CHAPTER FOUR
I MIGHT HAVE BEEN FITTED FOR MY ARMOR, BUT IT TOOK TIME to make. And this would be only the first set; master craftsmen would be working on a better, lighter, stronger version. By the time I got my first riveted chain mail (and, holy angels, it was heavy!), Brianna had moved our practices from her little kingdom into the real world. I understood now why she had started things in her home in the first place—it was the location where she was strongest, where her protections were layered and centuries old, and if I made a big powerful mistake, it would be relatively easy to contain the damage to a small part of her garden. When I had gotten enough skill, we moved to a practice room inside her castle. But now I had enough control that she felt it was safe to bring me and my power out into the “real world.”
So she created a protected place in the forest close to the palace for both of us to use for further lessons. Outwardly, it looked like a peasant’s cottage, old and nestled in the trees, cleverly made to look as if it had been there for centuries. There was an actual path to the cottage that branched off from one of the main roads the Court used when going hunting, and she had made sure that I knew the way, but I usually used the tree-trunk door to get there. In fact, that was the last lesson she taught me in her kingdom: how to use the tree trunk as a gate to any place she had set this particular door to go to. Doors, I had learned, were available for any Fae to use—but where they went was locked to each individual, and to allow another to go to the same destination, the information had to be shared.
The door in the tree trunk didn’t drop me right at the cottage; that would have been very risky for Brianna. An enemy could magically watch the forest and find her cottage as soon as she crossed the destination threshold. She explained to me that while she could fortify her own kingdom against interlopers, especially against Dark Fae, she could not do that with the forest.
So the door opened onto a path in the middle of the deep woods, and you had to know where you were going in order to find Brianna’s cottage.
On the outside, you’d never know it wasn’t the dwelling of some particularly prosperous peasant. It stood two stories tall, with a thatched roof of straw that had turned silvery gray with age. Two huge oak trees cradled the walls between them, as if they had been saplings when the cottage was first built. Whitewashed cob walls held red-painted window frames with red shutters. There was glass in the windows rather than horn or oiled parchment, which indicated a certain amount of wealth. A flower and herb garden with a whitewashed fence stood between the cottage and the end of the path. All perfectly normal. A decrepit-looking cottage might tempt someone to try to get inside to see if there was anything left in there to steal.
On the inside, it was one single room with warded walls to prevent anything we did inside from leaking out—and quite often the room was larger on the inside than the cottage was on the outside. It gave me quite the start when I first realized that the size changed. Maybe one day I’d learn how she managed such a feat.
But even though I might learn how, at least in theory, I doubted very much I’d ever be able to do it. The Fae were not only the masters and mistresses of magic, they’d also had centuries to learn every nuance of the craft. As half-Fae at best, more likely only a quarter, I might live longer than a human but not long enough to learn all I’d have to know to do what a Fae like Brianna can.
Anyway, the point of this place was to have a practice area out in the real world, where Fae magic could be a bit more unpredictable and where human magic could come into play as well. Brianna intended to teach me defensive magic first—something a lot more refined than my brute-force shield against that Dark Fae had been.
That was why I now stood in the middle of the odd empty room feeling horribly vulnerable. I wished I had my suit of chain mail despite its being really heavy. My own breathing seemed ridiculously loud in the silence of that room as Brianna studied me carefully.
“Bring up your power,” she said when I guess she thought I was ready. “Now concentrate on the forearm of the arm you use to hold your shield.”
I already knew where she was going when she said that, so I called the power into my arm and created a round shield of it, and I looked at Brianna over the edge of it. It weighed nothing but looked as if it were made of solid gold. She smiled with approval.
“Make it more dome shaped,” Brianna suggested, and I subtly altered the shape. “Now I’m going to launch levin bolts at you, and you are going to deflect them. For right now, I will center my attack on your shield.”
That was so I could get used to how the attacks felt, I guessed. I’d been in such a panic with the Dark Fae that I’d been working on pure instinct and fear, and all I remembered was the pressure on my impromptu shield trying to push me back. Now I understood her approach. Brianna intended to teach me how to handle an attack exactly the way Sir Delacar was training me—deal with any attack by paying attention, analyzing, and planning counters.
She thrust out her hand, and what looked like a ball of white fire hurtled from her toward me. I held steady; it hit my shield and splattered off, as if it had been a ball of liquid.
I felt the impact as a definite jolt in my arm. And the shield got hot for a moment before cooling again. Brianna nodded at me, I nodded back, and she repeated the attack.
Each time she sent a levin bolt hurtling at me, I understood a little more. Not the “thinking” sort of understanding, though. This was more feeling than thinking, and the feelings had to have time to work their way up into my head so I could take them apart. It’s power that acts like fire, I realized. Except it has weight and it hits me like a stone about the same size, and it also acts like water. Like molten metal, I guess. She continued to send these levin bolts at me, and I held steady, braced against the impacts.
My shield became warm, then uncomfortably warm, but I didn’t dare dismiss it, not while those fiery levin bolts hurtled toward me. I had to do something about that heat. A few more of those things hitting me and I was going to get burns! Can I make the shield more reflective? Like a mirror?
The second I thought that, the shield obeyed. The next levin bolt that hit splashed off with a lot more show, and the shield cooled a little. Brianna smiled ever so slightly and let her arm drop down to her side.
I let out a huge sigh and absorbed the shield back into myself. Sweat dripped down my back and clumped my hair, and my muscles ached exactly as if I had been working out under Sir Delacar. “Now tell me what you’ve learned so far,” Brianna ordered as I sat right down on the floor.
“What you used on me wasn’t like what the Dark Fae was using,” I replied. “It had weight and heat—like molten metal.”
“That’s a good analogy,” she replied. “And the levin bolts would have gone right through that instinctive shield you used with the Dark Fae. I suggest you try not to use that crude tactic again, at least not in that form. You did it in front of nearly every Dark Fae in the kingdom, and even the few who didn’t attend the christening will know what you did by now.”
I sighed. Of course they would.
“So tell me more,” she continued.
“The physical shield you had me make started to get hot, so I made it reflect more. But why am I so tired?”