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Only he does exactly what I just wanted. He sees my hand and he stands.

He practically jumps, and then looms over me in the most nonthreatening way I’ve ever seen him manage. His hands are at his sides, open and relaxed. His shoulders aren’t squared. And he’s sort of slightly turned to one side, so I don’t get the full force of him.

Even though doing all of this brings him into a lot more contact with sunlight. It sears a stripe down his back, and he grimaces, and clearly wants to move away from it. But for some reason, he just doesn’t. He stays there, slowly cooking, second after agonizing second, face getting increasingly tense, eyes actually starting to water. It’s honestly like watching someone insist that the burning hot plate they have their hand on isn’t hurting them at all, after they got dared to do it by a girl they like. And of course once I’ve thought that I have to break.

“For god’s sake, Halsten,” I say. “Move toward the building.”

Then I flap my hands at it in a way I don’t really understand. It makes it seem as if I care, when of course I don’t. And I don’t know why I said his name, either. It tastes alien in my mouth, like the word forced its way in there against my own permission. Like someone other than me said it.

And that person apparently knows how to pronounce it, too. You’re not supposed to go hard on that first A is the thing—when he says it, he almost drops it. It almost sounds like Helsten, even though I know that’s not how it’s spelled. I know my brain doesn’t always think of it that way.

But that is how it comes out of me.

It makes me itch. I eye the darkness behind the open doors with greedy eyes, and the words when they come are brittle, short. “You know, if you were really so keen on jumping to my commands you would have seen how afraid I was and stayed away. You would have left me alone, you would have gone far from here,” I say.

Then when I see his puzzled expression—his very convincingly puzzled expression—I point. I jab my finger at the horizon, over and over, and when that’s not enough I make circles over him, and do it again. I mime throwing him, and so forcefully that magic sputters from my hands. It almost makes a giant scoop in the air, big enough to gather him up and hurl him.

But it dies at the sound of Phone’s voice.

She suddenly lets out a string of words in that strange language—clearly familiar enough to him that he starts. He reaches for her, his expression so obviously full of wonder that I don’t know what to make of it. I’m not used to being able to read his expressions. I’m not used to him really having them at all, if I’m honest.

But it’s definitely there.

And it stays there, too, no matter what I do.

I back away, and he follows me. He reaches for her again, muttering words I don’t understand, but can sort of guess at. He wants to know what she is, clearly. He wants to see where the words are coming from. “Don’t let him have me,” Phone gasps, and I put a hand up to stop him.

And it works.

He does.

He looks up at me, those too-big eyes searching my face. “Say to him whatever you did a second ago again,” I order Phone, and she grumbles, but she does it. And after he replies, she translates.

“He says he did not mean to come here.”

“Then what made him do it?”

“It’s not that easy to figure out how to ask, Marley.”

“Just try, Phone. Give it your best approximation,” I say, and she sighs.

But she does it. I hear her press him, and she must succeed because he looks up from the wonder rectangle to me, with a gaze that’s even worse than all the others. This one looks almost soft. And the words that come with it are soft, too. They sink into my head like a sigh, like a song.

Even Phone responds with a little Oh.

Then after a silence that feels endless, she finally breaks it with this: “He says you have bewitched him, body and soul, and now he cannot rest unless he resides near you.” And just in case that wasn’t impossible and terrible enough, he continues. A stream of things comes out of him, each fiercer than the last, until he almost sounds hoarse with it, strained by it. I’m kind of overwhelmed before Phone even translates.

Though she doesn’t do it right away this time.

I have to give her a little shake, and still she hesitates.

In fact, even Halsten seems to know she’s stalling. He looks at her, gestures to her, says something, then looks back up at me with eyes so full of earnest desperation I don’t know what to say. I can’t even get Phone to talk, though in the end she does it anyway. Like even she is starting to fall for whatever this is. Like even she can’t resist his obvious pleas. “He says he sleeps, yet his body awakens and walks to where you are. That sense tells him he must turn back but his heart cannot. That he does not know who he is, but that who he is knew, from the first moment he beheld you, that it was his life’s work to serve so great a sorceress,” she says, in a voice so fraught and mournful I can practically see the expression to match.

Mouth turned down at the corners, eyes lit with a reluctant light.

Even though she has to know this is nonsense. It must be nonsense.

“Okay, yeah, that’s gotta be wrong. Ask him to put it another way,” I say.