She pauses. "Lightcraft."
I do not change the staff. I let the light gather instead, thin at first and uneven, then steadier as I hold my focus, extending it along the wood without altering what the staff is, reinforcing rather than replacing.
"Do not turn it into something it is not," she says. "If you need a sword you will take one. This is not a sword."
I adjust. The light steadies. She watches it for a moment and says nothing, which is the closest thing to approval I have received since we began.
"Again."
I move through the sequence, the staff heavier now with intention, the reach cleaner.
Then a wave of nausea rises without warning, pulling through my stomach and into my throat. I swallow against it, tighten my grip, keep moving.
Aunt Petunis does not look away. "I do not care that you are nauseous," she says. "You will practice each day, even when you are heavy with child. You will still be attacked when you are pregnant and when you are not. The body you have is the body you will be fighting in." She pauses. "Again."
The gate at the far end of the chamber begins to lift.
"A special creation," she says simply.
Something is brought forward.
The cage is blackened iron, marked with faintly pulsing etchings, and what moves inside it does not move the way living things move. Its limbs are too long, the proportions of it subtly wrong, the angles shifting in ways the eye keeps trying to correct for. A low uneven sound escapes it, not quite a voice and not quite anything else, coming from somewhere inside it that sound should not come from.
"Is this a deathmage?" I ask.
She smiles, which is not a comforting expression on her. "This is Orlakai," she says. "He has been here for centuries. The royal children have always practiced on him. He is capable of behaving as not only a deathmage but as many other creatures of power. He was created centuries ago, so that Alarnan royals could learn their enemies without leaving the comfort of the wards."
She looks at me. "Today, he is a deathmage. Now destroy him."
“Watch the hands,” Aunt Petunis says. “Not from across a room. When they reach you. That is when they tell the truth.”
The cage opens.
Something dark drifts from its eyes as it moves toward me, and then the force of it arrives before the creature does. Pressure, crashing into me, heavy and suffocating, pressing into my mind and my body at once. My limbs hesitate. My breath cuts short.
For a moment I cannot move at all.
I shift too late.
"Wrong,” Petunis snaps.
I force myself back into motion, stepping out of reach.
"Wrong."
It comes again, faster. The pressure hits first, that same overwhelming weight, that same certainty that whatever it is doing cannot be resisted. My body locks around it before I can stop it.
“At first it will feel as though you cannot move," Aunt Petunis says, her voice entirely calm behind me. "That whatever is being taken from you is insurmountable."
The creature closes the distance.
"That is the mindset of the weak."
I force my breath out. One exhale.
"A queen knows it is not the case."
She does not raise her voice. “Remember, Asharin. A queen does not freeze. She lets her enemies decide she has.”
