Haven (War of the Princes) (31 page)

           
The look on his face was serene at first but he sighed and stepped away from me. The severe mask that he normally wore was back.

           
“Before I go, while we still have a little time, you need to control your second Ability,” he told me. “For your own safety. You can use it to protect yourself.”

           
“I don’t know how,” I said, still feeling the ghost of our embrace. “I don’t think I can.”

           
“That’s the first problem,” he said. “You don’t believe in it. You still don’t believe that you have The Spark. You need to be wholly convinced before you can call it forward with any control.”

I know that I was the one to tell him that circumstances were too dire to consider romantic situations, but I found myself helplessly drawn back to the recent memory of our kiss and what it felt like to hold him.

           
“It’s just hard for me to imagine. I’m just a regular girl. I’ve never thought I could have an Ability,” I explained, trying to concentrate on the present.

           
“You’re far from regular, Katelyn,” he said confidently. “And you’ve used The Pull masterfully. So, you must have been convinced that you had some sort of Ability.”

           
“I just thought I was really lucky when it came to finding things,” I shrugged.

           
“But that belief was enough. You need to make it the same with this,” he explained patiently. “It’s not difficult once you do.”

           
He held a hand up and a puff of blue fire shot upward from his palm and vanished. I jumped, startled by the sudden display.

           
“Sorry,” he said quickly.

           
“Don’t be,” I answered with eager interest. I’d never seen such a visible Ability so closely before. “I want to learn.”

           
He rolled back his sleeves and held out his arms.

           
“Once you know as a solid fact that you can do it, it’s easy to control,” he said looking down at his forearms. A little line of fire traced its way just above his skin, looping around one arm to the other and back. “It’s
your
Ability. It’s a part of
you
. It makes just as much sense as being able to swing your arm or snap your fingers.”

           
He snapped them and the thin line of blue fire disappeared.

           
“Can you control all fire?” I asked curiously.

           
“Not to the same precise degree. I can direct it, but anyone else with a fire Ability would be able to do the same. And no, I can’t control another Dragoon’s fire Ability. What you create is yours and only yours.”

           
“Is there a limit?” I wondered.

           
“Of course,” he nodded. “Just like with anything, run too long and you’ll get tired. Use your Ability too long and it will exhaust you. Different Abilities have different paces. Passive Abilities like The Pull are less of a strain than physical Abilities. You know, I’ve only heard of one other person who had The Pull.”

           
“What happened to them?” I asked.

           
“The Prince obtained him,” Rune looked away uncomfortably. “Word is that he killed himself before the Prince could use him. It was fifteen years ago.”

           
“Oh,” I swallowed.

           
“Don’t think about that. You’ll never have to meet the Prince. Focus on your Ability. The Spark,” he said, guiding my attention away from frightening thoughts.

           
“How common is The Spark?”

           
“Oh, maybe one in fifty.”

           
“How about fire?”

           
“The Sear? One in twenty.”

           
“What about blue fire?”

           
He smiled a little. “One in two hundred.”

           
“Bragger,” I smirked back at him.

           
“You’re one to talk. You have two Abilities. Not to mention, the Pull is at least one in a million,” he told me. My jaw dropped open.

           
“How can any of this be real?” I said breathlessly, rubbing my eyes with one hand. “Everyone seems to think that I’m a Lodestone and that the place I’m from is full of other Lodestones. No one where I come from
has
Abilities. We’re all normal. Dylan said that people’s Abilities start to show in their early teens. I think I’d notice if my friends started shooting fire out of their fingers.”

           
“You’re really the only one who can answer that,” Rune said benignly. “Here, one out of ten people are powerful enough to be Dragoons. Maybe people with Abilities are fewer where you’re from. Or, maybe they just don’t realize they have any… like you. It’s impossible to manifest or control something that you don’t believe exists.”

           
“But wouldn’t it happen by accident? Like with my Pull?” I wondered.

           
“Yes… I think it probably would. I almost burned down the Breakwater Shipyard when I was thirteen. Lucky it was right beside the water. But I also knew that Abilities existed, so when it happened, instead of chalking it up to a fluke accident, I figured out that it was really coming from me. It’s hard to convince someone of something they don’t
want
to see. Maybe that’s the trick of it. Or maybe not,” he shrugged.

           
“I want to go home even more, just to find out,” I sighed. “Not that I could prove anything. I can’t use The Spark.”

He gently grasped my hand and led me to the table at the center of the room. “Come over here. I need to show you something. It might help you get your Ability under control.”

           
I looked at him curiously.

           
“Put your hands out, palms down, just like that. We use our hands the most, so directing your element from your hands is the simplest way to start. Now, tell yourself that you can make a little bit of lightning in your hand,” he said, slouching closer to the table to watch me.

           
I did what he asked. Closing my eyes, I imagined that a tiny bolt would appear, but when I opened them, nothing was there. I bit the side of my lip and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force it to be true, but it wasn’t any good. It wasn’t working.

           
“You’re trying too hard. You need to remove all doubt in yourself and it will be there. This might help,” he said standing with his back to the window light and used his finger to trace a shape onto the surface of the dirty table. It was a crescent with what looked like a misshapen arrow pointing to its center.

           
We waited, and I wondered if he’d lost his mind. It was just a drawing. But then I saw it... there was movement on the table, but I couldn’t understand how. He drew a second symbol.

           
“These are Shadow-Chasers. We don’t know much about them, but we think they’re related to Mimics: the creatures we call our warhorses. They are neutral beings that live in the Shadow World, and they are very helpful creatures. Only the Margraves know how to train the Mimics,” he said as casually as if we were talking about breakfast cereal.

           
To my absolute amazement, a pair of tiny critters pulled themselves seemingly out of nothing but Rune’s shadow on the table. When they separated from it, they were black, but they’d slink and dive back in, resuming translucence and disappearing. Their little bodies were fat and round, with wide heads and squat little legs. Thick tails curled this way and that as they plunged in and out of visible existence. They looked like caricatures of amphibians.

           
I recognized them as a smaller, but similar relative of the animal I’d seen in Breakwater Marketplace with Dylan. How they had the ability to dip in and out of reality through shadow, I had not the farthest idea. If I hadn’t watched a black skeleton horse dash out of a wall so recently, I wouldn’t have believed my eyes.

           
“Shadow-Chasers are only known to exist in the shadows of the people who have strong Abilities. They’re coaxed out by drawing this pattern. Something about the shape and the movement as it’s being drawn,” Rune explained without much interest in the creatures. “They are able to pull Abilities toward them in very small doses. It’s like they enjoy ‘wearing’ an Ability.”

           
“Creepy,” I said, watching them with morbid curiosity. “They’re in my shadow too, aren’t they?” It was a rhetorical question. I’d already seen one stare up at me, never venturing farther than the shadow it sat in. When it’d happened back at the Marketplace, I had just figured the little animal had run off, not that it was actually summoned within and confined by my shadow.

           
“Well, considering you’re a Lodestone with multiple Abilities, I’d say you’d have quite a few chasing you,” he answered, waving a hand over the Shadow-Chasers. Their attention went right to his fingertips and they tripped over each other to shuffle closer.

           
They sat on their hind legs like puppies trying to get a treat that was held just a bit too high. Their small milky eyes were unblinking and they opened their wide mouths to make little burping sounds.

           
“I don’t know how I feel about that.” There were little animals in my shadow? I couldn’t even begin to understand how that was possible, and it was unnerving. You could never run away from your shadow. Would that mean you could never get away from the Shadow-Chasers?

           
“They’re harmless,” he assured me. “You wouldn’t even know they were there unless you encouraged them to come out. Watch this.”

           
Rune lowered his hand and the stronger of the two critters battled its way nearer. A little shot of blue fire popped from one of Rune’s fingers, and the tougher Shadow-Chaser pounced on it.

           
“Won’t it get hurt?” I asked, a little worried for the creepy thing.

           
“Not at all.”

As soon as it made contact, the fire enveloped the Shadow-Chaser, but it didn’t scream or put the fire out, it wore the flames, just like Rune said. The little critter looked different now. It looked like it had been made of blue fire all along. It used the tiny bits of flame to make spikes and fins, which it promptly showed off to the other, plain Shadow-Chaser.

“Your turn,” Rune told me. “Just know that you can do it. The Shadow-Chaser will help you bring out your Spark.”

“Do they bite?” I winced.

“No,” Rune shook his head with a smile of amusement.

I didn’t like doing this, but I held out my hand anyway. The plain black Shadow-Chaser hopped up trying to reach my fingers, burping at me. I let my hand hover over him and squeezed my eyes closed.

The Spark was mine. It was a part of me. I focused on searching inwardly for anything that could make me feel one with my element. To my surprise, I found the answer. There was a hint of sureness. I also felt a tug from an outside force: small and gentle. My fingertips began to tingle.

I felt a sudden buzz and opened my eyes. The plain Shadow-Chaser was surging with electric light. Delicate spines of thread-thin lightning decorated its body.

Together, the Spark Shadow-Chaser and the Sear Shadow-Chaser circled and flared in a sort of rough and tumble display. I watched them and couldn’t help but smile. They were kind of cute.

The elements they wore began to fizzle and dissipate, and as soon as they had returned to their inky black little selves, they dipped away into Rune’s shadow and vanished.

“I think I can safely say I wasn’t expecting that,” I said looking up from the empty table to Rune.

“What are you referring to?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

I smiled back. “I guess I could say everything that has happened today.” I wasn’t expecting to be able to make the Spark or find out that little salamander things live inside people’s shadows… or be kissed by a Dragoon.

“Any regrets?” he inquired, straightening up.

“I should be asking you that. You’re the one who’s risking your life just by being here,” I said.

“Not a single one. Not even close,” he said lowly.

I stared at the tower door, the only way in or out. Paranoia ignited within me warning that at any moment someone would push it open and discover him here with me.

“Rune, you’re not the only reason I’m here.” I felt the truth in my words even as I spoke them. “My curiosity was what led me to you. If I have The Pull, and I do, I would have explored my way out of that cave with or without you. I would have been caught either way. I’m glad I met you. If I hadn’t, I probably would have brought my friends here with me. Seeing them in this situation is the worst thing I can imagine. I’m glad it didn’t happen that way. None of this is your fault. I wanted to find this place and here I am.”