19. Chapter 18

Chapter 18

The High Fae are not dragons, but it was necessary to find a conduit for this power. Only they were strong enough, but they will struggle with the effects of this new magic.

~Kasan the Lifegiver, A History of Magic and Dragons

I've never seen Cole fight High Fae before, but this evening I'm going to. He already trained with me just like when we were traveling together, and now I'm relaxing by the fire, every inch of my body sore and exhausted, but I'm excited to watch him train with Darian and Lee.

So is the rest of Aerwyn. Nearly everyone in the village has taken up perches around the clearing. I'm sitting next to Bog the goblin, who's picking at his bare feet with a twig while we wait. "Have you ever watched them fight before?" I ask.

Bog nods. "Lots. Cole thinks everyone should fight." He digs the stick under his yellowed toenail and a sizeable piece of mud falls out. The riverbank had been muddier than I'd thought, and Bog's been cleaning his feet for hours after he sank up to his knees and had to be rescued from it. "He won't fight any of us. Says we'd get hurt. Have you ever tried catching a bird with that net? I like fish, but birds are better."

I chuckle at him, but before I answer, Darian and Lee step into the circle. They're wearing full suits of steel armor that look nothing like Cole's. Where his looks like court attire with pieces of metal attached to it, theirs are exactly how I imagine human soldiers' armor, with a few differences. The armor gleams in the fading sunlight with perfect reflections, and I wonder how Cole can look at them with how bright they're shining. Darian is holding two swords that are nearly as long as Cole's, one in each hand. Lee is holding two daggers. All the weapons are made of the same black steel of Cole's sword.

They stare at each other for a few moments, and it's like the entire world is holding its breath. I feel like I shouldn't say anything.

"No blood," Cole says ominously, and both Lee and Darian nod. The rest of the audience is silent as they face off against each other. Lee and Darian on one side with Cole on the other. They all stand ready, each of them in a unique fighting stance.

Lee's the first one to move. She leaps into the air, wings sprouting from her back through slits in the back of her armor. I never expected her to move that fast. She's moving like a hawk in a dive, fast enough to miss if I blinked. Her wings appear in an instant, give two flaps to push her faster, and then disappear, sending her shooting toward Cole.

Darian grows as he runs. Each step has his body expanding, and by the time he's halfway to Cole, he's towering over him, looking more like a giant than a High Fae. The armor has shifted rather than breaking, all the metal sliding to the front and back of his body, leaving the sides with open slits.

But in those slits, hard plates of stone are sliding into place. The swords that had looked enormous wielded one handed now look tiny. Almost like daggers.

Two House of Steel warriors against Cole.

And Cole just smiles at them as they charge. Lee hits the ground in a roll just out of range of Cole's sword, moving so fast her body's a blur, and as soon as her roll's over, she's already inside Cole's guard.

You'd think that wielding daggers against a mostly unarmored opponent, she'd have won. Cole is faster than I'd imagine is possible, though. While Lee is still standing up, he turns to her and kicks her square in the chest, not using his sword at all. She goes flying, and the crowd has to scramble out of the way as she hits the ground hard enough that I question whether she broke anything.

Darian's hulking body moves just as fast as a normal Fae would while they're carrying daggers, except his "daggers" are six feet long.

Somehow, Cole still manages to roll, slide, and dodge around them as he moves close enough that Darian can't hit him. Using his size against him, Cole rolls under Darian's legs. Before Darian can move, Cole shoves his sword between the stone extruding from his leg and the gleaming steel of his armor.

"I give," Darian says immediately as he feels Cole's blade press against flesh.

I'm sure that the stab wouldn't have seriously hurt Darian for long, but the whole point of this is practice, not a true battle.

Lee has righted herself and is looking serious as she stares Cole down. "How do you do it?" she growls. "No magic, and you still beat us both."

"Training. Something you both are extremely neglectful of."

She hisses, and when she runs this time, a long, slender tail sprouts from another slit in the back of her armor. It starts off with pale skin just like the rest of her, but in an instant, it turns into what looks like dragon scales.

She tries to close the distance between them, but Cole's strikes are constant. Lee's forced to block with both daggers and her tail. He never attempts to push her off balance. Just constant strikes, all of which are lightning quick.

Lee blocks one strike after another, but can't ever make progress toward Cole, and it's as plain as day that she's wearing out while Cole looks like he could do this all day. Her expression goes from frustrated to anger to fear.

And then her tail catches Cole's sword. He's quick to rip it from her grip, but by then, she's already rushed toward him, daggers out. Her hands move in a blur, swinging as hard as she can, each blow hard enough to cut a limb off, but just like when I'd tried to grab Cole the very first night I met him, he's always just a hair's breadth out of reach.

She screams in frustration and launches herself at him, and he slips out of the way, his knee coming up at the same time. He smashes it into her chest, and I can hear the crumpling of metal as the armor collapses.

She lets out a loud oomph and falls to the ground. "Good catch, Lee," he says as he walks over to where a cup of water is waiting for him. She's still laying on the ground, and I don't know whether to go to her or to leave her like that. They're friends, but… I know how cold Cole can be.

I move away from the crowd to where Lee is still gasping for breath. A knee-sized indention in the armor has the metal pressing tight against her chest. She's trying to undo the leather buckles hidden under the steel plates, but her eyes are going glossy. She can't breathe. I shove my hand between the steel and her clothes, and with one hand, undo the buckle of a hidden belt. Immediately, the pressure on her chest is relieved, and she puts both hands on the ground as she sucks in a breath.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

She nods and I glare at Cole, who's watching us. "You won. Why didn't you help her? She couldn't breathe!"

Cole's quiet for a moment before he puts the cup down and crosses the makeshift practice field. "Because I'm not the only person in the world who can do that. In a fight, she won't have someone to help her undo that buckle in her armor. She and her brother are my two best friends. The two people I've spent my entire life with. I don't want her to die to something she should have practiced doing. I'm okay with her hurting here. I don't mind seeing her cry or bleed or be terrified here . But the thought of seeing her hurting on an actual battlefield is terrifying, so no, I don't think I should have helped her here . I want to help her when it matters."

He walks away from the practice field, not even bothering to let me respond. There's nothing I could say that would change Cole's mind. "He just worries about us," Darian says from behind us. He's back to his normal size now. The armor is back in place, like when they'd first started sparring with Cole.

"He doesn't always have to fight so hard. If you're actually his friends, he shouldn't be hitting you hard enough to do this ," I say, looking at the knee-sized indention in the steel armor that could have broken ribs, or worse.

Lee stands up now that she's recovered, and she shakes her head. "No, Maeve. He's right. What's coming won't give me time to catch my breath. It's going to keep swinging until I can't breathe ever again. We have to be stronger, and the only way he knows to do that is to hurt us. It's how he was trained."

"How he was trained? Someone taught him to be pissed off all the time?"

Darian laughs as he helps his sister take off her armor. "No, his father… is a very effective teacher. He isn't kind, though. I'm sure you got that from how he punished his son. Most Immortals hide any kind of weakness, including kindness, but Cole's father takes that to an extreme. At the same time, Cole's the best warrior there is. Other than his father, of course."

I think about how easily he's dealt with every fight that's come up. "Was he trying just now?" I ask.

Darian and Lee both start laughing. Full-bodied laughter that's so different from Cole. "Oh no," Lee says. "He was training us. He showed us our weaknesses without hurting us. When he was fighting me by myself, he was purposefully giving me a workout since he thinks I need the most help of the two of us."

Darian follows up, "He didn't use any magic, Maeve. He was fighting at half speed and with only a quarter of his skills. He deserves his title of Prince."

"And you're both good at fighting? I'm sorry, but it's hard for me to gauge anything since you both were incredible, too. You could have easily fought off every person in my village. To me, at least, you look like… well, you look like death."

Lee grins at me. "We're not bad. Slightly better than average for High Fae. We couldn't win a war, but we might win a fight. But we…"

"Hate it," Darian finishes for her. "Absolutely detest the fact that our entire civilization has come down to who can kill the other ones better. I don't think that every High Fae should have to learn to use their powers for war. I want to fly so that I can see the forests and lakes and oceans from the sky because it helps me understand them. Without wings, I couldn't have found that drakeling."

Lee raises her hand and light billows off the tips of her fingers. "I'm just glad we're not actual Great House High Fae. No one expects anyone from the House of Light to do anything in battle, and if we hadn't been born to a father who was House of Steel, we'd never have been pushed nearly this hard."

"That's not true," Darian argues. "Cole would have figured out a way for us to protect ourselves. Even if that meant only using light."

Lee nods to her brother. "He always says that being strong is the first step to being peaceful. Being weak and unable to fight isn't the same as choosing not to fight. The sheep can't choose peace. Only the wolf has that option."

"I think it's more that if you can't fight, you can't be safe." The way Darian says it, it's like that's a universal truth. And maybe it is for the Fae.

Maybe that's why Vesta always said that I'd never win a fight against any of the Fae. Because they all grew up knowing that learning to fight and win was the only way to survive. I'm beginning to understand that I was lucky not to have been born in Fae culture. Living with humans seems so much more enjoyable.

"Why am I even practicing then? There's no way that I could ever fight like you, much less like Cole."

Darian shrugs and looks toward the village where he knows his friend is. "I don't know why he'd teach you. He has his reasons, and I've learned to trust those reasons. He doesn't tell us everything, Maeve. Cole does what Cole thinks is right, and it's rare that he's wrong."

It's rare that he's wrong. But what about when he is? Aren't there other ways to do things beyond the "Cole way"? I brush my hands off on my pants and look up at the night sky. He specifically told me not to practice my magic, but he was wrong. I can do so much more now than what I could do when I'd first met Cole. The moon is going to be full tonight, and I won't need the fire to see. A grin crosses my lips.

The perfect kind of night for a midnight stroll through the forest.

"I guess we'll just have to see what happens, then. I'll keep training, but maybe tomorrow Cole will be in a good enough mood to talk about how he expects me to fight in a world where you two are average ."

Lee and Darian grin at me and look in Cole's direction where he's arranging the nightly fire. Lee says, "You probably won't get much out of him for a while. Give him some time to cool off, but keep training. It's never a bad idea to be as prepared as possible. Even if you can't fight a High Fae, you might be able to protect yourself from some of the Lesser Fae, and you'll be far more capable against humans."

I nod to them, and they wander toward the fire as I glance back at the darkness beyond the village. I'll learn to protect myself, but I think that I'll have a better chance with shadows than I will with sticks.