Page 38 of House of Embers
“And he didn’t kill her?” Hadrian asked in shock. “If he knew, he’d kill her.”
“I’m not sure, but the accounts I got were that she fought against it. No one believed the reasoning, and I don’t either. She was working with us. He had to have found out.”
Clover wasn’t sure what to make of any of that or what a magical collar even did. Knowing the Father, it wasn’t anything good. But that was for another time.
“There’s a lot to fill you in on,” Clover told her.
“And where do Islay and Ruen and the other drifters fit into this?”
Islay threaded her fingers through her human lover’s. “We want the same thing that you do, so perhaps it is time that we do not move on. Perhaps it is time that we fight back.”
Thea’s smile broadened. “Now you’re talking.”
“And as for that,” Clover said, “I’ve had a breakthrough.”
“Your father’s amulet?” Thea asked.
Clover flipped it over three times as she murmured under her breath. Then with a draw from the amulet, she pulled fire out of thin air.
Thea’s eyes widened in shock and appreciation. “We’re going to change the world.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Training
Wynter snorted as Kerrigan fell on her face in the training space. “Brother, this is beyond her.”
Kerrigan came up to her elbows and spit out the bits of hair that had fallen into her mouth. “I can do it.”
Fordham sighed. “Maybe we should go back to running five miles in the morning to clear your mind.”
“I hate you,” she muttered.
“That right?” he asked with a sexy smirk that made her knees wobble.
Kerrigan grasped her practice sword and slowly returned to her feet. She had agreed to shadow training with Fordham. Wynter had gleefully—maybe a little too gleefully—agreed to watch and give instruction on form. Apparently, that meant ridiculing Kerrigan for not picking it up, even though they both claimed that they’d learned how to do it over decades.
“I could call the shadows just fine in battle,” she reminded him.
“You were going to dissolve into nothingness if you tried to execute a jump,” Wynter said. “That’s why I barreled in like I did.”
“And here I just thought you were a show-off.”
Wynter shrugged. “And?”
“Run me through it again,” Kerrigan said.
She lifted the practice sword, centering herself in Ravendin’s twelve paces. It was always best to go back to the basics in footwork when she was learning something new. That’d helped her in the gladiator ring back in Domara. Sure, she’d learned the Andine footwork from Constantine, but she could only do that with the hours upon hours of training inside the Society keeping her quick and nimble. To learn what Fordham was teaching her, a combination of magic and swordplay, she’d need the same.
“Shadows are all around you. They’re in everything, the way the other elements are. The way your spirit magic is. But instead of being the thing itself that you’re reaching for, they’re the negative space around the thing. They’re the nothingness beyond our reality.”
“That’s helpful,” she grumbled.
Fordham smirked. “I didn’t say it was easy.”
Wynter snorted, clearly enjoying this.
“The shadow is not just the darkness. It’s the shadow self of the rest of the world. It’s a second skin. You have a shadow you can manipulate. Everything does. You just have to feel the edges of the darkness and not the energy all around it. Then you can draw the shadows to you and push them away from you. You can manipulate them into any shape that you want. You can use them as a weapon, and you can slip between them,” Fordham told her, matching her footwork. “The first rule of shadow work is control. You cannot let control slip even for a second or the shadows rule you.”
