take the time to think,” Siobhan snapped back with just a hint of annoyance. “I want a student who thinks about the world, rather than just reacting to it. I think that’s you. Do you want to prove me wrong?”
Kate shook her head again. “I’m getting… the world seems different when I look at it.”
“You’re starting to see it as it is, with the currents of life,” Siobhan said. “You will get used to it. Try moving.”
Kate took a faltering step, then another.
“You can do better than that,” Siobhan said. “Run!”
That was a little too close to Kate’s dreams for comfort, and she found herself wondering how much of it Siobhan had seen. She had said that she and Kate weren’t the same, but if they were close enough for the other woman to want to teach her, then maybe they were close enough for Siobhan to see into her dreams.
There was no time to think about that right then, because Kate was too busy running. She sprinted through the woods, her feet skimming over the moss and the mud, the fallen leaves and the broken branches. It was only as she saw the trees whipping by that she realized just how fast she was moving.
Kate leapt, and suddenly she was springing into the lower branches of one of the trees around her, as easily as if she’d stepped up from a boat to a dock. Kate balanced on the branch, seeming to feel every breath of wind that moved it before it could shake her off. She hopped back down to the ground and, on impulse, moved to a heavy fallen branch that she could never have hoped to lift before. Kate felt the roughness of the bark against her hands as she gripped it, and she lifted it smoothly, hoisting it above her head like one of the strongmen at the fairs that came to Ashton every so often. She threw it, watching the branch disappear into the trees to land with a crash.
Kate heard it, and for a moment, she heard every other sound around her in the forest. She heard the rustle of leaves as small things moved under them, the chirp of birds up in the branches. She heard the scuff of tiny feet against the ground, and knew the spot where a hare would appear before it came. The sheer panoply of sounds was too much at first. Kate had to clamp her hands to her ears to keep out the drip of water from leaves, the movement of insects along bark. She clamped down on it the way she’d learned to with her talent for hearing thoughts.
She returned to the spot where the ruined fountain stood, and Siobhan was there, smiling with what seemed to be a hint of pride.
“What is happening to me?” Kate asked.
“Only what you asked for,” Siobhan said. “You wanted strength to defeat your enemies.”
“But all of this…” Kate began. The truth was that she’d never believed so much could happen to her.
“There are many forms that magic can take,” Siobhan said. “You will not curse your enemies or scry on them from a distance. You will not call down lightning or summon the spirits of the restless dead. Those are paths for others.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Is any of that even possible?”
She saw Siobhan shrug. “It doesn’t matter. You have the strength of the fountain running in you now. You will be faster and stronger, your senses will be sharper. You will see things that most people cannot. Combined with your own talents, you will be formidable. I will teach you to strike in battle or from the shadows. I will make you deadly.”
Kate had always wanted to be strong, but even so, she found herself a little scared by it all. Siobhan had already told her that there would be a price for all of this, and the more wonderful it seemed, the greater she suspected that price was going to be. She thought back to what she’d dreamed, and she hoped that it wasn’t a warning.
“I saw something,” Kate said. “I dreamed it, but it didn’t feel like a dream.”
“What did it feel like?” Siobhan asked.
Kate was about to say that she didn’t know, but she caught Siobhan’s expression and thought better of it. “It felt like the truth. I hope not, though. In my dream, Ashton was in the middle of being razed. It was on fire, and the people were being slaughtered.”
She half expected Siobhan to laugh at her for even mentioning it, or maybe she hoped for it. Instead, Siobhan looked thoughtful, nodding to herself.
“I should have expected it,” the woman said. “Things are moving faster than I thought they would, but time is one thing even I cannot do anything about. Well, not permanently.”
“You know what’s happening?” Kate asked.
That earned her a smile that she couldn’t decipher. “Let’s just say that I have been expecting events,” Siobhan replied. “There are things that I have anticipated, and things that must be done in only a short amount of time.”
“And you aren’t going to tell me what’s going on, are you?” Kate said. She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice by focusing on everything that she had gained. She was stronger now, and faster, so should it matter that she didn’t know everything? It did though.
“Already, you’re learning,” Siobhan replied. “I knew I didn’t make a mistake in choosing you for an apprentice.”
In choosing her? Kate had been the one to seek out the fountain, not once, but twice. She’d been the one to ask for power, and the one to decide to accept Siobhan’s terms. She wasn’t going to let the other woman persuade her that it had been any other way.
“I came here,” Kate said. “I chose this.”
Siobhan shrugged. “Yes, you did. And now, it is time for you to begin to learn.”
Kate looked around. This wasn’t a library like the one in the city. It wasn’t a training field with fencing masters like the one where Will’s regiment had humiliated her. What could she learn, here in this wild place?
Even so, she prepared herself, standing in front of Siobhan and waiting. “I’m ready. What do I have to do?”
Siobhan cocked her head to one side. “Wait.”
She went to a spot where a small fire had been laid in a pit, ready to light. Siobhan tossed a flicker of flame into it without bothering with a flint and steel, then whispered words Kate couldn’t catch as smoke rose from it.
The smoke started to twist and writhe, forming itself into shapes as Siobhan directed it the way a conductor might have directed musicians. The smoke coalesced in a shape that was vaguely human, finally burning away to leave something that looked like a warrior from some long gone age. He stood holding a sword that looked wickedly sharp.
So sharp, in fact, that Kate had no time to even react when he thrust it through her heart.
CHAPTER THREE
They left Sophia to dangle in place for the night, held up only by the ropes they’d used to tie her to the punishment post. The sheer immobility of it was almost as much of a torture as her ravaged back, as her limbs burned with the lack of movement. She couldn’t do anything to ease the pain of her beating, or the shame of being left out there in the rain as a kind of warning to the others there.
Sophia hated them then, with the kind of hatred she had always chided Kate for holding too close. She wanted to watch them die, and the wanting of it was a kind of pain too, because there was no way that Sophia would ever be in a position to make it happen. She couldn’t even free herself now.
She couldn’t sleep either. The pain and the awkward position saw to that. The closest Sophia could come was a kind of half-dreaming delirium, the past mixing with the present while the rain continued to plaster her hair to her head.
She dreamed of the cruelty she’d seen in Ashton, and not just in the living hell of the orphanage. The streets had been almost as bad with their predators and their callous lack of care for those who ended up on them. Even in the palace, for every kindly soul, there had been another like Milady d’Angelica who seemed to revel in the power her position gave her to be cruel to others. She thought of a world that was filled with