She nodded. “The sword of the Summer Court.”
I had no idea how they’d managed to acquire it so quickly, but it had completely slipped my mind that I wouldn’t be fighting with Mort. I was required to wield Aurora, the sword of the Seelie champion. My opponent would fight with Twilight, the sword of the Unseelie champion and representative of the Winter Court.
Jaquard let the fabric fall away, revealing a decorated leather scabbard that looked older than Faerie itself. Maybe it was. He pulled the sword from its sheath and presented the hilt to Marisol. The blade was large—maybe an inch longer than Mort and slightly wider. The metal almost appeared imbued with sunlight, as it seemed to shimmer from within with the rosy yellow light of dawn.
I loved my broadsword, but Aurora had me spellbound. My fingers twitched with the need to hold it, my arms anticipating its heft and balance, my ears the sound it would make cutting through the air.
I was so absorbed in the weapon I didn’t realize Emmaline had arrived until she stood next to me, slightly out of breath. She shot me a quick look of pure delight and gratitude.
“We don’t have much time,” Marisol said. “We should begin.”
She held the hilt with both hands. I knelt on one knee in front of her.
As she began the knighting ceremony, the words seemed to pass through me, their meaning sinking into my cells. I wasn’t really listening in the normal sense. I couldn’t have repeated any of it later. My attention and focus were completely absorbed by Aurora.
Marisol touched each of my shoulders with the end of the blade, said a few more words, and then asked me to rise. Laying the blade flat across her hands, she presented it to me with her head inclined.
“Petra Maguire, the champion of the Stone Order and the Summer Court.”
A shiver began at the crown of my head and passed down through my body and out through my limbs. It reached my fingertips at the exact second I touched Aurora. Time seemed to pause. For a long breath, everything around me disappeared, and there was only the sensation of warm sun, the sound of summer breeze rustling leaves in the trees, and the feel of soft soil underfoot.
Then I was back in Marisol’s office. People were moving and speaking. Jaquard handed me the leather scabbard, and I sheathed the sword of the Summer Court and slung the strap over my shoulder like a bag, keeping hold of it with one hand.
Maxen came forward and offered his hand in a formal congratulatory shake.
“It’s done,” he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. He kept hold of my hand as he gave me a long, steady gaze.
“I will win,” I said quietly.
“I know.” He gave me a firm nod, but there was apprehension in his sapphire eyes.
Emmaline came up and nodded at my hand, which was clutching the scabbard strap. She already had Mort slung across her chest.
“The sword?” she said.
“Oh, right.” I reluctantly passed the scabbard to her. As my squire, she was supposed to carry all my knightly shit around.
“First, we’ll go to the mineral room,” she said. “You have priority access to it from now until the battle of the champions.”
In a daze, I nodded, and Emmaline, Jaquard, Oliver, and a few officials herded me to the training area. From then on, it was a blur of mineral treatments, sparring, resting, and eating. My schedule was managed entirely by others, leaving me free to focus on getting ready for the fight.
Every sparring session left me exhausted, but my fatigue was swept away by the most intensive, expensive restorative treatments available. It was a strange condensed period of training, but the pure, single-minded focus of it was its own sort of ecstasy.
And wielding Aurora . . . it was better than any high I could imagine. I had a couple brief twinges of guilt when I caught sight of Mort with Emmaline on the sidelines of the training yard, as if I were cheating on my broadsword. But I knew Mort and I would reunite. Aurora was mine only for a few days—a short, passionate, wholly absorbing affair—and I let myself get swept up in the glow of it.
When the Summer Court’s blade cut through the air, it felt much lighter than it appeared, almost as if it wasn’t made of solid metal at all. By some magic I didn’t understand, it seemed to condense its mass on impact. Light and swift as it moved, but bone-jarringly weighty when it hit. It was the most perfect weapon I’d ever touched.
“Your opponent will have a sword just as swift and powerful,” Oliver said from a few feet away.
I was sparring with Jaquard, and I’d forced him back to the edge of the training field. His face dripped with sweat. Oliver kept even with us as we fought, calling out corrections to me. He’d been coordinating and overseeing my workouts for the past two and a half days.
“Get used to the weapon, but don’t get overconfident,” he warned.
Jaquard parried and lunged at me with movements that were so practiced they seemed more like reflexes. I sidestepped a jab and whipped Aurora up to impact Jaquard’s side just below his ribs. The blade bit into his stone armor, and he winced.
We paused and Oliver came forward. The three of us watched in silence as Jaquard lifted his shirt to reveal a crack in his armor. Blood began to seep through it.
“Damn, sorry about that,” I said. It wasn’t the first wound Aurora had inflicted on my training opponents.
“No apologies,” the expert swordsman said. “You need to see how the champion blades affect stone armor.” He pointed at the crack. “This will be you if Twilight strikes you edge-on.”
I nodded, flexing my jaw muscles and rolling my shoulders to try to relax my arms and neck. We’d discovered that Aurora could crack rock armor, but only with a very precise hit with the edge of the blade. The flat of the blade or even a slightly angled slice didn’t seem to cause serious harm.
Oliver turned to me. “Your opponent may not know about this, but we can’t assume it for sure. The Duergar have people with stone armor. If the wielder of Twilight happens to practice against one, they’ll likely discover this weakness.”
A New Gargoyle had never fought a battle of champions, as the last fight had taken place before the Cataclysm and the emergence of our kind.
“Get that treated, Jaquard,” Oliver said. He lifted a finger at me. “And you go to the mineral sauna, and then go home for rest and food.”
I released my own armor, and in its absence the familiar ache spread over my skin. Fatigue began to set in at once. I’d been working out with fully activated armor for extended periods, and it was incredibly draining. If not for the rejuvenating treatments in the mineral sauna and salt baths, I’d have been comatose.
Emmaline jumped up and trotted over to take Aurora. She accompanied me to the mineral room.
“Tired?” she asked.
I nodded, circling my dominant arm. “Nothing that can’t be fixed, though.”