Simon gave a dismissive scoff, but Patrik was already guiding Eliana through the door. “Now then,” he announced, with a clap of his hands, “who’s hungry?”

17

   Rielle

“I worry about Rielle. All children have tempers, but hers comes with a certain look I’ve not seen on the faces of others her age, or even much older. Her rage holds a delight, a hunger, that I’ll confess sometimes keeps me awake through the night. I haven’t talked to my husband about it. Sometimes I think I’m jumping at shadows. I should not be writing this. In fact, I think I will burn it.”

—Journal of Marise Dardenne

Confiscated by the Church of Celdaria in the Year 998 of the Second Age

“Again!”

Rielle exhaled sharply, blowing a sweaty dark curl out of her eyes, pushed hard off the ground, and jumped—first over a boulder, then over a pile of wooden rails. Then she scrambled up the rocky slope past the rails and down the steeper other side.

Don’t lose the pole, she told herself. Don’t. Lose. The pole.

She made it to the bottom, dropped to her belly, and slid under the net into the mud pit. If she touched the wide-weave net stretching above her, she’d have to start over at the beginning of the course, and her father would add another stone to her pack.

She’d made it halfway through before her hands slipped and she fell chin-first into the mud. Inhaling a mouthful, she choked and gagged.

“Up!” barked a voice from above.

She bit back a curse. Of course he would choose that moment for a fight. She found an opening in the net and crawled up through it, maneuvering her long wooden pole free just in time for her father’s attack.

His own pole flew fast at her shoulders. She ducked, raised her pole, and swung it around to strike. The poles met with a sharp wooden crash that hurt Rielle’s teeth. She swayed, lost her footing, caught herself on the net.

“Get up!” Her father’s pole swung again, rapped hard against her knuckles.

“Damn it!” She bit back smarting tears of pain and lunged to her feet, swinging wildly. “I was down!” But her feet got caught in the netting, and she tripped and fell hard on her tailbone.

“And you’re down again.” Her father made a soft sound of disgust and flung his pole to the grass outside the pit. “You didn’t even make it to the wall climb that time. Get up, and go back to the beginning.”

Rielle rose to her feet, shaking with exhaustion and rage. She kept her eyes to the ground, ignoring her ever-present guard, which stood silently around the obstacle course her father had engineered. If they thought she looked ridiculous, well, they weren’t wrong.

The course Rielle had described to Audric and Ludivine as her “woodland torture chamber” lay in a secluded area of the foothills of Cibelline, the highest mountain in Celdaria. The saints had constructed Katell’s castle, Baingarde, upon its slopes centuries before. Every day for six days straight, in preparation for the next trial, Rielle had met her father here—to strengthen her body, he’d said, and improve her agility.

So far, all it had done was make her sore. And angry as the darkest corner of the Deep.

“I’m not an athlete,” she spat at her father, picking her way out of the mud pit and tossing her pole away. “Nor am I a warrior.”

He let out a sharp laugh. “Never has anything been so clear as that.”

“And yet you insist on putting me through this for hours!” She marched across the grass, peeling off her mud-soaked gloves, gauntlets, shin guards, and at last the cursed, heavy pack of stones.

“We’ve been out here since dawn,” she muttered. “I should be studying with Tal by now, practicing with Grand Magister Rosier. Water’s always been my weakest element. Or I could be working on my costume with Ludivine.”

“A costume.” Her father scoffed. “Yes, a wise use of your time, that.”

“Ludivine’s idea, and a good one. If I want our people to love me—”

He laughed again, soft and unkind.

“—and show them I’m not afraid—”

“Even you’re not that good a liar.”

“Stop interrupting me!”

He fell silent, glaring at her. She glared right back, heat climbing up the back of her neck, up her arms, coiling in her belly.

Her father glanced at her hands, but she kept them clenched tight. She knew what he was looking for—wild sparks, the birth of a fire that would rage out of control and consume everything in its path.

As she fought back tears, fists clenched at her sides, she wished, not for the first time, that her father had been the parent she had killed—and that her mother had lived.

“If you are to have any chance of surviving these trials,” he said at last, “if you want to have more than raw power and dumb luck on your side, then you will need to become stronger, and quickly.”

“I’ve been studying for years, working on my control with Tal—”

“And that may not be enough!”

Rielle stood her ground even as he advanced upon her. She could feel her braid slipping, sense how sloppy and small and foolish she appeared next to Lord Commander Dardenne. The man somehow looked unruffled even in his muddy training uniform. She bit down hard on her tongue.

“This is no joke, Rielle,” her father continued. He re-knotted the ties holding the thin leather padding in place around her torso, straightened her collar, tucked loose hairs back into her braid so roughly that it hurt her scalp. “The earth trial was nothing compared to what the Magisterial Council will engineer for you next. This is only the beginning of a long, hard path. Your life as you knew it is now over. You understand this.”

Rielle’s cheeks flamed. What must her guard think of him scolding her as he would a small child? “Yes, Father,” she said quietly. “I understand.”

“If you fail, they will kill you. They might kill me and Tal as well.”

Rielle looked at her boots through a film of tears. “I’ve thought of that.”

“Have you? We can’t know the council’s mind, nor the king’s. These are extraordinary circumstances.”

“Yes, Father.”

He removed one of his gloves, used his bare hand to turn up her chin. She stared at him, eyes full, until his mouth twisted and he walked away. He sat on the ground by the mud pit, found his canteen in the grass, and took a swig of water.

“Sit,” he said, handing the canteen to her. “Drink.”

She obeyed, saying nothing. As she drank, she stole glances at her father, noting the gray at his temples and peppering his thick, dark hair, the lines around his stern mouth. She realized, with a swift turn of sorrow, that she couldn’t remember what he used to look like, before her mother’s death had stolen his smile.