Page 43 of A Courage of the Chosen

Small tendrils of hair cling to her forehead and around the base of her neck, just like they did last night.

“We’re training now.” She doesn’t ask. She demands.

The same unease I felt this morning when she suggested this creeps in, despite my best efforts.

I’ve spent too much of my life fighting against the call to use my light. There’s nothing stopping me from wielding it now, and the taste of freedom it had facing Tavish has meant that it’s grown restless.

“Aye. Now we train,” I say.

Elsie heads back to the large rack of training weapons lining the wall of the mountain, and selects a short sword. A weapon she nearly always chooses unless Reyne makes her train with something else. I grab a broad sword, the weight a grounding presence in my palm.

Elsie dips into a crouch in the ring, and static energy builds as she calls to the vastness that lives within her. The air ripples as though the very fabric of this world is being summoned and is powerless to resist her.

I’ve never felt magic as potent as Elsie’s. Not even from Màiri. That woman was a force of nature, and the memory of the brutal end to her life still haunts me. If Elsie hadn’t already explicitly told us Tavish would die by her hand, I’d hunt him and make his death slow and painful.

I know that’s what drives Elsie now. That she thinks she’s not strong enough to defeat him, and needs to be quicker and smarter.

Elsie has no interest in hiding her powers either, and she wants me to come with her.

Mist curls around her forearms, steady streams of Aotrom magic ready for her command. She was so reluctant to listen to it at first, unable to see that it was part of who she is and not this separate thing that lived inside of her.

She wields it so confidently now, and while she still has a lot to learn, difficult battles to face, her progress is impressive.

She raises her forearm and forms a shield crafted of her mist, where she rests her sword, blunted tip pointed right at me. In the next blink, her irises are ringed by light, and the shield made of purely her essence fractures with streaks of brilliant white, like spokes through a wheel.

She’s the walking personification of magnificence, and I’m in utter awe of her. She doesn’t even realize her might or her worth. Something I intend to rectify.

Those training nearby pause to watch her easy use of a magic they believed to be long gone after Murdoch was murdered, jaws going slack and eyes wide.

Soldiers that were on the battlefield would have felt it when Elsie’s power exploded out of her to protect me. There was no mistaking the sheer force of it, but this may be the first time some of them have ever seen it being wielded.

Her challenge is lay at my feet. The question in her eyes.

Half my mouth ticks up and I follow her lead. The tune that has been singing in my heart since I discovered my abilities grows louder as I tumble into the well of it.

Always kept secret. Always hidden away.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t pause before setting it free. It was different when I faced off against my cousin, I wasn’t focused on anything but him, and the way Elsie pleaded with me to use it.

Now it’s different. With so many eyes on us, Màiri’s words echo as they always have when my light has been too close to the surface. “No one can know, Callahan. It’s not safe. Until the time is right, you must keep your power hidden.”

Did she ever elaborate on when the right time would be? No. But part of me knew it was because she didn’t know herself.

I listened, and honed every other skill with a vicious precision so that even without it, I was a force to be reckoned with.

“Show them who you really are, Cal.” Elsie speaks softly to only me, and it’s her use of my nickname that blows away the last bits of hesitation.

I drop into a crouch and the static crawls across my skin, my magic soaring from within to meet hers. To dance and fight and claim the way it had the first time I showed her.

The mist leads, coiling around my arms and creating my own shield in a long oval.

The light comes next, and my lungs expand fully in the way they only do when I unbind this version of myself.

The murmurs of surprise dimly register as I hone in on her, on the victory that looks back at me from green eyes that remind me of a summer morning as the sun hits the dewy grass. Not a rich green, but pale and soft and mesmerizing.

The energy prickles the air with electricity so tangible I can almost taste it, hers and mine clashing and becoming one. My body stands to attention as we circle each other, waiting for the other to lunge first.

“Give me what you’ve got, sir.” The smirk on her mouth has no business being as sexy as it is, and if I don’t do something about it, we’re going to end up putting on a different kind of display.