9. The Training Hall #2
With every exhale there’s an explosive expulsion of air, not from his throat but down in his diaphragm… a loud and deep, guttural sound like the short sharp shout of a battle cry.
My siblings performed the kata in a controlled and measured silence. They chastised me if I ever lost myself in the motions and got too vocal when striking a finishing move. But when the first few cadets join in, mimicking his chants, he doesn’t correct or chastise or stop them.
The sound should be jarring, but honestly, it makes the simple choreographed sequence seem more threatening, more intimidating as more and more join in with it.
I wait until ten or so others begin before moving myself, and once we are all in time and familiar with the Quiet Ember sequence, Silver picks up the staff again and walks the line, instructing us to carry on without him.
His corrections are narrow and specific. Pedantic. A thumb tucked wrong, a knee tracking, a jaw that needs to be unclenched.
We continue with the not-so-Quiet Ember for what must be an hour straight, and by the time the sequence is muscle memory and his corrections stop, we break to rehydrate.
Diana doesn’t have a drink, she must have forgotten to bring her canteen, so I offer mine, which she accepts with what sounds like a thank you, but her breaths are coming far too fast to be sure.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Mmhmm,” is all she manages.
“How are you feeling now?” I press, thinking back to breakfast in the Mess Hall. “Has your stomach settled?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You’re better to eat little and often, while your stomach gets used to—”
“Back in line, Ferrum! Training drills are next,” Silver orders, and everyone obeys.
The Overlord walks the line, handing out practice weapons, and he presses a wooden dagger into my palm without looking at me.
Some cadets are given the same wooden daggers, some bo staffs, and others, blunted throwing spikes.
“You will practice for one hour with your current weapon,” Silver explains, casually tossing and catching a throwing spike.
“Then you will swap. By lunch, make sure you have used all three weapons. If you see someone struggling, help them. Ferrum is a unit, and you will act as one. It will all help or go against you in the Triad later today.”
He’s going to select one of us as his champion today?
There isn’t time to worry about it because everyone with daggers heads straight toward the sparring dummies, and so Diana and I quickly follow.
“What are we supposed to do with this?” she asks, finally able to get enough breath to her lungs and looking terrified of the virtually useless knife in her hand.
“Pretend to stick it in the dummy like it’s a pin cushion,” I gesture a stabbing motion in the air with the dagger.
She nods and we share a dummy between us. Every time I move, I can feel her eyes burning into me, and when she tries to copy, she’s so weak the defenseless dummy appears to come off victorious.
Apparently being a demonologist’s apprentice didn’t come with learning how to kill or maim one.
She moves like a foal. Awkward and earnest.
She reminds me of myself in those first few weeks of training once my back healed up enough that I could move without the wounds reopening.
It had taken months before I regained full movement back, and though I’d always exercised in the turret, the training had been something completely new.
My mother and I were not strong or skilled like those who practice the kata and drills, but we had stamina, as long as our stomachs were full enough to spend the energy.
Diana’s stamina is feeble at best, and she’s so thin, so malnourished. I watched her stuff her face at breakfast and then throw it all back up a few moments later into a bucket.
I feel for her.
I get it.
I know what it’s like to be so starving you can’t help but gorge like a gluttonous pig when you finally have food in your fingers.
My mother had taught me not to do it. It would only waste the little food we had.
She’d made sure I had stamina too.
We’d hike cliffs and swim in the sea. Even when we were hungry, we would run, usually from the next town over’s tavern storehouse, chased by the innkeeper, our pockets full of bread and cheese.
We’d always outrun them. They tended to be well fed and more suited to rolling than running, but we would always pray to the angels for forgiveness as soon as we’d put enough space between us.
That’s why even now, years later, I have a soft spot for my marks who have been sentenced to death for stealing.
It’s stupid and reckless and I have to be sure they only steal to survive first, but it’s easy to tell which ones are motivated by gluttony and greed, and those who are like my mother and me.
Of course, my father is right, a sinner with no virtue does not deserve to live, and though it had taken some time to see it his way, I wouldn’t need to think twice before murdering anyone in this room now. Bar Diana.
But stealing…
Unlike the High Seraph and his other children, I learned from experience that sometimes it’s not a desire to sin that makes someone a thief. Sometimes it’s desperation, with death as their only alternative.
So, for me, killing them is a double standard and a line I shouldn’t cross, no matter the consequences.
‘It’s okay for me, but not for thee’ doesn’t sit right. But by the angels, if my father knew how many I have sent to seek refuge in Tidecrest… I shiver. I’d be deader than dead by now.
A soft step sounds behind me. Too soft for Diana. Too quiet for any cadet.
Before I can do anything to stop it, a wooden staff hooks across my shoulders and wrenches me backward into a solid chest.
The breath punches out of me and my nostrils flare at the hint of cedar and metal and smoke.
Silver.
His hold is a cage, the staff angled to pin my arms without bruising unless I fight back. And oh, every instinct in me wants to. A dozen maneuvers lash through my mind in vivid, lethal detail. I could break his grip. Flip him. Drop him.
But I don’t.
I can’t.
As far as he or any of the others in this room know, I wouldn’t possibly know how.
“Well, look at that,” the Overlord murmurs, his voice brushing my ear like smoke. “Body here… mind somewhere else entirely.”
Warm breath feathers over the nape of my neck, and he tightens the staff enough that I feel the shift of his muscles. The steady, infuriating, beat of his heart pressing up against my leather clad and scarred skin.
“Daydreaming during a weapons drill,” he mutters, voice low. “Bold strategy. Though usually people wait until the games to get themselves killed.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Mmm.” The single sound vibrates through me as his lips hover a breath from my ear.
“Sure you weren’t, Little Nephilim. Let me guess…
drifting off to thoughts of planning your next good deed?
Maybe you were busy praying for our souls?
Or are you not aware that you look at us cambion like we are monsters? ”
He has no idea.
About any of it.
About how I know first-hand exactly how monstrous his kind are, or that my daydreams are more like nightmares, memories etched into me like scars. Would his amusement vanish if he did? No chance. So, if I look at them like monsters, it’s only because that’s what they are.
I’m so angry at his words that I don’t trust myself to reply, it’s already taking everything in me to force myself to stay still.
He lets the silence hang until a chuckle ghosts over my skin. “Thought so.”
Then, without warning, the staff is gone, his heat disappears, and I can breathe again.
Goosebumps spread along my skin.
Why am I so cold? The island is a furnace and Vulcaris is a giant forge at its core. Why the sudden chill?
Stepping around me, Silver’s eyes drag over my face like he’s making a tally of every tell I’m trying so hard to hide.
“Next time you drift off,” he says, tapping his staff against my dagger with a sharp crack, “I might not be here to catch you.”
Our eyes meet over where our training weapons touch, and I wonder which would be more fatal, a well-placed strike from his staff, or blunt force trauma to the temple from the hilt of my wooden dagger.
It’s neither of those things.
The answer lies beneath his skin, silent, pulsing and ready. His body is the heat and fuel. All it needs is for him to give it air and I’ll burn.
I want to know more about it. To ask him how it works, what its limits are. How he decides when it burns and when it doesn’t.
Instead, I push the staff away with my weapon, my grip steady though nothing else in me is.
My heart is racing, and I find myself praying to the angels that his senses are not as keen as the seraphim. Nothing gets past them. Fear, anger, envy, arousal.
They can sense it.
“Good.” I reply on a swallow. “I don’t need catching.”
“Liar,” he murmurs, walking away, leaving my pulse a mess and the spark deep inside me more on fire than ever.