Page 82 of Kissed By the Gods
He stands over me, breathing hard.
“This is what failure feels like,” he says, voice low and rough. “This is what it feels like when you’re too slow. When you miss your shot. When your hesitation gets someone killed.”
I stare up at him, breathing hard. I want to scream that I’m trying, that I’ve lost too much, that I’m holding everything together with frayed threads and stubbornness. I want to cry.
But I don’t. Instead, I try to stand. My leg buckles, sending me back into the dirt.
He tosses a thick, leather-bound book to the ground beside me. It lands in the dust with a solid thud.
“You’re done with weapons training for the day,” he says. “Go to Elowen and have her do something about that leg. While you’re there, study. If you can’t outmatch their strength, outthink them.”
I slide my bad leg out to the side and use my good leg to come to standing. “Yes,Master.”
There’s a flicker in his eyes, but this time it’s not heat. It’s regret, maybe. It’s there and gone so fast I don’t know.
He turns to Leif with jerking movements. “Get her there.”
Leif moves to wrap an arm around my waist. I take the support, because if I don’t, I’ll eat more dirt.
But I’m not humiliated. I’m furious.
I hold the book with dirty fingers. After Leif and I turn the corner, I look at it.
The Treatise on Tactical Collapse. I’ll learn everything inside this damn thing.
So next time, I’m the one knocking him into the dirt.
“The one thing I have learned about the gods in my paltry three centuries of existence is this: When you are nothing but vast power, when you are eternal, change is a threat. Change means you can lose. Change means you can fall.But this—this is change. A blessing where there should be none. A Selencian girl where there should be silence. A call stirring where the Veil should be still.
Why now? Why her? Why Selencia?
What do the gods want?
And why am I the only one asking?”
E
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Sleep is a gift here,not a certainty, and I should grab onto it with both hands and give thanks to the gods that I’ve found myself in my bed at lights out. I should drift away, restless or not, and let sleep heal my newest spattering of bruises, cuts, and aching muscles. Instead, I toss and turn in my little cot, trying to block out the reek of unwashed bodies—why these boys don’t bathe regularly, I cannot fathom. Kiernan says he’s too exhausted at the end of the day, but to me, the warm water of the baths and the lavender soaps Elowen has started making for me are a balm on my aching muscles and bruised soul, even if I have to wait until all the men are done before I take my turn.
As always, I have one dagger strapped to my thigh, and another fisted under my pillow. My grip on it is tight until Tyrston’s glares stop as his eyes close, as his breath evens out and he starts to snore. Normally, that snore is my lullaby and eases me into a restless, dream-filled slumber.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I slip out from under my thin blanket, careful not to shift the frame of the cot. The cold stone floor shocks my bare feet, but I don’t put my boots on—they’d wake every manand boy in this room. Instead, I silently grab the book Ryot gave me and make my way out of the barracks. I lift the hinges of the door, barely, to stop the creak. I figured that out weeks ago, experimenting with both opening and closing it while all the boys were at dinner.
I move through the hallways like a whisper. The torches are out, but moonlight spills through the arrow-slit windows that guide me to the Reckoning Hall, the room where old scrolls go to die. It smells like parchment and forgotten things. I open this door silently, too, but this time I push down on the hinges. I sneak in here as often as I can, sifting through scrolls and maps and leather-bound books. I’ve not found much that’s interesting, really.
Most of the real library, I’ve been told, is locked away with the priests in the temple at the base of Elandors Veil. Here, they left us the military texts—things that teach you how to die better.
Tonight, though, I don’t dig into Aish or study the maps.
I move between the shelves, careful not to bump the warped wooden cases. A single stub of a candle waits for me in the corner under a window, tucked beside an overturned crate of brittle scrolls no one’s touched in years. I crouch beside it and strike flint against the wick. I don’t need it, not really. Even without the light, I could read the pages—one of the perks of being an Altor. But it helps me focus on the book that’s been burning a hole through my thoughts this entire week.
