Page 28 of Blood of the Sands

After finishing the fourth form, Aderyn indicated they were going to be moving on to sparring with blunted sabers before turning to me. “The queen is waiting for you in the main courtyard. You have some other training to attend to.”

I nodded before trotting off down the stairs, thinking hopefully of the cool shade of the palace after standing in the sun, still flushed from my earlier exertion. The queen greeted me in the courtyard before leading me through the grand doors into the palace. I found it odd that an exile would be treated so personally by the queen, but I reminded myself that Kelvadan was different from the clans. As we passed the statue, I looked at it again, this time in a slightly different light, knowing Kelvar’s fate was to be driven mad by his power.

Instead of heading up the stairs like we had the last time I visited, the queen led us down a winding stair cut into the stone. I repressed a shiver at the weight of the mountain pushing in on me from every side.

“It looks like Aderyn put you through your paces today.” The queen made conversation as we walked.

I pushed back the tendrils of sweaty hair that clung to my forehead and neck, considering how savage I must look, sweaty and panting, compared to the queen’s effortless grace.

“I’m not sure I’ll make much of a rider,” I admitted. It was true that I hadn’t even made it through half a day’s training.

The queen looked over her shoulder at me knowingly. “You might surprise yourself once we get another month or two of solid meals in you. But having you become a rider isn’t the only reason I asked Aderyn to train you. There is something about exhausting the body that makes learning to control the desert’s magic easier.”

Now we walked down a long corridor, and I got the impression that we walked straight into the mountain. Something inside me suffocated, and I chided myself for my claustrophobia. I was just not accustomed to being surrounded by stone and would get used to it in time.

Looking at the walls to distract myself, I noticed they seemed roughhewn, unlike the flawless cuts that formed the rest of the city. I reached out and ran my fingers over the walls, finding many lips and jagged edges.

“This wasn’t part of the original palace,” the queen explained, seeing my curiosity. “My father, Kelvar’s son, built this when he started finding the desert’s magic overwhelming and feared the same fate as his father.”

I tilted my head as I considered. It was odd to think of Kelvadan being ruled by one family for two hundred years, when in the clans, lordship shifted regularly as power waxed and waned. I wondered who would rule when Queen Ginevra died, as I had heard no word of her having children. Although, if she were to be blessed with the same long life as Kelvar, it wouldn’t be a concern for decades to come.

At the end of the hallway, the queen stopped and opened the door to a room. It was more a stone cube than a room really, with only two cushions sat across from each other at the center. I cocked my head at it dubiously.

Queen Ginevra settled herself onto one without hesitation and gestured for me to take the one across from her. I folded myself onto it, mirroring her cross-legged position.

“My father, King Torin, built this room for meditation. One of the most overwhelming parts of the desert’s magic is the ability to feel everything happening, as if you yourself inhabit the entirety of the desert.”

I nodded, remembering the sudden burst of awareness threatening to drown me before I unleashed a whirlwind at the festival. It wasn’t all that dissimilar to the eerie and deafening quiet that washed over me before the lightning storm at Clan Katal. That thought sat uncomfortably in my belly, but I tucked it away to examine later.

“This deep in the mountain, the stone blocks out most of that sensation, helping you concentrate as you tame the power inside of you,” the queen explained.

“Do you use this method to control your magic?” I asked.

“Along with other things, although it is not as difficult for me as for some. I have not been as touched by the desert as many in my bloodline. Most of my power seems to lie in diplomacy.” She gave a wry smile. “Still, my father taught me his methods in case I needed them some day.”

“I’m glad he did.”

“Now, close your eyes.”

I did as she asked.

“Picture how you felt at the festival, before you unleashed your power,” Queen Ginevra prompted in a soothing voice. “Think about the awareness that connected you to all the living things in the desert.”

I pictured the burrowing fox I felt that night, and the whispering of coarse grasses. The sensations felt choked and muted, but I held on to them.

“Follow those sensations to their source, deep within you.”

I did as she asked, finding the threads of sensation leading me to the part of myself that felt suffocated by the walls around me. It was a force in myself that had been asleep for years, until the fateful night the Viper came across my oasis. My breathing quickened as I prodded it with my consciousness, claustrophobia returning. I tried to focus on the queen’s words and control my heartbeat.

“Once you locate that source, imagine constructing a barrier around it. Something firm and hard, to keep it from leaching into the rest of your being. Something unyielding enough to control the wildness of the desert’s magic—as solid and permanent as the walls around you.

“You won’t be able to build the entire barrier today, but try to create the image of it, firm in your mind.”

I struggled with the queen’s directions, imagining burying that seed of power within myself under a mountain as tall and imposing as the one we sat within. In protest, the seed within me started to grow, sending tendrils through the foundations of my mountain. I tried to push back but it writhed and squirmed with the fervor of a wild horse who refused to be tamed.

My magic burst forward from the scaffold of the enclosure I sought to build around it, not silent in my head this time but screaming. The feeling washed me away for a moment before something caused the tendrils of magic coursing through me to retreat. My eyes snapped open as a loud crash echoed through the room.

The door behind the queen had been blown off its hinges, cracked in two straight down the middle. The queen bit her lips, looking me over carefully.