“You saying I’m slow?” I panted.
He shook his head. “No, I’m saying you haven’t run in more than ten days and you’re winded.”
“Am not.”
Owen glared at me. “You are grabbing your knees and cannot say more than three words without taking a breath.”
I shook my head. “It’s the magic.” I tried to inhale through my nose quietly. “You know, my all-consuming power.” That was six words. Another breath. “Makes it harder to run.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Wow.” He took off his backpack and unzipped it to get out the wooden swords he’d packed. This morning Owen had decided it was time to get back to my training. Both physically, with running and wooden swords, and also my magic. Fortunately, we split the time between those three things, but I felt as if I was going to be training with Owen day in and day out.
It wasn’t that I disliked Owen or his company. It was that I disliked Owen barking orders at me all the damn time.
“Come on, Your Highness,” Owen said as he gestured with his wooden sword. “Let’s see what you’ve forgotten.”
Remembering what felt like a thousand times he had told me to tighten my core, I did such, and automatically shifted my weight onto the balls of my feet, making sure I was ready to move.
And move we did. Owen barely let me take a breath in between his advances. Unlike with the running, I hadn’t lost as much with the sword as I had in being in physical shape. Soon the only sounds heard in the forest were the clacks of our wooden swords and the crunch of the leaves under our feet as we danced around one another.
I thought back to Krew telling me my magic was a built-in defense mechanism. I was able to keep my magic down easier now, but I was also a second or two quicker at suspecting what Owen was going to do before he did it.
Soon instead of stepping away to block his advances, I was stepping into them instead.
Owen grinned. “She gets it.”
I spun away, knowing he was going to go for a side shot and smacked his sword. He squinted. I wondered if I should not have poked the bear.
“You want to dance, Your Highness?”
Seeing my one and only opportunity to put in an advance until I was sure to be defending my very life, I spun around him and went in high like I would hit at his shoulders, before dipping the shoulder that held the sword at the last moment, smacking him in the calf.
Owen glared at me. Just stood there and glared.
I gave him a bow dipped in mockery. “That was a yes, Owen.”
With a yelp I jumped back, feeling the very tip of the sword graze my stomach.
“I feel,” Owen said as he lurched forward and swung at my neck, “as if I have trained you too well.” Having blocked his shot there, he swung down for my legs, which forced me to jump back. “It is giving you a bit of a false sense of confidence.”
I blocked and shoved his next shot at my stomach. “You know, you could just say I’ve improved.”
He wrinkled his nose and spun around me, dropping down to go for my feet. “But then we’d have to worry about your ego, Your Highness.”
I blocked him at my knees. “And yours, since you are such a great teacher.”
He snorted and increased his speed. Toward the end, I was again panting, and it had been clear in the beginning he’d been going easier on me. But the extra second of reaction time I had to defend his advances was making a huge difference. If Owen would have gone that hard at me before I had magic, I would have been riddled with bruises. As such, I only had one graze and one spot where he’d managed to hit me. Knowing how good of a swordsman he was, I was going to call that a win.
Owen was at least also breathing heavily. Though I was tired enough I didn’t want to anger him by pointing it out verbally. I knew he’d exerted himself harder than usual and that was all that mattered.
“I have a deal for you,” Owen offered as he took my wooden sword and put it in his backpack.
I squinted. “What kind of a deal?”
“Practice defending my advances with your magic, and then I will let you heal two more trees.”
I gave my head a shake, surprised with every little word of that. “What?”
“Krew said that because of the other night, the whole Renna thing, we can sell the fact that you were upset and crying in the forest again.” Owen held up a hand as he dropped the bag. “And I know. My magic won’t work on you. But I’ll still throw it at you anyway, wrapped around objects until they almost reach you, just to get you used to the feeling as you figure out what to throw back at me.” He paused. “I know you don’t like using your magic on people, Jorah. I get it. But if you can’t learn to trust your magic, at the very least, you need to learn how to react and use it without hesitation. If you hesitate for even a moment with the king, it could very well mean the difference between life and death.”
