Page 151

I should’ve felt relieved, triumphant, untouchable, even.

Instead, I felt nothing at all.

42

I was an obedient patient.

I let the nurses bathe and dress me; I ate every meal; I didn’t grouse when their dispensers pricked me all over. After they removed my sling, I diligently practiced every exercise.

All this to ensure Stian kept his promise to refortify my specter. And he did.

He instructed me in breathing exercises, so I could better solidify and relax different portions of my specter at will. He had me guide my power far out of the window, farther from my body than ever before—stretching the muscle, as it were. He even brought me my hoops from the outbuilding so I could continue narrowing my tendrils again.

The day I finally managed to thread my specter through the eye of a needle felt bittersweet. At last, I would’ve been able to twirl my mother’s coin without difficulty.

But now, that coin was in Erik’s hands.

Every time I thought of the king, my efforts redoubled. Though he’d spent his childhood in the grip of dullroot, he’d fought to build up his power despite those spectral scars. And in doing so, he’d honed his specter into something viciously powerful.

Yet when I’d escaped him that first time in Daradon, I’d glimpsed his uncertainty as my dullroot had worn off. Because he’d known that my specter was inherently strong. That I could potentially best him.

But even the sharpest blade could be useless in the hands of a novice.

“I need to be stronger,” I told Stian one morning after we’d run through the regular exercises. “Strong enough to fight.”

I braced myself for his denial. Instead, he gave me an approving smile, and our sessions became more than rehabilitation.

They became training.

While Stian may have been a healer, the years he’d spent working with Arun had apparently granted him a great deal of skill. Our lessons weren’t like those I’d had with Goren, which had been focused on grasping control over my power in the midst of emotion. Because now, I was no longer learning how to defend myself against a Wholeborn king. I was learning how to battle another Wielder.

From the first session, Stian treated me as an equal in combat. He defended my spectral attacks; he lashed against my still-healing spots until I had to surrender; he even tore through my power, using the same maneuver I’d employed on Goren on the Emberly riverbank. The maneuver Keil had called remarkable.

“The method,” Stian explained, “involves thinning portions of a specter so finely that they can shred through another Wielder’s spectral muscle. Your prior technique was evidently instinctual. Yet to truly best a Wielder in combat, you must use your power that way over and over, as though it were a blade.”

And so our lessons intensified. He taught me how to gather the power within myself before letting it breach my skin, how to sustain its shape and rhythm even through changes in my breathing and heart rate. Soon, I was slicing through his defenses like cutting through butter, awed at my progress.

“You possess a natural aptitude,” Stian said, smiling even as he keeled over from my assault. “Wielding appears to be your craft.”

The words settled warmly inside me, meaning more for the fact that he, like me, had been raised in the province of craftspeople.

“Keep performing at this level,” he added, “and you may one day master the eurium strike.” At my questioning look, he explained, “It is a maneuver achieved when a tendril thinner than a hair is thrust forward with one’s entire mass of power.” His specter slinked against mine in demonstration, and I marveled at its shape and thinness: no thicker than spider silk. “It produces in the victim the sensation of being cut with a eurium blade. It’s a skill few have mastered.”

“Do you think Erik used that maneuver on me?” I asked, uneasy. Although I’d felt the devastating cut of a eurium blade before, the memory from Erik’s boat was too tangled with blood and agony.

“I do not,” Stian said. “The eurium strike debilitates the Wielder who issues the blow as well as the Wielder who receives it. The hairlike tendril of power becomes your weak spot, and the force you use to drive it forward acts like a pickaxe on a crack. Your specter splinters from that hair of power all the way through to the mass of it. You may as well have issued the blow toward yourself.”

I shuddered. “Then why would anyone use that technique?”

“In dire situations, it can level the playing field. Both opponents become incapacitated . . .” He raised a brow. “But one may recover faster.”

Fascinated, I scoured the closet that night for the material that had formed my Rose Season gowns. Cross-legged on the window seat, I began thinning out my specter once again—but not by threading it through the eye of a needle.

By threading it, instead, through the pinprick meshwork of tulle.

A few days later, having been secretly forming hair-thin tendrils on my own, I asked Stian outright, “Why are you helping me? I doubt this is in your job description.”

“Because I have been tasked with taking care of you, and I take my role seriously.”