The ball surged forward, chasing the hollow she created. It hugged the curves of the spiral with impossible smoothness, accelerating as she deepened the silence before it. It wound its way to the heart of the labyrinth and dropped into the center divot with a satisfyingclack.
She held the silence for a long, steady minute, keeping the ball pinned by the sheer weight of nothingness. She felt a fierce, wild pride. Her hand brushed her empty pocket, the phantom weight of the hematite finally gone. She didn’t need a rock to hold back the storm anymore. Shewasthe storm.
“There,” Ky’s voice was soft with approval. He let his hands linger a moment longer than necessary before lifting them away. The absence of his touch was as shocking as its arrival.
Gessa’s focus stuttered. The silence shattered, the buzzing world rushed back in, and the lead ball rattled loosely in its socket.
“Good,” Ky said simply. She turned to face him, and their eyes met. The look held the memory of his touch, a shared, charged knowledge that had not been there a moment before. He cleared his throat, taking a half-step back and breaking the spell. “That’s enough for today.”
The forge of the day’s training was far from over. Midday found her in Jaedon’s combat yard, the sun a merciless hammer overhead. The air tasted of dust and iron.
“Again!” Jaedon’s strident command echoed off the walls.
As Torvin lunged with a powerful thrust meant to end the spar, Gessa didn’t try to meet his blade with force. She had been weathering his attacks, giving ground, letting him believe he was driving her back. But after weeks on Jaedon’s anvil, she was learning to see beyond the storm of blows to the patterns within. Torvin, in his arrogance, always overcommitted on his final lunge.
Instead of blocking, Gessa dropped low and steppedintohis attack, moving inside the lethal arc of his sword. As his blade whistled over her head, she sidestepped his lunge, letting his momentum carry him past her, and then drove the pommel into the back of his knee as he stumbled by.
Torvin grunted in pain, his leg buckling instantly from the strike. His powerful lunge collapsed into a clumsy, forward stumble. Before he could even think to recover, the flat of Gessa’s blade was resting against the back of his neck.
Silence. Torvin was on one knee, immobilized, breathing raggedly. He stared at the dust, then twisted to look at her, his face a mask of disbelief. The sneer was gone, replaced by a flicker of grudging respect.
Jaedon let the silence hang for a moment before a slow, appreciative smile touched his lips. He addressed not Gessa, but the still-kneeling Torvin.
“Well now, Recruit Torvin. It seems our grandmother has a better grasp of basic physics than you do. A painful lesson in the consequences of arrogance, wouldn’t you say?”
He let the rhetorical question sink in, his green eyes glinting. Then, his voice snapped back to the familiar command. “Again!”
The rest of the afternoon was a blur of activity. Theoretical lessons on Soul Beast care, practical lessons on foraging. In Rowan’s history lesson, she found herself leaning forward, captivated by a fable of a Wayfinder who faced the treacherous Silver Tangles, her own wild magic feeling less like a curse and more like a cousin to that legendary power. The recruits, once a solid wall of hostility, had fractured into individuals. Some, like Roric, remained aloof, but others now offered nods in the mess hall. She was no longer just the dangerous older woman; she was a fixture.
She was Gessa.
Kennard “Ken” Oakhart, the quiet, leather-faced Stable Master, paused to study the nervous animal. Resting against his rough tunic was the mottled amber glass of a Whisperer’s locket—the mark of one who speaks the silent language of beasts. He assigned Gessa to groom a young mare, who was skittish and jumpy after being startled by a training exercise.
While other recruits struggled with more physical tasks, Gessa approached the mare slowly, speaking in a low, soothing murmur. Her hands were gentle as she worked the brushthrough the mare’s tangled mane. The horse, sensing her calm, eventually quieted and leaned into her touch.
The rhythmic stroke of the brush brought a sudden pang of memory. Shadow. She wondered where the brave gelding was now, if the stable master in Hillston had found him a home that understood his fire or merely a plow to break his spirit. The guilt of selling him still lingered, a dull ache beneath her ribs, but as this young mare blew a soft, trusting breath against her neck, Gessa silently thanked him. He had carried her to freedom; the least she could do was pay that kindness forward.
From across the stable, Hal, a senior recruit in his third year, who was treating a minor scrape on his own horse, watched her for a moment. He offered a small, friendly smile. “You’ve got a way with them,” he said quietly. “Most recruits come in here with all the grace of a falling rock. Ken doesn’t say much, but he notices that kind of thing.”
Later, in the deep quiet of her own small room, the unrelenting heat seemed to press in from the stone walls. Beyond her door, the corridor was silent save for the drone of night insects and the distant, muffled cough of another restless recruit in a nearby room. Gessa lay on her cot, the thin sheet stuck to her skin, feeling trapped in the small, hot space. It was in that sticky stillness that her memory sparked.
The satchel.
With a jolt, she sat up. The petition for dissolution. In the exhaustion following the long day, she’d completely forgotten. Lolly needed them for the first courier in the morning.
Dressing quickly, she slipped out into the humid night. The moon was high, but its light seemed trapped in the heavy air. Heat lightning, silent and ethereal, flickered on the horizon, promising a storm that never came. The sticky air was a trigger, transporting her back. She remembered nights like this at Ironwood, the air thick with unshed rain and dread. She wouldlie awake, praying for silence, knowing that boredom and heat often made Polan cruel.
She shook the memory away, focusing on the here and now. She was tired of giving Polan space in her head. The anxiety she felt tonight wasn’t the cold dread of a victim. It was the warm panic of a student. This errand was an act of her own freedom.
She nearly collided with Galt emerging from the kitchens. The figure that detached itself from the shadows was built on the scale of a young bear, a hulking silhouette of broad shoulders and thick limbs that seemed to fill the moonlit courtyard. He froze, caught in the act, his expression not one of fear but of wide-eyed, boyish guilt. In one massive hand, he clutched a stolen apple, which looked comically small, like a child’s toy.
His honest, open face, usually quick to a grin, was a mask of comical surprise. Then, seeing it was only her, his features softened, and a slow, conspiratorial wink crinkled the corners of his gentle eyes. At that moment, he wasn’t a fellow recruit; he was just a big, friendly boy, miles from home and hungry for a midnight snack.
“Kitchen raid,” he whispered, his voice a deep rumble. “Don’t tell Mace.”
“Your secret’s safe,” she whispered back. The brief exchange warmed her, a feeling of shared, easy camaraderie.
The administrative wing was quiet. A single lamp glowed from the upper quarters of Aris and Lolly, the door propped open a few inches to tempt a nonexistent breeze. Gessa raised her hand to knock, but a sound from within stopped her cold. It was the unmistakable, rhythmic, urgent creak of a bedframe, a sound she knew with a sickening familiarity that coiled in her gut. A low grunt followed, male and strained with effort.
