Page 29 of Enchanted Shadows (The Enchanted Kingdom #6)

I wasn’t all that surprised to find I woke to Kessara heading out of the cabin door in the morning. She hadn’t even stayed for a romantic breakfast for day one of our marriage. Yeah, zero surprised.

My neck was going to hurt like hell all day from sleeping on the couch.

I wasn’t in my twenties anymore, so I was going to feel off for the next week.

I slopped some healing ointment on in my bathroom before it got any worse.

Was it capable of healing soreness and not scratches?

Didn’t seem likely, but who was I to limit a healing ointment? I had to try something.

By the time I made it out to the training ring, the team had already arrived. Gone were the days of them being late, recently they had been beating me here.

All my thoughts of being proud of them vanished when they began clapping and whistling at me.

“General Raikes!” Sam yelled. “A prince and a married man.”

I grabbed at my neck. “Can all of you shut up ?”

“Late to training the first day after his wedding because the marriage was hot, hot! ”

As they giggled and cackled among themselves, Kessara offered with a smile, “Actually we just drank whiskey.”

“Lusty and boozy,” Sam clarified.

I groaned.

She stopped smiling to add, “We planned this. To beat the two of you out here, though we only succeeded on one front.”

“To make fun of us? How kind of you,” I stated.

“No,” Vivian snapped. “It’s a good story. You two late to training after your night together. Helps solidify the main ruse with a bunch of eyewitness accounts.”

I stilled.

“You did say to consider it our mission,” Sam reminded me.

“So I did.”

Wren shoved me toward my wife. Kessara’s dark hair was braided back just like her blonde always had been. “You two are leading the way this morning. Running together up front.”

I warned, “We’re still running double. Triple if anyone pisses me off.”

Molly gave me some sort of weird salute. “We know. We will do our best to keep the comments to a minimum.”

I began walking for the starting point, Kessara at my side. To her, I said, “Rude of you to skip out before I could make you breakfast in bed.”

She rolled her eyes.

We began running, the women splitting themselves into clumps of twos and threes behind us.

Our feet fell into a rhythm, and I adjusted easily to Kessara’s speed.

“Why do you smell funny?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Marriage?” I asked. “It altered my natural musk.”

She snorted. “No.” A few steps. “You always smell—” another few steps. “Nice. Today you smell different.”

“You sure you don’t have a third Enchantment? Enhanced sense of smell?”

“Owen,” she groaned.

I had to admit, I liked my name on her lips. “I put some ointment on my neck. Turns out sleeping on couches is not advisable in your thirties.”

She considered that for another few steps. “You’re not a small man. You should have let me sleep on the couch.”

“Not a chance,” I fired back.

From behind us, I heard Molly offer, “You could sleep in the same bed. Just saying. It would only solidify the cause!”

The fact that she and Wren were keeping up with us meant that they were there for one reason only. Eavesdropping.

Kessara smiled at me. “Those two are going to be terribly disappointed—when you do not really fall madly in love with me.”

I laughed. “And when they find out I’m not your type.”

“Because you aren’t a prick?”

I laughed even harder. Between the interference behind us and the constant conversation, I was getting damn winded, and it was only the start. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Kessara said under her breath. “You’re everyone’s type.”

Not sure what to do with that compliment, I decided we should pick up the speed before the rest of them thought this was going to be the new normal. “All right, let’s go, Princess.”

My magic flared once and the next thing I knew I was in a massive ball of shadows. I felt a cold pressure along my neck, almost as if ice settled there. I could see nothing. My footsteps slowed. I couldn’t see my own hand, let alone know if I was going to run into a damn tree.

I released my magic to move around in the mass of shadows, my green bouncing around the mass, weaving throughout. To light my way .

Before I could figure out a way to break through it, Kessara released the shadows.

“I told you,” Kessara snapped. “Don’t call me that.”

“Okay, honey. Message received. Do try not to kill your husband on the first day of marriage.”

Behind us, Sam yelled, “That was fantastic .”

I smirked. It kind of was. Kessara had sarcastically referred to herself as a powerhouse, but her dual Enchantments were both lethal and efficient.

Add that I was training a water wielder and a shadow wielder on this team, and I was a little giddy about the possibilities this team held. The raw potential.

“Who knew,” Sam yelled again. “The only thing missing for this team was a little shadow magic.”

“Yeah, Kessara,” I joked. “Who knew?”

“Me,” she admitted. “I knew.”

“Enough chatter,” I barked at them all. “Move your asses.”

Later that afternoon, I wasn’t all that surprised that the women shoved the two of us together for strategy practice. Was it the mission? Or their side mission of wanting us to actually fall head over heels for one another?

Kessara took a deep breath and blurted out, “Does being around my Enchantments bother you?”

I cocked my head. “What?”

“My shadow Enchantment. If it bothers you, reminds you of him , I can switch to just my palm magic.”

I shrugged. “Earlier when I was surrounded without warning, I didn’t even have time enough to think about how it was similar to Theon’s, so no, I wasn’t really bothered.”

“Well, that was a low blow. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I can handle it.”

“So you do not mind?”

I shook my head. “Honey, at this point I suspect you are adept at both Enchantments, so we might want to focus more on sword training with the others.”

She stilled.

I put up a hand. “If I cannot call you princess, I need to practice with some sort of endearment.”

“No. It wasn’t that. That’s fine.” One side of her face scrunched up into a wince as she blurted, “I have previously had sword training, but I could use more practice with my palm magic. I didn’t exactly have a ton of people to learn from.”

“What?”

A few people stilled in their positions because I had said it rather loud.

My wife gave me an innocent shrug.

“What else have you kept from me?”

She called some shadows to her hands and began swirling them around our feet. “You cannot honestly expect me to divulge all my womanly secrets within the first twenty-four hours of being married, now do you?”

“I—” What? What the hell had she just said?

She dipped her head toward her shoulder.

“Not too late to get an annulment.” She was joking, but I could also sense her nerves and fear.

Her ex was coming for her soon. And when he did, her tie to me would keep her away from him.

Though I wasn’t sure I really believed that either.

Kessara could fight for herself, of that I was sure.

I just didn’t know if she believed that.

The others had gotten back to work, still, I lowered my voice. “How could I, with the allure of all those womanly secrets?”

“So, general, how would you like to strategize then?” she asked, still swirling the shadows around her feet.

Fall was starting to ease in, but today it was hot. Hotter than necessary. Come to think of it, she looked far less sweaty than the rest of us. “Are you cooling yourself off right now?”

She shot one clump of them toward me to do the same. “Yes. Shadows are cool. Though I learned I can warm them with my palm Enchantment.”

“Well, that’s going to be our strategy for today. You are going to use your Enchantments and I will use mine. Winner gets out of dishes tonight.” That was part of our plan. She would take her evening meals with me until training ended.

“Done,” Kessara stated.

She could have warned me how she normally used the shadows, but I realized that I’d be figuring it out firsthand as a mass of them aimed for me.

I released my magic to burst through the shadows, willing it to brighten them with the light.

The result was that it looked like lightning struck within a small, but ominously dark, cloud.

Despite my willing them to be torn apart, the shadows were compacted and weighted.

They couldn’t be obliterated into nothing.

I could light them up, but I couldn’t scatter them.

Three tries later, I willed my magic to chase down and encircle different sections of the shadows, trapping them in my magic. If I couldn’t break them apart, maybe I could move them myself.

She gasped as she took in her shadows wrapped up in my green magic. “You commandeered my shadows. Turned them into your orbs.”

“I did,” I told her. “But you can just release them anyway, right?”

“Yes.” She did exactly that to one. “Or do this.” She released her vibrantly gold looking magic to wrap around my green and squeeze, forming a barrier around my barrier.

While I stood there trying to thicken my magic to block out hers, she sent the four shadow orbs hurtling at my head. I had to dive to the ground in a pushup position to keep from being blasted by them, and even then, I still felt two at my back.

I turned to look at her, a slow smile spreading across my face.

“Oh no. ”

Without delay, I released a breeze to rush around her, spinning her, before I used a vine to pin down one of her feet.

She sent out shadows for me, but I wrapped my magic around them as fast as I could, sending them back at her, while she used more shadows to grab hold of my vine of magic and chuck it off her.

Her own shadows hit her in the face, and she fell back onto her butt for only a moment before popping back up.

On we went, and I learned how much stronger she was the closer she stood to the shadows. How much quicker she became while she stood in darkness.