he’d checked closely enough, he’d have worked out what I was up to. His trouble was that it didn’t occur to him that I’d try fake my way through getting fit.
I was lucky our binding would last only three months. I doubted Winter would fall for my tricks for long. But then, for all I knew I couldn’t trust him any more than he could trust me. He may have had something to do with Bell End and his partner breaking into Eve’s flat. They were all in the Order, after all.
Despite managing to fudge my way through most of the exercises, I was still exhausted by the end of them. My whole body was in agony.
Winter scratched his chin and cast a critical eye across my bedraggled and sweaty appearance. ‘I was going to move onto sparring,’ he said. ‘But I think that’s probably enough for today.’
‘Great.’ I was really looking forward to getting back home. I didn’t even care if my sheets were still wet; right now I’d sleep almost anywhere.
‘Take a quick shower,’ Winter said. ‘After that, we can hit the library.’
I went very still. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Why? What have you done?’
I glared at him. ‘You know what I mean. Why do we need to go to the library?’
Honest-to-goodness surprise flickered in his eyes. ‘So we can study.’ Belatedly he seemed to understand what I was getting at and slowed his speech as if he were speaking to someone of very low intellect. ‘The library is where books are kept. Books contain knowledge. If you read books, you can learn things.’ Winter raised an eyebrow. ‘You can read, right?’
I shook my head. ‘Nope. Not a word. So there’s no point going near any books.’
Winter remained deadpan. ‘Hmm. In that case, we’ll need to spend even more time in the library than I thought. We can begin with basic phonics.’ Damn it. The corners of his mouth twitched. ‘I’ll teach you the alphabet song.’
‘I hate singing.’
‘It seems, Ms Wilde, that you hate everything and everyone unless it involves lounging around at home and doing nothing at all.’
I grinned. ‘So now you understand why all this training is a waste of your time.’
He gazed at me with sapphire-hued promise. ‘I don’t fail, Ms Wilde. Ever. The Ipsissimus wants me to prove myself so that is what I will do.’
‘I’ve told you before, my name is Ivy.’ I put my hands on my hips. ‘And failure is good. People who don’t fail have no understanding of their own limits.’
Winter leant closer to me. ‘People who don’t succeed aren’t trying.’
It was like talking to a brick wall. I suppose I should have been grateful that sometimes he showed glimpses of a sense of humour. I sighed. ‘I’m going for that shower.’
‘Fifteen minutes,’ he called after me. ‘Or I’ll come in after you.’
