Page 83 of Kissed By the Gods
I tuck myself behind the crate and start reading the Treatise on Tactical Collapse.
It’s not like any book I’ve seen. The pages feel like they’re older than this room, like they should be brittle, but they’re not.
I’ve made my way through the first chapter, though it took me longer than I care to admit. Each sentence feels like a heavy stone I have to turn over. Making it through Chapter One—Of Force Applied Indirectly—was a triumph. I was bored at first,with the cold, academic way it’s written. I prefer my mother’s kind of stories. Stories of warriors who loved fiercely and died well, or myths of when the gods walked the earth wearing mortal skins in a time before the mountains shoved out of the earth, ragged and broken.
This book is nothing like that. The words are large and cumbersome—many of them altogether foreign—and I have to piece together the meaning. It’s a kind of reading that gives me a headache and leaves my pride bruised.
I keep reading, though, because it’s working. Chapter One talked about finding pressure points, not only in war but in people. An explanation of why we are weakest in the moments before decisions are made; a lesson on leveraging the weight of silence; a passage on how to shift the ground beneath your opponent until they fall without ever being touched. Timing. Manipulation. Moving a stone to cause an avalanche. Transferring your weight and letting your enemy break themselves.
This morning, I’d tried one of the principles sparring with Leif. I’d pretended to trip, and when he’d come in for the advantage, I’d put him flat on his back before he’d even realized I’d moved. He called it luck; I called it chapter one.
So, tonight I move on to chapter two: The Illusion of Strength. I know this chapter. I’ve lived this chapter in a hundred sideways glances and a thousand too-casual sneers.
Every time someone calls me quick instead of dangerous; or they say I’m lucky instead of good. When the villagers called me loud or bossy instead of a leader. When grandmothers would ask, “why don’t you smile? You’d be so pretty if only you would smile.”
When I was little, I watched them tell my motherdon’t be so sensitive—like her breadth of emotion wasn’t her greatest strength, her softness the very thing that kept our familytogether. And then, after Levvi died and she made herself hard, the villagers said she was a cold bitch.
When the soldiers who came for Seb looked at me like I was too small, too nothing at all, to be a threat. And now? It’s every time I’m dismissed with a smile—like I should be flattered the men at the Synod noticed me at all.
I run my finger down the first line. “Power is loud. Control is quiet.”
That makes me smirk, thinking about the men who shout when they fight, who roar when they win. The masters who yell constantly and the archons who drone on and on at wardcall. They think the noise makes them stronger.
I’m still smirking when my finger runs over ink scrawled in the margins—text in a different hand than the original scribe. I tilt the candle so that the light spreads more evenly on the pages and catch the dripping wax with my other hand. The heat is searing, but if I ruin a single page of this book, I’ll never forgive myself.
The words are frantic, the ink pressed hard into the page. “If a blade breaks into shards, do you fear the pieces? You should.”
I read it once. Then again. And again. I don’t know why it bothers me so much.
No, that’s not true. …I’mthat way, aren’t I? Haven’t I shattered, splintered? I know what it means to be broken into pieces and still be dangerous. I lean closer, fingers brushing the edge of the ink like I can feel the pressure of the hand that wrote it. And that’s when I realize—unlike the rest of the book, this little note is scribbled in the old tongue, the one my mother taught us. The one the soldiers don’t know.
But then the door of the Reckoning Hall creaks open. I close the book gently, coming to my feet, one hand on the dagger sheathed at my thigh and the other grasping the book as the treasure it is.
I’m not sure what or who I expected to see when I peek around the crate, but it wasn’t the Elder.
He doesn’t speak at first. Just stands in the doorway with his cane and that cloudy gaze that sees parts of me I haven’t discovered yet.
“You’re not supposed to be here at this hour.” His voice is as dry and old as the parchment lining these shelves.
“We don’t have any other hours for me to be here,” I tell him. I’m not snarky about it—or I don’t intend to be, anyway. It’s the truth.
He huffs, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. His cane clicks against the stone as he steps into the hall. I don’t move from behind the crate. I’m still holding the book like it might vanish if I let go.
“No,” he agrees. “I suppose you don’t.”
He comes further into the room and settles himself heavily onto a wooden chair positioned near a chaotic table—it’s covered in maps and unbound scrolls. It’s the only piece of furniture in here lacking a layer of dust. He lights a lantern sitting on the table, and the additional light makes me squint.
He doesn’t look at me when he speaks next, already engrossed in the map that he’s unfurled, small stones holding the corners down. “It’s rare for a ward to give up sleep to study. What are you doing in here, Leina of Stormriven?”
I stare at him, furiously trying to figure out how he can seeanythingwith his cloudy eyes, much less a complex map in a dimly-lit room. I thought he was blind. I take a cautious step forward, pulled by curiosity.
“It’s considered rude to ignore your Elder. Ruder still to ignore him to satiate your own morbid curiosity.” He lifts his head now, staring directly at me, one brow quirked.
“I wasn’t ignoring you.” I step out fully from behind the crate. “I was deciding if you were real.”
That earns me a sound—half-chuckle, half-gravel caught in his throat. “I’ve been accused of many things, but being a ghost is a new one.”
I cross the floor, drawn toward him despite myself. I’ve never seen his table this close—I’ve never wanted to disturb it. The map is marked in so many colors it’s like a battle raged across it.
