•
Not surprisingly, having ice daggers thrown at her was miserable.
Rowan hurled dagger after magical dagger at her—and every damn time, the shield of fire that she tried (and failed) to imagine did nothing. If it appeared at all, it always manifested too far to the left or right.
Rowan didn’t want a wall of flame. No—he wanted a small, controlled shield. And it didn’t matter how many times he nicked her hands or arms or face, it didn’t matter that dried blood was now itching down her cheeks. One shield—that was all she had to craft and he would stop.
Sweating and panting, Celaena was beginning to wonder if she should step directly into the path of his next dagger and put herself out of her suffering when Rowan growled. “Try harder.”
“I am trying,” she snapped, rolling aside as he sent two gleaming ice daggers at her head.
“You’re acting like you’re on the verge of a burnout.”
“Maybe I am.”
“If you believe for one moment that you’re close to a burnout after an hour of practicing—”
“It happened that quickly on Beltane.”
“That was not the end of your power.” His next ice dagger hovered in the air beside his head. “You fell into the lure of the magic and let it do what it wanted—let it consume you. Had you kept your head, you could have had those fires burning for weeks—months.”
“No.” She didn’t have any better answer than that.
His nostrils flared slightly. “I knew it. You wanted your power to be insignificant—you were relieved when you thought that was all you had.”
Without warning, he sent the dagger, then the next, then the next at her. She raised her left arm as she would raise a shield, picturing the flame surrounding her arm, blocking those daggers, obliterating them, but—
She cursed so loudly that the birds stopped their chatter. She clutched her forearm as blood welled and soaked into her tunic. “Stop hitting me! I get the point!”
But another dagger came. And another.
Ducking and dodging, raising her bloodied arm again and again, she gritted her teeth and swore at him. He sent a dagger twirling with deadly efficiency—and she couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the thin scratch along her cheekbone. She hissed.
He was right—he was always right, and she hated that. Almost as much as she hated the power that flooded her and did what it wanted. It was hers to command—not the other way around. She was not its slave. She was no one’s slave anymore. And if Rowan threw one more damned dagger at her face—
He did.
The ice crystal didn’t make it past her upraised forearm before it vanished in a hiss of steam.
Celaena gazed over the flickering edge of the compact red-burning flame before her arm. Shaped like—a shield.
Rowan smiled slowly. “We’re done for today. Go eat something.”
The circular shield did not burn her, though its flames swirled and sizzled. As she’d commanded. It had . . . worked.
So she raised her eyes to Rowan. “No. Again.”
•
After a week of making shields of various sizes and temperatures, Celaena could have multiple defenses burning at once, and encircle the entire glen with half a thought to protect it from outside assault. And when she awoke one morning before dawn, she couldn’t say why she did it, but she slipped from the room she shared with Rowan and went down to the ward-stones.