She and Evaine stood well behind Luc, equally unhelpful. Supperbaaed anxiously at the end of his leash, which Anaya held tightly in her hand.
“Calm your breathing,” Luc counseled as Rolan and the Cryptic circled one another.
“If you’d just let me—”
“No Arcana.” Luc had been firm on this. “If you rely on it to win your fights, what happens when you run out?”
Rolan growled, annoyed that Luc was right. He had to win this on his own merit.
“How do you beat a Cryptic with ranged attacks, Rolan?” Luc asked.
His thoughts flickered through all the hours of his training. “You close the distance and disable its primary attack.”
“And how do you spellattack?”
Through clenched teeth, Rolan muttered,“A!”
He rushed the Cryptic again, barely dodging its next glob of venomous spit.
“T!”
This time, instead of letting his momentum carry himpastthe monster, he stopped directly in front of it and whipped out a dagger.
“T!”
Slamming the dagger up through the creature’s vulpine muzzle, he drove the blade through its lower and upper jaws, pinning its maw shut.No more spitting for you, ugly.
“A!”
The Cryptic retaliated with a scrape of claws over Rolan’s dagger arm. He hissed as pain scorched through his shoulder, but did not let go. He rolled, gripping the dagger hard and pulling the Cryptic down with him, the creature’s weight momentarily crushing him. But he continued the roll and popped up to his knee, with the Cryptic—its mouth still skewered by his dagger—now on its back. Legs and claws flailed wildly, trying to take out Rolan’s eyes or throat.
“C!”Rolan yelled as he drove his sword into the Cryptic’s core and leaned on it with all his weight.
With a croak, the monster spasmed and went still.
Rolan fell back, panting and sweaty, his arm on fire. He couldn’tstop the grin of triumph that spread over his face as the Cryptic deliquesced, scales and claws and tough hide melting into blue smoke.
A tooth dropped onto the road, gleaming with Arcana.
Rolan picked it up, tossed it, and caught it again, smiling at Luc.
His master waited, one eyebrow raised.
“K,”Rolan finished. Then he gave an elaborate bow, drawing applause from Anaya. She beamed at him before reaching for her apothecary satchel and rushing to apply truth salve to his torn arm.
“That’ll do,” said Luc, sheathing his sword. “Once you’re patched up, we move. We can reach Sylvet by dusk if we push hard.”
Rolan’s wounds were not deep, and he sat on a log while Evaine talked Anaya through the bandaging and salves that would keep his arm from festering. When it was done, he grinned at Anaya, and she grinned back.
“Who’d have ever thought?” she murmured. “Us on the way to Sylvet. You an Arcanist’s apprentice. I an apothecary’s.”
“You saw it,” he replied. “Maybe not the details, but you always saw further than I could.”
She turned her face away, but not before he saw the blush in her cheeks. “Let’s go. Andtrynot to get yourself killed again, will you?”
“Give me some credit.” He took Supper’s leash as Anaya walked away, following Luc and Evaine down the road. “Did you see how I did that slide attack? It wasawesome. And then the trick with the dagger—”
“If you don’t stop bragging,” said Anaya calmly, “I will dose you with toadroot. It will make your tongue swell so much, you won’t be able to speak for a week.”
