Page 24 of Ira

“Verner?” Captain Soren said, doing a double take. Probably because my shadows were exploding out everywhere.

“Captain.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Yes. I’m looking forward to training today.”

“Apparently so,” he murmured. “But only Astrid is free.”

I hesitated at that. I didn’t want to interact with Astrid, despite repeatedly reminding myself that she was Meera’s friend. Or at the very least, she was the reason Meera was here. But I couldn’tlet go of my own bitterness where Astrid was concerned, not entirely.

And even if I could, I had no desire to spar with anyone who wasn’t a Shade. For all I disliked about Astrid, she was physically much smaller and weaker than I was, and she had been even before one of her hands had been rendered all but useless.

“Scared, big guy?” Astrid asked sarcastically, twirling the baton the captain must have formed for her between her fingers. “I’ll go easy on you.”

“Don’t antagonize him,” Captain Soren grumbled. “Batons only—no contact. Deal?”

“Sure, Cap.”

I waited for the captain to reprimand her, but he merely huffed in annoyance and took a step back, giving us space to get into position.

It seemed a little absurd to even consider, but was he… interested in her? Why would he let her speak to him that way?

I mostly stayed on the defensive, uncomfortable with the idea of even trying to land a hit on Astrid. I’d been all fired up when I came to the training ground, but interacting with her had thrown me off-balance enough that my ire had cooled.

“It’s no fun when you don’t fight back,” Astrid said flatly, moving with impressive speed and grace for a human.

“I don’t want to fight you.”

“You sure about that? Everyone wants to fight me.”

She was like a wounded animal, I realized. Lashing out to protect herself. It didn’t erase what she’d done or how I felt about it, but I immediately understood her better.

“Did you train like this with the Hunters?”

Astrid stopped, her hands dropping to her sides and she took a step back, staring at me with that unsettlingly probing stare. The captain was distracted with another sparring set, though she didn’t look to him for backup.

“Why do you ask?”

“Shades can’t join the Guard until they reach their age of majority. As I understand it, Hunters are inducted as children. I wondered how rigorous the training regime was—surely, they can’t expect that much of you when you’re young?”

The question had come out unbidden, and I was surprised that Astrid appeared to be giving it consideration. Meera’s childhood was hardly the only thing I was reflecting on after that conversation, but it was one of them. What kind of organization were the Hunters, really? How did they form her core support network as a child, yet seemingly provide her with no support at all?

“We don’t start knife throwing until around age twelve,” Astrid said with a small shrug. “Prior to that, it’s a lot of running drills. Obstacle courses. Being left outside in the dark a lot to get us used to it.”

“That’s… horrifying.”

She shrugged again, a little less confidently. “I mean, yeah. It’s shit. On the plus side—sort of—there’s a hierarchy even among the youth. Less based on who your family is, like it is for the adults, and more based on skill. The more promise you show, the more training you do.”

“How is that a plus side?”

“It means that thelesspromise you show, thelesstraining you do. I spent far more time in training than Ophelia did when we were kids because even then, it was clear she wasn’t cut out for it.”

That was unexpectedly nurturing of her, considering the kinds of things she had done. Then again, the whole reason Astrid had left the Hunters in the first place and thoroughly torched her future with them was for her sister, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.

If only I hadn’t lostmysister at the hands of a Hunter just as deadly as Astrid. It made it difficult to reconcile the different sides of the person in front of me. Bitterness wasn’t a feeling I was accustomed to experiencing, I liked to think I was above it. Clearly not.

“Are you wondering what kind of regime Meera would have been subjected to?”

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