My own still hammered. My voice was thin. “Don’t make me train with those things.”
“You’ll only train by day. I mean it.”
“Swear it,” I spat.
He stepped closer, until I could feel his breath on my face. A second passed, then two. “I swear, I’ll never make you train with them.”
It was the first real conversation we’d had—like we were speaking as equals, like the honesty could only have occurred when we could barely make out each other’s faces, half-shadowed on a staircase between one place and another. Like the conversation was accidental or a dream.
I turned away, took one step, then another.
I stopped. “Thank you.”
Behind me, his voice was low. “Sleep. You’ll need it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next morning—andevery morning for the next week—I trained. I woke, bathed, and dressed. I waited for Dorian’s knock, and we broke our fast alone together in the dining room. We didn’t speak of that night. We didn’t speak of the wraiths, and I never left the citadel at night.
After breakfast, we walked to the stables where I rode. After the first few days I could reliably mount my mare. I learned from Dorian how to sit bareback, which none of the patrol in my kingdom did. The few glimpses I’d had of the patrol as a child had been men on leather saddles; it was the only way I thought a person could ride.
I’d been wrong.
Bareback riding was wonderful and terrible. Wonderful, because you could feel the horse move beneath you—you were connected in a way a saddle would not allow. Terrible, because you sat dead center on a horse’s spine. My backside ached for days.
I learned how to use reins, how to hold them and sit back and shift them to turn the horse. How to click my tongue as Dorian had done and use my voice to speak to her in tandem.
Near the end of the week we progressed to a trot, which I hated, an endless, sharp jostling like your organs were being scrambleduntil you pulled the horse to a stop. Cantering was better, smoother, an easy seat, almost like riding a rocking horse.
We had yet to try a gallop. We’d have to take the horse out of the paddock, and I had only just begun to canter. Galloping would come next week.
After that it was bows with Haskel, who was convinced I couldn’t shoot an arrow properly without the right arm strength. I needed to be able to pull the gutstring taut, and I couldn’t do what he could, even with the small bow I’d been given.
But he was candid and patient with me—and equally impatient with Dorian, which pleased me—and my arrows came closer and closer to the target’s center each day, even as Haskel moved me farther and farther from it.
Twenty paces, then twenty-five by week’s end.
At noon there was lunch in Dorian’s study, and learning. During these sessions he seemed in a rush, agitated, and the more questions I asked, the more his agitation grew. He had insisted I learn all this, yet he seemed irritated by having to explain it. I didn’t care; I interrupted him constantly. It was in my nature—to ask, yes, and also to prod.
He already disdained me. What difference did a scowl make?
We started with the history of Feyreign and the politics of the courts.
The fae kingdom was a three-day ride from the Kingdom of Storms, and entirely inaccessible to humans. Even if they made it past the Sylvanwild scouts’ arrows, they would never be able toseethe gate to open it.
That was magic.
Then there were the four courts:
Sylvanwild of the autumn forest.
Noctere of the winter marsh.
Aurelia of the spring mountains and lakes.
Highmark of the summer plains.
Each court’s geography and season was eternal, distinct. When Iasked Dorian why, he said it had always been so. There were storybook tales taught to children and thousands of years of history even he wasn’t privy to.
