Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(98)

She rubbed her eyes and looked all at once like a young girl up far too late. “I wish none of what’s outside the farm, what’s coming, would touch the boys. But it will. You know more, the soldier knows more than you’ve told us—or told Mom—or taught us. I … watched the soldier, too, in the before, through the crystal.”

It tore at him, more than a little, to know he looked into his daughter’s eyes, and looked soldier to soldier. “You’re going to take a few days,” Simon told her. “Call it R and R. Then we’ll start training them.”

“You’ve had a long day,” Lana said. “You should get some sleep now.”

“I’m really tired.”

“Yes, I see that. Go on to bed.”

Nodding, half-asleep already, she hugged Lana, then Simon. “I’m so glad to be home.”

Lana watched her go, listened to her feet on the stairs.

“Simon.”

“We’ll talk. We’ll think, and we’ll talk. But right now somebody else needs sleep. You’re worn-out, babe, and I’m not far behind you.”

“I’ve known. I’ve known since she was inside me, and I still keep running up against the wall of no. No, this is my baby.”

“Join the club.”

He got up, took her hand. “We’re going to do what parents do.”

“What’s that?”

“Worry our asses off and do everything we know how to help her.” They started for the stairs. “You think you can learn that flash deal? Because, hey, you could bring me a cold beer like that.”

He snapped his fingers, making her laugh after a very long day.





CHAPTER TWENTY


She took a week, helped with the harvest, taught her mother how to make a Rainbow Cake. She went fishing with her brothers, hunting with Taibhse and Faol Ban.

At night she flew over the fields and hills on Laoch.

And though she was happy to be home, she missed Mallick, and the routine of work, training, practice, study. She missed Mick and all the others, and quiet times alone in the faerie glade.

But she spent her fifteenth birthday at home, with her family, and treasured every moment.

When the week ended, her brothers took to training like a game. It annoyed her down to the bone, but she took her cues from her father. After all, she told herself, he’d trained soldiers before, and raised children.

“It starts as a game,” he told her. “They’re kids.”

“Colin’s the same age I was when I went with Mallick. He sure as hell didn’t let me treat it like a game.”

“Colin isn’t you. They’ll learn, and more, they’ll compete. With each other, and with you. Then they’ll get better, then they’ll get serious.”

So through the fall and into the winter, it remained, for the most part, a game. She left Travis’s and Ethan’s magickal training to her mother, for now, and tolerated the complaints and malingering when she pushed them through assignments.

Reading, math, mapping.

They liked plotting battle strategies, and Travis particularly shined there.

When it came to the katas, the gymnastics, and sheer endurance, Ethan outpaced his older brothers as if born doing handsprings.

But when, during the wild and windy days of March, she introduced swords, Colin proved fierce, fast, and deadly.

Enough it irritated her a little when he mastered in days forms and techniques that had taken her weeks.

She took to working with him one-on-one, and though she killed him routinely, he made her work for it.

Her father proved a different matter. He’d spar with her, under strict rules. Blows would not land. He had his line in the sand, no matter how she argued.

He wouldn’t hit his children.

She compromised with a quick shock for any strike, punch, kick. Even under the rules, she couldn’t beat him without using magicks, and learned more and more.

The first time they used knives for combat—much to her brothers’ delight—Simon did what he did whenever a blade was introduced.

He tested them on himself. “They won’t cut cloth, break flesh, or draw blood,” she told him, as she did before every sword practice.

“Better safe than really, really sorry.” He swiped his knife, then hers, over the back of his arm. “Okay.” He handed her a knife, hilt first.

As they circled each other, the boys called out insults or encouragements. And Lana came outside. It gave her a jolt, as it always did, to see her husband, her child, facing off. Eyes flat and cold, bodies coiled.

Her heart leaped into her throat and stayed lodged there from the first swipe.

Simon lunged in, pivoting away as Fallon did the same so her vicious kick, her follow-up slice missed their marks.

A terrible dance that seemed to go on and on.

By tacit agreement, Fallon and Simon straightened, stepped back.

“Looks like a draw,” Lana called out as the boys moaned and booed.

“You’re good.” Simon swiped sweat from his face.

“You, too.”

Now he grinned. “I was holding back.”

“Oh yeah? So was I.”

“Okay then.” He rolled his shoulders, moved into a fighting stance. “Don’t.”

“You, either.”