He gasped for air as he rose to his feet on shaky legs.
“How did you do that?” he asked. “How did you make me feel that?”
“I didn’t create the feeling,” I told him. “It was already there. I just pulled it out of you.”
His wet eyes were wide, his lips parted in a perfect O, and he was watching me as if I was something he didn’t recognize, something he didn’t understand. A chill ran down my spine at that look.
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said then, clearing his throat and straightening his lapel. “Ursa’s training will not work for you.”
With that, he and his guards left me standing alone in the training room, a bucket of bloody water by my feet and now-dried blood to clean from the floors.
Chapter twenty-two
A Shot In The Dark
“Now,Ursa,”theKingbellowed and I turned my attention away from the three soldiers writhing on the ground to the princess. She stood still, waiting for me.
I turned my focus to a pinprick, a precision instrument, diving into her heart, her soul. Anger was first. Ursa always had anger lurking on the surface. I waded through the ocean of it, letting it lap over me, try to pull me under. The King had been unguarded before, when I had brought him to his knees in the training room, but now I was finding out just how powerful these royal Fae were.
Ursa didn’t just guard her emotions. She used the baser ones against me, weaponizing them. All of her fear, her sorrow, her doubt, her happiness, the little silver linings she celebrated and clung to, her love, her pride, it was all hidden behind a gleaming fortress built up in her mind. It was impenetrable. I had tried for five days now to breach it and every day before, she had used her rage, her ferocity, her ambition to drown me before I could. She had amplified and intensified that anger so that it wasn’t a weakness anymore. It wasn’t something I could use against her; it was her own weapon. Honed from centuries of stoking, nurturing. And she unleashed it when I delved inside her mind until it overwhelmed every one of my senses and broke my focus, pushed me out.
The soldiers on the ground hadn’t been able to guard against me, these new ones no more of a challenge than the last. I had found their deepest sorrows, their fiercest doubts, and had preyed upon them with it until they succumbed. The first time, it had left me cradled in a ball as well, wracked with guilt for the suffering I had imposed and for the trauma of another man that I had experienced all at once. But the King had explained they were only doing their duty. That they had agreed, even volunteered, to help me hone my skills. And they would recover. Like I said, I created none of those feelings myself. I just brought them to the surface.
But Ursa’s surface was already overflowing with emotion. There was no room for any more. Her chest heaved, her lip curled. She glared at me with a hatred I couldn’t fathom. And I wouldn’t even try or else I would get lost in it and never find my way out as I had on the third day. But not this time.
I planted my feet and closed my eyes, narrowing my focus to that impenetrable wall. I let the red rivers of her anger flow around me, push against me, but I waded into the mud and muck that was her surface. I stuck there, immovable, like a parasite on a host trying desperately to flick it away. And I moved. Slowly, so slowly, but I moved. I felt her tense the closer I got, felt her control slip slightly and the waters recede a bit. She was building up a wave, a tsunami. I knew it was coming for me again, as it always did before. I was running out of time. If I could just get within those walls, if I could just breach her defenses.
I shot out with hope and it ricocheted off like a fly buzzing in a window. I shot out with despair and it didn’t even make a dent. I thought for a moment, weighing my options. I could already feel the current shifting, the wave forming. I sensed the daggers in her hands now, aimed at me, materialized and waiting. There was one thing I hadn’t tried. One thing that no one would ever think to try, not in a battle, not while fighting a war.
I shot out with love.
And that impenetrable wall gained the tiniest chink in its armor.
My surprise was so great that she was able to pull me out and toss me down. I fell to the floor in a heap, stuck there by some invisible force as Ursa stormed toward me, eyes alight with something that might be mistaken for anger but I knew it was fear.
“How?” she snapped and the hall fell silent.
I pulled and pulled, but to no avail. I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t defend myself from those daggers she had created, the obsidian knives rotating slowly around her hand, waiting to be thrust out. And the King did not intervene. He waited, stroking his chin in interest, to see how this would play out.
“Everyone has a weakness,” I said. “Even you.”
She bristled.
“How?” she asked again, this time in a scream.
“Love,” I snapped. “Love is your weakness, Ursa. Not because you want it but because you have it and you want to be rid of it.”
Her lips curled into a hateful snarl and she let out a low growl before turning away and storming from the room, letting the door slam behind her.
“You should know,” I called out to her even though she was gone. “Love is a not a weakness.”
“For some of us, it is,” the King said finally, waving a hand so that I could move again. I shook out my wrists as I rose, shooting an annoyed glance to where Ursa had vanished. “Very impressive, Seren.”
“Can I stop hurting people now?” I asked, rubbing my wrists and glaring at the King.
“Is that what you think you’re doing?”
I gave a pointed glance to the one soldier still curled up in a ball in the corner of the room.
