Heritage: Book Three of the Grimoire Saga (2 page)

Something squeaked by her bed. Her tiny pet Flick stretched from his place on the pillow beside hers, his bushy tail straight up in the air. His ears—still too big for his head, even though he was mostly grown—twitched as he shook himself awake. No bigger than a squirrel, the furry red creature hopped along the folds in the blanket, battling the valleys of fabric on his way to her.

“Morning, munchkin,” she said.

He burped in answer. Charming thing.

Kara focused her attention on the broken window. She hadn’t fixed a window before, but she could manipulate the air and start a fire with the magic coursing through her. Since the glass just needed to be fused back into place, fixing a window couldn’t be too terribly difficult.

She reached her fingers toward the shards. With a deep breath, she borrowed the breeze sweeping through her room. Tension pulled on her hands, dragging her knuckles downward. She resisted, pulling back to lift the fragments of glass. The pieces hovered. Her palms warmed.

The shards slid through the air, and Kara directed traffic as best she could. When bits of the glass pushed into their neighbors, she focused the full weight of her gaze on the seam, fusing the pieces on contact.

In a matter of seconds, her window was once more whole. A little worse for wear, perhaps—she hadn’t quite gotten rid of some of the cracks in the pane—but solid nonetheless. She smirked with satisfaction.

A dull pain throbbed in her wrist. She scratched at it, her nails catching on leather. She sighed and resisted the impulse to rip off the wrist guard on her right arm. The ornate leather band on her right wrist covered spikes that dug into her skin, helping keep her uncontrollable magic at bay. Her arm ached when she wore the thing, but even her grandfather, Agneon, had worn the band at one point to restrain his magic.

After Stone awoke her isen nature, he told her to never take off the wrist band for fear she would lose her last ounce of self-restraint. So far, she had obeyed.

She headed to her closet to change. However good Stone’s intentions may have been, he’d forced her into the life of an isen. She hadn’t wanted any of this. Since he turned her, Stone was her master and could control her. He could make her hit herself in the face if he wanted, but she listened to him out of respect. He’d lived for centuries.

Still, despite his vast knowledge and experience, she would give him a piece of her mind when she found him.

Twenty minutes later, Kara stormed out of the neighboring forest and into the empty clearing Stone mentioned in his note. Flick purred from his place on her shoulder. His fur tickled her neck, but she tuned out the sensation.

She had one mission: find Stone and rip him a new one.

Kara narrowed her eyes and glanced around the forest clearing where he’d said her training would begin. Dirt filled the unimpressive circle, the ground void of grass as though someone had tilled the soil. A breeze tumbled by, stinging her nose with the hint of raw carrots and rust. Trees surrounded her on all sides, their trunks blocking out everything beyond the mini arena in which she stood. Wind tussled with the canopy, interrupting the forest’s silence with an eruption of clapping leaves.

A six-foot stack of bricks sat in the middle of the clearing. She tightened her hands into fists and walked over to it, not altogether convinced she actually wanted to know what Stone had up his sleeve this time.

Light poured through a three-inch hole in the bricks at shoulder level. She bent down and peered through to the forest line on the other side. One tree stood out from its brothers, perfectly centered through the circle. Dapples of sunlight broke through its leaves and glinted off a red “X” painted on its trunk.

“You have to hit that target,” a voice said from behind her.

She spun. There hadn’t been footsteps or even a breath, and yet Stone stood inches behind her. His tall frame blocked out a fair bit of the forest behind him. He frowned, his salt and pepper hair and beard framing his face.

Kara’s fists tightened. “You broke my window.”

He shrugged. “You fixed it, didn’t you?”

“Why would you wake me like that?”

Stone walked about ten feet away and dragged his heel through the dirt to make a line in the soil. “Shoot from here.”

“Stone, answer me.”

He laughed. “I am your master, child, not the other way around. Enough prattle. You wanted training, and this is it. Now that your blood is moving, let’s get started. Come over here and shoot from this line.”

She took a deep breath for patience—so much for giving him a piece of her mind—and glanced over her shoulder. “Where do you want me to shoot? Through the hole?”

“Obviously.”

She grimaced. “Look, I need to learn real magic. I need to learn techniques that can win a fight, not...whatever this is.”

“That will come. For now, you’re to hit that target by shooting a fireball through the gap in the bricks. If the fire is too large, it will knock over all the bricks. And if that happens, you have to restack each one by hand before you can try again. It won’t be easy, either, since you have to stack them such that the hole is in the same place.”

“That’s mundane.”

“It’s your training. Take it or leave it.”

Kara groaned. What a terrible teacher. She wished she had Braeden back. At least training with him was fun.

Her dream flashed again in her mind. She blushed. Braeden—she couldn’t think about him right now. She had trouble focusing as it was without her heart racing at the thought of the man she loved.

“Why do I have to stack them by hand?” she asked.

“Because it will frustrate you, and it’s harder to focus on the task at hand when you’re angry. You must learn to control that temper.”

She huffed. “Is that why you threw the brick through my window? You designed a training exercise around pissing me off?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

Kara shook her head and walked to Stone’s line in the dirt. Flick jumped off her shoulder and trotted to the edge of the forest, as if he knew she needed the freedom of movement. Often, she figured he understood everything.

Stone shifted out of her way as she reached the line, so she turned to face the wall. She could barely see the opening in the bricks, much less the red target beyond.

She sighed. Whatever.

A breeze whistled by, and she borrowed some of the air to feed a spark in her hand. Fire blazed to life, hovering above the creases in her palm. Magic coursed through her, warming her veins with its vigor. A second pulse thrummed in her chest, an energy she had begun to recognize as magic itself.

With each beat of her heart, the fire grew. It flickered and crackled, burning the energy she’d kept pent up inside. The flames licked her fingers, but fire made by magic would never hurt its master. If anything, it tickled.

She frowned and held her breath in an effort to scale back the flames. They shrank ever so slightly, and she shrugged. It would do.

The brick wall loomed ahead, the tiny hole her only hope of getting to try any useful magic. It should be simple enough compared to what she had already accomplished. Kara killed shadow demons and escaped entire armies on multiple occasions. She rescued a prince. She was tortured and left in poisoned chains for days on end. She faced Death himself and came back alive.

She could hit a stupid target.

Kara aimed for the gap, took a deep breath, and threw the fireball with every ounce of strength she had.

The fire crashed into the bricks to the left of the hole. Dust billowed into a cloud that hovered like a swarm of flies. The bricks tumbled, clattering to the ground in a heap.

Stone tisked. “Wrong. Restack and do it again.”

Kara grumbled under her breath and strode over to the pile of charred bricks. She rummaged through them, looking for any brick with a circular indent in it, and set those aside when she found them. The rest, she began to stack.

And with each
clack
from every brick she set back on the pillar, she resented Stone just a little bit more.

Thirty minutes, two bruises, and several curse words later, Kara walked back to the line in the dirt. She had only just reset the bricks scattered by her first attempt. Now, she once more needed to throw a fireball through the tiny hole in an effort to hit the target on the other side.

“This is stupid,” she said.

“Aim more carefully, then,” Stone answered.

Flick curled up in the shade at the edge of the field to watch. He stretched his tiny paws and yawned, apparently bored. The black stripes on his spine contrasted with his red fur, shimmering in the low light under the trees as he rolled onto his back.

Kara wished she could join her pet and just take a nap. Instead, she sighed and lit another fire in her palm. It crackled, but she resisted the urge to relish its energy. She needed to suppress the power, or it would get too big to sail through the hole.

She aimed, all the while keeping her focus on making the flame small. After a few seconds of inner debate, she hurled her fire at the wall and held her breath in the hope it would sail through.

It didn’t.

The fireball hit the opening, a full six inches too large. Bricks flew in all directions. More dust sprang into the air. Some crumbled to bits, raining to the ground like hail with the odd
thunk
. Other blocks sailed into the trees along the edge of the clearing, and some even flew farther into the forest.

“Wrong,” Stone said again. “Reset.”

“I destroyed some, though!”

“I brought extra.”

Stone nodded behind him. Sure enough, three stacks of extra bricks sat just beyond the forest line, cast in the canopy’s shadow. He had enough to rebuild the original pillar four times over.

Kara cursed.

“Reset,” Stone repeated.

Kara spent four hours shooting at and resetting the brick wall. She shot eleven fireballs, and every one of them failed. Her temper grew with each clack from every block. Tension pulled at her shoulders, her fingers, her neck—but it wasn’t from magic. She just wanted to scream.

Clack
. What a stupid exercise.
Clack
. What a waste of time.
Clack
. She had so much potential.
Clack
. How could she save Ourea if she spent all of her time stacking cubes?