Page 17 of House of Embers (Royal Houses #5)

Chapter Fourteen

The Training

Wynter snorted as Kerrigan fell on her face in the training space. “Brother, this is beyond her.”

Kerrigan came up to her elbows and spit out the bits of hair that had fallen into her mouth. “I can do it.”

Fordham sighed. “Maybe we should go back to running five miles in the morning to clear your mind.”

“I hate you,” she muttered.

“That right?” he asked with a sexy smirk that made her knees wobble.

Kerrigan grasped her practice sword and slowly returned to her feet.

She had agreed to shadow training with Fordham.

Wynter had gleefully—maybe a little too gleefully—agreed to watch and give instruction on form.

Apparently, that meant ridiculing Kerrigan for not picking it up, even though they both claimed that they’d learned how to do it over decades.

“I could call the shadows just fine in battle,” she reminded him.

“You were going to dissolve into nothingness if you tried to execute a jump,” Wynter said. “That’s why I barreled in like I did.”

“And here I just thought you were a show-off.”

Wynter shrugged. “And?”

“Run me through it again,” Kerrigan said.

She lifted the practice sword, centering herself in Ravendin’s twelve paces.

It was always best to go back to the basics in footwork when she was learning something new.

That’d helped her in the gladiator ring back in Domara.

Sure, she’d learned the Andine footwork from Constantine, but she could only do that with the hours upon hours of training inside the Society keeping her quick and nimble.

To learn what Fordham was teaching her, a combination of magic and swordplay, she’d need the same.

“Shadows are all around you. They’re in everything, the way the other elements are. The way your spirit magic is. But instead of being the thing itself that you’re reaching for, they’re the negative space around the thing. They’re the nothingness beyond our reality.”

“That’s helpful,” she grumbled.

Fordham smirked. “I didn’t say it was easy.”

Wynter snorted, clearly enjoying this.

“The shadow is not just the darkness. It’s the shadow self of the rest of the world.

It’s a second skin. You have a shadow you can manipulate.

Everything does. You just have to feel the edges of the darkness and not the energy all around it.

Then you can draw the shadows to you and push them away from you.

You can manipulate them into any shape that you want.

You can use them as a weapon, and you can slip between them,” Fordham told her, matching her footwork.

“The first rule of shadow work is control. You cannot let control slip even for a second or the shadows rule you.”

“Hence me on my ass.”

“Indeed,” he said smoothly. “Now, think about the space between the energy, and then I want you to draw the shadows in like a thread. Pull and wrap your blade in them so that the shadows are the weapon and not the blade.”

“Easier said than done.”

“If you don’t think you can do it—”

“No,” she interjected.

This was the first time they’d had to train all week.

Fordham had been busy with his kingly duties.

Meanwhile, Kerrigan was fitted and refitted into dresses and other outfits.

She’d tried on royal jewels. She’d sat through meetings on color schemes for the coronation.

She’d tasted samples for the buffet. She’d listened to various musicians audition.

It was a long, tedious week of monotonous queenly duties, which seemed to mean dealing with frivolous things that someone else surely could have made decisions about.

She could hardly complain, since they were listening to her, despite many an upturned nose at her presence.

She had to be seen as competent just as much as Fordham.

She would rather be in war meetings and trade agreements and, gods, on the back of her dragon.

But right now, her battlefield was the Fae nobility of the House of Shadows—as much as she hated it.

She’d take this training interruption for as long as they’d let her. Stretching her muscles and learning new skills was far superior to napkin embroidery.

So she leaned into her well of powers and felt for that bridge between her and Fordham.

It was cast wide open across the bond. She felt for that one black string that she could pluck like a harp.

Then she gently pulled against it, feeling for the shadows in the room, the negative space between worlds, and drew them toward her.

She had done this with ease on the back of her dragon.

Today, it took concentration and effort rather than instinct.

She wanted precision and not brute force.

The shadows answered.

For a second, she had to force down her panic as they rushed for her.

The first couple times she’d done this, she’d shrieked and dropped the connection.

Once she’d gotten past the initial fear, they’d snapped at her, and she’d ended up knocked out.

She didn’t want that. She wanted…no, needed control.

They were at her command. With a steady breath, as she moved into Chutrick’s art-of-war formations, the shadows wrapped around her blade one tendril at a time.

She bit down on her lip as they slowly slid into place.

She was nearly to the end of the blade when she switched to Kristoffer.

The complexity of those moves put her mind at ease.

And then it was complete. Her blade held before her was wreathed in shadows, her arm trembling with the control needed to hold it aloft, as if it suddenly weighed twice her body weight. As it settled into her, she lunged at Fordham.

A wicked smile reached his face as he met her advances with the grace of a predator.

She’d seen him fight more times than she liked, and it never ceased to amaze her how superior he was in every way—his smooth movements, his precise bladework, the fire in his eyes as he took command of every situation.

She respected him for it long before she fell in love with him.

So when her blade went flying from a misplaced thrust and his sword tapped under her chin, lifting her face to look at him, she smirked and said, “Again?”

“Ugh, the foreplay,” Wynter groaned.

“You did better,” he said, not acknowledging his sister as he dropped his sword arm.

“I got it!” Kerrigan argued. “Come on. I did better than better.”

“Your arms were shaky. The shadows were half ready to explode out of you. You barely had control.”

“I’m a work in progress.”

He shot her a look. “Understatement.”

“So am I ready to jump or what?”

Wynter threw herself backward, laughing.

Kerrigan winced. “I’ll take that to mean no?”

“No,” Fordham agreed.

Kerrigan shook out her arms. “Can we try that Ollivier trick instead?”

Wynter raised her eyebrows. “You showed her how to store things in the nothing?”

“Not exactly,” Fordham grumbled.

“He proposed to me by pulling the ring out of the shadows.”

Wynter lost it, doubling over. “Gods, that’s clever.”

“Shut it,” he grumbled.

Wynter winked at her. “I’ll teach you how to do it. Come here. It’s easy.”

Then Wynter started twisting her hand to form a pocket in the nothing. Kerrigan tried a few times, but every time she tried to drop something into it, it just fell through and landed on her foot.

Fordham shook his head. “That’s not how it’s done. You have to form a hole in it that only you can access.”

“Like it’s so easy!” Kerrigan snapped.

Wynter chuckled. “It’s a parlor trick. Keep working on it. Maybe you’ll be better at this than fighting.”

Kerrigan glared at her, but a sharp rap on the door made them all turn.

“I thought I had another half hour,” Fordham called.

But it wasn’t Adelaide who stepped into the room but Prescott. There was a red mark on his neck and a haunted look in his eyes.

“Didn’t think this should wait,” he said.

“Gods, are you okay?” Wynter asked as Kerrigan pulled her air magic in tight to seal the room.

“I’m fine,” Prescott said with a quick smile. “Plan is going just fine. You’ll get this in a day or so, but I came as quickly as I could.”

Fordham had removed his jacket and cravat for training, so he was clad in nothing but a pair of fitted pants and a half-unbuttoned black shirt.

Kerrigan had been admiring the sliver of skin of his chest and at this throat.

In fact, it had been a big distraction when she’d gotten started.

But now he moved to rebutton his shirt and slipped his arms into his kingly jacket with the expensive, silver stitching.

It was like armor and made him look twice as formidable as he had seconds earlier.

It was all a deception though, because clothes didn’t change how scary he was—they just enhanced it.

“All right,” he said. “Now I’m ready.”

Prescott handed him a crisp, white envelope. “Barron’s plan.”

Kerrigan came to Fordham’s side as he broke the black wax seal of a jagged lightning bolt. He removed what was inside and turned it over to show a party invitation. He read it over before handing it to Kerrigan with a sigh.

“What is it?” Wynter asked, coming to stand at Kerrigan’s shoulder.

“A ball in our honor,” Kerrigan said.

“Hosted by Barron Laurent and Viviana Blanchard,” Wynter hissed.

“A trap,” Prescott said.

“Obviously,” Fordham said.

“This is the night of the autumnal equinox.”

Spirit magic worked strongest during times when the veil was the thinnest. Kerrigan had been planning to use the increased cosmic energy on the equinox to reach their allies and begin Fordham’s training.

“Of course it is,” Wynter said.

“Do you think he knows that’s when we’re working spirit magic?” Kerrigan asked.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Fordham said. He cast his gaze to his cousin, who, despite his ragged appearance, did look remarkably similar to Fordham. A muddled mirror. “Does he know, Pres?”

Prescott nodded. “I don’t know how he could, but he was talking about it when he thought I wasn’t listening.”

“You ingratiated yourself quickly,” Wynter noted.

“He’s a simple man. He likes an easy smile,” Prescott said with a shrug. “Fordham talking down to me and Arbor’s death helped matters. I don’t have to fake how I’m feeling. He assumes that means I’m starting to hate you.”

“This will be over soon,” Fordham assured him. “I’m sorry you’re in this position.”

“I’m glad that I can help.”

Fordham got straight to business. “Wynter, talk to Dozan about his spy network, and see if he can figure out how this got out. I’m going to have Adelaide discretely question the guards and servants.”

“And me?” Kerrigan asked.

Fordham tipped her chin up with a finger the way he’d done with his blade moments earlier. “You need to get a very Kerrigan-esque ball gown.”

She huffed. “We’re going ?”

“We have to,” he said with a shrug. “We can’t snub them. We need their power too much.”

“Yes, but we’ve established that it’s a trap,” Kerrigan said. “Why would we walk into a trap?”

“Because otherwise, the Olliviers look weak,” Prescott said.

Wynter nodded. “If we all stay hidden away and forgo the party, it makes it look like we’re afraid of the other families.”

Fordham looked resolute. “I may be king, but the three families each control a third of the populace and the army. If Laurent and Blanchard turn their backs on us, we won’t have a strong enough force to take on the Society.

We must attend and have a show of strength.

” His shadows sparked around his hands. “I have some ideas for that.”

“As do I,” Wynter said in the same gleeful tone she’d had while interrogating Gerrond.

“I’ll be there too. So try to publicly humiliate me or something,” Prescott said with a shrug. “If I find out what he’s planning, I’ll find you. Otherwise, I should be scarce.”

“Understood,” Fordham said. “Anyway, I want to see what Barron has planned for us.”

“You don’t think they just want to kill us?” Kerrigan said, hazarding a guess.

“Probably just you,” Wynter said on a shrug.

Kerrigan shot her a look. “Great. And the spirit magic?”

Fordham winked at her. “We’ll make our excuses. Trust me. I’m not giving up my training any more than you are.”

“Let’s hope I can prove that you’re bad at something .”

He laughed and pressed a kiss to her lips. “I’m bad at staying away from you.”