Chapter 8 #2
Alina’s temper flared. “Not taking this—I've been standing here freezing my toes off for hours! Maybe if you gave actual instructions instead of cryptic nonsense like ‘feel the web’ while watching me flail around like a drunk puppeteer, we'd get somewhere! I've never—”
Tamsin cut her off, voice cold as the morning frost. “You've never failed at anything that mattered. Not once. Until now. And now you’re whining like a petulant little child because it isn’t easy.”
The words hit with precision, leaving Alina speechless.
Her hands curled into fists. Anger and frustration welled up in her in a huge tidal wave and erupted from her flung-out arms. The power hit a blue little wildflower near where Tamsin was sitting.
Delicate and perfect, its petals quivered in the breeze.
The bloom instantly withered, all color gone, petals curling in on themselves as if scorched from the inside.
The stem blackened, then snapped. A crackle—soft, like sugar breaking—was clearly audible in the otherwise perfect silence.
The scent of decay, sweet and unmistakable, rose and vanished.
Alina recoiled as if struck. She stumbled backward, boots skidding on the frozen earth, and landed on her knees.
The silence that followed was worse than any reprimand.
She stared at her hands, the fingers splayed and trembling. For a moment, she feared the blackness would creep up her arms, would stain her like it did the flower.
But her flesh remained her own. Only her insides felt ruined.
Tamsin waited, unmoving, eyes fixed on the spot where the flower had died. At last, she rose, approaching with measured steps.
Alina did not meet her gaze. She wanted to sink into the soil, to join the little corpse she’d made.
Tamsin’s voice was soft, but not gentle. “It always starts with death. The Gift wants balance. The more you push, the more it pushes back.”
Alina shivered, unable to answer. The frost began to melt around her knees, wetness seeping through her pants.
She closed her eyes and saw, again, the Gifted in the training ring. She wondered how many of them had once failed as she had. How many had killed by accident? How many had learned too late that every power was also a wound?
Tamsin let the silence stretch, the way a hunter lets an animal tire itself before the gentle mercy.
“I burned my mother’s garden,” she offered, matter-of-fact.
“The year I turned thirteen. She was fond of foxgloves—spent whole weeks tending to them. One night I lost my temper, and by morning every stem had blackened, every petal a scrap of ash. She never said a word, but she cut them down before sunrise. After that, I ran. Lived by the river for a season. Thought if I starved myself of company, the Gift would shrivel and die.”
Alina listened, part of her desperate to be comforted, another part recoiling from the intimacy of the confession. She risked a glance at Tamsin’s face and saw no pity there, only a reflective, clinical sadness. An old scar, long since closed over.
“I don’t want this,” Alina managed, the words as thin as spider-silk.
Tamsin didn’t offer any contradiction. “No one does. Not at first. But you learn it’s better to hold the blade than to be cut by it.” She gestured, not unkindly, at the dead flower. “You controlled it, in the end. It obeyed. That’s more than most manage.”
Alina’s gaze drifted to her hands. The skin was unmarked, but she imagined a blackness curling inside, coiling through the bones and tendons, waiting to erupt. She pressed her palms together, as if to keep anything else from leaking out. “That was not control,” she said.
Tamsin shifted her weight, then went to settle onto a fallen log that oozed cold sap. “Come here,” she said, voice returning to its usual command.
Reluctantly, Alina obeyed, standing on legs that trembled from exhaustion. She perched at the edge of the log, leaving as much distance as possible between them.
Tamsin drew a breath, sharp and clean. “It’s not about force. It’s not even about feeling. It’s intent, and control.” She plucked a twig from the ground, stripped the bark in a single motion. “Focus on a single thought. Nothing else. Not memory, not fear. Nothing.”
She held the stick out, level with Alina’s knees. “Try again. Small this time.”
Alina hesitated. “What if—”
Tamsin cut her off with a look. “Don’t worry about what if. Worry about what is.”
So, Alina fixed her gaze on the stick. She tried to empty her mind of palaces and parents, of rebels and victims, of the ruined flower at her feet. She conjured instead a single, childish command: bend.
For what felt like minutes, nothing happened. The stick lay inert, oblivious to her will. She felt the effort building, pressure in her temples, a sweat beading along her upper lip.
She inhaled, let the breath out slowly.
The stick quivered, just barely. It did not break, or blacken, or perform any impressive feat. But it moved.
A relief so profound it bordered on nausea swept through her. She let her hands fall, gasping at the release.
Tamsin’s lips twitched, a movement so minute it might have been imagined. “Better.”
Alina slumped, sudden fatigue spreading through every limb. The cold was no longer bracing, but a punishment, every shiver a new demand. She hugged herself, eyes fixed on the trembling stick.
They worked that way for hours. Tamsin set simple tasks—twist the twig, uncurl a dried leaf, coax a drop of water from the moss.
Each time, Alina struggled, failed, sometimes made things worse.
She burned a patch of lichen to crusted yellow, cracked a stone in two with an unintentional surge, made a cloud of spores explode in her face, leaving her sneezing and blinking away tears.
But as the light shifted and the mist gave way to weak sunlight, the successes accumulated. A droplet formed on a leaf. A petal opened when she asked it to. She could, if she tried hard enough, make a line in the dirt run just a finger-width further.
Tamsin never praised her, but she stopped correcting as frequently. She folded her arms and watched, gaze distant, as if reviewing an old memory. Alina’s own breathing had steadied, the way the ache in her chest had been replaced with a new, not-unpleasant sense of hunger.
As the sun began to sink, casting the clearing in gold, Tamsin stood. She gestured at a birch sapling, its new leaves trembling in the evening breeze. “Once more,” she said.
Alina squared herself. She thought of all the things she wanted to prove, then let those go, focusing only on the leaf. She extended a hand, willed it to move—not with fear or anger, but with intent.
The leaf shuddered, then stilled. Then, as if in slow motion, it bent downward, holding the pose for a breath before releasing.
Alina blinked, stunned. She felt an impulse to cry, or laugh, or run.
Tamsin’s mouth curved. Just the faintest edge, but it was enough.
“That’s enough for today,” she said. She turned, marching back through the clearing without looking to see if Alina followed.
Alina lingered, staring at the birch. The leaf, having survived her attention, seemed to glitter in the last light.
She touched her hands together, marveling at the absence of tremor. She flexed her fingers, and for the first time that day, they felt warm.
The ruined flower still lay on the ground, a warning and a monument.
Alina briefly knelt beside it, brushing the blackened petals with a fingertip.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. As she rose, she reached for the amulet, a deeply ingrained reassuring habit.
The last hours it had lain forgotten on her chest. Now she was looking for its comforting touch, as she had done a thousand times before. It was scalding hot.
The sun was a red coin spent and forgotten behind the trees by the time she stood up and stretched her aching limbs.
The forest had changed in the hours of their training.
What had been cold blue and silver was now a thicket of deep shadow and gold, the trunks painted in the last desperate brilliance of the day.
Kael was waiting.
He stood on the far side of the stones, arms folded, hair a tumbling mess, eyes fixed on the empty sky above.
His posture was one of careful neutrality, but even at a distance, Alina sensed the low thrum of anticipation that radiated off him.
He turned as they approached, the movement so smooth it could have been a trick of the wind.
Tamsin reached him first, just at the edge of the clearing, a sentinel with no intention of entering the circle. Alina drifted behind her, slow, drained and worried about the amulet’s reaction. Kael’s gaze flicked from one to the other, then settled on Tamsin.
“Well?” he said, voice as steady as a drawn bow.
Tamsin hesitated—just for a fraction, just enough to make it clear that she was weighing her words before offering them. “She’s not useless,” she said at last, and though it could have been a joke, there was a solemnity to it that made Alina’s ears burn.
Kael’s mouth quirked into a ghost of a grin. “A ringing endorsement.”
Tamsin shrugged. “She listens. And she doesn’t lie to herself about how it feels.”
Kael’s eyes sharpened at that. He nodded, then turned his focus on Alina, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Good,” he said. “That’s all we need for now.”
Tamsin ducked her head in concession, then stepped back into the woods without a word. She moved with the uncanny grace of a predator—gone in three strides, her passage marked only by the quick, liquid hush of branches swinging closed behind her.
That left Alina and Kael alone, the stones a ring around them, the darkness closing in.
For a minute, neither spoke.