She blinked. “You don’t want to hear my reasoning?”
“Just tell me what you want me to do,” Alet said. “If it’s within my power to do, I’ll do it.” She reached out as if she wanted to touch Daleina’s hand, and then dropped back. “I don’t want you to die.” There was an unspoken echo: What I want and what is true seldom have anything to do with each other.
Daleina stepped forward and took her friend’s hand. “It’s going to sound traitorous. And it’s almost certainly pointless. Fear and hope are twins—and I can’t help but want to explore every possible avenue, no matter how remote.”
“Again, all right.”
“I want you to spy on the champions. Go to each of them. Tell them I plan to hold the trials soon, but that I wanted to be certain they were ready. You’re there to warn them, and to assess their readiness. Get them talking, and learn what you can. Study them. Sneak around them. Determine who we can trust and who we can’t. Can you do that?”
“And if I find your murderer?”
“Bring them to me. Alive.”
“Alive?”
“Yes. I have questions for them.” She liked that Alet didn’t question that she’d be able to capture them. These were champions, the best of the best. But Alet herself was also remarkable. She’d be a match for any of them.
“Can I rough them up first?”
“That would be delightful.” Daleina threw her arms around Alet’s neck. “You’re a true friend, you know.” The captain stiffened, but Daleina knew that was just the woman’s nature. She cherished what they had. A rare find. She felt as if the sunlight were spreading, even though it stayed confined to the sliver of balcony. Between the investigators and Alet, she’d find her poisoner.
She just hoped they found him or her in time.
Champion Piriandra threw open the window to the training room—she’d commandeered one of the champion training rooms to use with her candidate. “She barely looked at you.” She stomped across the room, past her candidate, to the weapons wall. Savagely, she ripped weapons off the wall and tossed them into a pile.
“She accepted me.” Beilena’s voice was barely more than a murmur.
“She’s not worthy to be queen.”
Piriandra heard Beilena gasp, but she ignored her. She pulled a heavy tarp over the pile of swords, maces, axes, and knives and then dragged crates on top of the corners of the tarp—in the next stage of training, Beilena couldn’t have access to any weapons. She had to rely on her power. Piriandra wasn’t convinced her student was ready, but they were perilously short on time.
“If I might ask . . .” Beilena began, “what are you doing?”
“You may have done enough to prove yourself to Queen Daleina”—she growled the word “queen”—“but you still need to prove yourself to me. An heir must be capable of handling an irate spirit by herself with only the power of her mind. No weapons. No backup.”
“But I haven’t yet—”
“Excuses aren’t acceptable.” People were always making excuses for Queen Daleina: she was so young, she witnessed a tragedy, she hadn’t expected the responsibility . . . But no matter. She would be dead soon, and then another queen would take her place. Piriandra simply had to be certain that a worthy heir was ready. “This time, I won’t come to your rescue. You have to rescue yourself.”
Her chosen candidate had potential. Tons of potential. Piriandra wouldn’t have chosen her otherwise. The girl was young—the queen hadn’t been wrong about that—but all the better for molding. She didn’t know her own limits, because she’d never been pushed to them. It was Piriandra’s job to fix that.
Piriandra hefted a crate onto a table. It was covered in a thick cloth. “Come closer, girl.”
Swallowing so hard that Piriandra could hear her, Beilena crept across the room. She was so tense that her shoulders were up around her ears. Piriandra wanted to swat her and tell her to relax, but she controlled herself. She let a note of kindness into her voice. “You have done well. So well that I believe you’re ready for this.”
“What’s in there?” Beilena asked.
Piriandra withdrew the cloth. Underneath was a metal cage. Inside it was a spirit, asleep. It looked like a coil of silver, with crystal-like spikes that were its arms and legs. Its face was carved out of an icicle. It was no larger than her palm and looked breakable, though Piriandra knew it was hardly as fragile as it looked. She still had cuts on her leg from when she’d caught it—the thing was fast. Luckily, she was faster. “Your task is to calm it and then send it out the window.”
“Sounds easy. What’s the trick?”
Piriandra smiled humorlessly. At least she’d trained Beilena enough for her to realize there would be a trick. “It’s going to be very, very angry at you when it wakes up.”
“Why will it be very, very angry at me?”
“Because it will think you did this.” Piriandra grabbed a torch from the wall and shoved it between the bars of the cage. She then stepped out of the way so that only Beilena was standing in front of it when the spirit’s eyes snapped open.
Reacting to the flame, it shrieked and hurled itself at the bars of the cage. Ice spread across the metal. Beilena backed up quickly, toward the tarp-covered weapons.
“No weapons. Just your mind,” Piriandra commanded.
“It’s an ice spirit. I’ve never controlled one before!”
“You have mastery over all, don’t you?”
“Y-yes, of course. But . . . but . . . they’re rare.”
For a second, Piriandra hesitated. It was possible that she’d never faced an ice spirit before. But surely Headmistress Hanna would not have allowed her to be chosen if she hadn’t demonstrated mastery of all the spirits. “They’re not rare all the time.” In the worst winters, the ice spirits howled across Aratay, out of Elhim. They encased the branches in ice, froze the forest streams, and cracked the earth around the roots of the trees. “Remember: it’s angry. Don’t take your eyes off it.”
Wide eyed, Beilena nodded. “It can’t get out of the cage, though, can it?”
The spirit flitted from bar to bar, hissing angrily. The metal creaked and popped.
“Of course it can,” Piriandra said, and then stepped out of the training room.
Beilena surged forward. “Wait—”
Piriandra slid the lock shut. She heard Beilena scream and for a moment she was tempted to throw the lock open, but no. It was only one spirit, and Beilena was strong enough and clever enough to handle it. She forced herself to step back from the door and walk away.