I snarled, showing her my teeth. “You will not find someone else to train you to fight. They’ll only give you bad habits. If you’re bound and determined to learn to fight, then I’ll train you. I have to warn you that it will involve me hitting you repeatedly. There’s no way around that.”
“I’m a fairy. I can heal. I already know that’s possible.”
I gave her a half-smile and reached out a hand as a dagger materialized from mist. “Not from this, and not from anyone else who is used to fighting fairies. They’ll coat their blades in iron shavings just as I do. You won’t be able to heal from a cut filled with iron.”
“I’d hope you wouldn’t be training me with those,” she said as she eyed the obsidian blade.
“Eventually I will. If you’re going to learn to fight, you’ll learn to fight like me, and that will require you to wield an obsidian blade.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Fine. Then let’s get dressed and I can start training. God only knows when something will force me to race off and stop learning.”
I nodded, but before I got up, I kissed her. A simple kiss on the lips to remind her that this was not the last time I was going to wake up with her. She blushed again as my hand ran over her breast. “Yes, let’s get dressed, but when you’re done being a good little fairy, I’m going to show you how to be a bad one.”
Chapter 26
Rose
Cara stood next to me in her silk robe. Her eyes were a milky white as she stared into mine. Unnerving, I let her explore my soul with her powers. As I stared into her eyes, I felt a pull not unlike the mirror or the portal.
The forest surrounding us faded and I was standing on a lakeshore staring at a different forest. One that was on fire. Bodies littered the shore of the lake. Some in armor, most in simple leather clothing.
Blood ran into the lake, turning it a dark pink. The air was filled with smoke as shouts and screams came from the forest. A woman holding a baby in each arm ran towards me.
“Help me Cara!” the woman screamed. My body moved on its own, and I began to run into the water, trying to cross the narrow bit of lake. Then an arrow came from the forest and struck the woman in the chest. She didn’t survive even long enough to scream in pain. Her eyes stared at me, dead already as she fell to the sand, her babies hitting the ground hard.
They screamed in fear and pain, and I began to swim, my robes heavy around me as they soaked up the lake water and pulled me downward. I continued to swim, desperate to get to the infants.
A man in gleaming golden plate stepped out from behind a tree, shouldering the bow. He walked towards the dead woman lying face down on the sand, unworried about me.
I would never get to the babies in time to save them from him. Never. I couldn’t stop swimming though. I couldn’t just give up on them. Something inside me knew that this one man was no match for me.
A shadow seemed to grow from the ground around the woman’s body, and a man in an assassin’s cloak stepped out of it. I kept swimming, my hope renewed that I would get to the babies in time now that the man in plate had a distraction.
As I got to the shore, the assassin flicked his hand outward towards the man in plate, and an obsidian dagger appeared from mist right before it left his hand. The man in plate raised his arm to block the throw, but the assassin was already rushing him.
The dagger hit the man’s armored forearm, but when he moved his hand away from his face, the assassin was already too close, and his other dagger hit him right between the eyes, piercing flesh and bone.
He pulled it out immediately, and brandishing both daggers now, he approached me. I stared at him and saw the darkness inside him. A darkness that I knew.
Sebastian, the Prince of the Dark Court.
“Prince, please do not hurt the children. Let me take them far from here.” My voice sounded differently. More flowing. More lyrical. And stronger.
“There’s nothing we can do for the rest of them,” he said, pulling back his hood and letting me see his face. He looked different as well. Younger. Leaner. Less burdened.
I tried to run to him, but I couldn’t. Instead, my body went to the children and picked them up, tearing them from their mother’s arms.
“Take my arm, and I’ll get you to a place that is safe.”
I looked into his eyes and knew that he was telling the truth. No lies. No falsities. No fairy truths.
I took his hand, and he reached down, touching the shadow of the dead woman.
And then the forest returned. Cara stood in front of me, and Sebastian was further away, sitting on a tree stump covered in his assassin’s cloak.
“Interesting,” she said, her eyes becoming green again. “You have a remarkable gift, Rose. A gift not heard of in a very long time. It was once called the Gift of Sacrifice.”
“In times long past, dragons ruled the Fae Courts. A different dragon each millennium. They called it their sacrifice because they were never allowed to slumber as dragons tend to do. For a thousand years at a time, they were required to interact with the Courts as all rulers must.”
“Dragons
