Just when I found myself on the verge of the hysterical, girlish tears that Raimen would have paid money to witness on any other day, the Emperor frowned, a distant look in his eyes. At last he spoke, bridging the gap of silence between us.

“Are you the caged Dragon-child that my army has spoken of? I can sense your fear. No Dragon would fear me. It is not in the nature of the beast.”

I flinched at his estimation of my power, both because I had reason to anticipate his disapproval, and because of the sound’s similarity to Master Mikhail’s voice. I opened my mouth to reply, but the words didn’t come.

He shook his head, his long, white mane of hair rustling behind him. “If you are not the Dragon-child, then introduce yourself, please. I cannot understand how you came to find me, in this place, without specific intent.” For just a moment, a muscle clenched in his cheek. “I must have your name, enemy or friend. I will not be dishonored in my own home. Speak.”

I was treading on dangerous ground. Why he hadn’t called his guards for assistance, or destroyed me where I stood, I couldn’t guess. Out of necessity, bolstered by the Voice of Fire’s strength, I did my best to respond.

“I… I am the girl you speak of. But you… are not what I expected at all.”

He laughed, then, a sound as musical as that of Mikhail’s. “What we expect, Lady Dragon, is never what we receive in life. If more people could understand that, and respect it, perhaps this Empire, and others like it, might thrive.” Then he closed his eyes. “If you are a Dragon-child and not a full Dragon, the fear is understandable. You have much to learn.”

I couldn’t help the outburst that came next, after hearing those words from him. “You can’t tell me that. You trained me! You know how far I’ve come! You know how far we’ve all come! Yes, I have much to learn, but… is that all you have to say, after everything that’s happened? That I need more training? How… how very like you.” The tears overflowed then, and I sank to the ground, my knees warmed by the brilliant blue carpet. “All I ever wanted was to see you again. Forgive me. I’m still unworthy.”

I didn’t hear him stand up or move until he was close enough to touch me. He was fast; faster than he had ever been when he trained with me. His true power was amazing to behold. I had far more to learn than I had ever realized, it seemed. I listened, numb, to his voice above my head.

“I have trained no one, Dragon-child. That responsibility is not mine. It is the responsibility of those that feel they can bring good to this Empire, and to the boys that they raise into manhood. I am the Emperor. Everything around me is mine, but the same might be said of a Dragon, or a girl-child. Think not that I am able to place my hands everywhere at once. I must pass off some duties to others.”

I bristled at his exclusive mention of boys being trained by men. No thought was spared for a girl. Master Mikhail had never said such a thing to me before! I had never believed he ever would. It was impossible to equate the man’s words with the face and the heart of the Master I knew. That could only mean one thing.

“I was a student of Master Mikhail. It was your hand that ceased our training, and his life. Forgive my insolence, Great One, but why do you now wear his face, after all that has happened?” Then, it hit me. “Were you trying to trick me into submission by pretending to be someone I knew and loved?” The Dragon in me, contrary to his assumption, was raising her head for war. “Well, you’ve won. What do you plan to do with me? I never thought the ruler of our Empire would be a coward, resorting to tricks and cruelty to capture an errant child.”

He laid a hand on my head, and though the gesture was a gentle one, the weight of his palm seemed to press down forever. In that one touch lay the gravity of the entire Empire. “Now, you make sense to me, Dragon-child. It has taken far too long.” I chanced a glance upward at his face; he was smiling, though there remained a great deal of sadness in his eyes. It took me several moments to realize he was not looking at me; the pupils of his eyes were pure white. He saw nothing; only sensed it. “You mistake me for Master Mikhail. Forgive me, but it has been many years since I last saw my reflection. I had forgotten.”

He took his hand from my head, and knelt down himself, his balance perfect; I had expected less from a blind man. His hands located mine, and I allowed him to guide me up from the floor and back into a proper standing position. “There is no reason for a lady, much less a Lady Dragon, to be seated upon her knees in my presence. Stand, and we will talk. Otherwise we shall both be uncomfortable.”

I had only half been listening when he called me Lady Dragon the first time. The use of it the second time, plus the kind demeanor coupled with the courtly persuasion of his words, left me at a loss. Part of me wanted to latch onto him and cry, while the other part of me still wanted to kill him for not being Master Mikhail after all. There was so much similarity, both in his words and actions, though Master Mikhail had done away with much of the formality when he adopted us. Being separate from Keep life and politics, we had had no such need of the skill. If he wasn’t Master Mikhail, then who could he be? And for a man that assumed all students of the Way were male, why did he call me Lady Dragon, like Mikhail would have, if he had lived to do so?

“You have many questions. I cannot blame you.” The Emperor that wore Mikhail’s face was speaking again. “I have not seen my brother in years, but as boys, we confused people on a regular basis. We played at it well, until my duties drew me away from such games.” The muscle in his cheek that had shown itself when I refused to speak to him twitched again. “Mikhail was a dear friend, as well as my brother. I take it he did not speak of me?”

I shook my head, feeling stupid. “He mentioned no brother, Great One. When he spoke of you, it was as a superior and as the ruler of our Empire, no more.” How had he not told us?

“I should have expected that.” The sigh that emanated from the Emperor was almost too human to bear. “You became his family, in the end. Perhaps that was for the best. I would not have wished to find that he regretted the things he had done.”

His words confirmed Master Mikhail’s death, which I had assumed, but never allowed myself to accept without question. The fury I had been holding back burst forth in the face of his killer. “You ordered his death! He was your brother!” I wrenched myself away from him as the reality of those words hit me. Master Grimm might have been the weapon sent to put an end to our training, but the Emperor’s hand wielded it! “We would have died in his place, if he had allowed it. Does that please you as well? Would that have pleased you more?”

He shook his great mane of white hair again and closed his eyes. “Think not that anything I do pleases me, Lady Dragon. The shackles of ruling an Empire are tight and sharp. It is not uncommon to bleed beneath their grasp. Though some men are born to rule, not all are born to make hard decisions without care. You are a woman, and I doubt you will ever find the opportunity to experience it in your lifetime, but I pray you never must. It is not a fact I would wish on anyone.”

“I don’t want to hear your excuses.” The Voice of Fire was cautioning me to step back, but I didn’t have the heart. “You killed him. He was everything to us. Why?”

“I asked Master Grimm to bring you to me, and nothing more. He is a talented Master, just as I knew my brother was. I had hoped that my brother would allow the inevitable to take place unchallenged.” The Emperor was frowning again. “He gave you a fine start, but he found in you a family, not students. That is not how things are done. You must know how dangerous the power inside you is. You have used it to try to escape my guards already.” I glared at him, and his eyes opened to stare eerily into my own. He couldn’t see me, but it felt as if he could. “That danger poses a threat, Lady Dragon, not just to Kouda’s enemies, but to our Empire, as well. I have heard the laments of Mistress Ami already. Because of your lack of caution and control, she has lost everything.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“You and the other girl-child, the Lady Eagle of the Wind, have been permitted too much time to acquaint yourselves with what you are capable of. This is why we do not train women. Did you know?” I shook my head in silence. “Mikhail, my dear brother, was patient with you. He wanted you to grow into yourselves and each other. But women grow faster than men. And when they do, they act older and wiser than perhaps they are. You have the strength and temper of a girl twice your age, but what you lack is the wisdom and temperance that age could bring. Do you understand? I do not mean to slight you. I am speaking in honesty. If what I claim is a lie, then please correct me.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to slap him. Both of those would have been lies. Nana and I were both overconfident in our own ways. I got angry and didn’t think; Nana thought too much and pretended she was unshakable. The very combination of those two things had resulted in the destruction of Mistress Ami’s home. It could not be denied.

The Emperor took my silence as his answer. “My brother did the right thing in terms of what was best for you. If I were not the master of this Empire, I would have done the same. But I know that my brother’s actions jeopardized not only your lives, but the lives of all of my people when he chose to train you in secret. It was one of the many things we fought about, over the years. The fact that he fought Master Grimm is all the proof I need to know that he went to his death still believing that I had lost sight of what it meant to be human.” Now his face was more than sad; it was tortured. “I have always put this nation first, Lady Dragon. It is my duty and my honor. And it has now cost me my brother. Think not that I did this with a smile.”

I found myself shaking. My only comfort was in the fact that he was, too.

“Master Grimm claims that you children were the ones that thought first of escape. You did not wish to face me, for fear I would be more strict than my brother, and press you into advancing in your lessons at the proper pace. You believed that I would look down upon you as the girl-child you still are. I regret to inform you that you are correct. Do not mistake this distrust for a lack of respect, though.” The Emperor sighed. “I believe that you, and your Eagle, can succeed, if you are willing. But I must caution you that most women do not succeed for a reason. If you are not willing to make every effort to control yourselves and learn to overcome your weaknesses, you will become a danger to yourselves and to the other students. Is that a weight you can carry?”

He stopped me before I could even think of an answer. “Your Hydra, the Breaker boy, is without question gifted. I would have jumped at the chance to train him, even without my brother’s involvement. Do not fear for him. He has risked himself, albeit through calculated risks, to learn what Master Mikhail was not ready to teach him. That puts him in a class beyond either of you. He knew he was missing something, and took steps to find what he was missing. That is the kind of pursuit of control that you must all share, if you are to succeed. That is what it takes to become a tool of Kouda, and not just a fool.”

It was harsh, but I still couldn’t deny it. I found myself nodding.

“Think not that those Voices in your heads are your friends. The Way is not about communing with spirits, or about making imaginary friends that only you can see. It is about control. I cannot hear them, but I have been in the presence of countless others who could, including my own brother. What they say is for their own good, not for yours. Their desires will come through you if you do not learn to manage them, and I promise you that some of their goals will be against your wishes someday, if not right now. If you aren’t trained before that time, Lady Dragon, I fear for this Empire. I fear for the world.”

The Voice of Fire in my head had nothing to say to this. I expected She would have melted into sanctimonious rage. Perhaps even She had no defense against the truth.

The Emperor’s gaze bore through me, but the expression on his face still lacked the sternness of an angry man. He was not enjoying this any more than I was, but the weight of duty to his Empire and to himself overrode his emotion. For that, I found myself admiring him. Master Mikhail, though the Emperor did not seem to be aware of it, had often worn such a straight, impassive face at our harder lessons. The more I thought about it, the more similar they became in that regard. Yet Master Mikhail had taken the kind road, and the Emperor had taken what he believed was the necessary road. If only I could find a way to disguise my emotion so well! Perhaps I could, if I agreed to train.

Almost as if he could read my thoughts, the Emperor began to speak again. “You were trying to escape when you found my chamber. The man that sits upon my throne and gives audiences is not me, but he uses my name to handle those affairs that do not require my attention. It is a secret that must be kept, for the safety of the Empire.” Now he was speaking with complete seriousness. “Should this Empire fall under siege, I will be protected from harm, and I may act with complete freedom in secret. If you had not found your way here, I believe we would have met here, eventually. I would have had no choice but to hold an audience with you in person. Understand that although you are only a child, this matter is of the utmost importance. If you cannot keep the secret, I cannot entrust you to go free. It is your choice, and you must make it for yourself, not for me.”

“Free? You’re going to just let me go?” I couldn’t believe it!

“You, Lady Dragon, have the same two choices remaining that Master Grimm and my brother gave you. If you still wish to leave this Keep and return to the life that remains to you, I will be lenient. I do not wish to harbor students that hold a grudge against me or do not trust my intentions. However, you now know the full story. The beast inside you, without proper training, will someday break free. She has already begun to do so. While it is possible for a dedicated student like your Breaker to train alone, the potential for disaster is beyond high. Receiving no training at all is far worse. Whatever you do from this moment forward, you cannot remain couched in your ignorance. You cannot both remain a simple girl-child, and harness the power that resides in you.” I gritted my teeth.

“If you stay here, we will train you to become a tool and a weapon for this Empire. You will be responsible for defending those who cannot defend themselves, fighting for our causes and the expansion of our nation, and always striving to better yourselves. Master Grimm is one of the best Fire Masters we have. I am sorry for his role in my brother’s passing, but the blame for that should not be laid at his feet. He is not the most likable man, but he is intelligent, powerful and willing to do what he must to see you succeed. Your friends will receive training by those Masters that best suit them, and they will be allowed to choose, just as you are. I will keep no slaves under my counsel.”

I looked up at him, and a dark shadow passed over his face. It was the closest thing to anger that I had ever seen on his face, or on Master Mikhail’s. “But know this, Lady Dragon. I am a strict yet fair man. I do what is necessary for the good of all. If I find that you have betrayed my trust, used my training to turn against me, or left this Keep and lost control of your power in a way that affects this Empire a second time, I will not be lenient again. Remember what Mistress Ami has suffered. I cannot believe that any students of my brother’s would not suffer after such an event. Forget the consequences of your actions at your own peril. Do you understand?”

It was too much to absorb all at once. I was still trying to fit my head around the fact that the man standing in front of me was not my teacher and friend. To ask me to consider that Master Mikhail might have led us astray, or to consider my future in light of such a thing, was too much. Feeling more like a child than I had in years, I set my jaw and tried to look the Emperor in the eye. “Am I allowed time to think? Can I see my friends first?”

He paused, thinking for a moment. “I understand that this has been hard for you to accept. My brother’s death still weighs heavy on your mind. I am willing to allow you some time to consider my offer, but I cannot wait long. As I have said, untrained as you are, you pose a very real threat to this Empire. If you were to lose control here and now, for example, my life would be at risk. I cannot allow that. Your thinking must be a priority, Lady Dragon. Do not waste my kindness. I will give you two days.”

I opened my mouth to thank him, but he held up a hand to silence me. Considering his lack of sight, his anticipation was amazing. “I understand you are worried for your friends, and they are worried for you. I have spoken with them already. However, this is not a decision that can be made for someone else. I fear that if you have time to discuss things, you may not make the choice that is best suited to you. We all have weaknesses and strengths in other people. My brother was both, for me, in the end. I would rather you made this decision yourself, alone.”

He let his hand fall to his side. “I will offer you a compromise. If you still wish to speak with your friends, then you may do so. I won’t have you sneaking around and disturbing my Keep any longer, so consider yourself free to tour the training grounds and acquaint yourself with what life would be like for you here. I will not jail you as long as you do not cause harm. But I ask that you think on what I have said before you contact your friends. I will offer them the same compromise. What happens after that is up to you three.”

He had not lied when he claimed to be a strict yet fair man. If I hadn’t still blamed him for not being Master Mikhail, I might even have liked him. The resentment and anger and fear that I had been channeling since the loss of our peaceful home, however, left no room for anything more. Master Mikhail had been right, in the last moments of his life. The Emperor – his brother, in secret – was not our enemy. He was trying to do the right thing for us all, just as Master Mikhail had, though in a very different way. Whether I could trust him, however, was another matter; one that would require the time he had given me.

“I appreciate your offer, Great One. I will take the time to make my decision. I will never forget what happened to Master Mikhail, but my anger at least is lessened now that I know the man who ordered it will never forget as well.” It was the kindest thing I could say. “You know what it feels like to lose someone you love, too. Even if I trade his teachings for yours, I will always follow him in my heart. He might have been more than just a teacher, but the friendship and kindness he showed us will be eternal. I hope your training is too.”

The Emperor attempted to smile, but the expression never reached his eyes. “You may find, Lady Dragon, that very few things in our lives are eternal. Training may be the only one, in the end.” He then produced two small scrolls from deep pockets in his robe, handing them over to me. The first was a writ of safe passage within the halls of the Keep, provided that I did not cause harm or mischief on the grounds. The second was an allowance for a simple, ordinary room reserved for common guests. It was more than I deserved, but it was clearly not more than he had anticipated.

My scrolls in hand, he bade me farewell, promising to contact me at the end of my two days to retrieve my final response to his ultimatum. As I walked out the door and into the hallways of the Imperial Keep for my first time as a free citizen, I kept my eyes well away from the giant hole I had blown in the wall while arriving. All I could think about was Master Mikhail, how much I missed him, and the silent yet brooding Voice of Fire that still lurked in the back of my mind, awaiting her chance at mischief. There was much to discuss, and little time in which to discuss it. I would have to focus harder than I ever had in my life.

I crouched in the blackest depths of the darkness, hidden in a corner behind a veritable host of barrels and jars. The prison had been built underground, separated from the noble Kouda Imperial Keep by several layers of rock and dirt; I had climbed at least three flights of stairs accompanied by a strange lack of disturbance. Despite my caution, I had expected to run afoul of other guards than the one I had frightened on behalf of the Voice of Fire. This seemed to lend weight to the theory that the Emperor knew of my escape, and had, for some strange reason, permitted it. My mind could not, would not, accept the possibility that he had so shamefully overlooked my potential, as a female student of the Way. The knowledge that it was even possible at all made me want to stand up and announce my location, just to show him once and for all how powerful I was! But that was a Dragon thought. Master Mikhail had been right; thinking fire was far better than breathing it, at times. The cost of breathing fire now was too high to be risked.

Master Mikhail, I recalled, had also had important things to say about the Emperor. At my derision of any man who would send someone like Master Grimm to put an end to our teaching, he had defended the Emperor without hesitation. What was it he had said, about the Emperor not knowing what he had done? If the Emperor, our Empire’s near-divine ruler, was oblivious to such a filthy overextension of his power, then he could be oblivious to a girl such as me. In that case, I was the only one who could rescue us all. And yet, Master Mikhail had been torn about our teaching. He did not believe that his own role in our lives had been a waste, but he had never claimed that the Imperial army miseducated their students, either. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that he had never spoken of anyone as an enemy, not even those countries that opposed the Kouda Empire in war. The words of his lessons in regard to those countries came to me then, in a flash.

“The Kouda Empire is but one drop in a vast ocean, my Dragon. We are powerful, and wise, and ancient, but we are not alone. Never believe that those that live beyond our borders are not worthy of our respect. They may not hear the same Voices that we do, but they do hear.”

Just as I began to wonder if he had intended, someday, for us to see those countries with our own eyes and hearts, my hiding place in the storage room became a flurry of activity. Kouda Empire guards, armed and armored in full blue-and-gold regalia, stood shoulder to broad shoulder in a line, blocking the exit. At their head stood a man in simple, tight-fitting black garb; the mark of a Kouda squad commander. They had no need for armor; their role was in the rear of the army, protected by the troops they had trained. The lack of armor stood as a testament to their abilities. No trained squad would ever let their commander be harmed. If his death came before theirs, then it was a mark of his failing as a teacher, and the price he paid for his lack of skill. Master Mikhail, I knew, had been intended for such a job, had he not been so gifted in the Way. Those teachers that showed particular talent beyond the battlefield were often granted such a reprieve from the field of battle. Unfortunately, that meant Master Grimm, as well.

The squad commander was a man not much older than Master Mikhail, though the rough patches of stubble that marred his chin and jaw area added a few years to his appearance. He gazed into the storage room, an impassive look on his face that would brook no nonsense. His voice was as sharp as the curved sword he wore at his belt.

“Search the premises. She can’t have gone far. Be ready for anything.”

So, my escape had been noticed! The guard whose sword I melted must have managed to notify someone of what had happened. The squad of Kouda guards did not waste a moment before obeying their master’s orders, and I found myself having to think quickly about my next move. With the door guarded, I couldn’t hide forever. These troops were not the bands of children that Master Grimm had been training; they were military experts, seasoned by war. When every movement on the battlefield could translate to incoming death, soldiers learned to detect it immediately. I had no chance to overcome such odds, nor would they show leniency when they discovered me. If they had orders to kill me, at least it would be quick.

The Voice of Fire was still with me, though She had quieted Her rage to a distant murmur in the back of my mind. Upon seeing my predicament, She smiled. I could sense Her confidence and power; She would not be trifled with by even these trained pawns of the Empire. Her power was greater than the Emperor Himself. She was a poor influence on my own judgement, I knew, because Her fury matched my own wild desires, but I needed all the help I could get. I called to Her, and She was all too happy to oblige. I detected a minuscule pause in her excitement, however; she seemed surprised that I had asked for her help. She was not wrong to be surprised. It surprised me, too, how my mind had jumped to that conclusion without further knowledge. Either I was learning something important, or I was losing my grip on reality. That, of course, made me think of Nana…

The Voice of Fire did not share my hesitation. Instead, my blood began to boil inside my skin, just as it had when I melted the guard’s sword, back in my prison cell. She skipped the theatrics this time, much to my pleasure; though my radiating heat and flame had been an effective scare tactic, it had managed to scare me right along with the guard! Before long, my hands were smoking.

The guards, as I had surmised, were no fools. It took them the span of a minute to detect the smoke rising from behind the barrels. One guard alerted the rest; the squad commander leapt to action, hunting me down. He paused, right in front of the barrel that I crouched behind, and smiled. The expression did not suit his face at all.

“You are caught, woman of Fire. Will you come quietly? Or must I take you by force?”

He leaned forward, putting his hands on the barrel, to discover me; he did not realize that my burning skin had been touching that barrel all along. The barrel, and its cousins, contained one of the many popular exports of the Kouda Empire; the same one that Raimen had demonstrated the flammable tendencies of at Mistress Ami’s home: wine. It did not take him long to realize that the barrels of wine, stored together with sacks of flour and grain, had just presented him with a deadly problem. His stoic face began to twitch with an emotion that shifted between fury and panic. He was used to dealing with swords, lances and pikes, not the Voice that rang in my head. I had no time to muse on my luck. Every advantage had to be used.

The Voice inflamed my hands even further, and I reached out to touch another of the barrels, the one closest to the wall by my side. Behind me, I could hear the guards drawing their blades to stop me. For only a scant, fleeting moment, I thought they might be faster than She was, but that was a child’s folly. The barrel burst open in a spray of acrid mist, and the explosive chain reaction of burning wine meeting flour filled the air with smoke.

When the dust settled, I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized I had closed them. I needed not spare any thought for my own body; the Voice had made certain that I could withstand the fruits of Her labor. When She plotted through me, She seemed to grant me a kind of immunity to Her element. If not for that, I should have been dead, as close as I was to the center of the explosion.

I swallowed hard, realizing that the squad commander had been very close, almost touching me. I had not intended to take lives in pursuit of my escape. Master Mikhail had been very clear about the need to spare the sanctity of life whenever possible; meaningless death was meaningless, a phrase which he had used often, himself. I did not have a desire to become a murderer. Though the Way was used as a weapon of war, and Master Mikhail’s job was to raise talented warriors, that did not mean that such things came easily. Had my Dragon-ish tendencies, fueled by the irresponsible, provokable Voice of Fire, again produced a painful situation that I had not anticipated? Would this one scar me for life?

I did not need to wonder for long. The Voice in my head was stern and commanding. She had not made of me a murderer without my consent, and I would do well to remember the kindness. The men who lay prone, scattered across the floor of the storage room like fragments of broken glass, were unconscious from their ordeal, nothing more. The squad commander would suffer permanent scars, at the worst. It was all nothing compared to the fate I would face for my lack of action!

Accepting Her insistence, I turned to the wall that I had faced during the explosion. The force of the explosion had torn a hole in the wall, which now served as an exit into the adjoining room. My heart began to race when I looked beyond the smoldering hole. I had not found my way into another storage room, or into a meaningless hallway full of further passageways. What I had found was a massive room, with a simple dais at the farthest end; I had to strain my eyes to see it through the dissipating smoke. The ceiling above the dais stretched for what seemed like miles before culminating in a grand pattern of painted murals and images captured from nature. The floor was tiled; an expense that most Kouda citizens would never dream of. The dais itself was white, cold marble.

Upon it, a throne made of willow branches sat, facing me. It was painted white to match the dais; the combination of laced branches with space between them, and the expansive, uninterrupted slabs of marble seemed at odds with each other. As my eyes cleared, I began to make out further details; the settings of sapphire and gold that adorned the edge of the dais, and the blue velvet carpet that led up to it, protecting the expensive tile where feet would naturally cause wear. The room was fit for more than just a king. And yet, what kind of Emperor would keep his throne room below ground? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I wanted to believe it even less. But the truth seemed inarguable. I’d managed to find my way to the Emperor himself!

Had the Voice of Fire intended this? I turned on Her, in my mind, having learned nothing from the last time I had done so. My panic was too great for trust, now. What could he do to me, if given the chance? Had he truly underestimated me to this extent? Could he continue to do so, when faced with the proof of my power? And if he had not… what could it mean? I could not believe he had intended me to blast my way into his chamber with the aid of booze and flour! I was not so clever. I doubted the Voice could be, either.

Against my expectations, She stayed silent. It took me several moments of staring, my face as white as the marble dais before me, to understand why.

There was a man, sitting on the white throne of willow. He did not rise at the intrusion, nor did he appear to have any guards or interest in stopping me. I had been right all along! He only watched me from his seat, waiting for me to make the first move. He was the tallest man I had ever seen, apart from Master Mikhail; my mind refused to recall Master Grimm in his presence. His long, open robe was the same snowy white as his dais and throne. Beneath it, his bare chest was covered in what looked like bandages. It was difficult to see from my distance, but they looked to be in desperate need of changing. His feet, despite the chill of the tile and marble, were bare. His white hair was long and unkempt, spilling from his shoulders down to his back in perfect, straight lines.

When my eyes at last focused on his face, my mind found itself in a state of blank confusion that I had never been prone to. The instinct to cry, or to laugh, or to scream, was almost unbearable. Only the distant pain of the Voice of Fire’s presence kept me sane. His eyes were the eyes of someone I had thought I would never see again. And yet, they were the eyes of someone who should never have been seated on that dais, for any reason that I could fathom. Every line on his face was familiar and alien all at once; familiar because I knew them, and strange because I should not have been seeing them.

This man had to be the Emperor; the man that every citizen in the Kouda Empire worshipped and revered. He was the great war-maker, the great defender of tradition and history, and the unreachable master of our destinies. Nobody that saw the Emperor’s face ever spoke of what they had seen. It was an unspoken rule; a way of continuing to keep his likeness as holy and divine as people perceived him to be. Our people had believed for centuries that his power was handed down to him by the nameless Gods of the world, and he used it to guide us, with Their permission. Without that belief, our nation would not have the sense of unity and purpose under him that it had. I should have bowed. I should have knelt. I should have groveled on the floor and torn my eyes away. But I couldn’t.

The man I faced was no Emperor, no matter how he was dressed, or where he was seated. He had a different name, and it was a name that I had called him ever since I could remember. There was no question in my mind that it was him.

The only question left for me, was why Master Mikhail now wore the white, holy robes of the Emperor of the Kouda Empire.

My eyes were open, but the vision before me was unbelievable. It took me only a handful of minutes to establish that I was witnessing the Voice of Fire instead of the truth. I had seen such explosive and unmistakable displays of excess before, and they had never been intended to alert me to any threat. The threat, then, was the Voice of Fire Herself; I had managed to incur Her wrath again, and so soon after escaping Her last lecture!

She wasted no time, having gained my attention. Words written in searing heat flared into my mind, just as they always did when She spoke. Speech was a poor description of Her words; they were mental assaults taking the form of language that only I could comprehend. In the heartbeats between the pain, I wondered if the other elemental Voices that my friends heard were so violent. It would not have surprised me to find that they weren’t.

She voiced the same words of failure and disappointment that She had spoken during my lapse in consciousness at Mistress Ami’s home, but her impatience this time had grown. My apologies for being a slow learner went unheeded. Countless were Her examples of things I might have done to assist myself, or Nana, or Raimen, in our flight and battle with Master Grimm – none of which I had considered. I was still coming to grips with my own limitations; Master Mikhail had not had the time to train me! She found this excuse more amusing than the others, and shook Her head at the thought of my training by a Master of the Earth. He might have taught me of other languages, She said, but he would never have taught me to speak Her language. That was a task reserved for a Master of the Flame.

Master Grimm, of course, flashed into my mind, hot on the heels of denial. Would She truly have me obey such a man? She paused then, hesitant. When She spoke again, Her words were equal parts pain and pleasure. Though pride swelled in Her at his ability, it did not do so when faced with his heart. All of the anger and distrust I had built in my mind toward Her since the incident at Mistress Ami’s faltered in that moment. I had thought Her to be praising and supporting him instead of judging him; the truth was more complicated, and more than She was willing to tell me. The renewed fire and heat of my dream-vision, however, reminded me that She had come to discuss my behavior, not Master Grimm’s. Further discussion of his motives could come when they were earned.

Frustrated, I tried to think of where I had gone wrong. The only time I had managed to have any sort of influence over my gift with fire had been during the tragedy at Mistress Ami’s home, and even that had been involuntary. It had begun with a flame that already burned; was I supposed to create fire from nothing? She smiled at that thought, and Her laughter filled the stifling air with humor that was lost upon me. She gestured to the burning room around me, taunting me, demanding that I change the fate before me. Before I knew what had happened, the barred prison walls began to close in around me, burning ever faster and brighter as they advanced.

Frozen in fear, I looked down at my hands, and at the simple, spartan prisoner’s rags I wore. Her challenges before were always verbal, always personal; did She really mean to destroy me this time if I failed? I could not afford to guess. Forced to action by necessity, I dropped to the sandy floor — the one part of the cell that did not burn with the flames of Her rage — and closed my eyes. I had tried so hard to halt the inferno that Nana and I had created only hours ago, but I had assumed that Nana’s own trance had made that impossible. Perhaps, on my own and in control, I could find a way to stop what She had wrought for me.

The barred walls were upon me in an instant. The Voice of Fire was not impressed. Once again, I had failed to grasp my situation; by myself, I could do nothing. And yet, my friends were so far away, and my enemy was only in my mind…

The white-hot bars in front of me pressed closer, and without thinking, I thrust my hand out toward them, trying to keep them from burning the rest of me. My mind screamed rejection at my own painful demise; I could not afford to die! The moment my fingers touched the flames, fire leapt from my fingertips and exploded into action, sweeping into a graceful dance with the already radiant blaze before me. The bars, which had held through the Voice’s onslaught, began to melt and drip, forming liquid puddles of molten metal in the sand. By the time the bars closed in tight enough to destroy me, I had burned through enough of the wall to step free of Her death trap.

Breathless, covered in sweat and gasping, I fell backward against the bars behind me; at the same moment, the vision of destructive fire disappeared, leaving me to stumble and fall hard on my butt in the sand. The real barred walls of my prison had not closed in on me; the Voice of Fire had manipulated the world around me to suit Her lesson. Nobody else had seen or witnessed what I had, and there was no longer any wall close enough to support me. Rubbing my backside, I listened as a prisoner in the cell across from mine guffawed at my foolishness, and the lone guard watching our cells eyed me with disdain. For all I knew, he thought I was drunk as well as dangerous. If they’d discovered that Raimen had taken his fair share of wine at Mistress Ami’s house by now, it wasn’t an unthinkable guess.

With a sigh, I got to my feet and raised my hand in an obscene gesture toward the guard. Even if his job was to watch me, he didn’t have to wear such a smug expression in the face of my awkwardness! He smirked at my rude behavior, but he was far too well trained to let such a simple expression of displeasure, even from a young woman who ought to know better, ruffle his armored feathers.

With no way out of my cell, and no flaming vision to destroy, I found myself at a loss for what to do next. We had been blindfolded once we reached the Emperor’s palace, and I had slept for hours since my initial introduction to the cell. Where they had taken Raimen and Nana was a mystery; I could not rely on their assistance. The only available option was to trust my own sense of where we had been taken, and what purpose they had planned for us.

I did not appear to be in any kind of special holding cell. Someone, presumably the guard, had left a repulsive bowl of gruel and a bucket of water near the bars, which indicated a lack of interest in starving us to death. That small kindness seemed to imply that we weren’t scheduled for death at all; an anomaly, I thought. Could the Emperor be showing us leniency because we were children? Or did he still hold out hope that someone, perhaps Master Grimm, could restore us to our “proper” place in society? Faced with either option, I might have preferred death. To undo the lessons that Master Mikhail had fought so hard to teach us seemed like the worst sort of dishonor to his life and the memory of it.

Part of me still wanted to believe that he had survived his encounter with Master Grimm, and after seeing Master Grimm spare Nana’s life, I wanted to believe it even more. Still, the odds of such a thing were not good enough to trust with that kind of hope. Alive or dead, Master Mikhail could not save us now, so there was no point in waiting for his blessing. I had two options open to me. The first was to await whatever sentencing and future the Emperor – the man who had ordered our armed removal from Master Mikhail’s cabin — had in store for us. The second option was to use any opportunity for escape, knowing that any failure that followed would guarantee my death. The Emperor, for whatever reason, had let us live, but I doubted he could be foolish enough to allow the escape of criminals from his own prison. Frightened children, he could defend, if he had a mind to.

It seemed so simple, on the surface. The most intelligent course would have been to tolerate the Emperor’s plan for us all, while keeping Master Mikhail’s guidance and respect in our hearts as we did so. Nobody could force his teaching from us; it was embedded in every drop of blood that coursed through our veins and passed through our hearts. To pretend to deny his teaching, though, the way Master Grimm would expect us to, would be a dishonor far worse than any other. Under any other teacher, we might have been able to make the best of a bad situation and emerge without further trouble. However, the specter of Master Grimm, looming over us and beating every last ounce of perceived weakness out of us, left a bitter taste in my throat. I knew the others would agree.

There was one other problem. Master Grimm’s squad consisted only of boys. I had not seen a single female in the entire time since his battle with Nana, outside of the prison cook. I had been aware of the bias against female students of the Way all my life, but that didn’t stop the reality of such a thing from infuriating me anyway. Nana and I were strong and powerful too, and our gifts were just as respectable as anyone’s. With enough training, we could have an equal chance to emerge in full command of our powers. It wasn’t as if every male succeeded in mastering their Voices. As girls, though, we were perceived as being more suited to staying home and letting the men play their war games. Mistress Ami had said so herself, and she was only one voice in a wide, vast ocean of people who agreed.

Thinking of Nana made me sadder than I expected it to. I remembered the rage on her face as she fought for control of her situation against a man she could not hope to beat. After Master Grimm’s victory, her exhaustion and injuries had made her helpless. Who knew what he had done to her? I was no fool; Master Mikhail had not been lenient in his lessons for both of us on what fate awaited women who did not learn to defend themselves, even if they were students of the Way. If Master Grimm had wanted to make Nana a slave or worse, then he could have done that with ease. The fire that we both shared made us hasty and impulsive, as well as giving us a dangerous streak; we were bright as fire in intellect as well as ability. If I could think of such a twisted possibility, a man thrice my age would have no trouble at all. Some small part of me almost missed the wild Nana in the throes of her trance; it was the first and only time I had seen her act anything approaching normal. Her silence and separation in the years we’d been together had seemed more inhuman than the raging torrent of wind that fought Master Grimm.

Raimen, on the other hand, would fare better than either of us. If he were spared – and he would be, if Mistress Ami’s claim about the Empire’s need for soldiers was true – he would have no trouble finding his way into the ranks of the elite. As much as I detested admitting it, Raimen was a gifted young man with a lot of potential for growth, magically speaking. He had proven that countless times already. His battle skills were still green, but that could change with time and practice. He was everything the Emperor and Master Grimm could want. Knowing him, that would be the very thing that would make him least want to pursue it. Underneath the bravado and foolishness, Raimen wasn’t interested in battle; he was interested in books and study and learning. Between the three of us, I was the one best suited to the life of a true warrior, and I was the one they would never take. It just didn’t make sense!

Master Mikhail had given us a chance to make sense of the world around us. He hadn’t turned away when a ragged orphan with no memory of her past showed up on his doorstep needing a place to live. He hadn’t turned away when a country boy born to selfish and demanding parents had been thrust into his hands for the purposes of a miracle. He hadn’t turned away from a strange and mysterious young woman full of secrets and shadows needed a home that only he could provide. What good could come of giving up on that chance? We hadn’t fought our fates so hard just to give up and allow them to come to this end. When we took up arms against Master Grimm in defense of our teacher, true father, and friend, we had decided, together, what we would become. Not even the Emperor could deny us our chance.

The Voice of Fire followed this trail of thought with feigned disinterest. I could feel Her in the back of my mind, mulling over my words with careful consideration. In the end, I found myself with a new sense of fiery resolve that She decided to strengthen. I suspected that there was some part of my theory that she didn’t approve of, much as she had had misgivings about Master Grimm’s behavior, but the whole was acceptable enough to tolerate. As long as she was satisfied to the point of not stopping me, my answer was clear enough to me: I could not remain silent and obedient any longer. Escape was best attempted sooner rather than later, while I was still considered unpredictable and dangerous. If I waited much longer, they might have the presence of mind to bring in heavier guards bearing the anti-magical wards that Master Grimm’s squad had used on us.

Then, just as I was trying to formulate a plan, the Voice of Fire decided to assist me in my attempt. I could feel intense heat begin to radiate from my body, strong enough to alarm anyone near me, but not enough to cause my own discomfort. Not long after that, the air around me began to shimmer with the same distortion that a raging bonfire would have emitted. It took the guard outside less than a moment to react; he was concerned about my recent behavior from the fall already, and had been paying closer attention to me since the incident. It was far too late to regret the obscene gesture I’d given him that encouraged his attention, too. I was learning to think well enough when action was impossible, but doing so when faced with a more immediate option was still a challenge, it seemed.

The guard grabbed the bars of my cell, lines of worry and stress creasing his forehead. “What are you doing in there, woman? Answer me now and stop at once. I warn you…”

The Voice in my mind laughed at him. I tried not to allow Her laughter to become my own. Instead, I set my jaw and tried to will the Voice into creating more of a ruckus. She was all too happy to oblige; the words in my mind turned away from laughter and into an inhuman, ethereal song. Visible smoke began to rise from my prison rags, and I could see the rough edges of the material beginning to char. It looked for all the world as if I were burning myself to death, in order to escape the march of justice and the step of the law. If it had been possible for the guard to ignore me before, it was anything but possible now.

In a panic, the guard fumbled with the keys on his belt, at last arriving at the one he needed to open my cell after several minutes. If I had truly been attempting suicide, I would have been ash and soot long before his success. He tried to shout for help, but the lack of resulting footsteps seemed to indicate that our location wasn’t within range of anyone that could have helped him subdue me. What a fool the Emperor was, to leave me so unguarded! Why had Master Mikhail tried to defend such a man and his foolish actions?

Then, I had to pause. Nobody could be that foolish, least of all an old man like the Emperor. My escape was proving to be just too simple. Was it possible that he had expected this to happen? Or had he truly, in his foolish bias, assumed that no woman could be a threat to him? I had not anticipated the Voice’s interest in aiding my escape, but even without Her, I was not helpless enough to accept his mercy so easily. He had to know that! But the guard was in my cell, advancing on me. I had no more time to wonder.

He drew his blade, and thinking with a mind that was more Voice than my own, I reached out to grasp the sharp metal with both hands, one on each flat side of the blade. Free of Her influence, I did not doubt I would have done myself a great deal of unintentional harm. Unprepared for such a maneuver, the guard paused for a single moment; enough for the Voice of Fire to act. The metal blade, just like the metal prison bars from my dream-vision, began to melt. The guard watched, stupefied, as his blade dripped onto his crisp uniform and sturdy boots, leaving only a lame hilt behind. The heat from the metal began to scorch through his clothes and onto his skin beneath; that was enough to send him rushing out of the prison, screaming for help, the cell door wide open toward freedom.

As I rushed out into the prison hallway and into full view of the other prisoners, the Voice’s effects on my body began to dissipate. The prisoners were cheering me on. The man who had laughed at me for my spill in the sand now smiled like a saint poised in a temple garden, assuming that I would be taking the time to free him and the other prisoners. I knew they wanted freedom as much as I did, but if the guard managed to find help, my window of opportunity would slide shut faster than I could predict. Furthermore, I had no way of knowing if these criminals were in need of a chance to change their fates, like myself, or true criminals for which redemption could not be possible. I had no time to look back or to think. Action was necessary, and to fail to act would destroy all that I had done so far. With their assistance, I might have raised a small army to distract from my escape. However, with speed and secrecy at their most necessary, such a thing would have been more of a risk than a benefit.

I would have to trust in myself – but also in the Voice of Fire, my constant companion – to find my friends and flee the Emperor’s grasp. It would be a long and dangerous journey. I could only pray that the Voice would not steer me astray. The shouts and curses of the disappointed prisoners accompanied me into the shadows, where I would make my home until I could determine what had happened to my friends.

Behind us, pinpoints of light in the darkness of the night betrayed the Empire’s continued search for the ruffians responsible for the destruction of an imperial citizen’s home and property. Our trail, made in haste and panic, had not been hard to pick up for the guards or their lithe, intelligent search hounds. The guards were slower, seeking information and clues to our motive and purpose, but the hounds were a constant threat, harrying our every move. Only once we had reached the thick, tangled heart of the forest had they been forced to withdraw, seeking new paths and points of access to our location. They knew where we were; it was only a matter of time before we found ourselves at their mercy. If Nana had been well, she might have shifted the wind to pass our scent along a path that we had not followed, but dwelling on that would see us to an early prison, if not an early grave.

Raimen struggled to lift his hand in a silent signal, trying not to drop Nana in the process; I followed as he led us away from the thorns and brambles that tore at our clothing and the skin beneath. Before long, we arrived at a tight circle of trees, surrounded on all sides by roughage; the sound of water rushing announced the presence of a stream. It was too dark to see well, but one thing was clear against the moonlight; Raimen’s face and body were drenched in sweat from the exertion of our escape and Nana’s added weight, and his arms were shaking with the effort required to keep her aloft. If we didn’t get Nana to wake and assist us, we would soon run out of options; the Empire’s mercy would be all that stood between us and a lifetime of serving men like Master Grimm. She couldn’t want that any more than either of us did; his presence had been the only thing to trigger her emotion prior to the village.

Before I had a chance to object, in either a violent or verbal manner, Raimen’s face was close to mine. His lips blew words into my ear that might have been soundless; for some reason the feeling made me uncomfortable. “Stay quiet. The hounds will hear us. We need to get Nana awake. It’s the only way.” His usual long-winded bluster was gone; perhaps he didn’t have the strength, or perhaps he knew fewer words would lessen the likelihood of discovery. Either option was just as possible. “How did you… how did you recover? I don’t know how to help her.”

His near-confirmation that he hadn’t been able to rescue me from the Voice of Fire’s lecture and my unconsciousness shouldn’t have surprised me, but it still served as one less hope to rely on at a bad time. In a more comfortable place, I might have berated him for his failure to heal her; this wasn’t the place or the time. We might have managed to prove to ourselves just how far we had to come in order to be the skilled warriors that Master Mikhail had tried to make us, but forced into this unintentional exile, we had no choice but to treat each other as allies and equals. It was awkward, to be certain, but there was also something galvanizing about it; a chance to try to prove ourselves again, not just to ourselves, but to each other. The respect and admiration we wanted from each other would only come if we allowed it to manifest, and only these moments of desperation seemed to remind us of that.

“Anri? Please… I can’t do this alone.”

“Sorry.” I knelt down on the ground as Raimen laid Nana down in the softest patch of moss that he could find. “I don’t think it had anything to do with me. The Voice… She decided I needed to wake up, and then I did.” It was easier than telling him how She had come to that conclusion; by naming my anger and lack of faith in Her meaningless. “I don’t think I could have come back any other way.”

“That’s not true.” Raimen’s eyes were on Nana as he spoke to me. “At least, it’s not true for me.” He sighed, and sounded again like a man much older than his age. “This has happened to me too. I just made sure you didn’t see it. I can’t control when it happens, but I know how to stop it when it does.”

“More of your advanced reading?” I couldn’t resist.

“No. The first time it happened was because of that, but… never mind that right now, I don’t have time to explain.” Raimen wiped the sweat off of his brow and looked up at me. “You took so long to wake up because you wouldn’t listen to your Voice. I never thought Nana would…” He sighed. “There’s so much about her I don’t understand. How did he ever…”

I didn’t need him to finish the thought, though it hurt to hear even the unspoken name of Master Mikhail on someone else’s lips. How had Master Mikhail ever expected Nana to be able to work with us? It was obvious I didn’t have time to ask Raimen about his assessment of why I hadn’t woken up from the fire sooner, but on the surface, his explanation did seem to make sense. Either Nana was refusing to listen to her Voice, just as I had been, or she was doing battle with the inner demons that neither of us had bothered to learn about. We had no idea what to say or do to rescue her.

On top of that, nobody had been able to rescue me. They couldn’t have felt Master Grimm’s affiliation with the Voice of Fire; they couldn’t hear it. Even if Raimen had guessed at my inward anger, he could not have known how to dispel the rest of what was going on. The Voices almost seemed to reserve these lectures for times when we needed more help than our friends could give. It was easy to see the problem; if our friends were the ones to help us through these moments of extreme stress instead of our Voices, perhaps we wouldn’t need to rely so much on them, and spend so long in their embrace. Thinking back, I realized that Raimen had been much more forthcoming and honest in his dealings with both me and Nana since we left Master Mikhail’s cabin – if he’d figured this out before I had, then that would explain everything.

“She’s been acting weird lately. Why did she try to help me? Your stunts usually make me mad, but she never cared until today.” I sat down, legs crossed, next to Nana. “She went out of her way to keep up appearances for Mistress Ami, and to make sure you and I didn’t… well, kill each other.” It seemed foolish, when I said it. “And her reaction to Master Grimm was strange too.”

Raimen nodded. “That’s not the only thing. Remember how Master Mikhail seemed to be nervous around her? There was something he was trying not to tell us, I think. He protected us for so long, both from ourselves and from each other… and he expected us to find out the truth for ourselves, before it ever mattered. The team he wanted us to be would have known.”

He was right, as much as I hated to admit it. Staring at Nana wasn’t going to bring her back to us any more than anything else was, and who was to blame? Her, for refusing to deal with her own problems – but myself and Raimen too, for not being the friends we might have been to her. It was yet another childish mistake we were responsible for.

Just as I opened my mouth to tell Raimen the same thing, a flurry of loud, echoing barks split the silence and startled both of us. We had been so engrossed in Nana and our own thoughts that we’d failed to notice a midnight-black hound creeping up on us in the darkness. Its eyes gleamed, triumphant, as it stood at attention, beckoning its master toward our hiding place with a wagging tail. It was hard to hate the beast; it was only doing its job, but it couldn’t have come at a worse moment. Even if I’d carried a weapon, the impulse to harm it might well have failed. If anything, it was just the frustrating cap on the subject we’d been discussing; even a dog could do its job better than we could.

There was no time for escape, to say nothing of opportunity. The guards were on us before we even had time to pick Nana back up from the ground. I found myself with my arms wrenched behind me by a man three times my size, as his hound sat at his feet, awaiting any attempt at sudden movement from me. Not far from me, Raimen struggled against his captor, trying to use the Voice of Water to dissuade the guard; it was a futile effort, and the shock on his face was more than apparent. I could feel it without even having to use my power; the guards were equipped with something that made all of our gifts and talents useless. We were deaf to the Voices we cherished, and They could not save us from ourselves any longer.

I found myself wondering what would happen, as a third guard advanced on Nana, who still lay motionless on the moss bed Raimen had found for her. If her link to the Voice of Wind was severed by some outside force, while she was still enthralled, would it harm her? Wake her? Do nothing at all? Whichever outcome was the truth, there was nothing either myself or Raimen could do to affect it. Our fates had passed from our own hands into the Empire’s.

At first, it looked like she might continue to sleep. The guard’s touch on her shoulder prompted her to toss her head, as if trying to rid herself of some insect perched on her nose. Then her fists clenched with renewed energy, and her teeth ground together in clear refusal to accept what was going on around her, just as they had when we’d tried to disturb her inside the burning house. Her eyes, which had closed when Raimen laid her down, opened – but they still looked inward, not out at the world.

Before any of us knew what was happening, she sat up, as dainty and polite as she had ever been, and looked straight up into the eyes of the guard. She still didn’t seem to see him, but muscle memory guided her where sight did not. For a moment that felt like an eternity, everything around her seemed to stand still. Then, the gales began to come, one after the other. Sustained rapid winds punctuated by bursting gusts that threatened to bring down the ancient forest trees themselves hammered down on us, driven by Nana’s impossible command. The hounds yelped and cowered, trying to protect themselves behind their masters; their masters could not move if they wanted to, not even in their thick blue-and-gold armor. In the bedlam, they could not hold Raimen and me; we used what remained of our energy to separate ourselves from them and stay close to each other, fighting the same gales that they were to the best of our ability. Perhaps we still had a chance for escape!

Then Nana looked at us with her sightless eyes, and we knew we still had no chance. Her body itself was beginning to change; her skin was paler than it had ever been, and her veins were visible strands of blue against the whiteness. Her blonde hair had become ash-colored and wild, and the beauty of her face now seemed cold and judgmental rather than the emotionless, shy expression we expected from her. Raimen tried to call out to her, a desperate apology for not knowing how to save her; it was this attempt that brought her at last to her feet, and her lips parted to allow for speech.

“Stay away from me. All of you… stay away!”

Her scream was enough to pierce even the moonlight. Whatever she had become, she was no longer Nana; she had reached some kind of powerful state that neither Raimen nor myself had ever managed. I wondered, for only a moment, if he even knew what it was. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her; in her right mind, she would never have condoned such a display of insanity or emotion. She could barely even tolerate my outbursts, most of the time! Whether her new changes came from her continued refusal to accept what had just happened to us, or whether they came from some result of her being interrupted, or whether she had just gone a step beyond us all somehow, she had become almost a walking, living avatar of the Voice of Wind.

In the distance, beyond the range of the blistering winds, the call of a single horn echoed beyond our panic. We watched, helpless to interfere, as Nana turned her attention in the direction of the sound. She did not have long to wait before her enemy, and an entire squad of supporting soldiers, appeared. The squad stopped and parted to reveal Master Grimm, wearing his own suit of blue-and-gold Kouda Empire armor and a massive shield etched with red glowing runes. Those runes made my head ache when I looked at them; I didn’t need to ask to know they were invocations to the Voice of Fire. I wanted to laugh at him; we’d all seen what happened when Nana’s power combined with mine! What did he think he could do to stop her?

He did not stop to think for a moment; the runes on his shield ignited into bursts of flame, causing the winds around us to become a raging firestorm not unlike the one I had caused without intending to. The unbearable heat sent those of us without armor into immediate pain; Raimen, myself and the hounds all found ourselves scrambling as best we could for distance from the blaze. The guards, protected for several minutes longer by their armor, gave chase in order to keep us followed and close at hand for instant recapture.

Nana’s face contorted with naked rage at the sight of Master Grimm, but the flames that surrounded her began to choke her and burn her frail human body. The violent winds crashed against Master Grimm, furious and unrelenting, but with the aid of his shield, all he had to do was wait out the storm. His protection from the wind and fire would sustain him long after Nana’s changed body gave out; he knew it, and risked his life on the certainty that he would win. Even as recognition of this began to form in her distant eyes, she fought harder and harder, expending more of her power and forcing us all to continue moving backward until we couldn’t see her or Master Grimm anymore. We didn’t need to; we all knew how the story would end. Nana couldn’t survive. Master Grimm would be the murderer of not only the one father we had ever had, but also the girl who should have been our sister, and instead had been only a stranger. Master Mikhail would never forgive us.

Then, it was over. Both the wind and the flames trailed off and ended at once. The guards wasted only seconds in regaining control over Raimen and me, and forced us to march ahead of them as they attempted to regroup with the ranking Master that had just saved them from the painful sting of failure. When we got close enough to see what had become of Nana, both of us felt as empty as Nana had looked in her trance.

Master Grimm had dropped his shield on the ground, no longer in need of it. Instead, he held Nana’s burned, helpless body in his arms. It was not the kind, careful embrace that Raimen had tried to give her; it was the commanding grasp of a superior; a victor standing over the loser of a grand battle. Her eyes were closed; only a tiny gasp of air pulled itself from her lungs every few moments. She was still alive – but barely. I had never once anticipated such a man to be capable of preserving life rather than ending it.

When he opened his mouth, I understood why. It might have been kinder to let her die.

“These brats have been nothing but trouble. Their fool of a Master thought kindness and friendship and teamwork would be better lessons than how to overcome the forces inside them.” He was speaking to the guards and to his squad, not to us; we didn’t rank enough in his mind to be spoken to. “You see the result of his mistake. We aren’t here to teach infants how to play. We’re here to train warriors to serve the Empire. I hope you understand the risks. It’s the only opportunity you’ll have to see what happens to you without trying it yourself. If that changes your mind, then get out while you can.”

He turned his back on his squad, just as Raimen and I came face-to-face with the realization of what was going on. Master Grimm’s squad wasn’t composed of trained soldiers, it was composed of his students; young men like Raimen who had signed up for the Empire’s personal training instead of Master Mikhail’s errant tutelage. Those students had come to watch Master Grimm defeat a fellow student who had failed, both through her own failings and those of her teacher’s. Not only did it encourage his students to give training their all, it also made him something of a hero in their eyes. Bastard though he was, he was a skilled bastard, and any one of them would have killed to be like him in that moment.

As Raimen and I were herded along by our guards, and ignored by our enemy, we knew that our choices were getting slimmer by the moment. If we somehow managed not to be put to death for the trouble we had caused in the village, we would have to answer for our flight from the Empire’s intended training – and there was no question in anyone’s mind who would decide to train us to rectify all the many perceived mistakes that Master Mikhail had made. He had been set to become our new Master from the moment we met him, and he would never take no for an answer.

If Nana hadn’t been so injured and so lost, she would have been even sicker than the rest of us. However miserable we were, and however dark the future looked for us, at least we still walked on our own two feet, rather than being carried by a monster.

She raged, and the flames grew hotter – too hot to bear. I flinched against their might, but my heart still rebelled against its dearest master. She had betrayed me, in league with that man; what reason did I still have to trust Her promises? If She could serve such a man, who else might She serve? What plans did She have for me? My friends were lost, Master Mikhail was lost, and She was lost to me. Returning to consciousness under those auspices would bring me no joy at all.

Pain lanced through my mind then. Her anger was not to be trifled with. I was a foolish child, and She would not coddle me any longer. If I had reached sufficient age to balk Her, then I had reached sufficient age to reap the benefits of that decision. I knew nothing, and as long as I rejected Her, I would continue to know nothing. I wanted to ask Her how much She knew about Her other servants, but Her patience had run out for the last time, and I found a wall of white-hot fire bearing down upon me. Dream though it might have been, I had no desire to feel my bones charred to dust. I opened my eyes, still blinded by the searing might of Her power.

When I could see again, the world around me was not what it had been, in those fleeting memories I retained since leaving Master Mikhail’s cabin. The forest, wild animals, and Nana’s wounds seemed like they had never happened. Beneath me was a soft, comfortable bed that smelled of clean linen; atop me was a pile of warm and patterned blankets that blocked my view of the rest of the room. These two things marked how far I had come from Master Mikhail, who gave us meager cots and only as much comfort as we needed to rise in the mornings prepared for training. It had always been enough. In a sudden fit of anger, I sat up and shoved the blankets back, bringing myself face to face with my new surroundings. I could not bear to be where he was not for a moment longer.

The small room around me was simple but comfortable. The wooden floor looked older than my age, and bore countless scratches and marks. The bed was against one wall, leaving the other four walls to hold only a single dresser and a rickety wooden chair. I had the feeling that looking at the chair too long might crush it to dust, to say nothing of sitting in it! I considered getting up to check inside the dresser, in order to help me figure out where I was, but the handle of the door turned then, and I found myself laying back again, unwilling to greet my visitor until I had a chance to discern whether they were friend or foe.

The woman that entered could not have been an enemy if she tried. Her age might have made her Master Mikhail’s grandmother; her back was hunched, and the gnarled staff in her bony hands was the only way she could manage to move across the short distance between the door and me. Her simple patched dress and kerchief, as well as her bare feet, marked her as a commoner without question. She smelled of cooking meat and fresh herbs, and brought the same scents with her into the air; I realized I was ravenous only when my stomach let out a growl to rival the forest beasts of my memories.

The old woman reached my bedside and glanced down at me with the aid of her staff, and the kindness in her face removed all remaining doubt I had as to her intention. She smiled, her crooked teeth showing in all their questionable glory, and her tiny, wrinkle-flanked eyes squinted to take me in. When she spoke, her voice was as old as the Kouda Empire itself.

“Yer awake. Bless the Sun and Sky, I wasn’t sure if I’d done it or not.”

Puzzled into curiosity, and relieved by the use of the familiar Empire blessing, I gave up my pretense of unconsciousness and attempted to sit up; the old woman frowned and shook her head to stop me. “Careful there, missy. Yer not damaged on th’ outside, but it’s inside I worry about. The way yer sleepin, so fitful, ain’t a healthy one.”

I knew that my body responded in a physical way to my conversations with the Voice; Raimen had only taunted me about it every single time it happened. It was possible that I had spoken as well, but from the woman’s obvious lack of concern, I assumed that I had managed to avoid giving myself away in detail. Not every citizen of the Kouda Empire could commune with the Voices or followed the Way, and some even rejected those who did as evil. One of Master Mikhail’s many duties had been to teach us subterfuge in the name of protecting ourselves from such well-meaning bias, but thanks to Master Grimm, we had not received that training yet. We had only just begun to learn how to use our power at all, to say nothing of hiding it.

We. My mind seized on Raimen and Nana at last, and I struggled against the woman’s protests to sit up. “My… friends… are they…?” It was strange at first, calling them my friends in the open, but the need for simplicity in my story was best, until I knew more about what I was dealing with. Master Grimm’s actions had left us alone with each other, and if we could not call each other friends now, then we might never again. I found myself having more trouble with that thought than I had with voicing the word in the first place.

The woman smiled and patted me on the shoulder, though the sigh that accompanied it was a clear indicator that she disapproved of my disobedience. “They are well, missy. Trouble yerself not. Th’ girl had some scratches and th’ boy a few bruises, but I cleaned ‘em up fine, I did.” She leaned her staff against my bed, and before I could warn her not to, shuffled over to sit in the dangerous wooden chair nearby. To my utter shock, it bore her weight without a creak of protest. “It is yerself I feared for. Three days, ye’ve slept, with no wounds to show for it. I feared ye might be mad.”

Mad, indeed! I couldn’t help myself. “There’s nothing wrong with my mind, grandma. I was just tired. We’ve… been a long way.” How much did she know of what had happened to us? What had Raimen and Nana told her? They weren’t present to ask, or even to give me clues about what story they had concocted. Why couldn’t they make this easy?

She chuckled, and I found myself almost relieved that I hadn’t offended her. She had no tact, but then, neither did I; and she had saved us, if her words could be believed. I had no right to give her the same kind of hassle that I gave Master Mikhail or either of my friends. It had been so long since I’d been in the company of anyone other than those three that I still had a lot to learn. “Beg pardon, I meant no offense. Th’ boy said yer temper is legend in certain circles. If yer bark gets worse than yer bite, he said, ye’d be fine again. All’s well, then. That’s all I need to know.”

I scowled. As soon as I found out where Raimen was hiding, he’d get his! Still, though, he was right. My strength was returning, and I no longer felt the oppressive heat and overwhelming demands that the Voice had driven into me. I felt as right as I ever had when it came to physical function. My heart, however, had other distractions that weighed as heavy as my knife arm had the night before. What had become of Master Mikhail and Master Grimm? Where could we go now? Where had we ended up? If Raimen and Nana were already fine, then they had control of the situation here that I did not. I didn’t have to think for very long why that knowledge bothered me!

The old woman rose from her seat, bearing her weight on the chair, and I thought for the second time that there should be no human light enough to try that trick and succeed. Despite appearances, however, she made her way back to my bed and picked up her staff again. “Unless yer nose is broken, I guess ye smell good things here. This is my home, missy, and yer friends are tuckin’ away breakfast as we speak. If yer well enough, ye might as well join ‘em. Some food after three days would do ye good, skinny as ye are especially.”

I blinked – Nana was the skinny one, not me. But then, old women were legendary for their eternal authority on food and the presenting thereof. I tried on a smile and found that it fit better than I expected it to. “Thanks, grandma. For everything. I don’t know why you helped us, but…”

She seemed surprised at this. “Why would I not help ye? Children, lost in th’ forest without their parents? Why, yer parents must be worried sick. Anyone would do as much, bless the Sun and Sky. The Kouda Empire has not fallen from grace, child.” Confirmation, then, that she did not know our true nature or our recent past! Thanks to her indignation, she did not notice the relief on my face before continuing. “Once yer fed and bathed and comfortable, we’ll get yer things and see ye home. It’s the least I can do.”

I watched her shuffle out the door, leaving me to come at my own pace to breakfast. On the one hand, we had somehow found our way to a kind soul that had helped us despite our suspicious situation. On the other hand, her ignorance was soon going to be our downfall. I wondered if Raimen or Nana knew her plan to see us “home.” If they didn’t, things were going to get interesting, and fast.

Breakfast, however, was the first order of business. I was not at all sure that my stomach would forgive any other plan!

***

By the time I arrived at the breakfast table, there were only scraps remaining; if you could call platters still half-laden with food “scraps.” The sheer magnitude of the feast laid out before us might have at one time shocked and amazed me; what remained was a proper meal that Master Mikhail might have served – for all four of us. If my prior thought toward the duties of old women in feeding younger mouths was true, this woman was a saint in the making! Even what was left was more food than I had ever seen before in one place.

Raimen leaned back on the rear two legs of his wooden chair, looking like a stuffed turkey, a bandage wrapped around his upper arm and another around his forehead. Nana too looked a little plumper than usual, but she had no such lack of manners; she sat with her knees crossed and her head lowered in her usual polite fashion. Now that I was awake, I had zero difficulty believing that Raimen had already healed every single wound the two of them had; the bandages were just for show. Of course, he couldn’t heal me; the Voice of Fire would burn forever, even through his healing waves.

“Glad to see you’re still alive, Anri. I was starting to worry that I’d have to find another wife, and Nana wasn’t interested.”

Raimen was picking a fight with a full belly. I wondered if he knew how stupid that was. The old woman watched with a soft smile and rosy cheeks as I glowered at him across the table, but Raimen’s grin was triumphant. I opened my mouth to berate him, but he held up a slow, gentle hand to stop me. “Now, now. You don’t have to say anything. You know you’re the only one for me, dearest. We shouldn’t embarrass Mistress Ami, of course.” I knew in my heart he was making fun of me, but the look he was giving me seemed to suggest a deeper meaning to his words. Confused, I paused long enough to sit down at the table myself.

Then it hit me. He’d given her “his” version of our relationship, not the truth. Worse – if I wanted to maintain the obvious facade, I would have to go along with it! I thought Nana hunched over further at Raimen’s words; had he been using her in my stead? That would be too easy. Perhaps she just didn’t like lying. She had always been the most honest of the three of us; Master Mikhail always got a straight answer from her. If she knew how to lie, none of us had ever seen it. If anything, Raimen was in control of this situation, not Nana, and it was his game I would have to play. All at once I wished I could go back to bed!

Busying myself with filling my plate, I tried to focus on the information he had given me rather than his words. The flush of repressed anger darkened my cheeks enough to make me look shy, at least, which managed to suit Raimen’s plan well enough without words for the time being. The woman’s name was Mistress Ami, and thanks to Raimen’s outrageous lies, she had no idea of the truth of what had happened to us. If I didn’t have those fragmented memories of the night before, and of losing Master Mikhail, I might even believe the lie myself. Here we were, sitting around the kitchen table, eating a magnificent breakfast like the best of friends, a young couple in love and their… well, whatever Nana was supposed to be. Master Mikhail was the strategist in the cabin, and barring him, Raimen was the undisputed best of us to be handling things. Against my better judgement, I would have to trust and follow his lead.

Without warning, and without looking up, Nana interjected. “Leave her alone. She just woke up and is eating now. You have a lot to learn about women.”

I almost choked on the spoonful of food I had shoveled in; Mistress Ami chortled and Raimen blinked in disbelief, peering at Nana as if he had just met her for the first time. Had Nana just defended me? And made a joke at the same time? It couldn’t be! Still, her life was in as much danger as ours; it was as important to her to keep the story flowing as it was to us. I just hadn’t expected her to be any better at it than I was!

Raimen coughed to hide his momentary lapse in control, then resumed his previous bluster. “I tell you, Mistress Ami, what has happened to the young women of our great Empire? They could take a lesson from you, ma’am. Putting food on the table, mending wounds and caring for children are skills more worthy than a sharp tongue or a sharp wit. Don’t you agree?” I could feel my foot twitching with the urge to kick him before he even finished. He was playing his usual superiority card to the hilt – as well he might. The majority of the Empire believed that women should be seen and not heard, so he was only making his story more believable by doing so.

As I expected, Mistress Ami nodded, and a note of sadness crept into her voice. “It’s true that many young women these days lack the respectability they ought to have. So many go off to war and waste their precious lives instead of bolstering th’ Empire with new children. Ye know, half th’ women in our little village shaved their heads and lied when th’ recruiters came last week. Some wanted to protect their menfolk. Some just wanted to fight. I’ll never understand.” She shook her head, but then smiled back at Raimen. “Still though, laddy, ye’ll never do better than a woman who does all those things and still has th’ time to sass ye right back. A smart gal is worth thrice the dumb ones.” Her smile in my direction, despite the uncouth way I was gulping breakfast down, was approving at least.

Raimen squirmed in his seat, but I could tell that something else was bothering him other than the fact that the old woman had just put him in his place. His gaze strayed to the door and back to Mistress Ami, and I began to realize he was looking for an exit strategy, perhaps to avoid the possibility of my temper interrupting his tale! When he spoke, I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “With all those women joining the Empire’s forces, I gather they are in need of a few good men? I was thinking of joining myself, but I fear for my lovely wife, left behind while I fight. My cousin might care for her, but without a firm hand, I might come back to nothing but ashes.” By now, the look in Nana’s eyes was bordering on treason as much as mine was! They didn’t even look like cousins. Raimen was treading on the thinnest ice I had ever seen. It was only a matter of time before he fell through, but what other lead did we have?

Our time, it seemed, was shorter than any of us knew. Mistress Ami paused, her kind eyes narrowing into the studious squint she had first used on me. “Indeed, laddy, they are searching. They have searched every town from here to th’ Empire’s seat in th’ Great East. How is it that ye have managed to elude them all this time? I would think that they would be difficult to miss, desperate as they are. A young lad like ye, they would never have overlooked, if they had seen ye.”

For the first time in my life, I watched panic begin to spread across Raimen’s face. He had miscalculated! He paused to take a drink, and I realized that Nana was holding her breath. Could he get out of this one?

“Well, you see, Mistress Ami… um, my cousin isn’t well, and… uh, I’ve been having to care for her in private. Away from cities and villages. The crisp forest air does her good.”

The old woman shook her head, and the look she gave us now was more than suspicious. “Laddy, we have spent th’ last three days together. Your concern for your wife to be has kept ye and yer cousin sheltered and fed here that long. I believed everything ye told me. But now, ye’ve betrayed yer own word. A boy accustomed to living in the forest could not have gotten lost as ye claim. Yer cousin is as well as anyone I have ever treated with my herbs. I would know if she were not. And with th’ way your wife lay screamin’ in her sleep for three days…” She pursed her wrinkled lips and set her jaw. “I wonder if there is not more to ye than meets th’ eye.”

Raimen was done for, and he knew it. His face fell and he slumped over at the table, no longer the cocky young man he had been playing at. I knew what would come next, as it always had when Master Mikhail caught him in some trap or another; begging. From the look on Mistress Ami’s face, she wasn’t about to feel sympathy for a caught liar.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I couldn’t tell you the truth… please forgive me… we’ve been through so much, and… if they catch us… we’ll…”

Mistress Ami did what any sensible citizen of the Kouda Empire would do with such a statement. She frowned and turned on a heel toward her own front door. No citizen of our Empire had ever failed to stand in defense of truth, honor or justice; our people were too proud and too strong to harbor or accept evil. She had no idea what we were, but now that Raimen had called into question our true nature, she could not determine whether we were friend or foe to the Empire and its interests. Rather than guess for herself, she would call the authorities to guess for her. It was the right thing to do. None of us could blame her.

“Don’t say another word, laddy. Speak your lies to the Empire instead. I have heard enough.” Her words hit Raimen as if she had thumped him with her staff; he didn’t even bother to lift his head from the table as she shuffled her slow way to the door, stepped outside and closed it behind her. It would not take her long to find a single village guard; most places in the Kouda Empire were manned by civilians under the employ of the Empire in some fashion, or hired guards direct from the Empire’s seat in places where extreme security was needed. Raimen had led us to disaster.

I stood bolt upright from my chair at the same time Nana did, but Nana failed to realize that she still had the corner of the tablecloth tucked down her shirt to protect her clothing from fallen food. Between the resulting tug on the entire surface of the table, and my own panicked scramble out of my chair, several things went flying; platters of food, drink glasses, empty plates; and a candle, which immediately proved that the liquid in Raimen’s glass was alcohol by catching fire and tracing a line of liquid flame toward my empty seat.

I had only a moment to blink before I doubled over, clutching my head in pain. I knew what was happening, though the knowledge seemed a part of someone else’s mind; the fallen candle’s proximity to my location, combined with the sudden rush of anger and panic I felt near it, was adding fuel to an already dangerous blaze and magnifying it tenfold. No matter how hard I tried to think happy thoughts, or pretend that I wasn’t afraid or furious, my heart knew the truth; it was my heart that the fire obeyed. I knew such things were possible, for Master Mikhail had told us tales of those who communed with their Voices much deeper than I did, but those tales were of men and women far older and wiser than me. I wasn’t ready; I had never thought that She might be ready before I was, and refuse to wait for me.

As I tried in vain to stop the spread, it became faster and more violent than any fire I had seen outside the one from my earlier unconsciousness. In desperation, I fought for enough control over my body to turn my head, seeking my friends; they were the only ones who could help me now. What I found, however, shocked me almost more than the fire itself. Helpless tears streamed down Nana’s face; she was on her knees, her fists clenched with emotion that I couldn’t even begin to fathom. She moved only enough to cause her frail shoulders to tremble. There was only one explanation I could think of, though it left me more confused than ever about our friendship; Nana heard the Voice of Wind. If she had lost control, as I had, then our unchecked Voices would combine to form a song that neither of us could bear to hear. The inferno would build until only ashes and dust remained.

Raimen jumped back from the table, but he still had full control of himself; of course. I didn’t need to think long on why. His extra study with Master Mikhail’s advanced tomes, and his healing prowess, indicated a level of training that we girls had not been privy to yet. If he could control it enough to use it at will, then he also had the power to hold it back to some degree. He bent down and shook Nana’s shoulders, but her eyes were glazed over and the tears still fell, as if nothing in the world mattered to her anymore; she would die without intervention as much as I would. Unable to reach her, he did the only thing he could think of to bring one of us back to our senses.

He walked over to me, hesitated, and then kissed me full on the mouth.

When I blinked next, I was standing in the same sea of fire, with Nana still senseless, and Raimen nursing a nose that was unmistakably broken. We had no time to blame each other; the fire was climbing into the rafters and rushing toward the door itself. If we didn’t find a way to get ourselves and Nana outside, we were all dead – our status as traitors and fugitives from the Empire wouldn’t even matter.

We knew what had to be done. Raimen picked up Nana and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of grain. She fought him without seeing him at first, but her tiny fists were meaningless against him and she gave up within moments. I had just enough time to follow them before a deafening crack echoed throughout the house; the roof was splintering in two. Soon it would fall down on top of us, trapping us in a blaze of our own making. Though I could not deny it was what we deserved, we had not meant to cause such mayhem, and I didn’t want to die, even for such a reprehensible act.

If we were not fugitives and criminals before, we were now to be sure; we could not have come out of this situation any worse than we had. I didn’t want to think it, but Master Mikhail’s words came back to haunt me as we made our way toward the door. He had said that we didn’t know how to use our powers, and that if we didn’t learn, we might harm ourselves or others. Without the Empire to aid us in learning, would there be other such disasters in our future? What would we do if there were? How many other innocent lives would we destroy in our quest to flee our inevitable fate? There was no time for such thoughts, but I thought for only a moment that I understood what Master Mikhail had meant about learning when to breathe fire. If I had not been so angry with Raimen at the moment the candle fell, and if I had not jumped to action before thinking first, perhaps we wouldn’t be here now. Nana had reacted to my panic, which surprised me to no end, but my flame had acted first; I was to blame.

Together we pressed toward the door, dodging smoke, fallen furniture and twisted, charred masses of fallen rafters. Raimen burned his hands on the doorknob without so much as a moment of hesitation; there was no time to tell him how stupid he was for not using his clothing to protect himself. He would just heal it all later, of course.

Beyond the door, I could see Mistress Ami on her knees, staring back into the destruction of her home, her staff thrown aside and tears catching in the wrinkles of her cheeks. A small semi-circle of citizens stood around her, having pulled her away from the burning wreck for protection once the fire began. Not a single one made any motion to seek aid for the house itself; it was as obvious to them as it was to any of us that it would be a complete loss. The only help they could offer the poor old woman would be a place to stay. From the look of her, she might not live long anyway, after the stress of losing everything she owned combined with our selfish betrayal of her trust.

I made a silent vow to myself as I followed Raimen and Nana outside into the fresh air, my nose and lungs still filled with black smoke. If she lived, I would find a way to repay her someday for the wickedness that we – I – had committed that day. Though our destruction of her home had been unintentional, and though she could never have known how she threatened our welfare by choosing to do the right thing, she did not deserve this. We would have to find a way to control ourselves; and until then, we would have to stay away from places bearing a large population. There was no choice, unless we wanted to harm others again.

I could feel Mistress Ami’s eyes on me as I passed, and her senseless babbling began to form into words that I could understand.

“I knew it all along… something wasn’t quite right… not healthy to sleep like the dead. I know now what she is. She’s a witch! An undead witch!”

The word echoed in my ears as I ran again with Raimen and Nana into the forest to escape any guards that might follow our footsteps. It seemed that the only thing that had changed since I was last conscious was our ability to wreak unintentional havoc on the world around us. I couldn’t help but think of Master Grimm, with his proud cruelty and disregard for human kindness; he would have looked at this and laughed. He might have even ordered it done. I didn’t know him well, but I knew enough from that one encounter that he was not to be trusted. Master Mikhail… no, I couldn’t even begin to think of what he would say if he saw us at that moment. Perhaps, if I lived long enough, I would find a way to erase the shame I felt.

The Voice of Fire was, as always, right when She spoke to me in my dreams. I had failed. I had failed Her, my friends, and an innocent old woman of the Empire, all for the sake of my own freedom. Next time, I would have to make a different choice. After all, I was not a witch – I was a Dragon, the most honorable of legendary creatures. Master Mikhail had named me; I would carry that name to my death.

It was time to start living up to it, in more ways than just my temper.

In the end, the voice that spoke stunned us all, perhaps most because it was not mine. If Nana had ever broken a silence before that moment, we had never known it. “What has happened, Master? You said we must know.”

Her brave words, spoken in her usual dream-like monotone, convinced Master Mikhail to cease his hesitation and let out his breath in a huge sigh. “You are correct, Nana. Though I have thought long and hard on how best to spare you from this, I cannot escape fate.” A bare suggestion of a wry smile crossed his face as he turned back to the rest of us. “Your Dragon, of any of you, knows best how I feel at this moment. I wish to breathe fire, and yet I am choked by the duty I have to myself, and to you, not to.”

I frowned as Nana and Raimen glanced my direction. It was obvious to anyone that I knew something of breathing fire. Master Mikhail knew I had no hope of holding it back!

“Does that mean you’re angry with us?” Raimen spoke this time, his hands searching with poor aim for his pockets. He, more than any of us, had reason to fear that! Had Master Mikhail noticed his excessive reading habit at last?

Master Mikhail shook his head. “I fear I have been angry with you for the last time, my students, and that is what troubles me so. Had I known, I would have made it count.” Our full attention rested on him, then, and on his words. Even Nana no longer looked beyond him.

I was the first to recover from the shock. “What do you mean, last time? We’re barely into our training, you can’t just leave us! We’ve come so far…” Had we at last pushed his patience too far? Myself, with my foolish challenge? Raimen, with his clandestine practices? Nana, with her lack of participation?

His eyes clouded over with an emotion I could not place as either grief or rage. “Rest easy on that, at least, my Dragon. I would never leave you by my own choice. Your weaknesses, though they are many, make me love you all the more. But the world will not see them that way. It is the world that must see them now.”

The door opened behind us with a loud creak, and Master Mikhail’s hand jumped to his blade’s hilt as the three of us whirled to greet the intruder. I did not need to glance at the others to know that they shared my immediate and intense dislike of the stranger. He was tall but muscled, twice the width of Master Mikhail, and the thick, greasy manes of black hair and black mustache he wore served to make him look bearlike. His clothing was simple but well made, in the familiar blue and gold of our own Kouda Empire, and bore a great many complicated designs and badges on the shoulders. Whoever he was, he was high-ranking military, and where he walked, oceans trembled in his wake. He did not deign to hide it from us, children that we were, let alone from Master Mikhail.

Master Mikhail greeted him, if his words could be called a greeting. “I believe I requested some time to inform them, Master Grimm. I have had but a moment.”

Master Grimm sneered beneath his mustache. I imagined I could smell his foul breath between his yellowing teeth. “A moment is all you need. You were always long-winded, Mikhail. Maybe if you’d talked less, they wouldn’t be here now.”

The absence of the “Master” honorific when addressing Master Mikhail could not be mistaken for anything other than an insult. I bristled, and Raimen took a step forward, but Nana made no motion, her veiled gaze now locked dead with the stranger’s face. He was not immune to her charms, teenager though she was, and it was with clear disgust that he looked away from her and back to Master Mikhail. “Taught this one to make eyes at gentlemen, have you, Mikhail? That’s bad for her, pretty thing as she is. Where they’re going, I won’t be able to babysit her like you do.”

Again, Nana surprised us all by speaking. “Baby me at your peril.” We stared at her, stunned by the offensive comment to anyone, let alone a powerful military officer. Was this the same Nana who had ignored us for years?

Master Grimm laughed, a loud, obnoxious bellow that made us all want to punch him just to remove the source of the noise. He moved toward Nana with more speed than we had expected from such a hulk of a man, and his grubby hand shot out to grasp her pale, skinny arm. When he pulled, it was like pulling a child’s doll off of a bed. Nana stumbled and fell, Master Grimm’s power the only thing keeping her aloft. Her lashes ceased to veil her eyes then, and the look she gave him delved deeper into hatred than any of us had reason to see before. He himself paused, uncertain, before smiling a gap-toothed grin at her. “It would seem, missy, that your Master hasn’t taught you to respect your elders.”

Master Mikhail’s sword was halfway out of its scabbard by the time Nana stumbled. When he spoke, there was an edge of warning in his voice that went beyond the ones we had heard as punishment over the years. “Master Grimm. Your orders are clear, and I will obey them without question. However, invading my home and mistreating my students is an abuse of power that will not go unpunished. I came here to do as you wish. Unless you want further trouble, I suggest you allow me to finish. This will take far longer, and will be far more difficult, if you do not.”

“Is that a threat, Mikhail? You must keep plenty of blackwine in that cellar of yours. You’d have to be drunk on something, to challenge me after so many years nursing babies in the forest.” Master Grimm laughed, and thrust Nana away from him as if she were no more than a sack of meal. As the only one not in the immediate path of the brewing storm, I found myself forced to catch her. She did not want my help; she pulled away from me as if my touch burned her, and stood tall and proud before her attacker again. I knew what it was like to feel the heat of my anger manifest, but for the first time in my life, I felt as if I could hear the wind howling like that of a monsoon storm, enraged and proud, ready to destroy everything it touched. If I weren’t still pretending to know better, I would have called it proof that the Voice of Nature did indeed have multiple Voices.

At last, I found my voice. “Get out!” Nana’s anger, and Master Mikhail’s, were becoming infectious, and I wasn’t about to be the last one yelling at this oversized monster! “I don’t know who you are or what you’re here for, but Master Mikhail was trying to tell us something important. Those marks on your sleeve are pretty, but standing in line is something that we all do, not just those of us without uniforms.”

He glowered at me, and might have resorted to violence again, had Master Mikhail not stepped forward and blocked my sword arm with his body. “Silence, Dragon.” He did not look at me; his eyes were for his fellow Master alone. “That goes for you all. What I have to tell you concerns Master Grimm, and now it has become even harder to tell you.” If looks could kill by themselves, Master Grimm would have ceased to concern us in that moment. “Master Grimm, wait outside until I have done what I must. I will keep you waiting no longer than necessary. If you suspect me of treason, so be it, but I will not have you entering my home like a common criminal, whatever your rank may be. If you leave now, the Emperor will not hear of your misconduct this day.”

Master Grimm shook his head and turned his massive back on us all, heading for the door. I half expected him to walk through it, reducing it to so many splinters, but he did not. Something about his face when Master Mikhail called me “Dragon” seemed to change, but he did not allow me more than a moment to notice. With no further word, he opened the door, took his leave and then slammed it behind him, the force of the slam making our heads ache and our bodies tremble. Beast though this Master Grimm was, the power he commanded had to be envied; at least I thought so. The others were glad to be rid of him, and little else.

Master Mikhail sighed, at last resigned to his duty. Before a moment had passed, he found the strength to continue his speech to us.

“Master Grimm, as you can see, is very high up the chain of command in the Empire’s military. He and I are of equal stature, in fact, though he lives at the side of the Emperor and I choose to live here in the forest with you as my students. He has trained a great many children in the Way, just as I have. Most no longer live. The ones that do are great warriors, destined for the blessings of the Gods.”

He paused. “You know that my teachings are not what other Masters expect. They have run counter to the Emperor’s expectations for a great many years. It seems the time has come for my incorrect teaching to end.”

“Incorrect?” My voice was louder than I expected. “We’re the best! Sure, we make mistakes, we’re nowhere near a team, but… but…”

“You are behind.” The sadness in his voice betrayed him at last. “Or so they would have you believe. You know that other children your age have seen their first war, and still others have died in it. The world is a fearsome place, and with each day that dawns, new enemies come to our great Empire, seeking glory or riches. They believe that battle is the only thing that matters. I wanted…”

His voice broke, and it frightened us all more than anything he could have said at that moment. “I wanted you to know you were not alone in the world, before you had to face that reality. On each other you must rely to survive, not just in battle, but in life. That is why I held you back, why I never pushed you as hard as the Emperor demanded. Now, you must survive in a world that will not look kindly on you for my choices.”

Raimen’s hands were shaking. I watched him clench them in his pockets to ward it off. “So you will no longer be our Master. Instead, we are to go with that man.” It was not a question, it was a statement, and Master Mikhail could do nothing but nod in affirmation. “He will fix the mistakes he sees in us. What then?”

Nana answered him, but in her usual, emotionless way. “Then we go to war, with the enemies of our Empire. We destroy them so that we may live.”

Master Mikhail’s voice was growing more quiet by the moment. “Nana is correct. They will ask you to fight, and die, for this Empire that you love so well. As followers of the Way, they will expect you to have powers that you do not, and skills that you do not. They will teach you all that you need to know in how to kill a man, or a woman. For Anri, and for Nana, these days will be dark indeed. The Emperor knows that war games are not for women. I have indulged you too far, by his eyes. You must prove to him that you are worth training.”

At that moment, I realized that everyone’s eyes were on me. Uncomfortable with the sudden attention, I tried to figure out if I had spoken out of turn or moved to follow through with some action. Instead, I realized my cheeks were wet with tears. Embarrassed, I dragged my sleeve across my face, but the wetness remained. I had to admit, if only to myself, that I was terrified. Not only were we losing the man I adored as a father figure in my life, but chances were good that we would all be separated. Raimen, the last person I would have chosen to stay with, and Nana, the strange girl that I would never understand, were not friends, but they were all I had known in life. To lose them was to lose all that remained of my history. I still had so much to learn; I wasn’t ready to be on my own! And it was obvious that Master Mikhail’s heart was breaking as much, or more, than mine was. But what could we do? The beast still lumbered outside, awaiting his call to take us away, and Master Mikhail could no longer keep us.

“They won’t take us.” Raimen’s voice was harder than I had ever heard it, and looking up at him then, I caught a glimmer of the man I had seen the night before, when he healed the wound in my hand. The foolish boy was gone, and in his shoes and clothing stood a man of no small power and no small intellect. I could not sort out in my mind whether his voice made me want to hate him, or to follow him to the ends of the earth. “We escape, of course. That brute looks to be all strength. Most of us here aren’t. There must be a way to get free and follow our own path back here.”

Master Mikhail was a man divided at these words. At once his face shone with pride, and then fell in an instant back to despair. “If you choose that path, my Breaker, know the dangers you face. They will hunt you. They will always hunt you. The war they lead you to will rage, with or without you, and your hands will not be able to join them. Right now, you may not believe there will be a reason to fight and to die. That may not always be true. War is always the last resort, but there are things in life that are worth fighting for. Joining the military after such an act will be impossible.”

“Then we fight alone.” I wondered if Raimen had lost whatever remained of his mind when he chose to continue his argument. Despite the fear we could all see in him, he was not to be dissuaded from his newfound goal. “The three of us. We’ll make it work.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, and at the sound he flinched as if I had struck him the way I’d wanted to for years. Frustration won out in the end, however, and he rounded on me with every ounce of courage he possessed. “What choice do we have, Anri? Either we get caught up in this trap that’s been laid for us, or we run and try to find our own way. Neither option is best, but do you want to be a slave? If they control us now, they control us the rest of our lives. I can’t imagine you a slave for long.”

He was right about that! The future, however, I had not stopped to ponder much beyond the eventual necessity of needing to form a team under Master Mikhail. The things that were being spoken of – war, control, death in battle – had never been concrete ideas in my mind until now. The tears on my cheeks were more than enough proof of how terrified I was; I needed not tell Raimen the truth when my heart betrayed it for me. The other option, though, was to trust my life, such as it was, to this boy, this Breaker, whom I could not look at without consequence; or the girl that seemed never to see me at all. Even now she looked through me, as if trying to hone in on a tiny speck on the wall somewhere behind me. What she was looking for, I would never know, but if I placed my life in her hands, I would have to help her find it. I had enough problems of my own!

“Consider this as well, my students.” Master Mikhail broke our silence for us, which was just as well; I had not formulated a response that suited me yet. “The Voices that speak to each of you have not done more than whisper as yet. You know this as well as I do. Without training, the first Words She speaks may destroy you, to say nothing of your own first Words.” His eyes rested on Raimen then, which made both of us shift in place. Raimen had a sudden urge to scratch his head and look downward while doing it. He knew! “You grow in power every day now, but without proper guidance, you may not live to use the full extent of your abilities. Under the Emperor, you might.”

A thought came to me then, a dangerous one that I dared not speak aloud. If we learned to use our powers, could we not then use them to put an end to those that forced our hands into such decisions? If the Emperor wanted us, he could have us, in a blaze of fire.

“No, my Dragon.” Of course, Master Mikhail knew what I was thinking! “You may think this is the Emperor’s doing, and it is, but he acts for the good of us all. He is not your enemy. The world is your enemy; this world full of fear and suspicion and danger between men, women, children, animals and even the ground you now walk on. His path is to find unity between them all, and what he does, he does to this end. Right now, his hand has put you all in a dangerous place, and I suspect he knows not the full extent of what he has done, but this is not aimed at us. I cannot believe that, not while I know him and serve him.”

A voice interrupted our thoughts from outside – it seemed Master Grimm had tired of waiting again. “Finish your goodbyes, Mikhail, or I’ll finish them for you. I’ve been more than patient.”

“We have to decide.” Raimen’s eyes, blue as the ocean, were as black as a stormy sea. “We can’t stay here any longer.” Before Nana or myself could react, he knelt down on the cabin floor in front of us and bowed his head. “Master Mikhail has taught us to stand together in the face of danger. Whatever we decide, we must decide it as one. What will you do? Anri? Nana?”

I bit my lip almost in two. How dare he put all the pressure on us? How dare he insist that we were to choose? It was true, he’d given us all his thoughts already, but still, how many times had he played the “older and wiser” card, or the “man chooses” card in our past to his benefit? Then I knew, and the knowing came deeper than it ever had before; the time for childish games was over. This was not Raimen the boy, taunting us, pulling hair and threatening to marry me for the billionth time. This was Raimen the growing man, reaching out to us as equals, as partners, in a moment of weakness. He was right – if we didn’t stand together, we had no chance and no choice in what followed. I would never follow him for the sake of following him, I would sooner die; but could I, should I, follow him because he was right? Or was there another way that none of us had seen yet?

I had thought Nana would flee, if forced to rely on either of us. She had not given us any indication that she trusted us or would protect us, if need came. Neither of us had expected much from her, once we had graduated past Master Mikhail’s influence. Yet in the end, she was the first to reach down and rest one of her dainty white hands on Raimen’s head without so much as a flinch. “I will not give myself to a man like him.” We knew she meant Master Grimm, even if she would not speak his name herself. “I fear no Emperor, but if he wished my consent, he would not send such a man. Perhaps in time he will understand.”

It was the largest number of words I had heard from her. In her own way, she was as serious as Raimen was now. That left me, and I had yet to find my own answers. Master Grimm’s heavy breathing on the back of the door, and the movements of his giant shadow beneath it, seemed to mark each second of my indecision. It wasn’t that Raimen or Nana’s arguments lacked sense. It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong. It was the finality of it all; the saying farewell to the only man I had ever trusted, and walking away into the sunlight as my own woman. I was only thirteen years old, and the others not much more than that! What had happened to the peace we so cherished, the time we had to learn and to grow, as Master Mikhail promised us? Somewhere, the world had changed, and robbed us of that. In our solitude, we had not known until too late. Even Master Mikhail knew it, from the look on his face. He had lost us far sooner than he meant to; he had failed.

At those thoughts, I understood, or at least I believed I did. Master Mikhail had told us that the world was our enemy. The enemy that controlled the Emperor’s hands, and Master Mikhail’s, and even Master Grimm’s, controlled ours as well. Whatever had happened, we needed to discover it, and choose for ourselves what to do about it.

The door burst open then, and Master Grimm thundered in, his massive sword drawn and clenched in his giant fist. “Time’s up. Hand over the brats, Mikhail, or…”

I acted without thinking, much as I always did. A kitchen knife from the morning’s breakfast still lay on the table nearest us, and I almost grabbed the blade end first in my haste. Master Grimm’s onslaught paused just long enough for him to register the small drop of blood trailing from the new glancing slash across his bicep, and then come face to face with the impetuous brat that caused it – me.

Master Mikhail looked furious; Raimen looked stunned. Nana, I could have sworn, wore a hair’s breadth of a smile. I glowered at the towering Master with all the ferocity of the Dragon I had been named for, and stepped forward, putting my friends and former Master behind me. Though I was not sure, as Raimen was, that we could make this work between the three of us, I was not willing to hand myself over to the horrid man in front of us any more than Nana was. He stood in the way of the time we all needed most, and for that, I would delay him further.

“We choose, together,” I growled between my teeth. “We choose Master Mikhail.”

“No.”

The voice behind me was Master Mikhail’s, but it was quieter and sadder than it should have been, after such a statement. Master Grimm, trembling in rage from my insolence and the injury I had dealt him, prepared to put me in my place, but Master Mikhail put his hand on my knife arm, and I found myself powerless to lift it again. I tried, straining all my might against it, but my arm refused to obey my orders. The knife, useless now, clattered to the floor beneath me. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that I had never known what Voice Master Mikhail heard. From the looks on the faces of the others, neither had they. Until now, he had never had reason to use his power against us, when he could manage us so well with mere words.

He forced me backward with a gentle but firm sweep of his arm, and stood between Master Grimm and the three of us, radiating a silent authority that not even Master Grimm dared to interrupt. Then, when we were well behind him, he drew his own sword. Master Mikhail never, ever drew his sword unless he intended to fight and die, just as he had the night I challenged him. The sight of it left all of us breathless.

“You have chosen, my students. I am proud of you, though I grieve for what must come now. Be strong. Find in each other the strength you found in me. Know that my teaching, and my heart, will follow you as long as you keep them in your memory. You have been all that I wished, and hoped.”

He set his jaw then, and the rage that filled his face and his body forced me to look away; Raimen pulled me close and I did not even think to stop him for the first time in my life. Even Nana took an involuntary step toward him for protection. Master Mikhail wasted no time on customary battle preparations or honorifics; he held his blade at the ready.

“Go now, make your choice known to the world! My choice, in this matter, is to give you the chance to do so.”

Then, with a deafening crash of steel meeting steel, Master Grimm and Master Mikhail began to fight. It was a good thing that Raimen held me close; my head thundered not with the mere sounds of battle, but of two Voices. The familiar one spoke in heated, raging letters of fire, but the other was unknown to me. Almost silent, it spoke in deep echoes, but the strength therein was louder than even the power of Raimen’s crashing waves or Nana’s breezy whispers. I could not understand the Words themselves; they were another language, from another time and place, perhaps a billion years before my own birth. They called to me as if I were a child, but refused to answer the questions that built in my soul.

The building pressure on my mind and in my head grew in rapid bursts as the battle continued. I felt Raimen lift me onto his shoulders at the same moment that I began to fade in and out of consciousness.

What followed was a blur of scenes that all seemed disjointed and random when I tried to recall them later. Trees and time flew by us unnoticed. We stopped, in a dark place, alone. There were panicked flights from the beasts of the wild. Nana, with bleeding gashes made by something’s claws. Raimen, cooking something over a fire.

Last but not least, a larger fire that swept over the forest sky, in the distance, engulfing everything it touched. I remember only the scream of fury unleashed by the Voice of Fire; though Her exact Words eluded me, the intent could not have been clearer. It was this Voice, and this fire, that began my journey into the future.

She was a strange one, and I’d done my best to avoid her; a sentiment she seemed to share in regard to the rest of us.  She had come under Master Mikhail’s tutelage more recently than Raimen or myself, thus giving us seniority.  Though Raimen and I had not become fast friends quite in the way that Master Mikhail had hoped, this girl was a different matter.  We were not enemies, but we were not friends.  In fact, it was safe to say that she noticed us only in bursts.  Master Mikhail had been making excuses for the better part of two years, claiming that her shyness kept her from communicating well, and that she would just take time to come to terms with all of us, but we had decided between ourselves that she must have been, to quote Raimen’s usage of the term with me, a dummy.

Still, for all the unawareness she seemed so content with, the girl was gorgeous, and a talented fighter on top of it.  My own looks were nothing to consider for very long, or so I thought, but that girl – her name was Nana, I thought I remembered – could have been a princess based on her face alone.  At fifteen years old, she was head and shoulders taller than me, and could almost look Raimen in the face if she had ever wanted to.  She ate and drank little, unlike the rest of us, and the lack of “excess” showed well in her figure, but less so in her strength.  Still, when it came time to practice, she could do impossible things with her blade, things the rest of us had yet to consider, and she did them with such accuracy and speed that they put even Raimen on the defensive.  I wanted to believe that maybe he had such trouble with her because of her wide, haunting pale blue eyes or her long blonde hair, but he ignored all such hopes and suggestions toward that end, of course.

To top it off, the tale of her life before coming to live with Master Mikhail was, if anything, more complicated than my own.  Where I knew nothing of my own past and could not have told anyone had I wanted to, Nana did know, but refused to speak of it.  Anytime family or parents were mentioned, or anytime things in the cabin got too cozy, as if we were all a real family bound by blood, she got even quieter than usual and disappeared into her room again, refusing all visitors, including Master Mikhail.  To add to the strangeness, this behavior he accepted without question.  If Raimen or myself had done any such thing, I had no doubt that he would have been in our rooms within the hour, but Nana he seemed to leave alone with an awkward but acceptable grace.  Her secrets were her own, and would forever stay her own, it seemed, since he was unwilling to shed any light on them for the rest of us, who might have been interested in getting to know our house sister.

Though Raimen and I knew it was cruel, we had created a game between ourselves to see which of us could get through her fog enough to produce some sort of a reaction.  She had spoken to us perhaps a handful of times in the two years she’d been with us, and all of them were short bursts, free of discussion or extrapolation on anything.  If given an order, she would obey it and then return to doing nothing; if asked a question, she would answer and fade into the background, or shrug without words if she didn’t know.  She did all the things that most normal people do – eating, sleeping, basic hygiene – but beyond that, she was in a class by herself, a class where nobody spoke and everyone stared into the distance as if there was something very interesting there all the time.

A soft voice behind me – Nana’s – brought me to the realization that the subject of my thoughts had come back outside to join me.  I looked at the ground rather than into her perfect face; it was painful at best to pretend she was normal like the rest of us.  “Anri.  Master Mikhail says to work on your form.”

My heels dug into the ground.  “Thanks.  I’ll tell him how much that means to me when I see him next time, if I ever see him again.  Is he even watching us?”

I watched her shadow shake its head.  “No.  He’s gone.  He got a summon this morning.  He left that in a note for you.”

“Note?”  I blinked.  “I didn’t see any note.  Who did he go see?”

She shrugged, pulling a practice blade from the bin between us; I took that to be all the answer I was going to get about Master Mikhail’s whereabouts.  “You didn’t see the note because Raimen put it in the fire this morning, before you woke up.”

“Figures.”  I spat in the dust, ignoring Master Mikhail’s warning about doing so from days ago.  It somehow gave me courage to fly in the face of expected behavior around this strange, ethereal ghost of a girl.  I had always believed that girls needed to be twice as strong as boys, in order to be their equal and surpass them, but Nana seemed to disagree.  Her mannerisms and behaviors were all delicate and polite, even when fighting.  It made me want to hurt her just to see if she could get dirty.

As I expected she would, she stepped around the place where I spat and onward toward her training dummy on the other side of the field.  Just like that, our conversation was finished.  She couldn’t even say goodbye or “I have to go” like any normal person would.  The urge to trip her or break her sword or something just to get her attention was beyond difficult to ignore.  Sighing, I returned to my own practice, stray thoughts swirling about in my head as they always did.  I was going to have to work on my focus, first and foremost, if I ever wanted to beat Master Mikhail!

The most difficult part of living at the cabin with Master Mikhail, Raimen and Nana wasn’t that our differing natures made it hard for us to co-exist in peace.  It was the knowledge that we, the students, were supposed to be more than just strangers to each other.  Master Mikhail had chosen us, out of all the students interested in practicing the Way, because he felt we were the brightest and the best, with the most potential.  At some point, we would have to stop being children.  By the estimates of some Masters that Master Mikhail made acquaintance with, we had been children too long already.  They looked down on him for letting us grow and learn as people, not to mention the fact that he had not forced us into a team yet.  That team was the problem, as far as I saw it.

The training that Master Mikhail put us through was designed to make warriors out of us.  Only Raimen, I thought, had taken this to heart.  I loved to fight, and to win, and Nana – who knew what Nana thought?  Raimen, on the other hand, was learning things like tactics, and skills that did not rely on his blade alone.  As I had said before, he was the eldest, and that meant that he was a step ahead of the rest of us in realizing where his responsibilities and expectations for the future lay.

His parents, both respectable merchants in the nearby city of Kino, had given him to Master Mikhail hoping that some of his headstrong behavior would be removed by the time they next saw him, and also that he might find a respectable wife to help him carry on the family tradition.  I knew what he thought of the former, but it seemed as if he had accepted the latter without further discussion or argument.  Still, I had met his parents once or twice before, and come to the immediate conclusion of what they would think of his intended bride!  Women, of course, did not belong in the Way.  If not for Master Mikhail’s reputation, training Raimen with the intention of introducing him to a team with two females in it might well have ended his time with us years ago.

A team of students seeking the Way spent their lives together.  They learned to guard each other’s backs, make up for each other’s shortcomings, and work as a perfect, cohesive unit to handle anything that came their way.  The very idea of this as a future made me want to giggle, and it was an urge I could not fight in the end.  Nana did not even glance at me, which just further confirmed my amusement.  How Master Mikhail expected us to even tolerate each other, much less defend and protect each other through death and beyond, was beyond me.  It might even have been beyond Raimen, though he had never said as much near me.

In my eyes, we had an un-winnable combination.  A headstrong girl with no memory of her past and no hope of ever getting it back, a boy more interested in books than fighting, and with enough clout in his life to get whatever he wanted with minimal effort, and a girl that nobody knew or understood enough to guess at what she might be thinking – these things would never make a team!  But then, Master Mikhail had chosen us.  However hard he worked us, and however strange his methods might have been to outsiders, he was the only one of us that could avoid the title of “dummy.”  He was amazing, both as a teacher and as a person, and we would have done anything for his praise, anything at all.  My failure would not have been so crushing if this were not the case.

In light of this, we tried.  We had had very little training as a group, and most often each of us acted on our own instincts.  I was the one that got us into the most unexpected trouble.  Raimen wanted to end everything in one strike and go home for dinner.  Nana rarely even noticed she was in trouble until the blades started flying, and after that her opponents didn’t last long.  I wanted to believe, somewhere inside me, that Fire, Water and Air could combine into something more powerful than each of them alone, but the reality of such a task seemed impossible.  If anyone could do it, Master Mikhail could, but could it be done?

Just as I had stopped laughing and returned to my training, leaving Nana behind me, the silence of the cabin and the surrounding forest was interrupted by the sound of frantic hoofbeats.  Master Mikhail, on the back of his favored horse, arrived out of a gathering cloud of dust, a dangerous frown on his face.  He wasted no time in arriving at the cabin, dismounting, and ushering his horse into the small adjoining stable that he kept for our mounts.  We all had them, but only Nana ever did more than ride hers; she even talked to the things as if they were human!

Master Mikhail turned away from the stable and looked out at Nana and me.  His eyes were serious and sad in a way that I had never seen them before.  If he hadn’t been our esteemed teacher and someone worthy of at least some respect, I might have asked if his best friend died, or perhaps his dog.  It worried me more than I cared to admit.  He was always the firm one, the calm one in the face of anything.  What could have happened?  Where had he been summoned, and what grave news had he received there?  Hadn’t he just accepted my failed excuse for a challenge with grim amusement just two days prior?  To look at him now was to see a man aged ten years in a single day; no, a single afternoon.

The feeling of despair that had started with Raimen’s careless healing and worsened with thoughts of how we were ever going to band into something approaching a team was getting stronger.  When Master Mikhail spoke, it reached newer heights again.  “Anri, Nana, I have something you need to hear, and the sooner you hear it, the sooner you will be prepared to face it.”

I went inside, with no argument, and Nana followed, moving as fast as I had ever seen her move before.  It was the least I could do for a man I respected so much, and who had tried, at least, to humor my selfish need for attention via a challenge I should have known I could never win.  Whatever news he brought was grim indeed, and I wanted to be sure that I was the first to hear it for myself.

Master Mikhail called it the Voice of Nature.  According to him, the Voice could speak in any of four tongues, and each ear that listened heard Her in a different way.  With this understanding came intimacy and trust within a given worldly element – those who heard the Fire’s Voice, such as myself, could learn after a fashion to embrace all things born from Fire.  The sunlight of a fierce summer’s day or the raging heat of an active volcano all spoke with the same Voice, and could be heard by Her chosen.  There were other Voices, too; of Water, and Air, and Earth, but these I had never witnessed beyond the insistence of others that they were real.  It was only fair; they didn’t believe me, either.

Thinking of the others – Master Mikhail, and Raimen, and our third housemate, the other girl, that I had yet to see for the first time that morning – began to pull my attention back from the dancing fire and into the visible world once more.  I regretted the interruption, but there were exercises and studies to perform if I wanted to undo the shame that I had brought upon myself the previous day.  Master Mikhail had said nothing to the others about my failure, and this omission was perhaps more painful than any truth he might have told.  To have tried and failed was bad enough, but to have tried for nothing?  There would be no recognition, no praise for my brave, if foolish, attempt.  Had I not at least found the courage to continue, after Master Mikhail had brought real blades to the challenge?  Had I not at least done well for the first half of the fight?  He knew, and Raimen knew that I had failed, but beyond this, it would be as if nothing had ever happened at all.

Raimen was the first to notice my return.  He was lounging in one of Master Mikhail’s armchairs, reading his ever-present book of advanced studies.  I had thought often, to my own great satisfaction, about what he might do if I were to steal that book while he slept, or twist it out of his grasp and (accidentally on purpose) drop it into the mud.  It had taken me a few tries to figure out where he kept it when he did sleep, and the unfortunate realization that it resided beneath the small of his back during nights had left me pondering how best to snatch it for the future.  It seemed as if he were married to it, sometimes – if only that were true!

“I thought you looked a little less dumb than you did a minute ago.  Your jaw was hanging open.”  He didn’t even look up; he might have been talking to the book rather than to me!  “Drool isn’t very attractive for a girl your age.”

My hands were on the book before I realized what I was doing.  “I don’t look dumb, and my jaw wasn’t hanging anywhere.  It looks to me like you’re reading this with your eyes half closed, if you can see all that from across the room and still read.”  I tried to tear the book out of his hands with every ounce of strength I had; of course it was like trying to tear a single brick from a built wall.  I knew that he heard the Water’s Voice, on Master Mikhail’s word, but more often it seemed that Earth would have been appropriate!

He didn’t laugh or return my insults as I had expected him to.  It only occurred to me after the searing pain in my left palm dissipated why he did not.  Damn my foolish injury!  Until it healed, so much would be difficult – taunting Raimen, planning how best to get a reaction from that girl, and finding the time to challenge Master Mikhail again.  Next time, it would have to be public; I would have to make sure that everyone attended.  Of course, that meant I would have to be sure not to fail again, too.

A growl in my throat, I let go of the book and turned my back on Raimen.  “Fine, keep it.  One of these days I’ll just burn it, you know.  Then where will you be?”

“Get back here, dummy.”

I paused at the new tone in his voice.  He wasn’t angry or teasing, this time.  Turning, I found his face to be unreadable, much as it always was.  He had the gift to change his expressions and thoughts so fluidly that they were unintelligible to anyone who did not hear the Water’s Voice – though I refused to give him an inch on my belief in such things, the concept fit him without a doubt.  Raimen was serious quite often, perhaps more than any of us, but the timing on this bout of it was strange indeed.  He was the eldest, it was his right to be serious when he pleased, or so he reminded us at least once per day.  Still, I knew that Master Mikhail watched him, and that he wondered at what thoughts swelled in Raimen’s unreachable depths.  I had not yet determined whether he feared that Raimen’s advanced training would someday be the death of him, or whether his interest was just that of a surrogate father concerned for his child.

Sighing, I turned back to face him, my hands on my hips – with my left hand just a little gentler than my right!  “You didn’t listen when I said I wasn’t dumb before, did you?  Why should I listen to you now?”

“Give me your hand.”

He wasn’t kidding.  Deep in my chest, my heart started to pound harder than I had ever heard it before.  Touch him?  Him, of all people?  I did my best never to be closer than a mile to his presence, and he knew it.  Even the other girl got closer to him than I did.  He loved to taunt me with it too; sitting on benches together when we had no choice resulted in the worst fights between us, when his knees “accidentally” bumped into mine, or when his hands “accidentally” pinched where they shouldn’t.  He was three years older than me, after all; expecting innocence from such a deep thinker was foolish on a lot of levels.  Master Mikhail never interfered – not because he approved, I knew that, but because I had agreed to this when I agreed to study the Way.  As a girl, I would have to fight and choose my own battles.  My name was only as good as I chose to make it.

He sighed, impatient.  “Just give it to me.  I didn’t mean that way.”

I had to think for a moment before my brain caught up with his, and the resulting comprehension made me even more flustered than I had been.  I hadn’t even considered he might have been asking about THAT!  It was one of the many reasons we didn’t get along, Raimen and me; even when taunting me, his mind was at least three years ahead of mine, and sometimes it felt more like thirty.  He could run circles around me, and make me feel like even more of a fool than Master Mikhail could, if he set his mind to it.  The less time I spent in his company, the better I felt.  It was clear from his expression that he’d assumed at least as much as I had; he thought I had been worried about the meaning of his words on a different level, not that I had just hesitated for the obvious reason.  Not for the first time I wished I could just walk away and leave him unanswered, but I knew that would never happen while he still lived.  It was a shame, really.

Gritting my teeth, I stuck my good hand under his nose, and was compelled to use it to slap him.  From the flinch I noticed at least halfway through the motion, I held off, realizing he had already expected something like that.  Always a step ahead, Raimen was… one day I would catch him off guard, and savor the moment like the most delicate of gourmet feasts!  “I suppose you want to spit on it or something?  Look, Rat-man, I have things to do…”

On any other day, at any other moment, the insulting nickname that I’d used for years would have irritated him into some sort of response.  Instead, he shook his head – and sprung into action.  Before I knew what had hit me, he held both of my wrists in a death grip and he was on his feet.  The instincts to fight or run were at war within my head, but he gave me no time to consider either option.  He was so strong, and so fast, and I was helpless against anything he might have chosen to do.  Maybe he’d decided not to wait for marriage… If only I’d learned faster, thought faster, if only I hadn’t been such a failure, in front of Master Mikhail and everyone…!

My eyes were closed so tightly that I could see spots of light hovering at the edges of my vision.  I felt him slide his hand from my left wrist to my left palm, and his touch crossed the line where my skin was covered by a thick bandage.  Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there, and brought his full palm to rest over my injury.  The pain was instantaneous.

“What do you think you’re doing?  Stop it, Raimen, you know that hurts, don’t you?  You saw me get it, you know what happened, don’t play me for a fool…”

He was ignoring me.  From the lack of other motion, I realized that I wasn’t in danger of being taken advantage of, at least, and my eyes began to slide open again.  I had not wanted to believe he would do such a thing, but I couldn’t trust him, couldn’t read him, not with so much water in the way…

At last he spoke.  “I wanted your other hand, not the one you gave me.  I’ve been reading a lot, as you noticed.  There’s something in here I’ve been wanting to try.  You can be my test subject.”

“What?”  I think my voice hit an all-time high at that moment.  “Don’t you dare test anything on me!  Did you run this by Master Mikhail?  Does he know what you’re about to do?  Is this even safe?  You know I don’t trust you…”

I started to pull on my hand, trying to free myself of his grasp, but it worked about as well as it ever had in the past.  His grip tightened on my palm, bringing the pain to new heights.  Unbidden tears came to my eyes, but I would sooner have died than let him see them.  Instead, I lifted my foot and stomped down hard on his bare toes.

He howled in pain, dropped my hand and fell backwards into his chair, wincing as if I’d broken his nose in the same movement.  His hands went for his foot, exploring through the pain to see if I had broken anything.  The scowl on his face when he looked back up at me was the Raimen I had come to expect; the sullen little boy that I’d known for years rather than the thoughtful, curious imitation of a man that I’d seen mere moments before.  It comforted me more than anything else had, perhaps even the fire, that day.

“You’re so stupid, Anri.  I wasn’t going to do anything bad!  I know we don’t get along, but I’d never…”  He trailed off, one hand scratching at his messy hair.  “I’d never… you know, hurt you.  On purpose.  Unless I had to.  Or you wanted me to.”

“Why would I ever want you to hurt me?  I think you’re the dummy here, Raimen, not me.”  I stuck my nose in the air and turned to head for the door.  “Next time find a different test subject to play with.  I’m not your toy any more than I am your wife.”

He smiled, and this of course made me frown.  That statement should not have in any way brought a smile to his face…

“In that case, you might have a look at your hand.”

I looked.  I had to, because I couldn’t feel anything wrong anymore.  The bandage was still tight and unsullied around my palm, and the bloodstains from before still dirtied the white cloth… but I knew before I even unwrapped it what he had managed to do.  With a sinking feeling in my gut, I went through the motion of unwrapping it anyway, just to prove to both of us his expertise.  I couldn’t wait to give him one more reason to gloat over me.

As expected, the wound on my palm was as if it had never existed.  There was a rough scar in its place; whatever Raimen had learned, it was not the kind of complete healing that Masters practiced, but that was to be understood.  After all, Raimen was not supposed to be practicing anything out of that book without Master Mikhail present!  He was no Master – he was too young, even if by some miracle of nature, he had managed to find the talent!  I half expected it to reopen with too much provocation, but the only way to do that…

Then his comment registered at last, and I felt even worse than I had after failing my challenge.  He knew it, too; the look on his face was somewhere between triumph and agony from having his toes crushed.  Disgusted, and finding nothing to say that would not make the situation even worse, I decided to do what I had intended to do all along and leave.  I stalked to the door and left without so much as a second look at him.

As the door slammed shut behind me, I could hear him say one thing, and one thing only.

“You’re welcome, Anri.”

I stood before him with my head bent, in the manner he informed me was respectful.  The amusement in his blue-gray eyes fueled my ambition more than anything else had, that day.  I’d thought once about turning back, but now that he was laughing at me, I wasn’t going to harbor the thought.  I waited for him to ask me what I wanted, but a smile broke out across his angular face instead.  “You want to test your skills, do you not?”

I flinched.  Of course, he knew!  He knew everything, because he’d taught me everything.  My own speech was a mirror to his own; my thoughts were a reflection in his ocean of musings.  However, if he knew, that was even more reason to go through with my plan.  “That’s right. I want to see if I can…”

“…defeat me.”  The smile faded for a moment as he put a large hand on my shoulder and thrust me away to arm’s length, looking me over from top to bottom.  He paused to hold my eyes with his; I never looked away.  His own lessons had taught me that to look away from an enemy was to court death, and it wasn’t my time to die.  At last, he was the one who broke the stare, though I knew his guard wasn’t down by any means.  “You always were the stubborn one.”

I smirked, pointing to the barrel nearby that was filled with wooden practice swords.  “If you insult me, you insult yourself, sensei.  After all, it was you who taught me.”

“Indeed I did.  But it isn’t yet time for the student to become the master.”  The faint dimple in his left cheek shone despite the slender smile he gave me.  “That time will come only when you learn not to challenge your enemies.  The Way is meant to be discipline for your mind, not a way to bully your enemies.  It is not a trial, my Dragon.  It is a way of life.”

Scowling in his direction, I once again met his gaze with my own.  “So you’re backing down?”

His chuckle was a whisper on the wind.  “No.  I said that the time would come when you learn not to challenge others.  I didn’t say not to accept a challenge when it comes.”   I watched as he turned on a graceful heel and made his way over to the barrel, his face unreadable.  After a moment, he ran a hand through the dark strands of his hair.  “Speaking of a challenge… if you challenge me, we fight on my terms.  We will use real blades this time.  If you’re old enough to confront me, you’re old enough to handle a warrior’s tools.”

My throat went dry.  Real blades?  I’d practiced with wooden blades for years, but I could count on one hand the number of times I’d handled a true sword.  “Sensei, it isn’t fair.  You learned the sword.  I haven’t.”

“Are you backing down?”

It seemed my own words were coming back to haunt me.  Removing my boots and cloak, I set them aside and pulled a wooden blade from the barrel right out from underneath his nose.  He opened his mouth to object, but I held up a finger.  “Nowhere in the rules did it say I couldn’t make a few practice runs first.”

That singular, knowing smile came to his face again.  “Of course not.  Take all the practice runs you want.  But I will still beat you.”  Leaving me to swing at my imaginary sparring partners, he disappeared into the cabin; the same one he had lived in for years, and the only home I had ever known.  I knew his arsenal of arms was kept in the cellar under padded lock and key, but to open that door meant hours of labor and training beyond what I cared for.  It was better to let him do the choosing.

I was still as skilled with a practice blade as I had ever been, and I smiled with satisfaction as the wooden stick slammed through the straw head of a practice dummy.  Not only was the strike excellent, but the passes had been near perfect as well.  Spinning, I thrust the blade into a second dummy, grinning as it pierced just shy of where the heart would have been on a real human.  Perhaps I wouldn’t be so handicapped in the challenge.  Maybe I knew more than I thought.

“Your form needs improvement, Anri.”

I whirled around, glaring with every ounce of dignity I had at the boy who’d just come out of the cabin and was watching me practice.  A smirk played across his scrawny face; his dark hair fell haphazardly into his eyes, which were making fun of me long before his words ever were. “Shut up, Raimen.  Nobody asked your opinion.”

He shrugged, turning his back to me.  “Suit yourself.  I just don’t want you to get beat too badly by the sensei.  If you do, I might not want to marry you.”

“Good!  Who would want to marry a pig like you anyway?” I spat in reply, pointing my wooden practice blade at him.  “I’d kill you before I even thought about it!”

Before I had time to retaliate, he’d pulled a blade from the barrel and countered my clumsy strike so fluidly that my own blade was torn from my hand and stuck upright in the soft dirt.  A chuckle escaped him as he thrust his blade back into the barrel and walked off.  “Next time, be careful who you challenge, Dragon.  You may be Master Mikhail’s favorite, but I still have more training than you.  Doubt you’d be able to kill me if I asked him for your hand.  For your sake, be glad I haven’t.  You know all I have to do is ask, and you’d be mine.”

“When pigs fly,” I muttered as he left.  He was beginning to get arrogant, with all the time he spent practicing and reading out of Mikhail’s more advanced books.  He’d just see if I married him after all.  Nobody would tell me who to love, not even Mikhail himself.  Ignoring the strains of flute music from the trees where Raimen had gone off to sulk, I returned to my assault on the dummies.  First one, then another fell to my stick, and I grinned when I noticed Mikhail watching through the window.  Maybe he was scared of me now; maybe he thought I was a worthy opponent.

“Work on your form, Anri!” he called from inside.

I wanted to strangle him.  However, it wouldn’t have done any good to get angry.  No matter how angry I got, the Way commanded that I keep control of my wits.  A fighter without his wits about him would fall quicker than a calm, alert warrior.  Granted I was no man.  Perhaps that was the reason all of the lessons about anger management never worked on me.   I once again turned to the dummies and made a point of being as graceful and perfect as I could.  I wasn’t about to let him or Raimen see me slacking off again.  They were both right, however much I didn’t want to admit it: my form needed work, and a lot of it.

Finally, I heard the door to the cabin slam shut, and I wiped the sweat from my brow before turning to greet the glint of twin steel blades that Mikhail carried.  He watched with interest as I pointed off in the direction Raimen had gone.  “Did you send that out to bother me, or is he just being annoying as usual?”

Mikhail shrugged his slender yet muscular shoulders.  “Hard to tell with that boy.  He does love you though.  I sent him out here to empty the trash.  Anything he said to you wasn’t my doing.”  When I spat in the dust, he frowned.  “That’s hardly ladylike, Dragon.  If you expect to get married, you’ll have to learn to be more graceful.”

“And if I don’t expect to?”

He smirked.  “You will.  It’s just a matter of time before it happens.  You’re too young yet to know how much fun it can be.”  I opened my mouth before I could even think of a fiery retort, but he covered it with his hand.  “Silence, Dragon.  There’s a time for breathing fire and a time for thinking fire.  This is one of the latter.  When you think fire, you hurt only yourself.  When you breathe fire, all around you is damaged.”

That managed to get me thinking.  He was right.  Who was I hurting by failing to control my words?  I already knew Raimen had his eye on me; it was no secret.  I also knew that should he ask Mikhail for my hand, that I had no say in the marriage plans.  That was the destiny of a female inducted into the Way.  Even though he was arrogant, and fully aware of his power over me, he truly did care for me.  Maybe that was why I didn’t like the idea.  I had only just passed my thirteenth summer; it was too soon for marriage, in any case!  Yet, I hurt him when I got angry, even if he didn’t show it.

“Here.”  Mikhail took my silence for an answer, and tossed me one of the silver-hilted blades he carried.  I caught it, making a few test swipes with it as I continued the downward motion.  “Let your fire guide you, but the Way is not to burn your enemy.  It is to awaken the fire within him, and let him burn out.”

Nodding, I walked to where he stood, stopping a mere ten feet from his spot.  He laid his blade on the ground before him, and I did the same, laying mine across his to form a cross.  The challenger’s blade always covered the challenged in a formal duel, and this was no exception.  The steel-hard look in his eyes told me that he was taking this very seriously, and that meant that I would be wise to do the same.  He didn’t waste his time on beginners, and I had the distinct feeling that if he didn’t think there was a reason to continue the battle, he would have called it off.  He knew something I didn’t, as usual, and there was a lesson to be learned, somewhere.  I would have to find out where.

In unison, we brought our hands together and bowed to each other, then touched our palms together in the traditional respectful acknowledgement of the enemy before backing away and lifting our blades from the ground.  Only a breath passed before that instant and the next.

With a great crash of steel and silver, our swords met each other.  He spun away quickly, jabbing back toward me, but I stepped out of his way, smiling.  “Too soon for mistakes, sensei,” I whispered to him.  He nodded in response, and swung hard toward my hand, intending to disarm me.  Ready for that trick, I jumped high, bringing my blade down to meet his.  The impact thrust his blade downward as well, disabling the strike.  He seemed thoughtful for only a moment before launching into the Crisis Moon attack we’d spent countless hours working on. I counted with him as he moved.

One, down, two, up, three, lift, four, stop, five… block!

Right at the moment his sword swung down in a sharp arc, I slammed a strong attack of my own up to greet it.  He blinked as vibrations shuddered up both blades, but spun into a retreat by whirling backward.  I moved forward, following him; as he’d taught me, the best defense was a good offense.  It was easy to see our styles were growing closer, and I found myself fascinated by it.  That was why Raimen always believed I was Mikhail’s favorite; he’d never been able to approach the smooth look of Mikhail’s battle technique.  He always relied on his speed and strength to win battles, much as he had with me just a short time ago.

Beads of sweat broke out on Mikhail’s forehead as he circled me.  No longer was he using simple tricks and games to fool me; he’d decided he would have to work harder to defeat me.  Without warning, he crouched, then sprang toward me, blade set to impale.  Stunned at the violent attack he’d told me never to use, I barely had time to duck and roll out of the way to avoid meeting my death.

Panting, I glared up at him.  “What are you doing?  You told me never to do that!”

A soft smile lit his face.  “Not all of your enemies will do what you’re expecting them to do.  Be alert, Dragon, and you’ll get much further.  The Gaia Slice is only the beginning of the tricks a trained swordsman might use on you.”

“But…you said…”

He shook his head.  “I’m not your teacher now… or did you forget?  I am your enemy.  I won’t pull any punches.  So strike me down… if you can.”  He stretched out his free hand in my direction and made a quick beckoning motion with his fingers.  Feeling my anger rising, I let it fill my body before launching into a series of spinning attacks, each of which he blocked.  While I tried to recover, his attacks seemed graceful and planned, not clumsy like mine.  He wasn’t angry; he was fighting with a calm mind.

Awaken the fire within him… let him burn out…

His words echoed in my mind, and I stepped back, thinking.  At the same moment, he attacked, snaking his sword around mine and thrusting hard.  I had only a moment to gasp as the point of his sword pierced my palm and my blade fell from my hand to clatter on the dirt below.  My eyes widened as blood streamed from my palm, and I looked up at him, angry.  “You told me to think before I attacked, and this is what happens?”

He shook his head, hooking his blade onto his belt before walking over to me.  “Think, yes.  Step back and think, and allow your enemy an opening?  No.  You must think while you act, Dragon.  Even when the enemy appears to be weak, think as you act.  A desperate man will do anything to win, anything at all to save his life.  Not all men follow the Way, and they will cheat.  You have to be ready for the cheaters as well as the honorable.  Your enemy isn’t going to allow you a recess to come up with your next move, my girl.  You did well up until that point.”

By now, my hand was stinging, and tears welled in my eyes.  “You weren’t supposed to hurt me though!”

He sighed, easing an arm around my shoulders.  “Sometimes, pain is the best way to learn a lesson.  I’m sorry, but you had to be shown.  If I’d told you to pay attention, would it have had the same effect?”  He smiled down at me.  “I don’t think it would have.  Knowing your temper, my Dragon, you would have scoffed at me and continued to make the same mistake.  This way, I know you learned.  You know you learned.”  A chuckle escaped him, and he used a gentle thumb to wipe away a single tear that had escaped from my eye.  “Come now, Anri.  Are these tears because of your pain, or because you lost your challenge?”

“Shut up, just shut up!”  I curled my bloody palm into a fist without thinking, ready to give him a broken nose if nothing else, but the pain inflicted by the steel blade was too much.  Gasping, I unclenched my fist to see that I’d only widened the gash.

“Do you see now what anger does to you?”  His voice was gentler when he spoke.  “It cost you your train of thought, then the battle, and now it’s making things worse.  You won’t win a battle until you can put aside that anger, Dragon.  It will be difficult for you… but you must do it.  Even a true dragon knows when it’s appropriate to get angry.”

As he led me up the stairs to the cabin to be cleaned up, I noticed Raimen emerging from the trees.  He crouched by the spot where my blade had fallen, and I watched him frown as blood from the hilt where my hand had been coated his curious fingers.  He glanced up at me, and I turned away before he could comment.  He was probably happy; his prediction had been perfect.  I’d been beaten, and now he was probably ashamed to admit he loved me.

To tell the truth, he wasn’t the only one ashamed of me.  I would have to work harder, or risk losing all faith I had in myself.  The next time, I would be better. I had to be.