Quill of Thieves

Chapter 30

Sebastian was beginning to think Abel secretly hated him.

"Get up, Bash!"

She stood across from him on the other side of the indoor training hall she and Astrid had commandeered in the guards' barracks for the past week. Her long, auburn hair was pulled back tightly by an elastic piece of cloth, hands placed on her hips like a war general assessing her weary soldiers. The white armor of her guard's uniform lay stripped off in a pile in the corner, leaving her in nothing but the thin linen beneath it.

"Muscles need to be broken before they can rebuild."

It was the fifteenth time Abel had recited the same saying in the past hour alone. Sebastian wished he could roll his eyes at her, but even his eyelids felt beyond sore. With a grunt, he pushed his hands against his sweat-soaked thighs and forced himself upright.

There were three others watching his pathetic progress along with Abel: Matthias, Melvin, and Astrid who seemed positively delighted over Sebastian's physical duress. When she caught Sebastian scowling at her, Astrid wiggled her fingers at him in such an annoying way that Sebastian half-pondered following Spirit's threads to her and using them to snap those fingers clear off.

Did no one else see the violence these bloody lessons were sending him towards?

"By the Scribes, I miss my books," he muttered. 

Nonetheless, and having no real other option, he demanded his legs into a steady jog once more, swiping the beads of sweat from his forehead and out of his eyes.

For all his belly-aching, he was growing stronger. The definition in his calves and chest had sharpened, lines carving out cleaner, rounded muscles growing more defined. As the hours of grueling training wore on, Sebastian found himself gaining more pleasure with his progress. 

"A little too pleased," Abel had teased him when she had caught him flexing in front of a mirror earlier that morning. 

So, he had taken to glancing at the ridiculously muscled royal captain every so often, just to keep himself humbled.

He glanced at Matthias now as he ran past and snorted to himself. It had become the captain's custom to watch every millimeter of movement Abel made as if she were the one in possession of some hidden magical talent and plotted to burn down the entire fortress with it.

Not completely implausible, Sebastian had to admit.

Abel paced him along the edges of the obstacle course she and Astrid had designed. They had brought in a variety of different sized rocks and stones, some as large as the fishing boats from back home, and had placed them into a maze-like configuration that he had to leap, dodge, or jump. Large standing torches stood at equal intervals around the arena, flames flickering with menace, causing Sebastian to nearly gag against the added smoke and heat. Astrid had even commandeered a few wardrobes and tables and covered them in leaves, vines, and bark to mimic trees. She often frowned at them, disappointed in herself that she hadn't been able to drag up real trees from Earth itself. Not with that cuff on her arm, anyways. But she could still perform smaller feats; whenever she was feeling particularly nasty, Astrid would use her elements to cause patches of the floor to freeze over without warning.

Yesterday had been the first time Astrid had begun tossing in unannounced opportunities for him to call on the elements himself. Already, it had been nine times that Sebastian had failed to stop her random bursts of magic from knocking him off his feet while running the obstacles: thick vines that had shot up from beneath the ground; rocks that moved without notice, threatening to crush his toes; water that pooled from basins she had set up to flood into his shoes. At least with the dampening ability of her cuff, each attempt of hers weakened. There had actually been six attempts where Sebastian had successfully used the elements and halted Astrid's attacks, but, in his concentration, he had tripped over the physical obstacles and fallen, nearly bashing his two front teeth out.