Garden of Serpents (The Demon Queen Trials #3)(29)

Kas rose, and he dusted off the back of his jeans. “Everything is fine. But we have a long day ahead of us because Legion decided to give you the most tedious possible task, and we’re all going to be sitting through it for hours.”

I took a deep breath. “As long as it helps me win the trial, I’m fine with tedium.”

“Good.” Legion flashed me a faint smile. “First, you will practice control of your magic. Then you can practice summoning more power. But first comes mastery. Understood?”

“Otherwise, we could all die in a fiery hell-world of your exploding magic,” said Kas.

“Of course.” I held out my hand for the spell book. “What spell?”

“Sifting soil,” said Legion.

I frowned. “What is that, exactly?”

“Really, just what it sounds like.”

Kas crossed his arms, his caramel eyes gleaming with amusement. “Legion has decided that you will spend the entire day making small piles of twigs using magical spells, and maybe trying to build tiny structures with them.”

Good thing I’d brought the coffee.





*



By the time Shai showed up, I’d made two tiny twig houses, and I was ready for an afternoon nap. On my twentieth recitation of the spell, I was yawning uncontrollably.

Shai was rubbing her eyes as she crossed into the grove in wrinkled clothes.

“Late night?” I asked.

She exchanged a quick look with Legion, then shook her head. “The storm kept me up.”

It was so brief that I nearly missed it, but the look she’d given Legion made me think they’d been together.

“What’s your excuse?” she asked.

I let out a long breath. “Now that you’re all here, there’s something I should maybe mention…don’t freak out, though.” I touched my throat, right where Jasper had tried to crush it last night. “Orion moved me into his home.”

Shai glared at me. “What? You can’t stay with your rival.”

“Did he give you a choice?” asked Kas, anger lacing his voice.

I shrugged. “Well, I didn’t say no. He saved me from an assassin.” Why was I feeling so defensive on Orion’s behalf?

Shai raised a hand. “Hang on—”

“An assassin?” Legion finished her thought.

“Do you know who it was?” asked Kas.

I felt that unwelcome sense of protectiveness again for the demon king. “It was Jasper. The king’s right-hand man. But Orion killed him.” I let out a long sigh. “The weird thing was, Jasper thought Orion had ordered him to do it. And some of his other guards said the same thing. Orion thought that maybe they’d been enchanted. Mind control magic.”

Shai’s nose wrinkled. “Only Lilu have mind control power, and even then, it’s rare.”

“A spell, maybe?” I offered.

“Rowan,” she said sharply. “You said that if he started to seduce you, I was supposed to remind you about Queen Elizabeth and the cotton candy.”

Kas pulled off his flower crown and dropped it on the ground. “Seems like a brilliant ploy to get you to trust him. Maybe he even hoped you’d call off the trials.”

Of course that was the most likely explanation. And yet…if Orion were going to stage some kind of ruse, he wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave all these people telling on him. “At this point, I know one thing and one thing only for certain: I need to win the trial, and nothing else matters.”

Kas stared at me. “Nothing else matters except that you’re now living with a psychotic king who probably wants you dead.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said sharply. “I really don’t think he wants me dead.” What would they think if they knew I’d kissed him last night? If kiss was really sufficient to describe what that had been.

Legion pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t think your rival for the throne wants you dead? What, do you think the mad demon king is…too nice?”

He managed to make the entire concept sound insane.

“Look, I have eight days left,” I said. “So am I going back to the twigs, or what? We’re wasting time.”

Legion glanced at the mounds of soil. “I think you’ve mastered those. I have something new for you.”

I smiled. “Exciting. Are we going to raise the dead?”

“You’re going to summon ants.”

I took a deep breath. “You remember that I only have eight days left until I need to summon a dead witch, right?”

Legion nodded. “We’re getting there. No shortcuts in magic.”

“I mean, they exist,” added Kas, “but if you take them, sometimes, a whole lot of people die.”

I held out my hand for the book. “Ants it is, then.”





*



I was almost delirious with fatigue by the time Kas offered to walk me home. After the initial twig successes, my magic had grown unfocused, flames bursting out in trees around me. I’d accidentally summoned red ants instead of black, and Shai has shrieked at me every time she was bitten.

And yet, tired as I was, I still didn’t want to go back to my new room. The problem with Orion’s cottage was that Orion lived in it, and I desperately needed to avoid him.