“Get ready,” Ursa said suddenly and my eyes snapped open to find her standing at the foot of my bed, watching me.
Her arms were crossed, her lips set in a grim line. I wiped the tears away and then the blood off my palms and wondered how long she had been standing there, how much she had seen. I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stood, already padding toward my washroom.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “It’s late.”
It was. It had been three days since breakfast with the Lord of the Court of Friends and Lord Koa had long since departed the Bone Court to return to his own. I had spent every waking moment since training or searching for that fragment within me. One was proving far more successful than the other.
“There’s someone who lives in the city, someone we trust,” she told me. “If anyone can help you access your physical magic, it’s her.”
My eyes snapped to her momentarily while I washed off my hands. Then I turned back to the foaming soap and finished my task, wiping my hands on a towel nearby.
“Just let me change and then—” I started but Ursa cut me off with a wave of her hand.
A moment later, I was wearing a brown racer back tank and matching leggings, the look I had worn during all of my hand to hand combat training. The King had claimed I didn’t need to know how to fight but Ursa had insisted. I thought it was just her way of justifying cutting me up some more in the training room, coating that obsidian floor with my blood in vengeance for our other training drills when I invaded her soul. But it was strengthening me. I wasn’t the thin wisp of an academic that I had arrived as. My muscles were becoming more toned, my stomach flattening, my curves more pronounced, more feminine.
“We don’t have time,” she snapped. “Let’s go.”
Before I could object, she reached for me and we were hurtling through contorted darkness, away from the palace and toward some undisclosed location in the city. I stumbled on the other side, taking a few steps down the cobblestone road behind me, gasping in the frosty night air.
“I hate that,” I growled, gritting my teeth against both the nausea roiling through me and the frigid air creating goosebumps on my exposed skin.
“It’s the quickest, safest way to get you out of the palace,” Ursa snapped, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me quickly from the alley in which we had emerged. “Gemini Morningstar wards against anyone shadowstepping right into her home but the alley by the pub nearby is fair game.”
“Morningstar?” I croaked, rubbing my arms to keep warm as my breath froze in front of me. “Who—”
“My aunt. Father’s sister. And one badass Fae.”
My eyes widened as we stepped out of the alley onto the wider cobblestone road beyond. We were indeed outside of a pub. I could hear the loud jeering of drunken men as they whistled at the women making the rounds inside, clapping each other on the back and laughing in deep, booming voices. One man stumbled outside, still holding a pint, and fell face first into a freshly piled snowdrift, his ale spilling out and dribbling down the side, turning the snow a deep gold.
I looked above the shutters of the tavern and saw the sign, beaten and faded, swinging in the faint arctic breeze. The Evening Starr. A play on the royal family’s name and a hint at what could be found inside.
“She trained me,” Ursa told me, still talking about her aunt, the elusive Gemini Morningstar. “She trained all of us and she can train you, too. I’m sure of it.”
Ursa led me onward, toward a large and looming house at the end of the road. If we were in the mortal plane, it would be the kind of home that started rumors among the neighbor kids, the kind of place that everyone would assume was haunted simply because of the dreary color scheme and the lack of proper landscaping. It wasn’t the immaculate manse that I had expected for the sister of a King. It was a modest home, two stories and thin. The land around it was fenced as if to keep any loiterers out and I wondered what happened if one tried to shadowstep into a place that was warded against it as Ursa and I passed through the physical gate. The surrounding air shimmered as we passed and I glimpsed a glowing, magical shield enveloping the house and its grounds as we entered.
“Aunt Gemini takes her privacy seriously,” Ursa explained, noting my observation.
“How does your father have a sister?” I asked, suddenly realizing something else as well. “I thought the succession rites—”
“Gemini was thought dead already at the time of my father’s succession. She only came to light afterwards and then she bent the knee and promised not to usurp him.”
“Thought dead? Why—”
But the sound of the front door swinging open interrupted us. No one, however, stood on the other side. Eerie haunted house indeed.
“Come on,” Ursa instructed and then we hurried along the path, up the steps, and into the foyer. Once inside, the door slammed shut tightly behind us and I tensed.
“Is this the mortal?” a disembodied voice asked from somewhere to our left. I whirled to find a woman emerging from a darkened room, her dark eyes heavily lidded, bags beneath them. Her long dark hair was graying, frayed and tied behind her in a loose knot.
“Yes, Aunt Gemini,” Ursa spoke with a tone of respect I thought she reserved only for her father, the King.
Gemini Morningstar looked over me with a shrewd eye, crossing her arms and glaring at me as if I were something insignificant, hardly worth her time.
“Explain to me, dear niece, why my brother deems it wise to train our enemy’s heir,” she said.
“Hope for a new generation?” Ursa guessed with a shrug. “The king’s intent is not for me to reason out.”
“No, you just follow his orders.”
