The Reluctant Queen (The Queens of Renthia #2)(76)

She felt stiff, mechanical, as she performed the task and thought through the logistics.

The candidate's family would need to be notified, as well as Headmistress Hanna. She'd have to arrange for a burial. If she paid the caretakers extra, they would take care of the bulk of the arrangements. In the meantime, she'd have to find a new candidate, train her even faster, try not to break her. Time was short. Soon, the queen would call for the trials . . . I am sorry, Beilena! This was not the plan! Two candidates, dead. Not the plan at all. She felt like punching something, hard, and her eyes fell on the caged spirit.

She heard a knock behind her. Automatically, she flipped the tarp to cover Beilena's body. Standing, she turned. "Yes?"

One of the caretakers-she'd never bothered to learn his name-bowed. "A representative of the queen is here to see you. Captain Alet. She says the queen has asked her to check on your progress with your candidate."

Piriandra swore under her breath, and then sighed. "Show her in."





Chapter 19




In the center of the late queen's bedroom, three water spirits circled Naelin's head. Cackling in voices that sounded like rain hitting glass, they sprayed water in her face. She flinched and put her arms in front of her, but the water hit just as she took a breath. Inhaling it, she coughed.

"Get them out of here, Naelin," Ven said.

Coughing, she seized on the one command she knew better than any other: Leave. She shoved it at them, and they streamed out the open balcony door, dumping water in their wake. Sloshing through the puddles, Naelin slammed the balcony doors shut and pulled the curtains. One hung limp, half torn from its curtain rod, with gashes left by an air spirit from yesterday's disaster. "This has to stop," she said, wiping the water from her face. "It's only a matter of time before I accidentally kill someone."

"You're learning control," Ven said.

He was being kind. "This is not control." She waved at the pool of water on the inlaid floor. "I can't control them for longer than a few minutes."

Leaning against the mantel-one of the few items in the room that her lessons hadn't destroyed, though it was singed with ash-Ven looked calm. His green leather armor was clean, while she was soaked from the water spirits. The dirt from the earth spirits had smudged into mud that ran down her arms. He looked as casual and relaxed as if he'd stopped by for a cup of bark tea. "It's not the spirits you need to control; it's yourself. Right now, your fear is controlling you, instead of the other way around."

"Please don't tell me I just need to ‘calm down.' In the history of the world, telling someone to ‘calm down' has never done anything but piss them off more." Even Renet knew better than that. She stalked across the room to a pitcher and poured herself a glass of water. After coughing up inhaled water, her throat felt as if it had been scratched. She took a sip. Her hands were shaking.



       
         
       
        

Ven laced his fingers across his stomach. He was studying her, again, clearly cataloguing her flaws. She straightened her shoulders and glared back at him.

"Do you want another pep talk?" he asked mildly. "Because I can do that, but you must have already memorized all my best speeches."

"Save it for your next candidate." She closed her eyes for a moment against his response. But he didn't launch into his usual speech. Maybe he's as tired of it as I am. She hated that she was disappointing him, even though she'd never wanted this. "How does Queen Daleina do it?"

"Every queen and every heir I've ever worked with has been, at their core, an optimist. Even knowing the odds were against them, they never allowed themselves to believe they'd fail. Daleina was shocked at the Coronation Massacre. She never truly believed that spirits would kill the other heirs. You, on the other hand, would have gone in there expecting it."

Every time spirits came, she was thrown back into remembering the day when her family died-how she felt huddled under the floor, the sounds and the smells. "You can't turn me into an optimist. I've seen too much death." She couldn't stop fearing the spirits, and she didn't want to. The day you stopped fearing them, the day you felt you had control, that was the day you died. Her mother didn't expect the spirits she called to overwhelm her. Neither, Naelin was certain, had the heirs who died in the grove.

He hesitated, and Naelin liked him better for that hesitation-he didn't know what to do either, and weirdly that was comforting. But then his "in-charge champion" face snapped back into position, and he was again using his voice of authority, which was probably highly effective on young candidates but less impressive to Naelin, who had used that tone herself plenty of times. "As corny as it sounds, you need to believe in yourself."