She sighed. “Some enchantment. I’m not entirely sure you’ve been forthright with me.”
“You merely ask for things we don’t have,” David said. And then he shocked her by abruptly saying, “Did the eastern laird teach you how to handle a sword?”
“Yes, of course he did,” Adaira answered, inevitably thinking of Alastair. “Why do you ask me that?”
“I would like to measure your skills,” he said, turning to the doorway. “To see for myself how well they taught you.”
“In the rain?”
David paused on the threshold, hands laced behind his back. “You’ll soon learn that if we halted our lives every time it storms, there would be little life remaining to live. We make the most of what we have here.”
Half an hour later, Adaira had chosen a long sword from the armory and followed David into a training ring. Or she had assumed it was a training ring. Once she stood in the center of it, she realized it was an open-air arena. Wooden stands for a vast audience surrounded them. The sand beneath her boots was riddled with ankle-deep puddles; she could feel the water begin to seep through the leather as she tripped over a mound.
“What is this place?” she asked, raising her voice so David could hear her over the downpour.
“A place for me to test your skills,” he replied, walking to the center of the arena.
Adaira followed, struggling to see him in the rain. Her hair was drenched and her clothes felt heavy and rough against her skin. She couldn’t explain the disquiet she felt or what had sparked it. The eerie, empty arena. The uneven ground she was about to spar over. The difficulty of seeing in the storm. The lingering effects of the Aethyn in her blood.
“Have you changed your mind, Cora?” David asked, sensing her reluctance.
Adaira came to a stop, three paces away from him. “No.”
“Then draw your sword.”
Her hand found the hilt. As she drew the sword from its scabbard, wielding a weapon for the first time since arriving in the west, Adaira wondered if this was another test. She didn’t know much about David. She had conversed with him only when she had dinner with him and Innes in their quarters and when he delivered her letters. Letters that he read, as if he trusted neither her nor Jack, Sidra, and Torin. As if she had come to live with them for no other reason than to plot the Breccans’ demise. Adaira felt her anger stir as she held her sword in middle guard.
“Does Innes know you’ve armed me?” she asked, a touch wryly.
“I never do anything without Innes knowing,” David said, deeply serious. “Now . . . take a strike at me.”
Adaira lunged forward, teeth clenched. She took a hard cut at David, but he moved effortlessly, as if he were part of the rain. He blocked her with his sword, and Adaira stumbled back, her hands stinging from the clash.
“Again,” he said.
Adaira blinked against the water streaming down her face. Stars danced at the corners of her eyes and her head continued to throb, but she didn’t want to look weak in front of him. She soon fell into stride with the storm and the uneven ground, drawing from her memories. The lessons Alastair had once given her. Torin observing and calling out tips. Warm, sun-drenched days on the training green at Castle Sloane.
David blocked her cuts with ease. Again and again, as if he were reading her mind, knowing her actions before she took them.
It became infuriating. Adaira couldn’t even make him flinch. She couldn’t provoke him to strike back—their sparring was simply her cutting and him blocking—and she began to strike at him with harder cuts, her feet digging a trench around him in the sand.
“You’re striking me in anger,” David finally said. “Why?”
Adaira stepped back. Her lungs were burning, her arms trembling. She stared at David through the wash of rain and tried to read his expression, but his face was like stone.
She sought to measure her anger, but its roots ran deep within her. Anger at David for letting Innes give her up. For holding a small, weakly child spun from his own blood and breath and believing she was better off in another realm. For not fighting for her.
And yet, if he hadn’t given her up, Adaira would have never known the Tamerlaines. Lorna and Alastair, who had loved her as their own, but lied to her. Torin and Sidra and Maisie. Jack, who would have never been born had the Breccans not handed her over to the Keeper of the Aithwood.
Her emotions suddenly felt tangled, her chest small and cracked.
But the only words she could find to say to him were, “You’re reading my letters.”
David was quiet. Adaira could tell she had caught him off guard.
“You think it wrong of me,” he finally stated.
“As a laird’s consort? No,” Adaira replied. “But as a father? Yes.”
This time when she cut her sword at him, he moved. He blocked and lunged, forcing her into a short guard to protect herself. They fell into a stilted dance of a spar, kicking up clumps of sand and splashing through small streams. If this had happened a week earlier, Adaira might have felt a thread of fear. Fear that David had brought her to the arena with the intention to test more than her skills. But she realized now that he was giving her a way to channel her fury and the hurt that lurked beneath it. He was letting her unleash her anger on him, as if he knew the two of them couldn’t move forward without this altercation.
She bared her teeth, catching him by surprise with a feint to the left. His block was slow. He winced as if in pain, and Adaira reacted without thinking. Her sword grazed his side. If she had pushed any harder, the sword would have pierced him.
David grunted and swung around with such speed that Adaira couldn’t parry his blade. It struck her upper arm, slicing through her drenched sleeve.
She stumbled away, dropping her sword. The fiery pain was disorienting, and the world felt like it was tilting. She grasped her arm, the blood welling between her fingers.
“Dammit,” David said, sheathing his sword. “Cora? Cora!”
She fell to her knees. She felt like she was sinking in a bog, and she gasped for breath, tasting the brine of the rain. Her blood felt cold, crackling with frost. Had his sword been enchanted? She hadn’t noticed radiance in the steel, but perhaps she had missed it in the storm. When she drew her hand away from her wound, she saw that the blood had beaded on her skin. It looked like tiny red jewels, slowly deepening to a dusky blue color as they hardened. They glittered in her palm like chips of ice.
“What is this?” she whispered, letting the gemstones tumble from her hand.
“Cora, look at me.”
A man stood before her, in sharp relief against the gray rain. It was Alastair, reaching down to steady her.
“Father?” she breathed.
Hope crushed the last air from her lungs as she plunged into darkness.