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Chapter twenty-two

A Shot In The Dark

“N ow, Ursa,” the King bellowed and I turned my attention away from the three soldiers writhing on the ground to the princess. She stood still, waiting for me.

I turned my focus to a pinprick, a precision instrument, diving into her heart, her soul. Anger was first. Ursa always had anger lurking on the surface. I waded through the ocean of it, letting it lap over me, try to pull me under. The King had been unguarded before, when I had brought him to his knees in the training room, but now I was finding out just how powerful these royal Fae were.

Ursa didn’t just guard her emotions. She used the baser ones against me, weaponizing them. All of her fear, her sorrow, her doubt, her happiness, the little silver linings she celebrated and clung to, her love, her pride, it was all hidden behind a gleaming fortress built up in her mind. It was impenetrable. I had tried for five days now to breach it and every day before, she had used her rage, her ferocity, her ambition to drown me before I could. She had amplified and intensified that anger so that it wasn’t a weakness anymore. It wasn’t something I could use against her; it was her own weapon. Honed from centuries of stoking, nurturing. And she unleashed it when I delved inside her mind until it overwhelmed every one of my senses and broke my focus, pushed me out.

The soldiers on the ground hadn’t been able to guard against me, these new ones no more of a challenge than the last. I had found their deepest sorrows, their fiercest doubts, and had preyed upon them with it until they succumbed. The first time, it had left me cradled in a ball as well, wracked with guilt for the suffering I had imposed and for the trauma of another man that I had experienced all at once. But the King had explained they were only doing their duty. That they had agreed, even volunteered, to help me hone my skills. And they would recover. Like I said, I created none of those feelings myself. I just brought them to the surface.

But Ursa’s surface was already overflowing with emotion. There was no room for any more. Her chest heaved, her lip curled. She glared at me with a hatred I couldn’t fathom. And I wouldn’t even try or else I would get lost in it and never find my way out as I had on the third day. But not this time.

I planted my feet and closed my eyes, narrowing my focus to that impenetrable wall. I let the red rivers of her anger flow around me, push against me, but I waded into the mud and muck that was her surface. I stuck there, immovable, like a parasite on a host trying desperately to flick it away. And I moved. Slowly, so slowly, but I moved. I felt her tense the closer I got, felt her control slip slightly and the waters recede a bit. She was building up a wave, a tsunami. I knew it was coming for me again, as it always did before. I was running out of time. If I could just get within those walls, if I could just breach her defenses.

I shot out with hope and it ricocheted off like a fly buzzing in a window. I shot out with despair and it didn’t even make a dent. I thought for a moment, weighing my options. I could already feel the current shifting, the wave forming. I sensed the daggers in her hands now, aimed at me, materialized and waiting. There was one thing I hadn’t tried. One thing that no one would ever think to try, not in a battle, not while fighting a war.

I shot out with love.

And that impenetrable wall gained the tiniest chink in its armor.

My surprise was so great that she was able to pull me out and toss me down. I fell to the floor in a heap, stuck there by some invisible force as Ursa stormed toward me, eyes alight with something that might be mistaken for anger but I knew it was fear.

“How?” she snapped and the hall fell silent.

I pulled and pulled, but to no avail. I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t defend myself from those daggers she had created, the obsidian knives rotating slowly around her hand, waiting to be thrust out. And the King did not intervene. He waited, stroking his chin in interest, to see how this would play out.

“Everyone has a weakness,” I said. “Even you.”

She bristled.

“How?” she asked again, this time in a scream.

“Love,” I snapped. “Love is your weakness, Ursa. Not because you want it but because you have it and you want to be rid of it.”

Her lips curled into a hateful snarl and she let out a low growl before turning away and storming from the room, letting the door slam behind her.

“You should know,” I called out to her even though she was gone. “Love is a not a weakness.”

“For some of us, it is,” the King said finally, waving a hand so that I could move again. I shook out my wrists as I rose, shooting an annoyed glance to where Ursa had vanished. “Very impressive, Seren.”

“Can I stop hurting people now?” I asked, rubbing my wrists and glaring at the King.

“Is that what you think you’re doing?”

I gave a pointed glance to the one soldier still curled up in a ball in the corner of the room.

“I told you he is doing his duty—”

“I’m done.”

I turned and strode toward the door that Ursa had vanished through.

“You came here afraid,” he called out behind me and I stopped. “You were a frightened little rabbit when you appeared in the middle of my dining room with my meddling daughter. Wide eyed and terrified, you were looking at all of us as if we were predators and you were just waiting for us to pounce. Do you remember that feeling, Seren? The hopelessness? The doubt? The knowledge that we could pick you apart at any time without lifting a finger?”

I took a deep breath. I remembered it well.

“You aren’t that little rabbit anymore,” he told me. “You aren’t a mere mortal. When they look at you with scorn, you can glare right back. You can hold their minds. You can break them even more efficiently than they could break you.”

“I don’t want to break them,” I said, my voice soft.

“No, maybe you don’t. But at least you have the choice now.”

Then he was gone. I didn’t see him go, just felt his absence, felt my own loneliness. I closed my eyes and took a breath before pushing through the doors into the hall beyond.

I followed the familiar tapestries to my room. The servants had lit the glowing orbs of light for me when they had gone for the evening. I couldn’t light them myself. I was a powerful empath, capable of feeling and altering emotions and auras, but I couldn’t manage even the most basic practical magic. I couldn’t clean the shards of glass I had made. I couldn’t light my room or change my clothes. I couldn’t even form a passable physical shield. The King hypothesized that my power was temporal rather than physical, that I might never manage the type of physical magic that others seemed to use with such ease. Likely because I was only half Fae and therefore did not have as privileged a use of magic as full Fae. Though personally, I believed my connection to emotion was a gift bestowed upon me by my mortal side. Humans felt more, emoted bravely. Fae hid their feelings behind impenetrable walls and empty minds.

I bathed, stripping from my brown tunic and thin leggings and changing into the silk beige nightgown. I brushed through my wet hair and tried in vain to dry it with magic to no avail. I padded, on bare feet, through my room, letting my toes sink into the soft carpet as I reached for a book written by some Fae astronomer from the Court of Scholars. I read the names of the constellations, compared them to my own, and ran a finger along the detailed drawings of each, much finer than mine, much more intricate.

I turned to the stars and stared up at the blinking night sky, memorizing the view of it so that someday I could return and tell my uncle all that I had seen. I could paint him a picture of the stars from memory and show him all the constellations in this book, their real names and the ones I had made for them myself. I could show him what I had accomplished and who I had become. I could tell him about magic, about how it was used and what it felt like.

I closed my eyes, feeling the thrum of it in my veins. A steady, near-silent hum I had ignored my entire life, that I had never heard over how loud I was being, how loud I was thinking.

I had begun a new practice lately, when no one was around and I was all alone. It was difficult to practice an ability tied to emotion when the only emotions I had to investigate were my own. But it was possible. I had found that much. I kept my eyes closed and narrowed my focus, organizing my feelings into buckets. Pride here, sorrow there. Happiness here, anger there. Some feelings were associated with people, some with places, and some were just a haze, an intangible and undefined concept flitting between the others. I arranged them, bucketed them, bracketed them out using the methods of a true type A academic.

I sifted through them all, recognizing them for what they were, memorizing the feel of them, the conceptualization of them, so that I could recognize them in others. I studied them, played with them, held them, and let them go. I dug deeper than I ever had before until my fists were clenched in the blanket beneath me, until tears were flowing down my cheeks and I gritted my teeth against the strain. I let myself feel it, truly feel it, all of those emotions I had been avoiding.

My abandonment, I toyed with that for a moment, indecisive over whether to place it with sorrow or anger. My mother I held firmly in hand, not wanting to let it go. Lark, I gripped him tightly and then dropped him to sorrow, to grief, one of the more potent emotions. Cass and Rook followed. My uncle, I missed him but he made me happy. These things, these people, they weren’t easy to categorize. They had made me feel so much, so many different things, but nearly all of them ended up in sorrow because of the betrayal, because of the hurt, the death, and the absence.

I picked up every broken piece of me and started to make it whole, started to help it mend. The categorization helped. But toward the end, I picked up a piece that didn’t go to my puzzle.

I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t just hazy; it was obscure. It was dark and dismal and unrecognizable. I caressed it, held it, examined it. And, when I had almost given up on identifying it, I reached out with my whole heart and gave a firm tug.

My eyes shot open.

Because that piece, it had tugged back.