Chapter 6 #2
She paused at the threshold, letting her eyes adjust to the contrast between the gloom of the corridors and the blaze of torchlight.
The first figure to catch her attention was a girl, maybe her own age, her hair cropped close and dyed the color of wet sand.
She stood barefoot on the stone floor, both hands gripping a wooden sword.
It was no ordinary fencing lesson: with every pass, she summoned wind in a visible arc, a force that bent the blade’s path and sent dust spinning from her toes in concentric rings.
The girl’s instructor, a man with a limp and a voice that could strip paint, barked commands from five paces away.
“Again, Adair. Harder. You're coddling it like it's a baby bird.”
The girl’s teeth flashed white. “If I go harder, you'll lose what little hair you have left. Starting with the eyebrows.”
“At least then people would notice my charming personality,” the man shot back, “instead of being distracted by this devastatingly handsome face.”
Adair twisted, brought the sword down in a two-handed cut, and a blast of air howled across the space. It clipped the instructor's cloak, spinning him halfway around. The torches flared, and the wind rattled through Alina’s bones.
She shifted, staying in the shadow of a support pillar, unwilling to be noticed but unable to look away.
At the far end of the yard, a different kind of training unfolded.
Here, the Gift was earth, not air. A man in battered leathers stood with his back to a rising wall of stone, his face set in grim determination as he shaped the material under his palms. It responded with a slow, grudging obedience, rippling and folding in on itself until it formed a low rampart.
He moved with the deliberation of a man digging his own trench, and maybe he was.
Alina watched as he placed a palm flat against the wall and pushed; the stone slid forward, clean as a slice of bread from a loaf.
“Again!” barked the woman pacing the wall, her gray hair pulled back so severely it seemed to drag her ears back. “Faster, and don't you dare cut those corners. My grandmother could shape stone more precisely, and she's been dead twenty years.”
The man grunted, wiping sweat from his forehead with a grimy sleeve. “Your grandmother probably had better tools than my bare hands.”
“My grandmother had arthritis and a bad attitude,” she shot back. “What's your excuse?”
He muttered something under his breath and returned to the wall, fingers digging into the stone.
The Gift didn’t seem to be powerful in him—but what he lacked in innate talent, he made up for in sheer stubborn effort.
Each movement betrayed the cost: trembling muscles, whitened knuckles, the tight set of his jaw.
The Gift, even in its crudest form, always demanded payment.
Alina shivered, and not just from the cold.
A third group huddled near a wooden post planted in the earth.
Here, the lesson was more subtle, but no less strange.
A woman in a moss-green shift stood with her eyes closed, arms extended toward the post. From her fingertips, thin tendrils of energy—green, nearly transparent—snaked through the air and wrapped around the wood.
She coaxed them forward, then snapped her wrist; the tendrils constricted, binding the post so tightly that the grain bulged under the pressure.
For a tiny moment, Alina felt a tingle in her fingers.
There, then gone. She put her hands in her pockets.
“Stop!” called her partner, a slight man with fingers stained black by ink. “You're choking that poor post to death. It's turning purple. It’s panicking.”
The woman cracked one eye open. “It's a piece of wood, Elias. It doesn't have feelings.”
“Neither did my last lover, but I still treated her with respect,” he quipped. “Gentle, remember? You're not making rope for a hanging, you’re weaving a blanket for a baby.”
The woman rolled her eyes but relaxed her grip, and the green tendrils softened, looping the post in a delicate net. “Happy now? Shall I sing it a lullaby too?”
Alina stared, unable to reconcile what she saw with the stories she’d been raised on.
The palace had always painted the Gifted as threats, aberrations, a class of people whose powers were uncontrollable, whose every breath was a danger to the Realm.
She’d never thought of the power in the context of discipline, or teaching, or—she struggled for the word—art.
The wind-girl, Adair, noticed her then, pausing between drills to wipe her forehead on the back of her hand. She gave Alina a lopsided grin, unashamed. “You want to try?” she called across the yard, voice carrying like a bell.
Alina shook her head, managing a polite smile. She doubted she could even lift the sword, let alone summon air to move it.
Adair shrugged and went back to her practice, this time sending a lazy, swirling gust toward the ceiling. It caught the torch smoke, spinning it into a tight, inverted cone before it collapsed. The show-off.
A stray wind—one of Adair’s weaker swings, surely—rolled across the yard and swept up the fringe of Alina’s tunic, tossing a handful of debris at her feet. She stepped back, caught off guard, and felt heat rise in her cheeks at the reminder that she was, in every way, out of place.
The sound of laughter—honest, open, unmocking—drifted over from the sword group.
Alina glanced around, half-expecting to see Seraphina lurking in the shadows, ready with some barbed comment.
But Seraphina was nowhere in sight; it was just Adair, grinning and shaking her head as if to say, “Better luck next time.”
Alina found a bench at the edge of the yard and perched on it, arms folded.
She told herself she was observing, gathering information for the inevitable escape.
But she knew, deep down, that she was watching because she couldn’t help herself.
There was something thrilling, almost intoxicating, in seeing the Gift wielded with control and purpose.
Again, a tingling arose in her fingertips and the amulet around her neck grew warm on her skin.
She chose to ignore it. It was simply her body reacting to what she was seeing.
Just like when somebody complained of a queasy stomach and her own stomach started to twist. That was it.
As so often, her thoughts strayed to her parents. What would they make of all of this? Had they actually ever seen someone wielding the Gift? If they had, surely they couldn't keep believing them to be monsters. The more Alina thought about it, the less everything made sense.
The yard was a portrait of discipline, but also of defiance.
Every drill, every demonstration, was a refusal to be what the world had accused them of being.
Alina envied their certainty, their mutual reliance.
They would all die for each other. She doubted the palace guards would ever die for her, not out of loyalty.
The bench was cold. She hugged herself tighter, trying to ignore the sting of the air on her ears and the ache in her legs.
But she did not move. She watched until the training ended, until the sword group dissolved into laughter and the earth-shapers scattered, until the green-shift woman picked up her bundle and drifted toward the warmth of the sleeping quarters.
Alina remained. She watched the torches burn down to nubs, their light sinking into puddles at the base of the wall.
She listened to the echoes fade, and to the way her own breath seemed so much smaller in the absence of all that force.
Again, annoyingly, her thoughts went to Kael and what Gift he must possess.
He seemed to be handling it so naturally, as if it wasn’t any different from walking and breathing.
Only when she could bear the cold no longer did she rise and walk back into the winding corridors.
Her feet carried her onward, but her mind stayed in the yard, replaying the sweep of Adair’s sword and the pressure of the wind on her face.
An image of herself in Adair's place arose unbidden in her mind, wielding sword and wind.
Startled, she shook the thought away. Childish fantasies, nothing more.
But as much as she tried to ignore it, she couldn't shake the uneasy knowledge that deep within her a truth lay buried, waiting to be uncovered.
Once again, her feet had taken her to the training ground.
In the last few days she had felt increasingly irritable.
Nobody was actually doing anything with her, apart from Finn, who didn’t count, because everything was a joke to him.
She was constantly waiting for something to happen, for someone to take her somewhere or interrogate her or anything.
But nothing happened. She had been here for three weeks, and still she didn’t know what to expect.
They interacted with her regarding the bare necessities, showing her where to bring her laundry and where to get fresh clothes.
They handed her food and answered when she asked for the way.
But nobody really talked to her about anything, least of all what their plans for her were.
Now she stood and watched Kael ordering his people about. He did it with such confidence, so sure of himself, his heart so invested in the cause. It seemed to come to him with such ease. And it made him so annoyingly attractive.
She hated him. She wanted to hate him. And yet...something drew her to him, made her eyes swivel to him, let her attention wander to him. She had to watch that damn lock of hair fall over his eyes. Had to observe his graceful movements, strong and sure. Had to—