Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Morgan
I’m not prepared when Astrid finally speaks. Her low, even tone is expected but surprising, a gift and a curse.
“I heard a rumor.”
Astrid slides closer to me, and I tense up. The dagger won’t do much against her and we both understand it, the way some animals inherently sense a storm with a change in the wind and the ache deep in their bones.
“Did you now?” I keep my tone light.
Darkness twists around me and my fingers flex as my ears ring with a distant warning to watch. My skin is tender and battered and the last thing I need is to take a shot at Astrid, or whatever else I’ll have to do to leave this gym.
I step to the side, and she moves with me.
There’s nothing soft about this girl. Where Evie has something to manipulate, and a throat waiting for me to burrow my knuckles against, Astrid is hard edges, keen enough to cut yourself on if you get too close. She’d be pretty with her luminous warm brown skin and intelligent eyes.
Right now, she’s staring at me like chaos is about to break loose.
“You are moving up or you’re moving out,” Astrid finishes. “Kieran isn’t the one who told me, if you’re wondering. I have my finger on the pulse of this place. A few strings tugged and the knowledge slips free right into my hands. You found yourself faced with a decision.”
It’s funny how fast gossip spreads in this place. Not long ago, what happened in the office of the headmistress stayed trapped within four walls. Now it passes through the school like dust borne on a wind to foreign lands.
“I’m moving out,” I reply. “I have no interest in tugging myself to the peaks of the towers here.”
Astrid’s eyes narrow at my tone. “An attitude?”
“Always.”
She stares at me a moment longer, her face a masterpiece. “That’s good. You aren’t strong enough to be a student here.”
A prickle of unease fills the space between my ribs.
“Interesting, considering I’d been issued an invitation days prior to my arrival, before my village got torched,” I grind out the last, my jaw spiking with pain.
She tsks. “Fury is powerful and deadly. It’s a wildfire. But without direction, it consumes. What will be left of you once your anger runs its course?”
The flow of her voice shakes me. I hate the way this stranger pins me neatly in place, and how the picture she paints mimics the past.
“Enough,” I answer tersely. “There will be enough of me left to do what is necessary.”
She shrugs. “I have my doubts. Then again, the decision isn’t up to me.”
“Ah. Another one of Kieran’s sycophants, then.”
Bluster often does the trick, at least, it used to. Against people like Evie, bluster is one of the most powerful weapons because those types don’t like to be questioned. Underneath my flaws, the layers I’ve stacked on top of each other, I’m the same. The last thing I want is to be confronted.
Astrid is different. It makes her formidable and dangerous.
“If it gives you peace to consider me that, then by all means. I have no care or energy to stop you.”
She breaks eye contact to look around the gym. Her gaze penetrates through the splinters of the wood, through the fibers of the mat. A formidable one. I take the split second to catalogue her as well and search for weak spots, but I come up short. There aren’t any.
She’s made herself impenetrable.
Everyone has something, I tell myself. I’m just out of time.
“What do you want?”
Her lips form an easy arc, soft in a face of hard planes. “I’ve seen it time after time, people who consider their way to be the right one, and so it’s the only one. I’m sure you’ve experienced the same.”
“I—”
“You and Kieran are the same,” Astrid interrupts. “Your way, his. The right. The only. In the end it comes down to one small difference. He’s willing to change his mind. You? I think not. Which is why you’ll never belong.”
Air hisses past my teeth. I have a few choice words for what she can do with her comparison, but nothing makes it out into the open. Instead, the truth clings to me, sucked in through the cracks and crevices I’d let widen.
“Good thing me being here isn’t up to you,” I tell her. “Headmistress Harbi was ready to accept me this afternoon.”
“Mistakes happen,” Astrid says with a sniff.
“It’s not a mistake.”
She slides her arms behind her back, standing at attention. Will she hit me? Will she attempt to take the dagger from me and use it to slice my throat and be done with me?
She gives nothing away, and it’s almost impossible to guess her next moves.
“It’s not,” I insist. “I have every quality DragonSpear looks for in a candidate.”
“Possibly. You might have Kieran convinced, but not me. He is much more easily won over.”
I scoff. “Won over? Is that what I’ve done with him?”
“This isn’t a joke, girl.”
“I know it’s not.” I step to the door and Astrid moves with me.
A frisson of tension laces through my vertebrae.
“He intends to use you. He’s convinced of your efficacy. He has a protectiveness he rarely lets others see.”
Anger stretches through my limbs, and I scowl at her, side stepping to the door only to be blocked again.
Heat pinks my cheeks. “He’s not protective over me.”
“Then it proves how little you see.”
“You’re baiting me into a fight.” I cock my head to the side. “What’s the point?”
“Yes. I’m baiting you into a fight. And it’s taken you this long to notice.”
She nods once, like everything she does is brief. Like I’m lucky enough to catch it the first time because she will never repeat herself.
“I see you as arrogant and pigheaded. Your actions are selfish rather than born of survival the way you think they are.”
I swipe a hand over my face to clear my burning eyes. “Like you know anything.”
“You haven’t begun to understand the sacrifices it takes for peace. Which is why you have such a difficult time imagining what Kieran has done.”
I take a step toward her, and Astrid flows with me, keeping a pace ahead so there is no accidental touching.
Concern pricks my skin.
“Why does it matter?” I ask.
“The deal is simple.” She steps up to me and my mouth opens in automatic protest. “You land a hit on me, and I’ll make sure you stay. You only get one.”
She tips her chin, indicating a spot.
“You land a hit, then you’ve proved you have earned staying here.”
“I don’t want to stay,” I tell her again. “I want out.”
“Don’t insult me,” she breathes.
Her gaze lights with determination and I double down.
“This place is not what I thought it would be. If staying involves showing my neck to General Ryson, then I don’t want it, no matter what.” My voice stays firm to banish my own doubts.
“You want it so bad you can taste it.” Astrid grabs the neck of my dress and hauls me to her so quickly I barely have time for the surprised gasp to make it past my teeth.
She smiles sardonically. “I’ll make sure you get to graduation, and I’ll make sure you know the truth. One hit. You’ll stay, because you know this is where you belong.”
It’s an olive branch disguised as a sword. Has the entire day led up to this moment? Just the two of us, together in Kieran’s private sparring gym?
My gaze flickers over her shoulder.
“You’re not making it out the door,” Astrid continues conversationally. “Like I said. There is one way for you to leave and it’s through me.”
Attacking Astrid is the last thing I want to do. The bottom drops out from under me even as the room constricts, in the inexplicable way that rooms in this place do, until I feel the individual grains of the rafters against my skin.
She never answered my question—why she’s doing this. She won’t, either.
“I’ll give you a second to compose yourself.”
She goes through the motions of kicking off her boots. The laces are already loose enough for her to slide off. She peels off her socks, methodically, the right and then the left and sets them in a neat pile.
There is something entirely disconcerting about the unhurried way she moves. If she wants to get me unnerved, then she’s accomplished her goal.
Nothing without reason.
None of her movements are wasted. I can train for years and not have half of her stillness. She’s a warrior down to her bones.
What am I?
When Astrid rises, she nimbly undoes the knots keeping her leather braces in place over her forearms. The left, then the right.
She places the braces neatly at the edge of the mat and the leather armor over her chest follows. When she finishes undressing, she stands in front of me in a loose shirt and trousers, her hair done in multiple braids and held back from her face by another thin strip of leather.
“Don’t make it easy on my account.” I strive for the same kind of neutrality and absolutely fall short.
The pain from Evie is already distant. Present, but secondary to the weird fluttering in my chest. Bumps erupt along my chest and the side of my arms.
Astrid is eyeing me the way I once saw a pit viper stare at a baby bird, fallen too soon from the nest. An easy meal hardly worth the effort but delicious nonetheless.
Rattled, I take my place in front of her on the mat, drawing a steadying breath into my lungs.
“One hit,” she reminds me.
I rush her before the word fully leaves her lips.
She steps to the side easily, but I thought she might. She’ll never let me punch her dead in the jaw the way she indicated with a tap of her finger.
I pull up short and punch outward, curving my arm through the air. She bends her back, graceful, elegant. A dance.
I’m callow and rough by comparison. Exhausted, the caked-on blood makes my skin crack in all the wrong places.
A yell pries itself out of me as I lunge forward and send both arms out this time, my jaw dropping, and my fists meeting open air. I’ve overextended myself, and my joints protest immediately as I stumble.
Astrid says nothing. She moves fluidly, and her hands stay locked at her tailbone like some kind of mocking posture designed to remind me of the way Kieran leashed me.
Hands behind the back might be a hindrance to some, like me, but not to her.