Brightly (Flicker #2) Read Online Free PDF

Market.
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    For once, Filo thought, Jason was right: The storyteller was nothing special. He looked young—in his mid-twenties, though it was hard to tell with faeries—and his fur-tipped ears twitched endlessly. He sat on a wooden crate, hands clasped, his dark tail lashing back and forth behind him.
    The three of them joined the circle of listeners in the middle of a rather dry recounting of “Furrypelts.” When the tale was over, the listeners clapped and tossed coins and trinkets into a basket at the storyteller’s feet. He rose and bowed.
    “Requests?” asked the storyteller, surveying the crowd. A smug smiled curled his mouth up at the corners. “Any requests?”
    Alice raised her hand. “Let’s make this more exciting,” she called. “I propose a bet.”
    “A bet?” The storyteller chewed his lower lip with one fang.
    “Yes. I’d like to bet that my friend here can tell a better story than the one you just told,” she said, nodding toward Filo. “I’ll bet you all the money I have on me.”
    “And my money, too,” Jason added.
    A low, amused murmur ran over the crowd. The storyteller hesitated.
    “Unless you don’t want to take the risk,” Jason offered. He made a great show of glancing around at the gathered fey, eyebrows arched skeptically. “We would understand.”
    Filo winced internally. Few things made him more uncomfortable than having this many sets of eyes fixed directly on him. He preferred not to make a spectacle of himself, but it was already done. If he refused, he knew he’d never hear the end of it.
    The storyteller’s ears drooped slightly. Then he narrowed his eyes, as if to an insolent pup, and stepped aside. “I accept,” he purred finally. “Tell a better story, boy —if you can.”
    Sighing, Filo took the storyteller’s place atop the crate and mentally thumbed through his rather large repertoire of stories. He settled on an old Japanese folktale.
    The faeries watched him with glittering eyes, looking hungry, almost predatory—the look faeries sometimes got when they caught a whiff of humanity. And it was his responsibility to entertain them.
    Of course, they didn’t realize the nature of Filo’s magic.
    Magic was a live thing, endlessly adaptive and endlessly creative—artistic. It had desires of its own. The magic that lived within a human could sometimes take control and create through that person, using the body like an instrument to make whatever art it was best suited to.
    When Lee’s magic took control, she grabbed her pencils and filled her sketchbooks with elaborate artwork. Jason composed complicated, beautiful music. Alice tore up newspapers and folded dozens of tiny paper animals that walked around by themselves. And Filo told stories.
    He hadn’t learned that magic. It was simply part of him, an instinct folded up inside him like a second heartbeat. Over the years, Filo had learned how to harness that magic at will.
    “A long, long time ago, in a tiny fishing village, there lived a fisherman named Urashima Taro,” Filo began. “He was known for his great skill—he could catch more fish in a day than his comrades could catch in a week—but he was also known for his kind heart. He couldn’t bear to see any creature suffer. One summer evening, as he was walking home, Urashima came across a group of boys who were tormenting a turtle, pulling it this way and that, beating it with a stick. Urashima rescued the turtle and carried it back to the sea…”
    As he spoke, he could feel the magic stirring like fireflies in his blood. But it was more than magic that made the crowd lean in closer. It was eye contact, gestures, facial expressions. It was different voices and speech patterns for different characters, and the stress on individual words that could make the audience laugh or gasp or cringe. It was the use of silence as well as sound. These were things Filo had learned .
    At the edge of the crowd stood a boy about Filo’s age, maybe