Page 169 of Wings of Destruction

“If it gives you peace to consider me that, then by all means. I have no care or energy to stop you.”

She breaks eye contact to look around the gym. Her gaze penetrates through the splinters of the wood, through the fibers of the mat. A formidable one. I take the split second to catalogue her as well and search for weak spots, but I come up short. There aren’t any.

She’s made herself impenetrable.

Everyone has something, I tell myself. I’m just out of time.

“What do you want?”

Her lips form an easy arc, soft in a face of hard planes. “I’ve seen it time after time, people who consider their way to be the right one, and so it’s the only one. I’m sure you’ve experienced the same.”

“I—”

“You and Kieran are the same,” Astrid interrupts. “Your way, his. The right. The only. In the end it comes down to one small difference. He’s willing to change his mind. You? I think not. Which is why you’ll never belong.”

Air hisses past my teeth. I have a few choice words for what she can do with her comparison, but nothing makes it out into the open. Instead, the truth clings to me, sucked in through the cracks and crevices I’d let widen.

“Good thing me being here isn’t up to you,” I tell her. “Headmistress Harbi was ready to accept me this afternoon.”

“Mistakes happen,” Astrid says with a sniff.

“It’s not a mistake.”

She slides her arms behind her back, standing at attention. Will she hit me? Will she attempt to take the dagger from me and use it to slice my throat and be done with me?

She gives nothing away, and it’s almost impossible to guess her next moves.

“It’s not,” I insist. “I have every quality DragonSpear looks for in a candidate.”

“Possibly. You might have Kieran convinced, but not me. He is much more easily won over.”

I scoff. “Won over? Is that what I’ve done with him?”

“This isn’t a joke, girl.”

“I know it’s not.” I step to the door and Astrid moves with me.

A frisson of tension laces through my vertebrae.

“He intends to use you. He’s convinced of your efficacy. He has a protectiveness he rarely lets others see.”

Anger stretches through my limbs, and I scowl at her, side stepping to the door only to be blocked again.

Heat pinks my cheeks. “He’s not protective over me.”

“Then it proves how little you see.”

“You’re baiting me into a fight.” I cock my head to the side. “What’s the point?”

“Yes. I’m baiting you into a fight. And it’s taken you this long to notice.”

She nods once, like everything she does is brief. Like I’m lucky enough to catch it the first time because she will never repeat herself.

“I see you as arrogant and pigheaded. Your actions are selfish rather than born of survival the way you think they are.”

I swipe a hand over my face to clear my burning eyes. “Like you know anything.”

“You haven’t begun to understand the sacrifices it takes for peace. Which is why you have such a difficult time imagining what Kieran has done.”