Chapter 1 #2
In my opinion, a better title would be Crown Prick. It suited his delightfully sunny disposition and the radiant scowl on his face. He was the abject opposite to Mihrunnisa in every way, and I struggled to accept they were related.
“Of course I don’t have better things to do than train my sister,” he replied, his tone about as gruff and flat as he could possibly produce.
I sighed. Heavily. We’d been doing this for enough mornings now that I felt comfortable expressing my annoyance; the Saber family had swept me into them as if I’d always been a member, treating me with kindness and acceptance.
I didn’t trust it. But Varidian told me his siblings would protect me, so I trusted them at least. Even if Kamaal took a single staff from the rack of potential weapons. None for me today, then.
“Must we?” I asked, my body already aching from yesterday’s session.
The injuries I sustained in the attack on the Red Star had been gone for days, swept away by the palace’s healers as if the gash on my leg had never existed.
Kamaal seemed determined to make up for that by giving me a hundred new bruises.
If I ever expected Kamaal to treat me lightly because I was a woman or his sister, that impression was soundly beaten out of me the first time he knocked me on my ass. Then the second, and the third, and the fourth. And that was just the first ten minutes.
Kamaal smiled, a slow thing that hooked a scar deeper into his cheek. He looked like a sadist, but I was informed he had a good heart deep down. Really deep down, I assumed. That or he’d replaced it with muscle as part of his exercise regime.
“Yes,” he said. “We must.”
After every session, I told myself it was the last one, and I never had to face Kamaal’s miserable, scowling face again.
All it took was an hour in the library reading every passage and poem and tome about lightning souls I could find to remind me why I needed to be strong.
As far as anyone knew, I’d been moved by the dark clergy’s message and was doing my duties as a good princess of Ithanys by trying to find ways to rid us of the lightning soul.
No one knew I desperately scoured for ways to save my husband.
The fact I was back in the training hall for another masochistic fighting session ought to tell you how much luck I’d had with the books.
Any other instructor might have chided me for being distracted. Kamaal just swept the wooden staff into my calves and took me down to the ground without a single hair leaving the punishingly tight knot his dark hair was locked into.
“Ouch,” I muttered, glaring at him like an accusation.
“On your feet,” he commanded, not cruel or harsh but completely unyielding.
With a sigh, I pushed off the cold stone floor and rubbed my tailbone.
It was far from the first bruise Kamaal had given me, but he was one of the best ground warriors in the empire.
Not the biggest or strongest, but the fastest and most skilled.
That’s what I needed to be to keep Varidian safe when everyone discovered the lightning soul was inside him.
My gaze drifted to the ring on my finger, soft morning light catching the purples in the dragon opals and making them sparkle.
I dropped my hands and fixed my attention on Kamaal as the warrior assessed me.
He was likely five steps ahead of me, and already knew the first move I’d make, but it didn’t stop me adjusting my body the way Aliah and he taught me, tracking every minute shift of his arms for the next swing.
I saw it coming and jumped, leaping aside with enough time to thrust the flat of my palm towards his body, planning to finally land a hit on Varidian’s stone-faced older brother.
The staff knocked my legs from beneath me before my hand could connect. I clenched my teeth against the dull throb of another bruise forming, splayed on the sandstone floor.
Kamaal peered down at me and said, “On your feet.”
So I got up. And I kept training.
“Hardass,” I muttered under my breath as I left the training room, heading through the bright, golden hallways of the palace, the scent of orange blossom drifting from the pots overflowing with flowers that lined the open windows.
I limped slightly, thanks to the hard knock I took to my hip before Kamaal dismissed me with a frown that could be concern or simple disappointment. “Smug, stern faced—”
A piercing whistle made me ground to a halt in the middle of the hall, so loud and sudden that it hurt.
I threw my hands over my ears, teeth grinding as the shrill noise burrowed like a screw into my brain.
An alarmed look around the hallway showed the only other person here was a woman with a basket full of clean clothing, her demure gaze pinned to the floor as she passed.
None of the staff looked me in the eyes, I’d noticed, but not because they feared my mismatched eyes or my touch; they didn’t meet Mihrunnisa’s eyes either.
“Can you hear that noise?” I called to the woman, startling her enough that she nearly dropped her basket. “What is it?”
She flicked a glance at me and then away. Her fear made my stomach tighten, the feeling familiar, but I told myself it wasn’t a personal insult. As far as I could tell, no one in the capital knew what my dark power was capable of.
“All I can hear are the birds, a-lalla,” she breathed, bowed, and hurried away.
But the ringing in my ears didn’t stop for another three minutes, and when it was gone, the impression of it remained in my head all the way across the palace and up three floors to my new room.
Had the woman lied, or could I hear something she didn’t? And if the latter… what was the damned thing?