“It’s not a real prophecy,” he said. “Just a story. The old rebels say someone with your Gift will either save us or end us. They think you’re meant to change everything.”
Alina frowned. “And if I don’t want to be that person?”
He looked at her then, and for a moment she saw fear—real, bone-deep fear. “Then you choose your own fate. I’ll protect you, whatever you decide.”
She believed him, but it wasn’t enough. Not with the echo of Maven’s words, the cold certainty that something bigger than her or Kael or even the rebellion was moving just out of sight.
“That’s why everyone mistrusts me, or fears me, or hates me, isn’t it? Not because I’m royalty. Because they see me as a ticking time bomb.”
Kael remained silent. It was all the answer she needed.
She rolled away, pulling the furs up over her shoulders, and lay staring at the ceiling. Kael turned toward her, spooning close, but she could feel the gulf between them, a chasm of secrets and possibilities neither of them wanted to name.
He drifted off quickly, his breath slowing and body growing heavy with sleep and fulfilled desire.
Alina did not. She lay awake for a long time, listening to the drip of water in the tunnel outside and watching the play of candlelight on the ceiling. The parts of him he denied her weighed heavier than the ones he let her see.
She wondered who she was meant to be.
She wondered if Kael could still love her when he found out.
She wondered, most of all, what waited for her at the end of this story.
The darkness offered no answers.
Alina closed her eyes and tried to dream of a future that belonged to her alone.
13
You're A Legend Now
The woods had always been indifferent to pain, and so the clearing where Elara trained Alina was a theater of cruelty made beautiful by sunlight. Afternoon light fell in hard shafts through the naked winter branches, slicing the world into gold and black. The trampled grass at Alina’s feet was still wet from last night’s frost. Each time she exhaled, the air clouded and then vanished in a rhythm of becoming and unbeing—which felt appropriate, considering what they were about to do.
Elara did not stand still, instead choosing to prowl the circumference of the clearing, movements stitched together with the same predatory elegance as the cats Alina had watched from palace windows. Her violet eyes never once left her student. Elara’s hair gleamed white in the sun, the color almost otherworldly, and the long sleeves of her robe snapped and twisted in the cold breeze with each flick of her hand. She did not speak, but her expression was one of faint, amused challenge—a test in progress, and so far, Alina had not impressed.
“Again,” Elara said, not pausing her orbit.
Alina braced. She could already sense the pressure building, the way a migraine announced itself with the taste of metal and the flash of white behind the eyes. She hated that she was learning to predict pain, even though she understood why it mattered. The enemies she might face outside the woods would not care if she was tired or scared or wished only to hide in bed, pressed warm against someone she loved. They would come, and they would try to break her.
The first bolt hit her right in the heart. Not real magic, not lethal, but a projection of raw kinetic force, enough to knock her breathless and send her staggering. She caught herself, barely, arms windmilling, and managed to stay upright.
Elara’s laughter, when it came, was like ice fracturing on a pond. “Better,” she said. “But you won’t always have your feet to catch you.”
Alina’s face stung with humiliation and the harsh slap of the cold. She could feel her pulse at the edges of her vision, thumping behind her eyes. The sting did not fade as she drew herself up, instead radiating outward in a heat that threatened to betray her in the trembling of her hands, the wobble of her knees. Elara circled her like a wolf with all the time in the world, and Alina wondered if she would ever stop measuring herself by the standards of people who seemed to relish her weakness.
She drew in a lungful of air so frigid it made her teeth ache, willing the bitterness to steady rather than splinter her. Above her, the sky was a thin blue, as brittle as spun sugar and just as quick to shatter. She did not look at Elara, not directly. She knew the faint twist of her mentor’s mouth would be there, the one that said, not bad, but you’ll need to do better than that. Instead, Alina forcedherself to stare at the trampled grass and the perfect ring left by the sweep of Elara’s robes around the clearing. She tried, with all the stubbornness she had left, to stop thinking about Kael, the way her muscles ached from last night’s failed exercises, and how, in a hidden corner of her brain she was ashamed of, she missed the easy, unthinking comfort of the palace and its always-burning fires.
She clung to that discomfort like armor.
“Ready,” she spat, trying to make her voice hard as flint. She felt it, too: the way her tongue cut on the word, how the sound vibrated in the air between them before being swallowed by the woods. Her readiness was a lie, but it was a lie she intended to live by.
There was the briefest flicker in Elara’s eyes—something like satisfaction, or perhaps just anticipation of the next test. Alina braced not just her body but her mind, and tried to feel herself into the Gift. She was terrified to touch it, but even more afraid to let it go unused.
She pictured Kael again, unbidden, imagining how his jaw set when he was angry, how he had once told her that pain was just the body’s way of marking progress. She tried to believe that, too.
This time, the attack came from above, a lance of light that split into a dozen shards before arcing down in a ring around her. Alina reacted—more out of reflex than by conscious thought—throwing up her hands and summoning the shield she’d learned to weave only a short while ago. The pain was immediate: the shield cost her, every heartbeat a tax paid in muscle and will. The shards scattered against her defense, every impact still landed like a punch to the ribs.
Elara didn’t wait for her to recover. “Faster. Your enemies won’t wait while you gather your strength.”
