She falls into step beside me, matching my pace without effort. “What did the research tell you?”
“That the Crown is significantly more powerful than we anticipated.” I navigate the corridors on autopilot, my mind still processing the morning’s revelations. “The other three Relics are tools—dangerous ones, but limited in scope. The Crown is something else entirely. An amplifier without apparent ceiling.”
“I know what it can do.”
“Do you?” I glance at her, cataloguing the set of her jaw, the steadiness of her gaze. “Have you ever opened it? Used its power?”
“No.” Something flickers across her face—not fear, exactly. Wariness. “My mother was supposed to train me. We were going to start after my twenty-fifth birthday.” A pause. “That was two weeks ago.”
Two weeks. The timeline crystallizes in my mind. Two weeks since her birthday. Only days since the Shadow Clan attacked. She should be learning to wield the most powerful Relic in existence under her mother’s guidance. Instead, she’s here, learning control from a dragon who has every reason to want her dead.
“Then we start with the basics.” I push open the doors to the training yard, letting the cold morning air wash over us. “Your dual abilities first. The Crown can wait.”
The training yardis empty at this hour—a wide expanse of packed earth surrounded by stone walls high enough to contain most magical accidents. Targets line the far end, ranging from simple wooden dummies to warded constructs designed to absorb significant power. Weapons racks stand along the eastern wall, though we won’t be using them today.
I position myself at the center of the yard and gesture for Tamsin to stand opposite me.
“We’ll start with your Fire-Bringer abilities.” I let frost gather across my palms, a familiar chill that grounds me. “I want to see your baseline. Don’t hold back—I need accurate data to work with.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You want me to attack you?”
“I want you to show me what you can do. The format is irrelevant.”
For a moment, she just looks at me. Assessing. Then fire blooms in her palms—not the desperate flare from the infirmary, but something controlled. Deliberate. White flame that burns so bright, I have to squint against it.
She doesn’t throw it at me. Instead, she moves.
It’s nothing I expected. I anticipated the rigid forms of formal combat training—structured, predictable, the kind of technique drilled into royal heirs from childhood. What I get is something else entirely. She flows across the training yard, fire trailing from her hands in spiraling patterns, her body moving in ways that have nothing to do with military precision and everything to do with instinct.
She approaches this like a dance.
The realization throws me. I’ve trained warriors for centuries. I understand the language of combat—the angles, the footwork, the calculated application of force. This is different. She’s not fighting the air; she’s moving with it. Not controlling her fire; she’s letting it follow the natural rhythm of her body.
“Stop.”
She halts mid-motion, fire guttering. “What’s wrong?”
“Your technique is...” I search for the right word. “Unorthodox.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It’s a variable I wasn’t accounting for.” I circle her slowly, analyzing the way she holds herself—loose, balanced, ready to move in any direction. Not the rigid stance of formal training. Something more fluid. “You weren’t trained in standard Fire-Bringer techniques.”
“My tutors tried.” She tracks my movement without turning her head, peripheral vision sharp. “I learned the forms. They just never felt right. My fire doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work?”
She’s quiet for a moment. Considering. “It wants to move. To flow. When I try to force it into rigid shapes, it fights me. But when I let it follow my body—” She demonstrates, a small spiral of white flame curling around her fingers. “—it responds.”
I file the information away. Instinctive magic rather than structured casting. It explains why her control is so volatile when she’s exhausted—she relies on physical awareness rather than mental discipline. When her body is depleted, her magic has nothing to anchor to.
“Then we’ll need to modify the training approach.” I let my frost spread across the ground between us, thin ice crackling over packed earth. “Your instincts are strong, but instincts fail under pressure. You need a foundation that holds even when your body can’t.”
“And you’re going to teach me that?”
“I’m going to try.” I meet her gaze. “Whether you learn depends entirely on you.”
The next twohours are an exercise in frustration.
