My men glowered at me as Nex sauntered by them.
“Ugh,” I whined as I trudged up to them. “I need a day off. Why can Nex go out but I can't?”
“Because Nex has trained for years,” Rath said. “He can skip as many days as he wants. You, however, can't skip a single day. Your sword skills are improving, but they're still not passable.”
“It's just a few hours,” Keltyr said as he joined us. “Most people work all day.”
“Yeah, I guess. But most people are good at their jobs.” I grimaced, then noticed one of the kids watching me and turned the expression more extreme, making it comical.
Becky giggled, and didn't that just improve my morning? I winked at her and then left the dining hall. I shouldn't complain. At least this was my home, not a temporary residence while I waited for Wraith Lords to find my parents. Even the children who had their fathers weren't in a stable situation. They had no home to go back to. The Corrupter had destroyed Fress in a fury because of what I'd done to him. I had brought this upon them. The least I could do was work hard to end the war. And that meant training.
My men and I headed out of the keep and to the left. Around the corner waited the training yard, and the sound of men hitting pells with wooden swords thudded in my ears. I wasn't the hardest working Wraith Lord even though I should have been. The men who lived in the citadel trained tirelessly, even Nex. And they never complained.
My shoulders straightened with renewed determination, but then I saw Wraith Lord Jathalion—ex-trainer of Wraith Lord recruits, winged Makhan, the most brilliant warrior in the citadel, and my nemesis. My footsteps faltered, then slowed. This wasn't at all similar to my response to Taroc, though I had once greatly desired Jathalion. The problem was, when Jathalion worked at the Wraith Lord training fortress, he'd lost his last group of trainees. All of them died. They stole a stash of starfruit and ate it before they were ready. Eating starfruit could kill you or it could take you for a nice visit with the Goddess. The Goddess made us into Wraith Lords, granting us some of her Spirit Magic, but we needed to train first. Not just to prove ourselves worthy of her gift, but also to survive the trip to her.
Not that I had gone through any of that. I did see the Goddess, but that was after the Corrupter stabbed me in the heart. The Goddess brought me to her, healed me, and sent me back, turning me immortal in the process. But she hadn't saved Jathalion's trainees. And they had taken that risk because of me. To get to me faster, before I stopped taking lovers. They wanted to be heroes.
And Jathalion blamed me for their deaths.
He didn't mean to. In fact, he'd said numerous times that he knew it wasn't my fault they died. But he couldn't get past his anger, and it had soured our relationship. Not that we'd had much of one, to begin with. Acquaintance was more accurate. The climax to our tragedy literally came when he found me outside the citadel, in the rain, and had sex with me. No, let's be honest. He fucked me. Hard. It was fantastic, and I hadn't tried to stop him. This made me feel as if I had betrayed my lovers, it made my lovers feel betrayed, and it made Jathalion feel as if he had betrayed his friends. All around, a lot of betrayal.
Now, Jathalion and I were polite to each other. Mostly. All right, I was polite to him, and Jathalion was morose at best, resentful at worst. I tried to avoid him, and he usually just glared at me. He'd been training me before everything had taken a horrible turn, but, of course, that had stopped. Unfortunately, all of my progress with a sword had been due to him. My lovers simply didn't have the experience to teach me—someone shorter and leaner than them—properly.
“Over here,” Xaedren directed us to a pell off to the right, as far away from Jathalion as we could get.
Yup, everyone was aware of how I preferred to avoid Jathalion, especially my lovers.
At least now I was annoyed enough to want to hit something. I grabbed a wooden practice sword, one that was just my size, and went over to the pell—a huge log standing on its end. A stone base supported it, and it had been wrapped in padding to dampen sound and soften blows. Hitting the pell could still send terrible vibrations up my arm if I did it wrong, but Jathalion had taught me how to swing. I thought of him as I smacked the thing. And not in a grateful, student-to-teacher kind of way. More of seeing him instead of the pell.
Oh, yeah. That helped.
“Asshole,” I muttered under my breath.
“You gotta let that go, Ember,” Kel said.
“I have,” I said. Wham! I grinned.
“You put him in his place,” Xae said. “It's over. There's nothing more to be done.”
“Yeah, I did put him in his place.” My grin got bigger. “I told that motherfucker off.”
“Then maybe you can stop calling him a motherfucker,” Rath suggested. “We've accepted what happened. You should as well.”
I dropped my arm, making sure to keep the sword tip off the ground even though it was just wood. “Thank you for that.” I looked from Rath to Xae to Kel. “I know how awful it was for you. How awful I was to you.”
“Accepting it means we forgive you,” Xae said. “Stop apologizing to us. We understand what happened and how he led you on. It was a bad time for you both. Now, let it go.”
“I have let it go, Xae,” I said, softening my tone. “But letting it go and then enduring his fucked up looks can still be aggravating. I'm only human, remember?”
Xaedren chuckled and stroked my hair. “No, you're not.Remember?”
I grinned back. “I guess notonlyhuman. Just mostly.”
Then Taroc walked by.
I glanced at him, then determinedly looked away. I didn't know much about relationships or what led up to them. My experience pre-Wraith Lords was minimal. So I wasn't sure how to get Taroc to chase me. I figured I'd start by ignoring him. Or maybe not ignoring exactly, but focusing on myself. I needed to do that anyway.
So I swung again. And again. And again. But I didn't put anger into the blows. I focused on my technique and what my men suggested as they watched me. And then I watched them hit the pell, giving me something to emulate. Just like that, our talk of Jathalion was over, and we were into training.
