Page 69 of Crown of Wrath

More than anything, she’s moving and breathing better. Her body responds almost as quickly and effectively as it had before.

She stares at me from across the training grounds. Hundreds of human soldiers look on in awe at a woman wearing nothing but a dress made of shadows and wielding a spear made of that same darkness. She’s breathing hard, but it’s been almost an hour of steady training. Even I’m getting a little winded. She’s making me work for it, and that’s what matters. If she can make me try, then she’ll have everyone but Rhion and Gethin beat.

I see her hesitate, but her mind isn’t slowed, and I know exactly what that means. The lightest change in pressure occurs, and I lash out with the dulled edge of my sword, catching the tendril snaking toward me at the base. If I’d been trying to actually beat Maeve, I’d be using fire, Shadow’s weakness, but I’m not. I’m trying to train her as if I were part of the House of Steel. More importantly, I’m trying to teach her what it’s like to fight Rhion. He’s fast and clever and adapts flawlessly. He knows most of her tricks, and there’s no way he’ll let himself be caught like he did before. I may believe that I could beat him, but he might be holding back just as much as I am.

He’s also one of the few people who knows to take Maeve seriously. She’s taken him out of the fight twice now. I know Rhion won’t let himself lose a third time just by treating her like she’s weak.

My spin continues and at the end, I leap at Maeve, pixie wings appearing between my shoulder blades and giving me just a touch more distance to my jump. Maeve’s shadow spear strikes out in a stab, but I knock it out of the way. Instead of drawing it back and using it to defend herself, she drops it, letting it disappear at my feet at the same time that she creates two daggers made of shadow.

It's a surprising decision since she hates daggers and is slower than I am. My blade swings in short arcs, and she blocks, pushing the sword away from her just like I’d tried to teach her so many times when we’d first begun training. It was somethingshe’d never understood, but now she does it seamlessly, as though she’d been practicing all this time.

“When did you learn to use daggers?” I say in between strikes.

“I learned a lot of things while I relived all those memories. You were a surprisingly good teacher.” Her breaths are close together and purposeful. Each one comes out harder than the last, usually in time with her strikes or blocks. She dances around my sword, her daggers moving to contain its power, yet she doesn’t move to attack. Then I smell the scent of rain beginning to rise. I leap into the air, and my pixie wings carry me higher. When I look down, I see the tendrils that had risen behind me. She’d managed to reach through the void to control shadows behind me while she fought me with daggers, something that she’s only now revealed to have any skill with at all.

She drops the daggers, and a shadow spear appears in her hand. Immediately, her body moves to throw, and I let go of the wings on my back, falling eight feet to the ground as the spear flies over my head.

I force pride to fill me, and for the first time in decades, a tail sprouts from behind me. It explodes from my body as I leap toward her. She’s not the only one with cards up her sleeve. My sword comes down hard as I attempt to hit her shoulder in a strike that would cut her from shoulder to hip.

She blocks it with the spear, as I expected. My tail swings around, my body’s momentum carrying it more than any muscles do, and I try to hit her in the back. A wall of stone appears behind her, and my tail crashes into it, not touching her. She falls through the world and appears at my back almost instantly.

I swing behind me, but my sword passes right through an effigy made of shadow. I leap away from where I’m standing.A spear follows me, barely missing, and I pause and try to understand what she’d done.

She’s standing in the same spot that she’d been standing when she shadow walked. She’d dropped into the world and come right back, sending an effigy to trick me. “That was clever.”

She shrugs, a grin on her face. “Not clever enough, I guess.”

“It would have been if I’d been anyone else, and you’re still not up to full speed.”

She nods, and I see her hands shaking as she holds the spear out. “Let’s call it for the morning. We’ll have another set this evening before dinner.”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out as she stands up. The spear falls to the ground, but before it hits, it disappears, the shadows fading into nothing. “I could use a break,” she says. That’s when I see that it’s more than her hands. Her entire body is shaking. She’d kept up, but it was like when I was fighting the Nothing. Every movement had been barely fast enough. Each strike had taken every bit of willpower to make. My body had given up long before, but my willpower had forced it to keep going.

Maeve’s body has been pushed so hard every day. Weeks of painful work to reteach her body how to move, how to swing a spear. Her mind didn’t forget, but her muscles couldn’t do it.

In between that training, we’ve been fighting the House of Steel soldiers every chance we can get. They’ve started sending upwards of fifty soldiers at a time. I haven’t seen Rhion again, though, and I assume Gethin realized that the risk of losing Rhion is too great. He knows that if Rhion isn’t there, then he’ll have to take the field if we attack Draenyth, and I don’t think he wants that.

Rhion’s always been strong enough to lead the soldiers, but he’s never been worthy of becoming the head of the House ofSteel. It’s insane how Gethin has treated him, but that’s not a problem I’m willing to deal with today.

It’s only now that I realize an officer is waiting just outside the sparring area, not daring to interrupt two High Fae while they’re wielding magic. I want to go to Maeve, to ignore her arguments as I drag her up to our chambers. I want to fill our bathtub and heat it so that it’s that perfect temperature while I massage her aching muscles.

I want to run my hands over her body, to convince her to spend a few hours doing nothing but existing beside me.

But she’s already seen the officer with the paper. Damn him. I won’t fight it, though. At least not before I’ve seen the message he’s carrying. Maybe it’s as simple as an invitation to dinner.

She’s already moving toward the human, and I follow her. “A message from King Aric,” he says, his eyes first on me and then on Maeve, pointedly at the shining golden brown Painted Crown that shimmers on her forehead.

Maeve takes the piece of paper and tears the wax seal on it. “We’ve been invited to a small council meeting. There’s an army of High Fae massing across the border.”

I glance at Maeve, and her eyes are hard. I know what she’s thinking. We aren’t prepared for even a small army. “Maybe we should skip tonight’s training session,” I say.

She nods, silently looking past the officer. I turn my attention to the soldier and say, “Thank you.”

With all the eyes on us, I don’t want to say anything to Maeve, so I slide through our bond and find myself in that beautiful forest that she rebuilt. Shadows cling to the bottoms of a myriad of trees, but they don’t lash out at me any longer. They caress my skin. They call to me, begging me to come deeper into the forest, but that’s not the right decision this instant. I just need to talk to her.

“Are you able to go to this meeting?” I ask. An effigy appears, and unlike the ones in the past, it’s not made of stone or shadows. It’s made of flesh. It looks so like her, and yet, I know it’s as much a creation of her mind as the shadows that flow beneath the trees.

“Yes. I can go to the meeting. I was just thinking, is all.”

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