Chapter 27 The Education
The Education
The next day, Aunt Petunis leads me past the main training hall and into a narrower chamber set deeper within the palace. The walls are reinforced, the light dim and contained. There are no attendants. No observers. Only the two of us.
She moves to the rack along the wall without explanation, selects something, and returns to me. A wooden staff. She holds it out.
“This is your trainer,” she says.
I take it. The difference is immediate. No hum. No pull. No quiet force shaping my grip toward something easier. Only weight. Only balance. Only what I choose to do with it.
She watches my hands adjust and says nothing.
"Again," she says, before I have done anything.
I move through the first sequence, the staff cutting through the air in controlled arcs, my footing steady, my grip firm. The motion is familiar enough that my body finds it quickly, settling into the rhythm of it.
She lets me finish. "You are mediocre at best." The words come without force, which somehow makes them sting worse. She pauses, letting them sit. "Mediocrity is unacceptable."
My fingers tighten around the wood.
She steps forward and adjusts my grip with precise minimal correction, two fingers repositioning my hand in a way that changes the entire angle of the staff.
"A staff is not a blade," she says. "If you fight it like one you will lose it.
" She taps the end lightly against the floor.
"This is reach. This is control. You command distance with it. "
She steps back. "Again."
I move. This time I shorten the arcs, control the extension, feel the length of it rather than forcing it. The staff becomes less about striking and more about where I am in relation to everything else.
"Better," she says. "Not good."
We repeat it. Again and again, each pass stripping something away. Force. Excess. Assumption. What remains is smaller and tighter and harder to maintain, which is precisely the point.
"You rely on reaction," she says as I reset. "Reaction is slow. You will act, and others will respond to you."
She pauses. "Lightcraft."
I do not change the staff. I let the light gather instead, thin at first and uneven, then steadier as I hold my focus, extending it along the wood without altering what the staff is, reinforcing rather than replacing.
"Do not turn it into something it is not," she says. "If you need a sword you will take one. This is not a sword."
I adjust. The light steadies. She watches it for a moment and says nothing, which is the closest thing to approval I have received since we began.
"Again."
I move through the sequence, the staff heavier now with intention, the reach cleaner.
Then a wave of nausea rises without warning, pulling through my stomach and into my throat. I swallow against it, tighten my grip, keep moving.
Aunt Petunis does not look away. "I do not care that you are nauseous," she says. "You will practice each day, even when you are heavy with child. You will still be attacked when you are pregnant and when you are not. The body you have is the body you will be fighting in." She pauses. "Again."
The gate at the far end of the chamber begins to lift.
"A special creation," she says simply.
Something is brought forward.
The cage is blackened iron, marked with faintly pulsing etchings, and what moves inside it does not move the way living things move.
Its limbs are too long, the proportions of it subtly wrong, the angles shifting in ways the eye keeps trying to correct for.
A low uneven sound escapes it, not quite a voice and not quite anything else, coming from somewhere inside it that sound should not come from.
"Is this a deathmage?" I ask.
She smiles, which is not a comforting expression on her.
"This is Orlakai," she says. "He has been here for centuries.
The royal children have always practiced on him.
He is capable of behaving as not only a deathmage but as many other creatures of power.
He was created centuries ago, so that Alarnan royals could learn their enemies without leaving the comfort of the wards. "
She looks at me. "Today, he is a deathmage. Now destroy him."
“Watch the hands,” Aunt Petunis says. “Not from across a room. When they reach you. That is when they tell the truth.”
The cage opens.
Something dark drifts from its eyes as it moves toward me, and then the force of it arrives before the creature does. Pressure, crashing into me, heavy and suffocating, pressing into my mind and my body at once. My limbs hesitate. My breath cuts short.
For a moment I cannot move at all.
I shift too late.
"Wrong,” Petunis snaps.
I force myself back into motion, stepping out of reach.
"Wrong."
It comes again, faster. The pressure hits first, that same overwhelming weight, that same certainty that whatever it is doing cannot be resisted. My body locks around it before I can stop it.
“At first it will feel as though you cannot move," Aunt Petunis says, her voice entirely calm behind me. "That whatever is being taken from you is insurmountable."
The creature closes the distance.
"That is the mindset of the weak."
I force my breath out. One exhale.
"A queen knows it is not the case."
She does not raise her voice. “Remember, Asharin. A queen does not freeze. She lets her enemies decide she has.”
I step forward. The staff meets it. The impact shudders through me, the pressure still present and still enormous, but I hold my ground, forcing movement through it rather than surrendering to it.
The creature recoils.
"Again."
We repeat it until the repetition becomes its own kind of knowledge.
Each time the pressure comes I feel it a fraction sooner.
Each time it tries to root me I find the exhale faster, force the step forward with a little less effort, hold my ground with a little less cost. The nausea stays beneath all of it and sharpens the edge of every movement, which I have begun to suspect is intentional.
I push too far on the next pass. The pressure turns inward and blood slips from my nose. I do not stop. I force the step anyway. For a moment I am back in the forest, copper on my tongue, Arven’s voice low and irritated, telling me I was tearing it through myself instead of using it.
Not Arven. Teorin.
The last I saw of him, the dead were closing in. He is alive, I tell myself. And if he is not, it is his own fault.
“Control it,” Aunt Petunis says. “Or it will control you.”
Eventually she raises a hand. "Enough."
The creature is restrained and dragged back, still moving wrong, still making that sound.
I lower the staff. My breath is uneven and I do not try to hide it.
Aunt Petunis studies me for a long moment. "I know of your intunar ability," she says.
I blink, surprised that she knows.
"I am not stupid, Asharin. And you are not subtle. It is painfully obvious when you fight.”
“Someone attempted to teach you how to use it in a very crude way,” she says. "Likely that protector of yours."
"We are not crude here," she says.
A man steps forward from the edge of the chamber, his presence quiet enough that I had not marked him before. "I am Brakorin," he says. "A master of the mind."
Aunt Petunis looks between us. "You will learn how to protect your mind from those that wish to control or manipulate it." She clears her throat. "More importantly, you will learn to use your intunar properly," she says.
“I cannot train you,” she says. “This is not a gift usually held by Alarnans."
"So I inherited it from my father?"
"Your father is dead, and my time is precious. Less questions."
I am not surprised by her answer, and as much as I want to know who he is the only thing taking up space in my mind these days is Colsar.
Will he be here in time to meet his children? Will I give birth to them here in Alarna?
"Pay attention," Aunt Petunis snaps, pulling me out of my thoughts.
"You will practice mental strength. You will learn how to be better than you currently are, because right now your weakness would embarrass even your mother.
" She lets that sink in. "You will go to the libraries each night and learn your histories from the Archivists.
" She sighs. "When we are done with that, we will work on presence and decision-making. "
"What does that mean?" I ask.
She studies me. "Queenly behavior, Asharin," she says. "You are too tentative. Too quick to make yourself smaller than you are." She tilts her head slightly. "That ends here."
She looks at me. “Whatever version of you was so weak or so simple or so sad that you allowed yourself to fall into a trap that nearly killed you—”
“I did not—”
“Once again, I am not stupid, Queen Heir. You claim your brother almost killed you. He could not waltz into the palace and accomplish such a thing. You were likely stupid enough to be fooled into a trap. Because you were weak for love, or acceptance, or perhaps naive enough to think that no one would dare harm you.”
She sniffs. “You must overcome this…affliction of naivety that you once held. You are Queen Heir. You will be a mother soon, and maybe you are still a wife. It is not endearing, it is unacceptable.”
My hands tremble at the thought of Mysin, at the injustice of what was done to me. At the fact that some of what she spoke was true.
She turns back to the rack. "We begin again tomorrow. You will not be late."
She does not wait for my answer.
She does not need one.
That night I go to the library. The Archivists bring what I ask for without comment. Texts bound in worn leather, their pages thin and marked with careful script that feels older than the palace above us.
I do not search for history. I search for the wards.
Alarna's wards are not walls. They are made from the blood of the royal line, layered and reinforced over generations. They recognize what belongs and reject what does not.
All Alarnan royals can pass through them.
But not easily. Crossing requires power and focus, and the wards are strongest at the border, their magic demanding the recognition of at least one bloodline.
Ideally two. Ideally the person crossing would carry the same blood as the one holding the ward open.
That is where the ties come in.
Loosening ties. The term appears rarely, buried in older records as though it was never meant to be widely known.
They are not openings. They are permissions, woven into the ward structure using Lightcraft and blood.
Made in advance. Made with intention. Each one bound to a single crossing, a single person, unless the one creating it is strong enough to anchor more.
I turn the page.
The Avanki are bound to a separate system, a blood oath woven into their service that allows them to pass in and out when required. No one else can use it.
Further down the text shifts. Older records. Less certain. Passages beneath Alarna, created during the dark war when the royal line fractured. Sealed. Abandoned. Forgotten. Reactivating them would require more than one royal, more than one source of power, and time.
I close the book.
My hand lowers to my stomach.
Two royals. Alarnan blood, both of them. And his blood runs through them too, which means they carry the ability to recognize him. To know him.
If I create the loosening ties, I would not be anchoring one source of power.
I would be anchoring three.
It might be enough.
It has to be enough.
The next morning arrives different.
I will learn everything, I decide. Every text in that library, every ward, every political current, every piece of this country I do not yet understand. Not for Colsar alone. For myself. For the two lives inside me.
I will figure out the loosening ties. I will prepare the way. He will find me. I am certain of it. If he was brave enough to cross the undead to reach me, I could be crafty enough to make sure he gets through.
“We are not broken. We are matched,” I had told him once.
I will not spend another evening hollow and miserable. I will never again allow myself the level of hopelessness that had me standing alone in a sea of undead, wishing I were no longer alive. I will be strong in the way that lasts. A queen in more than title.
I begin to develop a routine. My days fill with lessons, libraries, and the slow accumulation of knowledge that begins to feel less like study and more like armor.
Aunt Petunis corrects every misstep before I can ignore it, and I soon realize I must learn quickly or not at all.
There is no room here for hesitation. Power in Alarna is not shown. It is assumed.
Evenings are quieter. Uralish and Syle often dine with me, and sometimes Korvis joins. There are games, small wagers, though Aunt Petunis has made it clear I am not to gamble or be seen in taverns in the capital. I am not sure I would go anyway. Tellys has not left me.
On the third day of each week, I take tea with Aunt Venya, Aunt Petunis, and Aunt Jularin. Nyara usually attends, though I suspect she will soon move to the capital for the theater. I could not be happier for her.
I see Parshin’s children often. They bring gossip without restraint, their language worse than it should be, though I have learned not to stop them.
Hurstinal appears throughout the palace without purpose I can name. When I ask Uralish what his role in the palace is, he only says, “He is more useless than a pile of ant shit.”
It is not helpful.
Sometimes, leaving the library in the evenings, I would notice Hurstinal in the corridor.
Never close enough to address. Just watching.
The air always smells faintly wrong when he is near.
His pale eyes following me until I turned the corner and he disappeared from view. I told myself it meant nothing.