CHAPTER 5
Talan’s spear cut through the air at a speed that shocked me. I swept my weapon up and caught his blade on mine—barely in time to keep it from slicing into my calf. The steel on steel screeched as we pulled back and reassessed one another. Talan didn’t hesitate for more than a few seconds in his attack, and once he started in on me, he didn’t slow. This wasn’t like the fight before when I’d been in the Deep. No, he’d been holding back then but had made it look like he was doing all he could.
He truly was an asshole.
We circled the central funnel of water, trading blows back and forth, and each move left me another half second behind until I was barely fending him off. In desperation, I turned my spear around and drove the wooden haft into his middle, stealing the breath from him and driving him back a few feet. I should have pressed my advantage but I couldn’t. I needed to breathe and pull myself together. Sweat poured down my face and trickled along my spine and arms, and I tried again to reach for my element in the hopes the blow would have broken Talan’s concentration.
No such luck, my elements slid through me like water through fingers. I couldn’t hold either Spirit or Earth even with him winded.
Talan stood, one hand on his belly. His eyes were not full of anger at all as I’d thought they would be. If anything, I would have said he was laughing at me. “Are you ready to concede?” He spat off to one side.
I glared at him. “Let me go. I won’t stop trying to free myself, no matter how much stronger you are than me. You will never be able to let your guard down.”
“Nope, can’t do that. But it’s nice to know you are seeing you can’t win.” He winked and I glared at him wishing I could pummel him with rocks.
Without another word, he came at me again, forcing me to back up even while I tried to push him away. We used our spears as staffs, the hafts slamming into one another, shuddering under each blow. It was a true test of strength as we pitted our body weights and muscle against each other. Twice he caught my fingers with the staff with a hard, quick rap, making them numb, but I held on through the sharp pain. If I let go of the spear, I would be done.
I would not be done until he let me go.
We slammed our spears together, and he reached across and twisted his arms to one side which brought me in close, my arms locked between the two hafts.
“Do you yield?”
His face was right in mine and I answered by swinging my head down, catching his nose with the top of my skull. There was a satisfying crunch of cartilage that made me smile as I reached for my element again.
Nothing, his concentration hadn’t slipped an inch.
He stumbled back and my arms were released from the spears.
Talan grunted and blinked as the blood ran down his nose. I kicked out with my right foot, intending to hit him in the chest and send him flying backward. I had to press my advantage now because I realized the only way to get him to release his hold on me was to knock him out.
When I was in midair, he caught my foot and twisted it hard, spinning me to the side so I faced down as I fell belly first onto the stone floor. He jerked my leg upward and turned my ankle farther so my foot nearly touched the back of my head as he pressed a foot on my lower back. I tried to look over my shoulder, but he put so much pressure on me, I could barely move. Shit, I could barely breathe past the crushing pressure. I scrabbled at the rock with my hands, reaching once more for my connection to the earth and again getting nothing back.
“I’ll ask again, do you yield, Larkspur of the Rim?”
That burning anger in me had not abated. “Fuck you, asshole!”
“Oh, that’s not nice.” He laughed the words. “Your choice then.”
He bore down on my leg and spine, nearly bending me in half, my joints and bones creaking. I screamed, the pain in my lower back was like a thousand blunt-ended spears jammed in me all at once. I gritted my teeth against the pain, refused to give in.
“Peta!”
“No. She is not in this fight; this is between you and me. You need to know you are not stronger than me,” Talan said.
What he didn’t understand was that Peta was me, that she was part of my strength and heart. Besides, he had no say over my familiar. She was mine, not his. Possessiveness like I’d never known swept over me as I called her again. “Peta!”
There was a blur of white and gray and then the pressure on my leg was gone. I rolled to my back and Talan stood over me. Peta was flat out on the floor, her eyes closed and her body still. She’d stopped him, but at what cost? Had he killed her?
Fear lanced me as no weapon ever could have.
“She’s going to be pissed when she wakes up.” Talan shook his head. “I didn’t want that.”
Relief was slow as his words sank in. He’d knocked her out, not killed her.
I pushed to my feet but my leg and back screamed they would not bear my weight, and I stood hunched like an old woman who’d been packing baskets of rocks all her life to and from the fields. I took a limping step toward him. He held up his hand.
“I will let you go, Lark, eventually. I’m not keeping you here forever to act as my sex slave.” He grinned and a part of my brain knew he was trying to make me laugh, trying to make me like him, which only made me angrier. This was not a laughing matter; lives were on the line. The lives of people I loved.
I glared at him, hating what I had to ask next. Hating that I could not fight my way out of here. “When will you let me go, exactly?”
He bent and touched Peta on the head and her body shifted down to her smaller housecat form. He scooped her up and handed her to me, careful not to touch me. I tucked her into the crook of one arm. My spear was across the room, and I knew the way my body was reacting to the pain, I would have no chance at getting it. Humiliation burned through me. How long had it been since I’d been beaten in a physical fight? I couldn’t remember the last time.
“Are you going to answer me?”
Talan sighed. “We are on a time crunch, Lark. So yes, I am going to let you go. No, I don’t know when, other than we need you to learn as fast as you can so I can let you go and know you won’t be killed before you do what you must.”
The muscles in my jaw ticked and jumped. But before I could say anything, he went on.
“You think you’re the best fighter out there, and you’re not. I think this little exercise has shown you that, yes? There is always someone better, someone faster, someone stronger.”
Peta lifted her head, shaking it slowly as she came around. She let out a hiss before she spoke. “You think chastising her like a child is going to win her over to your side? That treating her with condescension will make her want to learn from you?”
Talan stared at us both. “No. You are correct, Peta, and that is not what is happening here. I am not chastising her. I am pointing out the obvious. Things you both already know but are choosing not to see.”
I would have spun on my heel and left him there if I could have, but I could barely move. The pain in my body was not letting up and I didn’t understand why. Elementals healed fast, but it was as if my body was healing human-slow, and even worse, the pain was growing. It didn’t make sense, not at first.
I blinked several times as the realization dawned on me. “You’re keeping my pain levels up, aren’t you?”
His violet eyes hardened ever so slightly. “Yes, that is one of the things you need to learn to do. Your enemies can’t fight you if pain cripples them. I am going to teach you how to keep them hurting. It’s ugly, but necessary, and part of that lesson is feeling it yourself, knowing where your breaking point is.” He rolled his shoulders.
Peta shook her head. “Talan, you are not giving her any reason to want to stay. You hurt her, you humiliate her, you knock me out and you have imprisoned us both. There is no reason not to keep fighting to find a way out, you idiot.”
I was glad she spoke because I was struggling just to breathe past the shuddering pain in my body. The last time I’d hurt this badly was when I’d still been blocked from my connection to the earth, when every time I tried to use it, I was slammed with an agony that threw me to the ground.
Worm shit and green sticks. That was partly what Cassava had done to me—she hadn’t just blocked me from my power, she’d made the pain too. The realization nearly took me to my knees. I wanted to ask him if he’d trained her too, if he was the source of Cassava’s abilities. I didn’t get a chance because he answered Peta.
“All right, I will give you more incentive to willingly stay with me to train.”
He turned to the water pouring through the ceiling and passed his hand through it. Slowly, the water darkened, multiple colors spreading and painting a picture of a place I knew very well.
“The Rim… how is that possible.” I limped forward, my anger with him momentarily forgotten under what I was seeing. The images wavered and danced with the rushing water, but it was my home.
And it was in utter chaos, people were running, fists were flying. Elementals were on the ground, flat out, while others fought over them. “What the hell is happening?”
I touched the figure of my sister, Belladonna, as she stood in front of not one group of people, but two. The Salamanders—fire elementals— had come to live in the Rim after their home in the Pit had been destroyed. By the look on my sister’s face, things were not going as planned, though I’d been gone less than a day. Her hands were above her head, and even though her betrothed—Flint—who was the new king of the Salamanders, stood with her, the elementals around them were obviously agitated. Flint had his mouth open and clearly yelling, but I could hear nothing.
Behind them both, fire erupted in the trees. Flint spun and the fire was gone, and then the images faded into water again.
“That is not incentive to stay, but to leave!” I wanted to yell at him, but big breaths in and out were too hard.
He said nothing, only raised his hand again in the water. This time the image was that of the Deep. All around the pristine city circled human warships. Finley stood in front of them, her hands raised, her face grim.
“She’s going to kill them,” I whispered and again put my hand into the water as if I could stop her.
Talan ran his hand into the stream, and again, the image changed. The Eyrie this time, the glittering silver and gold spires reaching through the low-hanging clouds. No snow on the ground, and there should have been this time of year.
Samara, Queen of the Sylphs, stood with a small child in her arms, openly weeping. But she was alone.
“Where are all the Sylphs?” I stared, unable to comprehend what the hell was going on. I didn’t even look at Talan now. I just stared at the water waiting for him to change the scene. And change it did.
An explosion rocked a human city and flames shot into the air along with bodies, vehicles, and debris. Again and again, the city was hammered with bombs dropped from high above. I stepped back, shaking my head slowly. “These are lies.”
“No. They aren’t.”
The sadness in his voice turned me to face Talan. The sorrow on his face was clear as a summer’s sky.
“This is not happening,” I whispered.
“It is. And it is why you must train, Lark. Time is slipping away; the world is coming apart at the seams and you must be ready to mend it.”
Already my mind raced with possibilities. Where would I go first? Belladonna and Flint could probably hold down the Rim, but Samara needed to be protected if all her people had left her… the question there was why? Or had she sent them away? Then there was Finley… if she started a war with the humans, what then? Fear and the need to get moving flickered through me.
I was not created to stand still when others suffered.
I lifted my eyes to Talan’s, hating that I had to let him win. “How long before the worst happens, then? How long do I have to train?”
“That is the problem,” he said. “I don’t know exactly. We could have a few days, a week, or even a month. Hell, we could have a year before things truly shatter. But because I don’t know, we need to act as though we have only weeks at best. Because it could very well be less. It could be mere hours.”
I wanted to sink to the floor, my soul crushed under the truths I’d seen in the mirrored water. “Peta, what do I do?” I whispered the question to her.
She was silent for a full minute before she finally answered me in a mere whisper.
“I think we must stay for now, as much as I hate it.”
Talan cleared his throat and scrubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “There is something else you should know. I won’t be your only trainer here. In order to speed up your learning, I thought it best to have two people showing you the ropes.”
I frowned at him, confused. “What do you mean? There is another Spirit Walker? I thought you were the last.”
From a side doorway stepped a figure I never wanted to see again unless it was laid out and dead at my feet. Hair black as the bird he was named after and eyes as blue as the sky, his face was scratched to hell and blood dripped from his nose, but he was alive.
Raven smiled at me. “Hello, Larkspur.”