She had misjudged him, and he had never bothered to correct her.
Aya ignored her flicker of unease as she raised the tonic to her lips and took a small sip. It tasted like water.
She paced the paddock again, kicking at the rocks strewn across the dirt as she waited for some sort of sensation. Two minutes passed. Then five. She frowned up at the sky, her arms folded across her chest. She didn’t feel any different.
Finally, she rolled her neck and shook her arms loose as she closed her eyes and reached inward.
There.
That raging sea that made up her well of power had calmed, its essence now smooth like glass. Aya’s heart stuttered as she looked at her hand, pulling a single drop of the power forward while she held the image of her friend in her mind.
Suddenly, a flame appeared in her palm, flickering gently like the lit wick of a candle. Her own shocked laugh startled her, and the flame vanished. She willed it to return, her jaw clenching as she pushed her power to the surface and urged the flame to grow.
Calling this raw power was simple, but keeping it – maintaining it, controlling it – that was far more difficult than using her persuasion. It felt slippery. Sweat dripped down Aya’s neck as she forced the flame to wreath her wrist. It stuttered and fought with a stubbornness to rival Hepha’s own, but eventually it succumbed, forming a perfect, flickering circle. She pushed harder, forcing the flame to encompass her arm, her teeth gritting with the effort.
Difficult, but …
No darkness clouded her vision. No screams rang in her ears. No tremors or nausea racked her body.
It was working. The tonic was working.
Aya stayed in the paddock for hours, steadily working her way through the Order of the Dultra. She tested each elemental affinity and found she was partial to ice.
Unsurprising.
Fire was a close second.
She worked on earth now, attempting to coax the moss on the paddock rail to expand. Her hair was plastered to her sweat-stained cheeks as she panted, her affinity shifting through her like mud.
She’d hit a wall, unable to push her power further. Aidon’stonic certainly did its job well. If she took a larger dose, she had no doubt it would nullify her affinity completely.
But now, just beneath that heaviness … her well began to churn once more. She could feel it in the way her muscles cramped, in the way the affinity seemed to be scraping along her insides.
Aya stormed away from the moss and let out a noise of frustration, her arm arcing downward in a vicious slash. The ground beneath her split, a shallow cut appearing in the earth.
‘Impressive.’
She whirled.
Will leaned against a tree just beyond the paddock. He wore his own fighting leathers, brown and light and sleeveless like hers. His hair, curled slightly from the humidity, clung to his forehead; his body was covered in a light sheen of sweat, as if he’d just finished his own training. She tracked the rippling of his biceps as he pushed off the tree and hopped the paddock fence. ‘I see you took my advice on practicing.’
He kept his face neutral – amused, even. But Aya could see the tension in him even with the space he kept between them.
‘How did you find me?’
‘I was running through the forest. Did you not want me to?’
‘I didn’t want to get your hopes up,’ Aya admitted. ‘I can hardly dive deep enough for it to matter.’
‘I just watched you move through the elemental affinities as easily as breathing.’
He’d been there for a while, then. Aya swallowed as a welcome breeze blew through the paddock.
‘So the negative effects are gone?’
And perhaps it was the hopeful note in his voice – the possibility that all of this could be solved so easily – that hadher pushing the vial of tonic deeper into her back pocket, unable to admit the truth. She toed the line she’d cut in the ground, a frown on her face.
‘Natali says light affinity use shouldn’t be too harmful. It’s the deeper work that’s the problem.’
