Page 35 of Daughter of No Worlds

Two weeks slipped by, and Max still refused to train me.

This was especially frustrating because I wasn’t even asking much of him. I only needed him to tell me what would be on the Orders’ evaluations. Those tests, I figured, were my best chance to prove to Nura and the rest of the Orders that I was capable of membership — and not only that, but to convince them of my cause.

And to do that, I had to do more than pass. I had to beremarkable.

Max’s books, as he seemed to suspect they would be, were unhelpful. The language was too archaic for me to understand, and more philosophical than instructional.

So, I did what I could. I tried to force my body physically back into prime shape, rising at dawn to run as far as I could force my legs to carry me, pushing my lungs until my breaths came in shaky, ragged gasps. I was soweak. I used to be able to dance for hours on end without letting my flirty smile waver. Now, my body sputtered at a fraction of its previous capability.

Max would watch me as I returned, gasping and heaving, usually leaning back in a chair with a book in his hands or crouched among the gardens. “That looks hard,” he would remark, and I glared at him as I panted and shoved another pin into my hair (as he had, frustratingly, been right about the length).

“Would be less harder if I knew what to study,” I snapped, between gasps.

“Running around in circles is probably not on the Order’s evaluation.”

I practiced every scrap of magic that I knew. Conjuring, bending the breeze around my hands, sucking droplets of water from the earth. I even tried drawing some of those circles on the ground, mimicking the ones I had found in Max’s study. I didn’t know what they were intended to do — which, I supposed, could have gone very poorly — but for me, they did nothing at all.

Once, while I was copying what had to have been my fifteenth circle, Max stood behind me and peered over my shoulder. “Hm,” he remarked, cocking his head, before wandering away.

That one sound made me want to snap him in two.

At least I was doingsomething, unlike Max, who seemed fairly committed to doing absolutely nothing, ever. On a particularly cold day, he stepped outside, shivered, looked up at the sky, and declared, “I’m not made for this” before wandering back into the house. I quickly learned that Max was apparently only “made for” an exceptionally narrow set of environments, temperatures, activities, and interactions.

I wished Sammerin would come back. Maybe I could have gotten more help from him.

But the weeks passed, and it was just me and Max, mostly ignoring each other. I never let him see anything but determined, steadfast confidence. But at night, curled up in my small bed in that ridiculously cluttered room, sleep taunted me. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the betrayal in Esmaris’s dying face. I saw the affection in Serel’s goodbye, felt his kiss on my cheek. I heard Nura’s voice reading Zeryth’s letter.

And I had the same dream, over and over again.

In a terrible way, it was funny. When Esmaris beat me, I had vowed to haunt him — cursed him to see my eyes every time he closed his. Now I was the one who saw him in every shadow.You forgot what you are,he had spat at me. Well, I never forgot now. Every time I came close, there he was – reminding me of everything I had left behind, and everything I would carry with me forever.

The days ticked by.

And then, one morning, Willa returned to look at my wounds. She was friendly and chipper as she informed me that everything was healing nicely. For a while, it was nice just to be around someone who was at least relatively pleasant.

Then, I asked her, “Do you have any new letters from Zeryth? About Threll?”

Willa’s silence plunged my heart into ice water.

“He says that things are a bit…” Her voice trailed off, the musicality flat. “Things are a bit complicated there.”

My fingers tightened around the bedsheets.

“Complicated?”

“I suppose with that Lord dead, there’s been some struggles…” Willa coughed. I wanted to yank the words from her. “But it’s just a period of change. Things will calm down.”

I did not trust myself to open my mouth.

All I could think about were Serel’s sweet eyes, and the sound that his sword had made in Esmaris’s chest — a crunch, a squelch, a reminder of how soft and breakable a human body really was. It didn’t matter whether it belonged to the most powerful man in Threll or a slave boy with a kind, gentle smile.

Chapter Eleven

That night, I collected every scrap of paper I could find that had those circular symbols scribbled on them. I lined them up outside, looking at them. Every single one was different — the markings going through their center in different shapes and orientations.

I still had no idea what they were, or what they did, other than that Nura used one to bring us here. And that they were the most concrete example ofsomethingimportant that I didn’t know how to do.

So, for whatever reason — perhaps simply because I needed a solid goal to latch onto — I channeled all my energy into understanding them. I copied every single one, imitating each stroke with exact accuracy. In some cases, I even layered the paper and traced them, stroke for stroke, line for line.

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