House of Shadows (Royal Houses 2)

She waved her hand, and everything in the room, including the five trainees, rose into the air at once. She clapped her hands, and they dropped back to the ground.

“Good enough demonstration?”

They all nodded with gaping mouths. Kerrigan had never seen anyone with that sort of control before, and she’d spent years sneaking in on air Fae practices.

“Good. Let’s get started. I didn’t volunteer for this post, but I owed Helly a favor,” she grumbled. “So, here I am.”

Zina moved them to equally spaced spots around the circular training room. She moved the rocks, water, and oil for the other elements to a spot at the center of the room, as if it were the easiest thing she’d ever done. The entire lot of them had to keep from staring agog at her.

Then, she ran them through wind drills. They had to pass a bit of air between each other as if it were a ball. If a person dropped it, they had to take a step forward until they reached the equipment at the middle of the room.

At first, it was easy, moving the ball of air around in a circle, feeling that tug from one to the next. Still, each of them dropped the ball at least once as they worked through it. Zina made them randomize the pattern. A person could throw it to whomever they wanted, even back to the person who had thrown it. They did all right with that until the blindfolds came out. And within fifteen minutes, all of them were at the center of the room. It was like none of them had ever practiced air magic, which was absurd. Kerrigan herself had done nothing but air in her fights, and Noda was a first-level air-magic user. The exercise made them look like amateurs.

“Where did you go wrong?” Zina asked.

“We don’t know who is going to get it, and we’re blindfolded,” Roake muttered in irritation.

Zina smacked him in the back of his head with a lob of air. “Those are the rules, not your failure.”

“We can’t anticipate each other’s moves,” Kerrigan tried.

“But can’t you?”

“No,” Noda said. “But we should be able to feel the magic moving. It’s a basic tenet of Flavia’s air teaching.”

“Bah! Flavia was a hack! I couldn’t teach her anything,” Zina said, banging on her head. “And I won’t teach you either if you don’t embrace what is around you. The air is already there. You aren’t catching a ball thrown. There’s no ball. You’re embracing the magic that exists in front of you.”

They all stared back at her blankly. This wasn’t how magic was taught at all. Kerrigan had never heard this sort of rhetoric in all of her time in the House of Dragons.

“Let me show you. You throw the ball with your eyes open. I’ll tell you who has it,” Zina said. She crossed her legs and sat folded in on herself, floating in the air before them. A blindfold appeared across her eyes. “Begin.”

The others shrugged and started up the game again.

Zina couldn’t see a thing, and she called out, “Fordham, Audria, Roake, back to Audria, Noda, to Kerrigan, back to Fordham, back to Kerrigan, Roake, to Audria, back to Noda, to Audria, to Noda, to Audria.” Zina removed the blindfold. “Stop that.”

“But how?” Noda whispered.

“I’ll teach you if you’re willing to learn. Most aren’t.”

But they were.

17

The Problem

The rest of the magic masters weren’t half as interesting or helpful as Zina. Water on Tuesday with Master Raysor, who fell asleep halfway through his own lesson and only woke up to talk to Audria about healing lessons outside of class. The rest of them clearly didn’t matter. Wednesday earth lessons with Master Tippan, which were not much fun for anyone but Roake, who apparently had an affinity for earth. On Thursday, they met with Mistress Sencha, who Kerrigan had had most of her magic lessons with in the House of Dragons. At the time, Kerrigan had been trying not to draw attention to herself, and so Sencha seemed surprised that Kerrigan had any mastery of the element. But still, the lessons weren’t that different, only more rigorous.

Each afternoon when they left magic lessons, they left with their well depleted. Their bodies ached from morning training and their mind and magic were just as bad. Kerrigan, who usually fought with her sleep schedule, crashed face-first into the mattress every evening and didn’t wake up until breakfast. No interruptions. No time to do any other research. No time to even think.

When Friday afternoon arrived with another verbally abusive match with Lorian, everyone was ready to call it a day.

“What did you have planned for your extra sessions?” Audria asked, running a hand back through her light hair. She hadn’t given up trying to keep it prim and proper despite the rest of them barely finding time for baths.