It was then that I noticed her.
She was standing where the tailors had emerged, as if she had been waiting there all along. She was ethereal, a vision so out of place in the rustic clearing that for a moment, I thought I had conjured her from light and magic. Her hair was a cascade of night-dark silk, falling in soft waves down her back. Her face was delicately sculpted, with high cheekbones and eyes the color of twilight. She was beautiful, but it was a beauty that carried a weight of grace and authority.
She glided forward, her steps making no sound on the forest floor. Her gaze, intelligent and appraising, settled on me. There was no hostility in it, only a deep, curious intensity.
"You must be Kairu," she said. Her voice was like the rest of her—melodic, refined, and utterly captivating.
I found myself straightening my posture instinctively. "Yes," I managed, my own voice sounding rough and common in comparison.
A small, knowing smile touched her lips. She then turned her gaze to the Duke, and the look that passed between them was a whole conversation in a single glance—a history of understanding and shared purpose.
"She is my wife," the Duke said, and though the words were simple, they carried a gravity that explained his own power. This was not just a noblewoman; she was his partner.
The woman turned her twilight eyes back to me. They scanned my face, my hair, the set of my shoulders. There was a flicker of something unreadable in their depths—surprise, perhaps, or a dawning realization.
"With your features," she murmured, more to herself than to us, "and the Edryas name... everyone will simply assume you are our kid."
Her words hung in the air. They weren't said with warmth, but with a cool, strategic certainty. She was stating a fact, assessing a piece on a chessboard. And in that assessment, she had just affirmed the entire, painful reason for the Duke's actions. The fiction was already becoming believable.
She looked back at the Duke and gave a single, slow nod. "Fine," she said. The word was neither an endorsement nor a rejection. It was an acceptance. A confirmation that the plan was sound, the logic unassailable.
Then, she did something that shattered her cool exterior completely. She stepped closer to me and raised her hand. For a moment, I flinched, unsure. But her touch was gentle. She placed her hand on my head, a soft, cool weight. It was a brief, almost maternal gesture, but it was filled with a profound and unexpected kindness. In that touch, I felt not the strategy of a Duchess, but the faint, hesitant empathy of a woman looking at a boy being thrust into a storm.
She didn't say another word. With a final, unreadable glance at her husband, she turned and walked away, her form disappearing into the shadows of the trees as silently as she had arrived.
I stood there, the ghost of her touch still on my hair, the scent of her perfume—like night-blooming jasmine—lingering in the air. The Duke watched her go, a complicated expression on his face.
"The carriage comes in three weeks," he said quietly, his voice pulling me back to the present. "Your training begins in earnest tomorrow. No more playing with light. We begin with defense."
I simply nodded, my mind still reeling from the encounter. The world was not just changing; it was layering itself around me, complex and deep. I had met the other key player in my new life, and in her beautiful, impassive face, I had seen the future, and it was both terrifying and fine...
The air still hummed with the lingering presence of the Duchess, the scent of jasmine a ghost in the clearing. The Duke watched the space where she had vanished for a long moment before he clapped his hands together, the sound sharp and decisive, shattering the fragile silence.
"Right," he announced, his voice returning to its familiar, gruff training-ground tone. "Enough of that. Time for training. We're going to begin with something practical. You've learned to shape your magic; now you'll learn to direct it with intent. We'll start with the Etherion Ray."
I blinked, the name itself sounding like a crack of thunder. "What type of spell is it?"
"It's an offensive spell," he explained, his eyes glinting. "A concentrated beam of pure magic, designed to strike a single target with precision and force." He walked over to a sack he had brought and, with a grunt, hauled out the carcass of a dead boar, its bulk thudding heavily onto the grass. It was a stark, grim reminder that magic wasn't just for creating pretty lights. "Watch closely."
He took a stance a few paces from the boar. He closed his eyes, and a fierce, sun-bright aura of yellow light enveloped him, so intense it seemed to bleach the color from the grass around his feet. He thrust his palm forward, and a sphere of condensed, swirling yellow energy materialized above his hand, humming with contained power like a trapped hornet's nest. With a sharp exhalation, he launched it. It wasn't a slow projectile; it was a streak of yellow lightning. It struck the boar's carcass, and there was a sound not of an explosion, but of violent, instantaneous dissolution. Where the sphere hit, the flesh and bone didn't just break; they vaporized, leaving a clean, obliterated hole straight through the middle of the beast.
My stomach churned, but my fascination was stronger than my revulsion.
"Now you," he said, turning to me. "The principle is the same. You can either focus purely on forming the ball of energy and then will it toward your target, or—and this is often more powerful for those with a strong connection to their Etherion—you can first ground yourself by imagining your entire surroundings, feel the flow of the world, and then channel that awareness into the attack. Try it."
I stepped forward, my heart pounding. I chose the second method, the one that felt more like what I had been doing. I closed my eyes, shutting out the world. I didn't just see the clearing behind my eyelids; I felt it. I felt the resilience of the earth beneath my feet, the whisper of the wind through the pine needles, the latent energy in the very air I breathed. I gathered all that sensation, that connection, and I funneled it into a single point in my mind, right in front of my outstretched palm. I imagined not just a ball, but a vortex, a tiny, hungry star born from my will.
When I opened my eyes, it was already there. Hovering serenely above my hand was a perfect sphere of deep, royal purple. But within it, like captured lightning, threads of brilliant gold swirled and danced with a fierce, untamed energy. It was beautiful and deadly.
"What are you waiting for?" the Duke's voice cut through my awe. "A target doesn't wait for you to admire your work. Shoot it!"
I didn't think. I just willed it. The sphere didn't just fly; it vanished from my palm and reappeared as a solid beam of violet-and-gold light that connected my hand to the boar's carcass for a split second. There was a sharp crack, not loud, but piercing. The beam didn't just make a hole; it drilled through with surgical precision, leaving a smoldering, perfectly circular tunnel through the boar's shoulder before continuing on to scar the trunk of a tree twenty paces behind it.
The Duke was silent. I looked at him, worried I had done something wrong. His face was a mask of pure, unadulterated shock. He wasn't just surprised; he was stunned into stillness.
"It was your first time..." he finally murmured, his voice low with disbelief. "The focus... the speed... it shouldn't be..."
A soft voice floated from the edge of the clearing. "It seems the student may yet surpass the master, my love."
The Duchess had returned. She stood there, her twilight eyes fixed not on the Duke, nor the obliterated boar, but on me. There was a new light in her gaze, one of intense, analytical fascination.
"Mirayne, you're back," the Duke said, his composure returning, though a note of awe still lingered.
She ignored his greeting, her attention wholly on the magic I had just wrought. "Your magic is fascinating," she said to me, her melodic voice laced with a scholar's curiosity. "That convergence of violet and gold... it speaks of a potential I have not seen in a very long time." She offered me a small, almost imperceptible nod of respect. "Keep at it."
Then, before I could even form a response, she turned to leave. But this time, she paused beside the Duke. She leaned in close, her lips nearly touching his ear, and whispered something. The words were meant for him alone, a secret on the wind. I saw his eyes widen slightly, his jaw tighten just a fraction. Whatever she had said, it was significant.
She glided away once more, leaving the two of us in the settling dusk.
The Duke let out a long, slow breath, then turned to me. He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, his grip firm.
"You did great today, kiddo," he said, and the pride in his voice was real and warm, washing away the last of my anxiety. "Truly great." He looked up at the sky, where the first stars were beginning to prick through the deep blue. "But we should leave now. It's started to get darker."
As we walked our separate paths home, the image of the Etherion Ray was burned into my mind. But stronger than that was the memory of the Duchess's whispered secret and the look in the Duke's eyes after. My power was growing, but so were the mysteries, and the shadows around my new life were deepening.