Chapter 10

The air was cold,colder than the night before. I walked outside the castle's wall and the guards closed the door behind me, shutting me out. The woods looked even darker than it had last time—or maybe it was my imagination. Maybe it was because I'd spent the whole day locked in the closet or in my bedroom, second-guessing everything I'd talked about with Quinn.

For all I knew, she could have been sent to me by Mama Si, or by Romin, or by the absolutely insane sirens to get under my skin. How could I agree to meet a stranger outside in the dark in the middle of the woods and pay her to teach me how to fight?

"Choices," I whispered to myself even now as I made my way through the trees and toward the town. It was almost ten p.m. and I had no clue if Quinn was here already, but we said we'd meet in the same place where she'd trapped me, and so that's where I was going.

Choices—that's why I was here and why I'd agreed to this—because I didn't have any other choices. Who else was I going to ask to teach me how to fight the way she had? Who else was going to give me at least a little bit of an advantage to protect myself when the brothers came to makeme submit to them for real?

Nobody, just me. And I needed to better myself in every way possible before that day came.

Quinn was right there by the same tree she'd used to trap me the night before, resting her back against the trunk, arms folded, a black shirt on her this time, the hood drawn.

"I've been waiting an hour," she said before I even approached.

"We said same time," I reminded her. It had been just past ten p.m. when we met last night.

"How about we do eight instead? I still want to enjoy my night," she said, looking me over slowly.

"No, ten is good," I insisted. Ten was considered late, and though I knew that the Evernights didn't sleep, and just because it was late didn't mean they weren't out there, hunting and walking and doing whatever they wanted, I at least had a lower risk of running into someone else when I left the castle. For now, I wanted to take every precaution I could.

Quinn opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. "As you say, wife."

The word made my stomach twist. "Fall is fine."

"Weird name, but okay," she said, clapping her hands, then rubbing them together. "First, I need you to show me what you got, how much you know. Then we'll take it from there."

I crossed my arms in front of my chest, looking around the darkness and the little light that came from the town beyond the tree line. "Nothing," I muttered, rubbing the goose bumps from my arms. "I know nothing, really. I've never fought a day in my life."

She squinted her eyes at me. "You surely fought in school sometime."

"Nope. Never."

"Are you serious?"

I rolled my eyes. "It's no big deal. Plenty of people have never had to resort to violence before. Besides, I thought you knew when I was being serious."

"Wow," Quinn breathed. "You're like…a different species. A brand-new species." And she waved her hands at the sky like she was revealing this out of thin air.

"Quit the drama, won't you? Just train me to do what you did last night," I said. "And how to set up that trap." I could use a trap or two around my bedroom, I guessed. Just in case. "Actually—how did you make that trap, and when? If you saw me at Mina's, when did you have time to come set it up?" I looked up at the tree now, at the branch from which that rope had been hanging last night, holding me up by the ankle. It wasn't there anymore.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. You are, apparently, a beginner. A really, really green beginner. Trap projection is advanced," she told me with a smug smile.

"Then get me advanced really quickly so I can do that, too."

"I can't just do that. There are things—" She started, and she was going to go on and on about it, so I cut her off.

"That's an order, Quinn Adringer." She clamped her mouth shut. I'd never been one to give orders, but I'll admit that was satisfying as hell. "You want the rest of that money, don't you?"

"Oh, I do. I really, really do," she admitted.

"So then let's get to it. Teach me how to defend myself and how to project traps, and we'll both be happy."

"Okay," she said, stepping away from the tree. "Let's get to it."

Energy buzzed on my skin. "Okay." I was ready for it. So goddamn ready to be moving, to be doing something, then?—

Quinn's fist connected with my jaw and I fell back as my mouth filled with blood, too shocked by the sudden movement to even feel the pain at first.

"What the fuck?!" I spit and blood sprayed out of my mouth, and my jaw hurt like hell, too. I stepped back a couple feet, holding onto my face, looking at Quinn—had she lost her fucking mind?!

"Oh, boy," she said with a deep sigh, grabbing her hips and shaking her head. "You weren't kidding."

Anger rose inside me, and with it came the magic, climbing up my throat like it wanted to come right out of my lips. Come out and devour Quinn, destroy her completely.

The urge was so strong, so sudden that I stopped moving completely until it passed.

What the hell was that?! And why did I feel like I was chock-full of magic just now, like I might burst in it any second?

"Don't do that again," I said, spitting out the blood in my mouth. My teeth were fine. I'd just cut the inside of my cheek with them when Quinn hit me, nothing more. It would heal in no time.

"Yeah, no kidding," she said, and she looked genuinely concerned for me. Or for the fact that I didn't have reflexes to even stop a direct hit to the face.

Damn.

"Let's start running for a bit to get your blood flowing and those muscles warmed up. We'll find a good place to start with basics."

She turned around and started jogging back toward the castle, deeper in the woods where it was darker.

Spitting out the rest of the blood, I wiped my face and picked up my dignity that had fallen all over the ground, and I followed, fully aware that the night was going to suck even before Quinn fisted me on the face the second time.

Quinn fistedme in the face plenty of times the second night, too, and I never once was able to block her or move away in time.

But on the third, I saw it coming because I decided to focus on her energy rather than actually seeing her arm extending or her fist coming for me.

I got the idea when I met her in the woods that night, when I felt her long before I saw her, but it only worked because I was looking for her. I'd come out of the castle a bit earlier because impatience had gotten the best of me, and I'd been wondering if she was early, too, if maybe I could find her waiting for me somewhere, and I had. I'd found her making her way into the woods from the town about three minutes before I actually was close enough to see her.

So, while she was teaching me how to hold my position, how to hold my arms, and trying to show me how to block fists and kicks coming my way, I'd tried to feel the energy of her body first.

It worked.

I could hardly believe it, but it worked. I felt it, and I moved my head just in time so that her fist went right in front of my face.

"Well, at least you're not completely broken," Quinn then muttered, but she was grinning ear to ear. I was used to her comments by now, and she didn't mean any of them. It was just her sense of humor, and she made me laugh most times when she wasn't making me bleed.

She only managed to hit me another two times before I learned how to read her energy—it was much more reliable, faster than my eyes, at least for now. And when she couldn't land a single hit on my face with her fists anymore, she knocked me to the ground with a kick on the side of my leg. A really hard kick.

"I can make it up to you," she said when I complained that that hadn't been fair—and it hadn't. It fucking hurt to be kicked around like that every night, and my muscles were sore from the warm-up workouts she made me do. Not to mention that the few hours of sleep I got the past two nights were full of dreams about broken teeth and blood and pain.

"Hey, come on, Fall!" she called when I turned to leave. Two hours were already done, anyway. I needed a shower, and then I needed to lie down on the closet floor and tell Grey's portrait about how Quinn had kicked me when she said all we'd be learning tonight was how to avoid getting fisted on the face.

Pathetic. So fucking pathetic that I had lengthy conversations with colors on a canvas regularly.

"I'll buy you an ale. It's on me, come on. We can go to Mina's. Let me buy you an ale!" Quinn kept calling, but I didn't turn. I could already see the edges of the castle's wall, and the familiar dread of having to run the distance from it to the third tower returned, and…

I stopped.

I closed my eyes and forced a deep breath down my throat. Fuck, one of those disgusting ales sounded so good. And watching the soundmakers on stage again, dancing, or playing that heartbreaking sound the way they had that night?

"It's just for a little while. C'mon, I'm sure you have an hour," said Quinn when she realized I'd stopped walking.

I didn't just have one hour—I had the whole fucking day that I wished I could spend outside of that prison of a castle. I had my whole life to spend anywhere but between those walls.

Besides, Grey would want me to try to relax a little bit, especially after getting my ass handed over to me for the third night in a row. He'd want me to listen to the music of the soundmakers tonight.

So, I turned around and I went back to a grinning Quinn, and together we went to Mina's for ale.

Quinn seemed to know both Toss and the other bartender, so they gave us a free table at the edge of the room, and we got to sit down and listen to the beautiful melodies of the soundmakers—Lenna and Ralf, Toss had called them. This time, though, only Ralf was playing his purple piano, and Lenna had a yellow-colored violin with black dots all over it in her hands, and the sounds it let out each time she moved her bow was otherworldly. Together, they made for the most beautiful music I had ever heard.

The boost it gave me was incredible. The motivation it filled me with just to listen to them, to see how they lived as they played, was insane. I wanted to do that so badly. I wanted to play my heart away and make my own sounds exactly like that someday, too.

And maybe I could go downstairs to the room Grey had made for me tomorrow and start. I had no piano, but I had a violin and a guitar, and even a clarinet. Maybe I could figure out how to use this magic that I now had to alter the sounds of the instruments into something special, something uniquely me.

"When do you want to meet tomorrow?" Quinn asked when the melody slowed down a bit and Lenna sat on the stage's edge to rest while Ralf continued to play.

"Same time?" I said, taking a sip of the ale that didn't taste so bad once you drank about half the cup.

Quinn laughed a little, shaking her head. "I'll admit, I was sure you'd give up by now."

I raised a brow at her. "I won't." Not because I didn't want to.

"Why? Don't get me wrong, I don't complain about any kind of work, especially if it pays what you're paying me, but why?" She never gave up on the questions, either—I'd give her that. Sometimes I thought she was even more curious than me.

"Because I have no choice," I said reluctantly. "Because I don't want to be helpless. I want to be able to protect myself."

"But that's why you have magic. Magic protects us just fine—especially someone like you who doesn't even need it." She drank about half the ale in her cup at once, then licked her lips. "I've thought about it, but it doesn't add up. The rest of us make sense, but you've got a lot of magic in you. That should be more than enough."

"I do?" That certainly surprised me.

Quinn raised her brows. "Yes, you do. You know how much magic you're gathering, don't you? You're training it?"

I flinched. "Nope." And I turned to the stage again, but I wasn't really listening to the music anymore.

"Why not? The Evernights must be teaching you. They teach all the brides personally, and they're very good at magic," Quinn insisted.

"Grey's banished, remember?" If he were here, maybe he'd have taught me all about magic. If he were here, maybe I'd have wanted to learn all there was to learn about it, too. I'd have learned Faeish as well. Maybe even how to fight eventually, just for the fun of it.

If Grey were here.

"But the others are still there. I heard your blood is compatible with all of them. Is that a lie?"

I tried to focus on the people in the bar sitting around us next, hoping to distract myself a little bit. "No, it's true."

"Then why aren't you learning magic? That should be your main concern right now if there really is something you need to protect yourself from."

I turned to her, laughing. "Has anybody told you that you ask way too many questions, Quinn?"

She grinned like I'd paid her a compliment. "I'm a curious girl. What can you do?" She shrugged.

"I can't learn magic because I can't be taught by the other brothers because I don't want to. That enough for ya?"

"Not even close," she admitted.

"Well, it's all you're going to get."

"Fine. Then you should read a book on magic." She stood up from the table, grabbing her empty cup. "Want another?"

"I'm good." I still had half a cup left. "And I can't read a book on magic."

"You don't have books?"

"Oh, I have plenty of books. I just can't read Faeish." And unfortunately for me, I had nowhere to learn, either.

Quinn walked backward to the bar, deep in thought, then raised her index finger at me. "Let me see what I can do about that." And she winked.

We stayed another half an hour until I drank all of my ale, and she drank another two, and she told me all about how soundmakers use their magic to alter the sound of the instruments they played, even the sound of their own voice.

If I knew how to use magic, how to get it to bend to my will, I was pretty sure I could do it, too. Maybe not right away, but with practice. With years and years of practice, and I wouldn't stop until I got it right.

Besides, what else was I going to do in this place for the rest of my life?