Page 73 of Blood of the Sands

“How?”

He stilled, and I got the distinct feeling he would be frowning if I could see his face. “The part of you that feels all the desert crashing in around you when you lose control. Try pointing it at the rock and opening up a little bit.”

I opened my mouth to snap that his instructions were impossibly vague, but I paused. Somehow, they made the tiniest bit of sense. Deep in my core, dwelled a twisting, living thing—one that snapped and growled when I found myself closed in by the mountain around me or the writhing crush of people in the city. Even now, I felt it whirling inside me, drowsy but very much still there.

Experimentally, I nudged its attention toward the smallest rock in the pile. I tried to do as Erix said and roused it just a bit, but my mind clamped down around the efforts. I screwed my eyes shut, seeing scared faces behind my eyelids: Dryden, the queen. My parents.

A crack rung through the air, and my eyes snapped open. A boulder, once standing as tall as Erix, fell in two separate directions. It split cleanly down the middle as if hewn in half by an incomprehensibly large saber.

I stared in dumbfounded silence before stumbling back a few steps.

“This was a mistake,” I murmured. I turned and hurried back up the dune toward the distant noises of laughter and conversations that I was not a part of. Erix didn’t call after me, but I felt his gaze heavy on my retreating back.

I returned the next night. When I woke in the morning, I was resolved not to seek out Erix again. He brought out something wild and untamed buried deep within me, that I could not afford to unleash.

But as the shadows grew longer, and my restlessness with them, I found my feet carrying me out across the dunes. My opportunity to learn would be gone in a matter of days, and I would not let my fear stop me.

Fear was an old friend of mine, keeping me from wandering too far from my oasis in exile, and compelling me to count how many dried strips of meat I had left a dozen times over. I could live alongside fear easily enough if it would eventually free me from the burden of this power.

I found Erix with his saber in hand, moving through motions I knew by heart myself now. Something twisted within me at the thought of both of us practicing our forms, both on the opposite sides of the desert, and the looming war, but moving through the same patterns.

I stopped a short distance away, sure Erix could sense my presence, but he did not stop his flowing movements. He finished one set and moved straight into the next without pause. I glanced down at my feet, feeling oddly as if I were intruding on something private, but found myself looking up again quickly. After all, we had done these movements together over a week earlier, but I hadn’t had a chance to really watch him then.

The proficiency with which he moved through the positions, a dance of strikes and parries with no enemy, spoke of the deadly efficiency I had seen in his duels. Despite there being no wasted movements though, the pattern of his limbs moving through space was oddly mesmerizing—a dance as deadly as it was enthralling.

When he still made no move to stop, I decided to join him in his practice. After all, with Aderyn still busy with the extra security around the temporary encampment, there had been no training sessions for the new recruits.

I fell into my stance where I was, and while there was the slightest hitch in Erix’s movements, he didn’t say anything. I moved through the same form he did, trying to match the pace of his movements, once again slower than felt comfortable, and with grace I wouldn’t expect from someone rumored to be a ruthless butcher.

As I flowed through the poses, although not nearly as gracefully as my counterpart, an odd sensation started to inch through me, beginning low in my core and spreading out toward my fingers and toes. The rhythm of my breath was no longer mine, but the rhythm of the desert. It was the breath of Erix next to me and the wing beats of his falcon off somewhere on a hunt. My blood rushing through my veins was the rock squirrel scurrying through its tunnel and the water pulsing deep underground from a hidden well.

I felt the edges of my awareness blur before I gasped, snapping back into my body and standing stiffly. My hands curled into fists so tightly that my forearms shook, as if I could hold myself in my body with the strength of my grip.

Erix had stopped moving as well, masked face turned toward me. Maybe I was imagining things, but I sensed curiosity in his gaze. He didn’t say anything though.

“How do you manage it, when you feel your control slipping?” I had gathered enough from Queen Ginevra to know Erix must have experienced such things when he was younger. More than that though, something in his posture, in his very offer to train me, spoke of understanding.

“You must find something, a sensation or an anchor, to ground you in your body.”

I remembered his arms around me—their warmth and solidity the thing that brought me back to my own body. I shook the thought from my head. I somehow doubted that he would offer to repeat the embrace, or that such displays were how the Viper managed his power.

“What anchors you?” I asked.

“Pain.”

I blinked once. Twice. “You hurt yourself on purpose?”

“When the occasion calls for it. In a fight, letting yourself sustain an injury can work if you are running out of options.” He shrugged, as if having to injure himself to maintain control was no issue. “Pain cuts through the awareness better than any other sensation, impossible to ignore and utterly physical. If you hurt yourself badly enough, it’s impossible to lose yourself in the consciousness of the desert, even if you wanted to.”

“That’s barbaric,” I argued.

“The desert is not a soft mistress. Those who cannot do what it takes to survive the elements are shown no mercy,” he retorted. “Her magic is no different.”

“There has to be another way.”

He tilted his head. “I suppose other strong sensations might do as well, but pleasure is a little harder to deploy on a battlefield.”

His tone was so even that I couldn’t be sure, but I got the impression it was the closest Erix came to a joke. It was equal parts humanizing and unnerving, thinking that the faceless figure before me, wielder of unfathomable power, was being sarcastic.