“His Bloodforged Iron body takes too much madra to sustain, and he's weak as it is. No matter how physically resilient he becomes, he's no more than half a sacred artist.” Eithan looked over his shoulder and showed Cassias a grin. “Have I hit the mark?”
Cassias lowered his voice. They were still all sleeping, but this was the sort of subject matter that should be discussed discreetly. “Why train him, then? The branch heads will worship you for bringing home the Sage’s apprentice. You don’t need a second disciple. And I can name you a dozen sacred artists Lindon’s age with twice his skill.”
Eithan hopped down, tossing his book onto the control panel. He walked over and threw an arm across Cassias' shoulder. Then he turned so they were both looking out over the night.
“Imagine with me, will you?” Eithan extended his free hand as though presenting a glorious future. “Imagine if he could restore each of those cores to full size and raise them to Lowgold. With pure madra in one, he'd be a unique resource, and he could still follow a combat Path in the other. That’s two full cores, so he could bring out the full capabilities of the Bloodforged body with energy to spare.”
“It’s a delightful vision,” Cassias said. “He would throw the Lowgold rankings into chaos. In ten or fifteen years, he could grow into a pillar of our Arelius family, and follow me and Jing to the top of the Truegolds.”
Cassias shrugged out of Eithan's arm and turned to look him in the eye. “But he won't be ready in a year. Even if he were, he would be no match for the Jai clan exile.”
Eithan's eyes sparkled. “But you haven't heard about his second Path.”
When Eithan told him, Cassias was speechless for a moment. After a pause, he forced himself to start breathing. The Underlord was just needling him again, to watch him squirm.
“Please don’t worry me like that,” he said at last. “I almost believed you.”
“Then you were almost correct.”
The horrifying possibilities of Eithan’s plan started to creep into Cassias’ mind one by one, but he refused to consider them. “He’s not born of the Blackflame line. He couldn’t handle the madra.”
“Didn’t you wonder why I’d given him a top-grade Bloodforged Iron body?”
“But you can’t get him the aura though, surely, unless you’ve tucked a dragon away…in the…”
He trailed off. Horror dawned on him as he realized where they were going.
Eithan beamed. “Serpent’s Grave. We’re heading right into the dragon’s mouth, as it were.”
…that might work.
Heavens help him, but that might actually work.
“No,” Cassias said, still refusing to acknowledge the truth. “The branch heads will never allow it. The Skysworn will never allow it. The Emperor will never allow it!”
“There’s an old saying about asking forgiveness rather than permission,” Eithan said, “but the essence of it is, ‘I’m going to do what I want.’”
Cassias had given up his spot in the family for Eithan. He’d suffered for Eithan’s mistakes, taken the heat of the family’s anger over Eithan’s childish whims, and hauled his family halfway across the Empire to Serpent’s Grave…and then left them again, because Eithan had wandered off.
But even he had limits.
His shouts woke Fisher Gesha. She made it to the top of the stairs to see the Underlord with a hand over Cassias' mouth, stopping him from calling out to Lindon.
Cassias hadn’t even gotten a chance to draw his sword; Eithan had seen every movement coming, broken his techniques before they formed, broken his stance, and broken the flow of his madra. It had taken him no more effort than scooping up a kitten.
Cassias stopped struggling, his shoulders slumped. There was no standing against an Underlord.
As Lindon and the entire Arelius family would soon realize.
***
It was their last day before landing in the Blackflame Empire, and Lindon was up early to train. Not earlier than Yerin, who was sitting with legs crossed outside the circle of wooden dummies at dawn, already cycling.
And now, this was to be his final attempt at the eighteen-man course before landing in Serpent's Grave. He slipped the parasite ring into his pocket and cycled his madra, standing in front of the first dummy.
He glanced at Yerin so that she would start counting. She nodded. “Run it.”
Lindon moved with a speed born of habit, striking at the targets on the right arm, torso, left arm. Without looking, he raised his forearm to block the counterstrike.
He could hear the bone creak.
The sudden pain was a flash of lightning down his arm, but he'd already moved to the second dummy. The injury cooled just as quickly, his Bloodforged Iron body drawing his madra directly to fuel his recovery.
It had been impossible for him to complete the course. Even if he'd executed each step perfectly, every hit that landed on him took too much of his madra. He'd asked if he could stop the drain, and Eithan had looked at him as though he were crazy. “Can you stop your body from healing? No. That's what bodies do. Yours just does it a little too well.”
With two Iron cores and three weeks of training under the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel, he could barely, just barely, finish the eighteenth dummy.
This run went smoothly all the way up to number sixteen, where he placed his foot too wide and didn't have the footing to take the overhead blow. He blocked with both arms crossed, but he was supposed to stay on his feet. This time, thanks to his misstep, he went down to a knee.
He couldn't allow his last attempt to end in a failure.
Lindon slammed the heel of his hand into the dummy's chin, pushing an Empty Palm through the bottom of the circle and into the center. The madra penetrated, even though the hit had been off-center, and the circle glowed.
He lunged for the next dummy, clearing the last two without incident.
As soon as the last bell rung and the last light shone, he draped himself over the wooden frame, panting and sweating. Both his cores were weak and empty, and it would take him half an hour to refill them even under the effects of the pill.
But that wasn't the important part. He looked to Yerin expectantly.
“Twenty-one, by my count.” She chuckled at his relief as he sagged off the dummy, collapsing to the floor. “That's more than nothing. I'd have been proud of that at Iron.”
“I don’t believe you had a course like this when you were Iron,” Lindon said, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.
“No, I had to fight half a dozen starving wolves with a shaving-razor.” She sighed and moved into the center of the ring. “You got a count going?”
He hesitated. “Yerin, we're already there. I don’t mean to suggest anything...”
“Start the count,” she said, steel in her voice.
He started counting.
She leaned into the first dummy, her Goldsign blurring silver. First target green, second target blue, third target white. One-two-three and she was onto the next one. Even with just the bladed arm, she was faster than Lindon.