Page 116 of Lady for Embers

“I know,” Cyrus said, adamantly ignoring the feeling of their powers mingling together. “But it’s the only way I can put your ?ames out right now.”

It was another few minutes before he had them all out.

“Better?” Cyrus asked, taking a measured step back from ­Cassius.

“Yeah,” Cassius said. He sounded utterly exhausted.

“How do your reserves feel? Do you need blood after that?”

“No,” Cassius said quickly. At Cyrus’s skeptical look, he added, “I want them to be... not full right now. It is harder to control when my reserves are full.”

“Now that we are off the ship, you can start training with them. You can practice with them and learn to control them. It will get easier.”

Cassius nodded, looking towards the path they’d come down. “Ready to head back?”

Cyrus watched him for a long moment before he ventured, “Before we go, maybe you should try calling your power forth now. When it’s not so intense.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“So you can practice controlling it. Maybe it will be easier to control when your reserves aren’t full?”

Cassius ran his thumb and fore?nger along his brow. “I do not want to deal with this right now.”

“Obviously,” Cyrus drawled, and Cassius glared at him. “Whether you want to or not, your magic is going to demand it.”

Cassius shoved his hands deep into his pockets, tipping his face to the sky that was beginning to show the barest traces of the coming dawn. “Can I admit something to you?”

“Of course,” Cyrus answered with a slight frown.

“I often wish Scarlett had never awoken my gifts.”

He clamped down on the immediate response of wanting to refute that statement. His magic was a gift as much as any of theirs were, but he clearly viewed it as anything but at the moment. Instead he said, “I can see why you feel that way.”

Cassius slowly slid his gaze to him. “Scarlett would try to tell me I just need to learn to control them, that I will feel differently when I do.”

Cyrus shrugged. “I’m not Scarlett.”

“No,” Cassius agreed. “You are not.”

“Do I think you will eventually feel differently about your gifts? Yes. But can I promise that? Not really,” Cyrus added. “Do you need to learn to control them whether you like them or not? Yes.”

“I know,” Cassius sighed into the waning night. “I thought it might be easier when we got here, but I was not prepared for... that. Scarlett let her shadows free on the ship, and she... Gods, it was like her shadows knew they were home. It was likesheknew she was home. I thought... ”

“You thought you would feel that way when you got here too, but you don’t,” Cyrus supplied.

“Something like that.”

“You know better than anyone she was not always like... Well, like she is now. If this had all been happening a year ago, before she found Sorin and faced her darkness, I suspect she would have felt the same.”

“Maybe,” Cassius muttered.

“She struggled with her magic too, you know. She was so frustrated it didn’t come naturally to her, and gods, she could be so insufferable during that time. She was just so lost and angry. I don’t know how many weeks Sorin took her to the Courtyards and nothing would happen. Well, nothing with her magic anyway. But...” He trailed off, not entirely sure how Cassius was going to receive what he needed to say. He waited until Cassius looked at him again before he said, “Our magic is tied to our emotions and our mental state. It is why it can explode when we are angry. It is why it reacts when we sense danger. And when Scarlett was working through all of her trauma, it was hard to access her magic. It was buried beneath everything she was trying to shove down. You come to understand your magic, and it comes to understand you. Your magic tends to recognize when you are dealing with hard truths. ”

“What exactly are you trying to say, Cyrus?” Cassius asked, turning to face him fully. His eyes were still amber-red, although they weren’t glowing quite as intensely. They were more muted now.

“I’m saying you might ?nd it hard to work with your magic until you ?gure out all this stuff with your father and the HighWitch,” Cyrus said bluntly. “It is something you do not have control over, who your parents are, and you like control. I think things have always come easily to you, like they did for Scarlett, and magic is entirely different from ?ghting and darting through the night. Your power isn’t about control so much as it is about the give-and-take.”

Cassius exhaled another harsh breath. “I think that is about as much introspection as I can take for the night.”

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