Page 1 of Enchanted Shadows
CHAPTER 1
Asmarter man wouldn’t have used a real sword, but “smart” wasn’t exactly a word strung along with my name very often.
Brave? Maybe.
Foolish? More than likely.
Devastatingly handsome? No doubt.
I swung upward with force, shoulder blades screaming under the speed and depth of the motion. The thing with practice swords was that they gave you a false sense of security, even the ones Miles and I typically used, which were weighted to be as heavy as the real thing. With those, you forgot to fear the sting the real sword could leave. I’d rather meet that fear head on now and remember it well. There was a big difference in being comfortable with a weapon and being complacent.
Maybe it said more about me than fear that I no longer dreaded the taste of it. I rather welcomed it.
I jumped back, my power lighting up my veins with the close call Miles had just delivered. It wasn’t entirely his fault. I was still working out some lingering anger.
He took one look at my face. “Oh, damn.”
He was one of my protégés. For now. As much as I hated to admit it, he was close to surpassing me in skill. I wasn’t as fast as I had been a few years ago. Which had absolutely nothing to do with my age and everything to do with Jorah’s cinnamon oat cookies. But I wasn’t about to admit any of that out loud, so I moved. Pivoting, throwing, swinging the blade in my hand like it was my Enchantment, an extension of my thoughts.
The seconds bled into minutes. Sweat gathered at the back of my neck, clinging to my shirt as we trained. I wasn’t a terrible dancer, but this was a dance my body and mind longed for often. The grind of a hard-fought battle, no matter the victor.
I felt her before I saw her. The queen of Wylan.
But I wasn’t done being angry just yet.
My sword clanged against Miles’s. A sharp slicing sound pierced the air as our swords slid against each other in the downward motion of deflecting. I quickly spun on my feet and elbowed him in the middle of the back before he could get set for another advance.
“Tell me those are not real swords.”
Her Royal Highness, Jorah Collette Demir Valanova. I loved her like she was another of my sisters. I wasn’t sure at this point you could convince me she wasn’t my sister. I would walk through fire and happily take a sword for that woman. Had even taken a lashing for her once. But right now? Right now, I wanted to flip her upside down and give her a little shake.
I had been freezing her out of our telepathic connection for the past three days while I cooled off, but I dropped it now to respond,Don’t ask a question you know you don’t want the answer to.
Starting the day out belligerent, I see,she responded back, a phrase I had once used on her. Out loud, she added, “If I would’ve tried training with a real sword with my emotions running high like this, you would have knocked the weapon right out of my hand.”
In the blink of an eye, our swords were gone, riding on her silver magic to her.
Sweating, panting, I looked to Miles. Things had just been getting good.
He shifted his weight forward and I grinned.
Sure enough, he charged for me. Arms swinging, we used good old-fashioned fists in place of our swords.
“Would you two knock it off?” the queen groaned, though she didn’t sound altogether surprised.
“Is that an order?” I asked as we rolled.
Miles snagged the corner of my mouth while I was talking. A cheap shot.
So I rolled us again and rammed a knee into the middle of his back, knocking the breath out of him.
“No,” Krew clarified. To his wife he added, “Want to bet on who lets up first? One of these days Miles will get him.”
“Milesismore levelheaded,” was Jorah’s response.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to take that as a compliment or not, but life was too short to not stock up on pleasantries, so compliment it was. I let Miles free and got to my feet, ready for whatever he threw at me next.
For a few minutes more, we advanced on one another weaponless. Something that I trained my own teams to do. Without weapons or Enchantments, how fast were their feet? How capable were they of defending themselves?
