Page 36

In some ways, it stung even more than the notion that some of the tokens these Aureans carried had power within them that had been cultivated for centuries.

Anyone could take up a token pressed into their hands by a generous relative, but it was another thing to have the time to cultivate that power yourself, a luxury Kat could scarcely conceive.

But she knew what Adrien meant by it, and so all Kat said was, “I’ve never met a proper host-devoted monk, but I can’t imagine them being more exacting than a centurion.”

“And how has it been coming with Mira?” Adrien asked.

“It’s been…a process.” On the one hand, Mira had her loyalty, even if it hung by a thread during many of their mornings together. They’d been through too much over the past three years for Kat to ever throw her to the wolves just because she took Kat’s training seriously.

On the other, Mira was not the most effective of teachers, and the patterns from Kat’s first day had only become more entrenched as their sessions wore on.

Mira had started her Aurean training over a decade ago, and there were many aspects to wielding a token that she now found so instinctive she couldn’t properly explain them.

Worse, when she tried, she ended up parroting things she remembered from her tutors, who had been working on the presupposition that their pupil had a proper classical education.

Sometimes Mira tried to explain with scientific theory, others she took a crack at literary allusion, and all of it went clean over Kat’s head.

She’d realized after that first day that Adrien, for all his eccentricities, had a different kind of instinctive approach. And though she wouldn’t admit it even if the High King of Hell tried to burn it out of her, Kat had come to accept that in all likelihood, he was the better teacher.

It was probably confession enough that she was here on this hilltop.

“Well, there’s only so much a ten-token Aurean can teach you,” Adrien said nonchalantly, and Kat reconsidered.

“I would imagine ten tokens is closer to what I’m working with than—” She jerked her chin at his array.

“In principle, every token was created at the Forging from an equal weight of gold. I can tell you from my experience wrangling a hundred of them that, although attuning all of them at once is one matter, the process of bringing each of them into alignment is identical no matter what kind of token it is. The ease of that process is the only difference, and that’s a matter of cultivation.

And it’s gotten much easier for you, hasn’t it? ”

In answer, Kat brought her hand up to clutch her token, and light flooded through her fingertips as her call was answered.

She’d fought hard to gain this ground over the past month, but when she glanced over to Adrien, she found a furrowed brow, not the easy wonder she’d come to expect from every drop-in he made on her sessions with Mira.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, letting go of her alignment.

Adrien shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s…I don’t want to say it’s too advanced, but it’s just—”

“Out with it, Your Highness,” Kat said with a daring edge.

“ Fine, ” he groused. “In my training, I was told our fundamentals are essential to everything we do, and part of good fundamentals is recognizing bad habits before they can take root.”

“I’ve got a bad habit?”

Adrien reached up to his own array and smushed his hand against the tokens.

“My instructors called it ‘grounding.’ Creating a physical action that accompanies the act of coming into alignment. I’m guessing Mira didn’t call it out because she was more focused on getting results out of you.

I don’t begrudge her for that, but I bet you can do better. ”

He dropped his hand and nodded for her to do the same.

Kat found that she did so with great reluctance.

It felt like she’d hiked a massive hill and Adrien was asking her to roll down it and start all over because she’d led with her left foot instead of her right.

And yet, she wasn’t certain she could make it to the same heights if she switched up her gait.

The principle should have been the same, the alignment made spiritually, but when she reached for it, she hesitated.

Adrien nodded. “So you see what I mean.”

It annoyed her, in all honesty. She’d have to be hit over the head to lose the same amount of progress when it came to her skill with a spear. Her hands curled taut at her sides and she reached again. Light flared, unprotected by the cage of her fingers.

“Breathe, Kat.”

The light flickered out, and Kat huffed. “Why?”

“Because you’ve taught yourself to do it one way and one way only.”

“But the alignment has nothing to do with my body.”

“ Exactly. ”

“No, but then why is it harder?”

“Why indeed?”

Kat took back everything she’d secretly thought about Adrien being a better teacher.

She understood the principle of letting the student work through a problem on their own.

Hosts, she’d certainly let her fair share of green recruits go uninstructed so that they learned properly when they ended up hitting themselves in the face with their own spear.

The sudden thud of Daya’s boulder slamming back into the ground jarred her from thoughts of putting Adrien through a few spear drills and seeing how he fared.

Kat glanced at the young duchess, frowning as Daya pulled the boulder back up with another sweeping gesture.

“Daya’s doing physical gestures,” she said with a truly restrained amount of petulance.

“Conducting is a little different,” Adrien replied.

Noting her blank look, he continued, “When a gesture is bound to the action of drawing a connection between our plane and the realm of the angels, it becomes a crutch. But gestures can guide our intentions when it comes to what we do with the power we’ve accessed, and that is what you see Daya demonstrating every time she tosses that boulder so incredibly loudly, ” he concluded, shouting his last words over his shoulder and earning him a cheeky blown kiss from the other Aurean.

“And that’s called conducting?” Kat asked.

“Mira didn’t teach you that?”

Kat threw him a consternated look. “Maybe she didn’t think it was relevant. Or that I could grasp it.”

“I think I’m starting to understand why this has been so hard for you.”

“Because I can’t understand simple things like the difference between conducting and…and…”

“Grounding,” he supplied. “No, not at all. You didn’t even know what they were until I told you just now.

You’ve been trying to figure out Aurean magic without any framework for what you were doing.

It’s one thing to get instinctive alignment locked in— it’s essential, obviously, but anyone can pull it off if they grit their teeth and strain the way you do.

It’s another thing entirely to have no theoretical foundations to organize the process of drawing power from the heavenly plane and applying it. ”

Kat felt she was owed damages for hearing the words theoretical foundations before getting a solid breakfast in her.

It reminded her of Javi’s heretical theories that framed tokens as less of a magical gift, more of a technology beyond humanity’s understanding—the idea that there was a core logic, a mechanism beneath it all.

But she kept circling back to one sticking point.

“No one taught those words to my mother, but I never once saw her struggle to call on this token.”

Adrien’s eyes lit up. “That’s incredible.

She must have been a prodigy. My studies turned up a few cases of pauper’s tokens whose wielders could perform like a trained Aurean, almost as if they heard their instruction from the angels themselves.

Obviously that’s a lot of folk superstition, but maybe your mother just had the aptitude. ”

Kat wasn’t sure what she expected—all she knew was that some quiet hope inside her had started to curl up like an untended plant.

Maybe she’d thought that her mother’s skill with the token was a sign there was another path she could take, one with less stodgy terminology, one a simple forge girl could learn, just as her mother had.

But if Adrien was right, Bronwyn was simply born with a natural skill—and as evidenced by Kat’s struggle to reproduce her talent, it wasn’t something she’d passed on to her daughter.

“Guess I’ll just have to learn the basics like everybody else,” Kat tried to joke, but her throat was tight. “So! Grounding is bad. Conducting is good?”

“Let’s not think that way. Grounding is limiting. Conducting is directed.”

“Why can’t grounding be directed? Why’s conducting not limiting?”

Adrien opened his mouth, then closed it. Kat could practically hear ungreased wheels spinning in his head. “Great questions,” he said at last. “Light up that token without grabbing it and we’ll see if you can figure out the answers.”

She’d almost had him.

By the time Kat made it back to camp, the sun was sinking into the horizon.

She tore through the tents on a beeline to the mess and the hot meal she was owed after a full day of having her brain scrambled by frameworks.

She’d missed out on a day of digging—a fact she had no doubt Brandt would run with—and she was already lost in the argument she’d need to counter his jabs about the high and mighty Aurean skipping out on a day of honest work.

As a consequence, she ran headfirst into Emory.

The hit was hard enough that he nearly went down, and only the hand Kat snaked out to grab him by the hip saved him from collapsing on his ass.

“Oh,” he managed, looking just as disoriented and frazzled as she was—perhaps even more so, given the amount of dirt he was covered in. “Just the spear I was looking for.”

“For…me?” Kat replied. A heartbeat later, she remembered that it might not have been the best idea to be caught with him like a pair of dancers frozen mid-step, and she released his waist with no small amount of reluctance.

“You vanished. Thought Mira might have taken things a step too far and left you dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Kat scoffed. “Dead in a ditch? Mira? You know she’d parade my corpse around as a lesson to the rest of you louts. Could probably pull it off without looking like an overburdened donkey, too, with her Strength of Angels token.”

He fought for a straight face, and relief nearly took her feet out from under her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him battle to keep from showing that she made him laugh. “So you’re training as an Aurean full time now?” Emory blurted.

“Hosts, I hope not. I wouldn’t want to miss out on the joys of digging,” Kat countered, but the lightness in her tone was forced, and she was certain he knew it. “No, today was a…strange exception. Adrien invited me to train with him and his companions.”

Emory’s eyebrows shot up. “ Adrien, huh?”

“He makes me call him by his first name,” she clarified.

If anything, that made Emory look even more concerned. “Makes—”

“He fusses about it. As long as Mira doesn’t catch me doing it, I figure what’s the worst that could happen?”

She was getting her answer. This was the worst that could happen. The gulf between her and Emory had widened since the Goal game, but it was another thing entirely to feel it get wider with every ill-considered word that tumbled out of her mouth.

He’d wanted this for her. He’d said so himself, all those weeks ago. But that had been before she knew what it would feel like, losing him more and more with every step forward she took.

She reeled for a way to fix it. To prove to him she was still the same woman who’d fought by his side for years. “It was illuminating,” she offered, “but I’ll be back in the dirt with you tomorrow. C’mon, let’s get washed up for dinner.”

Emory nodded, flashing her a taut smile as he fell in at her side and they set off toward the mess.

“We’ll be in Fallon three days hence,” Kat added. She’d come to a decision all at once. “You and me, we’re going into the city.”

“Oh, are we?” Emory replied.

Fallon had once been overtaken by demonkind and used as a base to advance their Lord’s foul agenda, a factory from which his armies of thralls were issued.

Liberating it had been warfare unlike any Kat had experienced before or since, fighting not on sprawling battlefields but within the narrow confines of city streets, her century broken down from their usual split formation to advance one decade at a time over the cobblestones their enemy had shattered to slow their approach.

She’d never forget the crunch those cobblestones made as the people of Fallon hurled them from their rooftops onto the skulls of the demonic forces.

The Battle of Fallon had shown Kat the folly of thinking that only trained soldiers could muster the kind of valor necessary to fight back against the unceasing evil of the Demon Lord.

There was valor, too, in the way the people of Fallon cared for them and kept them going in the months it took to root out the demon occupation.

They helped establish supply lines, built barricades, sang songs that kept the darkest part of the night away.

And one of them—one old man Kat was desperately hoping survived the rest of the war—had given Emory a gift that he kept thinking of through the desperate fighting in those streets.

He’d kept describing it over and over until, during the press of a turnover, Kat had leaned in close and told him if they got through this, she had to know what the fuss was about.

“We’re going to the city because you would not shut up about those fucking hand pies for a week straight after the Battle of Fallon, and they’re on our list, and I’m finally going to see what was worth all that noise.”

Emory stopped dead in his tracks. “ The hand pies, ” he whispered with a longing that made Kat want to hiss, “ Not here, ” even if it was only directed at a pastry.

“Yeah, the hand pies. With that savory filling you wouldn’t stop going on about—”

“Onions, peppers, ground beef, dunno about the spices, I think there were olives?”

“Stop describing them. I’m hungry enough as it is,” Kat pleaded, elbowing his side. But no amount of feigned distress could overwrite the relief that surged through her at the spark in his eye and the knowledge that she’d caused it—that she’d given him something to look forwardto.

Something that almost made up for the fact that she was slipping away.