I’ve never even hurt someone, not on purpose. Not with a real weapon. The war was over before my magic settled, and so I spent an entire lifetime training for nothing. I’ve barely set footbeyond our lands. I’ve never fought a bandit or a highwayman or an Orsan raider.
I’ve never even gotten into a tavern brawl.
“Don’t worry,” Larus would say as he’d take the dull point of my training blade to the gut. “The killing blow will come to you. When you’re on the battlefield, your survival instinct won’t let you fail.”
This was a battlefield once. I feel the moves I’ve practiced a thousand times in my muscles, feel the twitch of anticipation before the strike.
But my survival instinct seems to be somewhere else.
On the other side of the carriage, Adria cries out. For a moment, I worry, but I can hear frustration in the grunts that follow, not pain. She’ll win, of course. She always does.
I’m just glad she isn’t here to see me hesitate.
I’m going to stab him. I’m just going to do it before he turns behind the carriage and makes things tougher for Adria and Larus. I don’t need to think about it anymore. His back is to me now, and he won’t even see it coming.
I step forward, and the road falls out underneath me.
Earth magic, the second-lowest school. The man must have it. It must be how they managed the ambush. They waited until the other carriages in our caravan had crossed over the hill and then sent the ground up into our carriage’s wheels.
It won’t be long before the other carriages return for us. They’re our escort, accompanying Adria, the head of House Verran, and me, the second in line for the title after our brother, on our trip to the capital. Our attackers are lucky that our brother Seth stayed behind in Kalla. Though a year younger than Adria, he’s just as formidable as she is.
And about a million times more formidable than me. I’m about to fall on my own sword.
I cry out, fighting for my balance, and the blade-wielder spins towards my voice. He deftly navigates the crumbling sand and dirt beneath us as he makes his way to me.
I thrust my sword forward to counter my fall, and he blindly runs right into it.
Oh,shit.
The brutal steel cuts through him like butter. The handle reverberates in my hand as the blade passes through layer after layer of flesh and muscle.
It’s exactly what needed to happen. What I should have done of my own accord.
And it makes me feelsick.
I need to focus. I’m not going to throw up. This is fine. It’s just a training exercise, and this man is a particularly juicy dummy. He’s not a person with feelings and hopes and dreams. He’s not someone’s child, someone’s lover, someone’s friend. His life isn’t draining through the gaping wound I’m about to leave in his chest. I need to focus and withdraw the sword or risk it getting stuck.
It's harder to remove the blade than I thought it would be, but I manage it. He surprises me by grabbing at it, lunging around blindly in the dark as he chokes and gasps, the blood filling his punctured lung. I should probably stab him again. But he’s getting further from me, pulled away by the sinking ground, and I have another problem to deal with: there’s a screaming woman running around the carriage.
She crouches into the shadows, unaware of my presence. Her hair and tattered dress are smoldering from Adria’s flames. “Please!” she shouts. “I surrender. I surrender!”
It could be a trick. She could be trying to ambush Adria and Larus when they come to find her.
I should kill her. Before she has the chance to kill them, I should kill her.
She’s young, I realize as she turns towards me, sensing something off about the shadow. My same age: twenty-one, maybe a few years older at most.
What is she doing out here?
She’s scared. I see it in the shake of her leg, the way she curls her shoulder away from my unnatural darkness. I see it in the prayer she whispers to Vayla.Help me, lady of light. Protect me.She’s terrified, just like I am.
“Step forward,” I tell her, the point of my blade inches from her back, hidden by shadow. I’m glad she can’t see it shaking. “Hands up.”
She jumps out of her skin at my voice, but she does as I command, stepping back into the light. “Please,” she says again. “We were told to. They paid us. We had no choice. We hadn’t eaten in a week.”
“Who paid you?” I lift the shadows. The effort of the magic is weighing on me, draining me in the way only magic can do. And with the man on the ground dying—he’s dying. Oh, gods. I’ve killed him—and this woman willing to talk, it’s a waste of energy.
The woman’s eyes flash with fear as she sees me and then terror as she sees the man on the ground. She backs away from my sword. “I don’t know,” she says. “I never saw them. I told Marcus it wasn’t the right carriage. Too nice, I said. Please.”
