At the center of the circle, another shape waited. Not quite a throne. Not quite a void. The ink there seemed thinner somehow, as if the artist hadn’t been sure of the shape.
Unease prickled along my spine.
Life, the rune whispered. Favor. Promise.
Debt.
I traced the circlewith one finger, feeling the faint thrum of magic in the page, and wondered which one of those I was meant to pay.
Chapter Eight
Aurelia
The day after Keres baited me into training with them, I stood in the grass behind Frithhold and breathed in the sharp, cold air, the clearing before me soft with fog and edged with frost-bitten pine. At the far edge of the yard, the ground dropped away into a sheer overlook, and through the mist that clung stubbornly to the mountainside, a city lay faint and ghostlike below—its towers blurred to smudges of silver and shadow. Close enough to see. Far enough to never touch.
“What city is that?” I asked as Thorne walked by.
“Ravenna,” he said.
I looked at him sharply. “That’s the Midnight Court down there.”
“Yes.”
So, we weren’t inside the city after all.
“Will we visit it?” I asked.
“That’s not up to me,” he said and walked off.
After another glance at Ravenna, I turned back to the yard. A circle of stones marked the training area, the dirt tamped flat by years of boots and blades.
By now, the sun had risen to directly overhead, but the wind remained brutal and unrelenting. The cold climbed through my feet, up my spine, rattling my insides. The fog that had rolled in before dawn never lifted—only softened until the trees looked like they’d been painted with a wet brush.
Even out here, the cabin’s kitchen exuded the scent of warm bread and simmering roots, soothing in a way that made me angrier than if it had been all chains and iron. Captivity wasn’t supposed to be cozy. But outside made up for it. The wind was a scraping blade that cut to the bone if you stood still long enough to let it.
So, I didn’t.
“Again,” Daegel said before I’d come to a complete stop.
He stood at the edge of the circle with his arms folded, patient and immovable, beard catching the fog’s fine droplets.
I tightened my grip on the sword in my right hand. Latha, Sonoma’s last gift to me, hummed low against my right palm. Dorcha rode my left; lighter, eager—the blade of my childhood.
From inside my palms, my furyfire burned as it licked from around the edges where I gripped my swords. All day, Daegel had been pushing me to wield both at once. So far, doing so had proven harder than it sounded.
I barely conjured a spark before I was done with the next sequence.
“You lift your left shoulder when you’re angry,” Amanti called from where she sat along the stone circle. “Keep it down.”
“I’m always angry,” I muttered.
“Then learn to be angry and precise,” she said without missing a beat.
She still wore the sling, and after her own one-handed hour of sparring with Thorne, sweat clung to her tunic and matted her hair. One wing lay too still across her back, darkscars weaving through it like stitches of the dead. The other wing remained tucked tight, stubborn. Every time she’d shifted her stance or parried Thorne’s blade, I saw the torn edges, and something inside me caught. But the dark circles no longer carved hollows under her eyes. She was healing. Slowly. Far more slowly than she would have as an Aine. But I’d take it.
Keres sat to her left, braids coiled, sleeves rolled. She held a blade and a whetstone, the steady scrape of steel on stone filling the silence. She hadn’t said much today, which was fine by me. I’d heard plenty yesterday and had no desire to hear more of her self-righteous opinions of me.
Thorne leaned against the far post, eyes on the tree line, attention flicking between me and the horizon. Earlier, when he sparred with Amanti, I’d watched the way he moved—fast, clean, not just his blade work but the grace with which he spun and leaped. Only the Aine moved like that. Now, his stillness was another gift. Maybe the ley lines had something to do with it.
