“Do you think Faol Ban will go with you?”

“It’s his choice, but I need to tell Mallick either way.”

Now with little to say, Mick walked with her to the edge of the woods.

“You could meet me in the afternoon tomorrow for more practice.” She sent him a glittering look. “Unless you’re afraid of me now.”

“I’m not afraid of you. Next time you swipe at me, I’ll swipe back.”

She shrugged that off, stepped into the clearing.

As if he knew, Mallick came out of the cottage and watched her walk with the owl on her arm, the wolf at her side under the light of the white moon.

CHAPTER NINE

Fallon’s initiation to swordplay left her considerably bruised and battered, and a lot determined. Her third and final quest left her baffled.

She argued about it as she worked to block and parry Mallick’s strikes and thrusts.

“But I have a horse. I have a great horse. Why do I need to find another one?”

She ended up on her butt again, and that abused area burned, yet again, at the rude contact with hard, frosty ground.

“Balance, girl. The sword is about more than strength and strike. Balance.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She got up, butt and sword arm aching, tried again. “And a golden saddle? That’s stupid. It would be too heavy, too hard.”

“If you think so, there’s no need for you to look.”

“I want a bathroom, so—” And once again, on her ass, this time with Mallick laying the charmed tip of his sword on her belly.

“Gutted.”

“Your sword’s longer than mine. So are your arms.”

“And do you expect to fight only those who are of your size?”

Stepping back, he gestured her up.

“I’m just pointing it out.”

She managed to block, stay on her feet. “Anyway, I’m going to look for the horse and the saddle, but I don’t need a horse and a saddle.” She blocked, and well, a second time. “What do I do with them if the horse comes with me like Taibhse and Faol Ban?”

“It might be a question to ask when and if you find them.”

“Oh, I’ll find them.”

Newly confident with a third successful block, she tried a thrust under Mallick’s guard.

He blocked, pivoted, and slapped the flat side of his sword hard enough on her aching butt to send her sprawling on her face.

“Damn it!”

“There will be times when you fight amid countless distractions, and still, without focusing on your opponent, you’ll fail. Put the quest out of your mind, put everything out of your mind but the sword, my sword, my body, your body. My eyes. And learn.”

She did her best to concentrate, and still ended up on her ass, on her knees, or with her face in the dirt. Often with a limb cut off, her throat slit, or some other part of her impaled.

At the end of the lesson, her sword arm wept, and her ass burned like the fires of hell.

As fall blew toward winter, she practiced, and though Mallick tended to be stingy with compliments, she knew she improved. To build her upper body strength, she started each morning with push-ups, like her father had shown her, and ended each session with some of the yoga her mother enjoyed to try to increase her flexibility and balance.

For more challenge, she scaled trees—she was getting better at it—and practiced yoga poses on a branch to increase balance and focus. Plus, that was just fun, and she imagined making her brothers laugh when she held a tree pose.

She’d be a tree in a tree.

She lifted buckets of water in curls and shoulder presses until her muscles trembled and burned.

When she was absolutely, positively sure no one could see her, she danced in hopes of improving her footwork.

She studied, the gods, the histories, the traditions, the magicks, practiced with Mick, and searched the woods for a white horse known as Laoch and his golden saddle.

With Mallick, she performed the ritual for Yule, lit the fires, the candles to represent the return of light after the darkest night of the winter solstice. She made and hung the wreath, the symbol of the Wheel of the Year.

Though she wished for a vision, for a night with her mother as she had had with Max, she felt only ripples of power, heard only the voices of the gods.

When the ritual was done, they left some of the cake for the birds, poured some of the wine on the ground for the goddess.

Her first Christmas away from home made her heart ache as keenly as it had when she’d ridden away from the farm. Even the Yule tree Mallick had allowed her to choose and light and decorate didn’t cheer her.

But the Wheel of the Year continued to turn, and turned into the next.

January brought snow, and chunks of ice in the stream that glinted in sunlight. It brought cold hunts for game, and for the elusive white horse Mick claimed was a great stallion fully twenty hands high, who would take no rider on his back.

It brought nights that lasted too long, and had too much room for dreams of circling crows, of gathering storms. Of a stone circle rising out of the fog, and things that slithered in the dark.

As winter took Fallon’s world in its frigid grip, the community of New Hope shoveled snow. They hunted game, harvested from their greenhouses. The community kitchen Lana had established years before produced vats of soups, pounds of bread, baked pies, made butter and cheeses.

Children went to school to learn academics and practical skills. The Max Fallon Magick Academy helped children with abilities learn control, respect, and inclusivity.

With the community now numbering more than five hundred, security—within and without—remained essential. They had a duly elected mayor and town council as well as a small police force and fire department.

More than fourteen years since the first group of survivors stopped there, New Hope lived in the founders’ vision of community.

None who’d lived through the Doom, who’d survived the journey, who’d survived the Fourth of July massacre forgot how vital protecting the community was, and how tenuous the line was between the light and the dark.

Katie Parsoni had survived all of it, and knew more than most how tenuous the line was. She’d not only lost her parents, but knew her father, through no fault of his own, had unleased the virus that would kill him, her mother, her husband, her entire family save for the twins still in her womb, and spread to take the lives of billions.

A plague that had toppled cities, governments, had unleashed magicks that inhabited both sides of that tenuous line.

She’d survived, and with the kindness, compassion, and heroics of two people had brought two children into the troubled world, and taken another orphaned infant as her own.

She’d wondered why her precious twins held magicks when she didn’t, their father hadn’t. But over time she’d seen children with no magickal parent bloom in gifts, and others born of magicks show no abilities.

It came through the blood and the bone, of that she was certain, but not always from the parent. She believed Duncan’s and Antonia’s great gifts came, like Tonia’s eyes, from her father, their grandfather. A good man who hadn’t known what ran in his blood, or that the dark across the line would somehow use him to destroy.

She worried as the powers her twins held made them targets outside the borders of New Hope. Targets of the murderous Purity Warriors—targets, rumors abounded, of secret forces inside the beleaguered and fractured government that wanted to enlist and train, or harvest those with powers.

And with their gifts, their skills, their fearlessness, even their mother couldn’t keep them inside those borders.

In the old world, her three children would have given her grief about so many other things. Schoolwork, teenage sulks and rebellions. Not that she didn’t deal with some of that, but in the old world, she wouldn’t have to deal with her babies going out on scouting parties, hunting parties, rescue raids.

Her fourteen-year-old son sure as holy hell wouldn’t be driving a motorcycle—and she still kicked herself for allowing that one. In the old world, her twins would never have taken combat training, much less be advanced enough to train others.

Her sweet Hannah should be mooning about boys or playing music too loud instead of stitching up wounds and setting broken bones at the community clinic.