Page 73 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

While she fiddled with the medallion at her neck, waiting for the next magical wonder to begin his test, Zarek sat by the door, chair tilted back on two legs, radiating the energy of a man stuck at a particularly dull council meeting. But he’d insisted she get tested to know what she could do.

Which was…

Nothing.

Angela couldn’t predict the future, tell time by shadows, move things with her mind, or summon a spark to light a candle. Even the testers had all agreed she held no magick, and that she was just an ordinary woman who’d survived a Black Cloak attack.

Angela was so exceedingly ordinary that, at the end of the day, she’d been trying to light the fire in her chambers for twenty minutes now.

The fire-starting tools she had to use were two curved sticks, a flat board with a shallow hollow carved into it, and what appeared to be a small nest of dried moss that she couldn’t decide was tinder or decoration for her sparsely furnished chambers.

But she wanted a fire to watch between turning pages of her latest book on magic, as she wasn’t ready to sleep. Because when she slept, the nightmares came.

The silly thing was that she’d watched Tamarr do it a few times now. And it took less than fourteen seconds to light a fire, in between setting down the breakfast tray, fluffing pillows, and bringing in fresh towels.

For Angela, it was now bordering on twenty minutes of spinning a stupid stick on a board.

But she wasn’t giving up or going to annoy anyone for help at this time of night. When those lucky, lucky people could slide between their sheets and sleep easily, maybe dream, and not wake up with a scream trapped in their throat that made Zarek rush into her room, ready to attack whatever brought on her fear.

Reading was so much better. And she’d scored a stack of books from Magick School to play catch-up.

Determined, Angela crouched on the slate floor in her storm-plum gown, with her hair pushed behind her ears. She pressed the curved stick into the hollow of the board and spun it between her palms, the way she’d seen in a documentary once by some bushcraft specialist, or more likely an episode of Survivor when she’d scrolled through channels late at night.

But this weird gadget was becoming her biggest challenge yet.

Because nothing happened—very much like her magick testing.

But this, starting a fire, she was not going to fail. Right? All she had to do was spin the stick like a spindle on the small wooden plank that already had the groove. It was so simple.

Determined, she pushed up her sleeves, adjusted her grip, and rubbed the spindle for the tip to spin and spark and do what it was supposed to do.

But it did nothing.

So she tried faster.

Only the stick slipped, the board flipped, and the little moss nest launched off the hearthstone and landed directly on top of her head.

Angela slowly reached up and removed it.

“The technique,” said that rich, deep male voice from the doorway, “is in the downward pressure, not the speed.”

She peered at him over her shoulder.

Zarek was still in his armor, leaning against the open doorframe between their chambers, arms and ankles crossed in a relaxed pose that clearly shouted he’d been there a while.

What’s worse, those teal eyes were glistening with amusement while trying hard not to react.

“Why is there no flint…” Her eyes moved to the scored staves carved into the walls, the slate floor, they were even scratched into the back walls of the fireplace to disappear inside the soot-stained chimney. The same wards she’d been walking past for days without really reading them, because they had sigils and runes and patterns on almost everything, like the sleeves on her dress, and the blackened ones that covered Zarek’s armor.

“Oh. There are no matches or flint in your wing, are there?” Because of what he was.

“No.”

“And you’ve been standing there how long?”

He shrugged. “You seemed to be doing well.”

“I had moss on my head.” She sniffed, trying to muster some sort of dignity, while dumping the moss nest back on the hearthstone. “I was about to apply more downward pressure.”