“Well—you eventually come to terms with dreadful things. Only assuming they weren’t your own fault.”
She put her arms around him, pressing her lips to the top of his head. He remained there for a while, leaningagainst her, and it felt charged, like a held breath. He would hardly need to move at all to be in bed with her.
But she had just enough self-control not to suggest it, and he didn’t test her willpower.
“I suppose we ought to try to get some sleep,” he murmured, pulling back. “Willi will be here immediately after lunch whether we’re up or not, and I want to start self-defense practice with you today.”
Self-defense. A few days until adventure.
He slipped back into his bed, and she lay in hers, unable to turn her mind off. She had a useful power, a dark sorcerer to overcome and an orphaned hero to fight alongside. He was right: It did seem like an adventure novel. It was all the fantasy-book dreams of her childhood come to life.
14
Mission Eve
The next afternoon, Hartgrave set Bernie and Willi practicing with each other on one side of the room and decreed that the other was for magic versus anti-magic combat.
He raised his hands and a challenging eyebrow. “Ready?”
She pushed up her sleeves and put out her own hands, the excited anxiety that churned in her stomach promising plenty of what Hartgrave had once called her disagreeable particles. “Oh, I’m ready.”
She wasn’t.
When his red-tinted spell hit her, she had only a nanosecond for it to register as smooth and hard—just like one of his barriers—before it pushed her backward at a rapid clip. She pressed bare skin against it and tried to project anti-magic with all her might, which had tobe considerable given the spike of adrenaline brought on by fear, but it wouldn’t give. Oh God, she would hit a wall—
The red barrier abruptly stopped. Hartgrave had let up. She slid to a halt, arms pinwheeling.
“You can’t disrupt magic nearly as easily when your opponent pumps in reinforcements,” he said. “Don’t youdareget complacent.”
“I won’t,” she said, shaky and mortified.
He mercifully ratcheted the next lesson down about ten notches, having her take apart barriers that (like the last one) he continued to bolster with magic but (unlike the last one) stayed put. Each took half a minute to destroy, an age compared with the seconds required for the sort she’d practiced on before.
“You will get better,” Hartgrave called out when she took a water break. Something about his delivery sounded more like a threat than encouragement.
When she trotted back, Willi had joined Hartgrave. The former was shaking his head at the latter.
“Alexander,” he said, “you are being too optimistic. She is not able to protect herself. You will need to do it.”
Hartgrave answered before she could insert herself into this conversation about her. “Yes, well—you may be right.”
“No,” she said, a little annoyed. “Give me more of a chance than that.”
Willi offered an apologetic shrug. “If we had more time—but even then, I do not think so. He is more suited to this. You are”—Willi waved a hand toward her—“delicate.”
“What,” she ground out, very annoyed.
“I mean you are not made for this sort of thing,” he said, as if the previous statement required clarification instead of rapid backtracking. “Let Alexander take care of it. This is a job for the men.”
“You—”
That was all she managed to get out before Hartgrave shot a spell at her. It hit her bare arms and fizzled to nothing at almost the same instant—which was also the moment she realized this was a setup to make her good and angry. Again. And she’d fallen for it—again.
“Oh yeah,” Hartgrave said, “really pissed off isdefinitelythe way to go.”
“I did not mean it,” Willi said quickly, raising his hands. “You are not a damsel.”
“Damn right,” she muttered.
