“No!” Ursa snapped, a thick cloud of darkness emanating from her in her fury. “It’s just a shield, Seren. This is the most basic thing I can teach you and we’ve been at this for two weeks.”
“I just… I need a break,” I wheezed, kneeling.
She just shook her head, turned on a heel, and stormed from the training room. She waved her hand on the way out and the dagger was gone from my thigh, the gash already closed and healing. I rubbed the spot where I’d been struck, staring down at my arms where they had bled before, again and again.
The King had disappeared after his son’s execution, the last of his orders appearing to have been for his daughter to train me to use my newfound magic. But Ursa only knew one way to train, through torture, and it wasn’t working for me. It was exhausting me, all the healing, the split second concentration, the agony. I wasn’t able to use any of my emotions because she wasn’t allowing me to feel anything but hurt.
I wondered if they had trained Lark like this, in this court, if they had cut him apart just to piece him back together again, stronger than ever. Cass too. I wondered if Rook had suffered the same strict regiment from Ursa or perhaps even the King. I wondered if this was the only way the Bone Court knew; pain and torment, exile and executions, blood rights and sacrifice. And then I remembered what he had said, so long ago, when we had sat across a dinner table in the Court of Wanderers and looked to the future with bright eyes and high hopes.
If Taurus or Ursa took the throne, things would get even worse than they have under my father. I can’t let that happen.
Would he have been a better leader? Would he have been kinder? Would he have taken away the suffering, made the world a better place? Now, we would never know.
The moment he died, Rook had disappeared and no one had seen him since. That fact seemed to irk Ursa. She had gone on a tirade the first day of our training when I’d brought him up, claiming that he should have known he would always be welcome at the Bone Court, with or without her brother. I had made the mistake of pointing out he had been banished for sixty years and she made me pay for the remark with a shining black spear through my calf.
Cass was gone too. They had taken her to her rooms afterwards. The guards outside claimed they’d heard sobs for hours but then they suddenly stopped and, when they entered the room to check on her, she was gone. And that was that.
So all the people I had believed once were my friends were gone, had abandoned me again as they had before. And I was here, under the tutelage of Ursa and the dominion of the absent King, a hostage because of my blood, because of my ancestry. I spent my days training with Ursa and my nights staring at the stars, trying to shatter them into a million pieces as I had the glass before.
But my magic hadn’t returned to me since that day, not even a trace of it. I hadn’t even felt it coursing through my veins. And that emotional connection, those visions of auras and feelings of spiritual bonding with the people and the world around me, they were all gone. As if Lark’s final breath had stolen all my power away. As if his death had been mine as well.
I felt more mortal than I ever had.
And I felt more lonely than ever before as well.
I grabbed the rag from the nearby bucket of water mixed with cleaning solution that the servants had learned to leave behind for all of mine and Ursa’s training lessons. One of her more tedious lessons was that I had to be the one to clean up the blood left behind from my injuries. She healed the skin, the muscle, the tissue. But she didn’t wipe away the blood. That was for me to do at the end of a failed lesson. To get on my hands and knees and scrub my own blood from the obsidian floors. So that I would remember the consequences of my failures as if I didn’t feel them in my burning limbs enough as it was.
“The method works,” a deep voice spoke and I froze, white rag turned red beneath my palms. “You may consider it barbaric, something you once called our succession rites as well, I believe, but it works.”
I plunged the rag into the bucket and watched the water turn red.
“It isn’t working for me,” I snapped.
“So what would?”
I turned to face the King, wiping my wet, blood-stained hands on my borrowed tunic, and stood.
“You said it was interesting that my power was tied to emotion,” I said. “Why is that interesting?”
He clasped his hands behind his back and strolled forward to meet me in the center of the room.
“Because your mother’s is tied to thought,” he answered. “And thought and emotion seem like two sides of the same coin to me.”
I cocked my head to the side, brow furrowed.
“Thought?” I asked, because I knew he wanted me to.
“Yes, thought,” he said, nodding his head and circling me, looking down at the puddles of my blood on the floor. “The strength of one’s thoughts, the strength of their will, she pulls her power from that. She’s amassed quite the collection of cunning advisors over the years. She can identify them easily enough, read the patterns of their minds and compare them to others.”
“She can… read minds?”
“No. She can read the patterns.”
My lips parted as I went to ask another question but wasn’t sure how to phrase it. He seemed to anticipate my confusion, though, and continued his explanation.
“Alban explained it to me once,” he said. “They both have the same ability, you see. He said he can see the patterns of thought like a musician might identify notes. There’s a particular flow, a rhythm. Everyone’s rhythm is different and the directions of their thoughts can indicate the state of their mind. Short, staccato bursts might mean someone is angry or impulsive. Cautious rests and holds might mean someone is paranoid or calm. A steady, thrumming rhythm is usually happiness and so on. I confess I can’t envision the matter myself but he says he sees it in the air around a person, it flows from them.”
I froze.
