The sparring circle was slick with morning dew, the black stone gleaming under a sky that had not decided yet whether it intended to rain. The air smelled of salt and wet rock and the particular sharpness of cold metal. Everyone had gathered. Not because they were required to. Because word had gotten around that Warren and I were paired this morning, and people wanted to see what that looked like.

  I knew what they wanted to see. They wanted to see the Princess lose.

  We moved in a blur. Warren was faster than he had been in those first weeks, his scavenger instincts sharpened by Vardos and by every morning session since, and he fought the way he always fought, with that loose, predatory efficiency that looked almost casual until you were on the receiving end of it. He lunged with a powerful overhead strike that would have ended the match against most opponents. I parried and felt the vibration rattle up through my wrists and spun away, my wool tunic snapping with the movement.

  I could feel his rhythm. It was a jagged, driving thing, beautiful in the way that purely aggressive things can be beautiful, and I had his timing measured within the first four exchanges. I could have taken his blade in the third. I could have ended it cleanly and walked out of the circle and let the silence do the work.

  I watched his jaw instead. The set of it. The particular tightness around his eyes that was not focus but something closer to desperation.

  He needed this. Not the fight. The winning. To the others he was the soldier, the scavenger who had clawed his way here from the Mid-Rim with nothing but instinct and nerve. If I took him apart in front of Vane and Kit and the rest of them, that was not a sparring loss. That was something that would follow him down every corridor of the temple for the rest of the season.

  When he surged forward for the final thrust I let my foot find the patch of moss I had noticed two exchanges ago. I mistimed the parry. My sword left my hand and skittered across the black stone and Warren's blade stopped an inch from my throat.

  "Yield," he panted. His chest was heaving and there was a flash of something in his eyes, triumph, relief, something he had needed badly enough that getting it had visibly moved him.

  "I yield," I said, and bowed.

  The back row erupted. Not the careful, polite acknowledgment they gave each other after a good bout. Real noise, the kind that comes from people who have been waiting to cheer for something and finally have permission. Kit clapped Warren on the shoulder as he walked out of the circle. Even two of the students who had never spoken to me directly were laughing and animated in Warren's direction.

  I retrieved my practice blade and walked to the sideline and stood and felt the noise move around me like water around a stone.

  Warren did not join the celebration. He walked out of the ring and stood a few feet away and looked at me with his brow furrowed and his eyes doing that thing where they went very direct and very still.

  At lunch the mess hall was loud with the retelling, the kind of story that grows in the telling, Warren's overhead strike becoming more dramatic with each version, my fall more spectacular. I sat in my usual place and picked at a piece of dried fruit and listened to the room be happy about something and felt the familiar specific weight of being adjacent to joy without being inside it.

  Warren sat beside me. He was quiet for a long time, long enough that I thought he might let it go.

  "You had me," he said finally. His voice was low, for me only. "Third exchange. My flank was open. You had the angle and you did not take it. Why?"

  I looked at him. The sweat had dried on his neck and he was looking at me with an expression that was not grateful and not angry but something in between that I did not have a clean name for.

  "You needed it," I said. "The others needed to see it."

  "I do not need your charity, Velara."

  "It was not charity." I reached out and touched the back of his hand, briefly. "It was a gift. There is a difference."

  He looked at my hand on his. Then he looked at me, and something shifted in his face, the defensive pride dissolving into something rawer and less composed. He leaned forward, slowly, his eyes dropping to my mouth, and I understood what was about to happen a full second before it did.

  I pulled back. I placed two fingers against his chest.

  "No," I said.

  He stopped. His jaw tightened. "Why. After everything."

  "On Misith," I said, and I heard my own voice go careful and deliberate the way it did when I was saying something I had carried for a long time, "a kiss is not a gesture. It is a vow. My blood is sacred to the Choice. I give my heart and my kiss and my life once, to one person, and it is permanent. It is not something I do because the moment feels right." I held his eyes. "If I choose you, Warren, it is forever. I have to be certain."

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  He was quiet for a moment. The noise of the mess hall continued around us, indifferent.

  "Forever is a long time," he said.

  "Yes."

  "I can wait," he said. And he said it simply, without the smirk, without any of the performance, and it landed in my chest like something settling into the place it had always been meant to occupy.

  I nodded and looked back at my food and did not let him see what my face was doing.

  The afternoon session was in Thorne's library, a low-ceilinged room carved into the rock with shelves of vellum scrolls along every wall and the smell of old ink and candle smoke that I had loved from my first day on the island. Thorne was standing at the center of the room holding something I had not seen before, a heavy metallic hilt attached by a thick insulated cable to a power pack belted at his hip. He looked, in his thick spectacles and his scholar's robes, like someone who had found an object that did not belong to him and was very excited about it.

  "The metal blade," he announced, "is a relic. The Force is energy. Our weapons should be the same."

  He flipped a switch.

  The sound was violent and immediate, a hiss-crack that compressed the air in the room, and a beam of unstable white light erupted from the hilt. It hummed at a frequency that vibrated in the back of my teeth and made the air smell of ozone. It was beautiful and alarming in equal measure.

  "The Protosaber," Thorne said, his voice dropping into reverence. "Powered by the Kyber crystals you harvested on Vardos. The color of the blade responds to the spirit of the wielder. Blue for the Guardians. Green for the Diplomats. It is not a tool. It is a mirror."

  I stared at the white beam and felt the echo of my vision from the Circle of Whispers move through me. The red dagger. The corridor. The sound like a voice held at the bottom of its register. I pushed it down.

  Morvin stepped into the room from the far doorway.

  "Tomorrow your spirit will be tested," he said. "The Great Cave on the southern coast has been overrun by Syrinx-Bats. Parasites that feed on the Force itself. They must be cleared so the Caretakers can return to their meditation. You will go as one. Prepare yourselves."

  The group began to filter out. I was gathering my things when I heard it.

  It started as a murmur. Vane's voice, low and conversational, aimed at the two students beside her but pitched just carefully enough to carry. "The sacred blood of Misith," she said, with a particular inflection that made the words sound like a costume someone had put on. "The holy Kiss. The eternal Choice." A pause. "Tell me, do they teach you in those palaces how to fall on your sword and make it look like an offering?"

  Laughter. Not everyone. Five or six of them, the ones who always moved in Vane's orbit, the ones who had been waiting for permission.

  I felt it land.

  Not in my chest the way hurt usually lands. Lower than that. Deeper. Something that moved through the floor of me and found the place where I kept the things I did not show anyone and touched them with cold, deliberate fingers.

  I straightened. I turned toward the door. I was aware of my own hands and the fact that they were shaking and that the shaking was not sadness.

  Warren was looking at me from across the room. His expression had gone very still.

  I walked out before he could say anything. Before anyone could say anything. I walked out because I was not entirely certain what would happen if I stayed, and that uncertainty frightened me more than Vane did.

  The path back to the huts was empty. The wind off the ocean was cold and I walked into it and let it be cold and kept walking until I reached my door and went inside and sat on the edge of my pallet in the dark.

  I sat there for a long time.

  The thing that was moving through me was not grief. I had felt grief before, the clean, exhausting weight of it. This was different. This was hot and specific and it had a direction. It wanted something. It was looking for somewhere to go.

  They do not know me, I thought. They have never tried to know me. I have healed their wounds and ended their wars and held a creature the size of a city above their heads and they stand in a circle and laugh at the things I hold sacred because it costs them nothing and it is the only power they have over me.

  The thought arrived next and I did not choose it. It simply appeared, fully formed, in the quiet of the hut.

  I could make it cost them something.

  I sat with that thought and did not push it away immediately, which frightened me more than the thought itself. I looked at it. I turned it over. I felt the shape of it, the clean cold logic of it, how easy it would be, how entirely within my capacity.

  Then my hands began to glow.

  Not the warm gold of healing. Something else. A faint, bluish white light that gathered in my palms without my asking for it, static crackling softly between my fingers, the smell of ozone rising in the small dark room. I looked at my hands and the light looked back at me and for three full seconds I did not make it stop.

  Then I pressed my palms flat against the cold stone floor and held them there until the light faded and the static died and the room was dark again.

  I breathed.

  I sat in the dark for a long time after that, my hands flat on the stone, feeling the cold of it, using the cold of it, and I thought about the red dagger in the vision and what Thorne had asked me. Whether it had felt like a sickness or a cure.

  I had told him it felt like power. I had told him that honestly and it had frightened me.

  What frightened me now was that the light in my hands had felt the same way.

  I did not tell anyone. I put on my sleeping clothes and I lay down and I looked at the ceiling and I listened to the ocean and eventually, much later than usual, I slept.

  In the morning Warren caught my eye as we assembled for the day and gave me a look that asked a question without asking it. I shook my head slightly. He nodded and let it go and fell into step beside me on the path to the southern cave, close enough that our arms brushed with every other step, and I let that be enough.

  The Protosabers were distributed before we descended. Thorne handed me a hilt and I strapped the power pack to my belt and looked at the unlit weapon in my hand and thought about mirrors.

  I flipped the switch.

  The blade that erupted was not blue or green. It was white, brilliant and clean, with a violet core that pulsed slowly like something breathing. I held it up and watched the light it threw against the dark rock of the cave entrance and felt the Force move through the crystal in a current so clear and strong that the anger from the night before felt, for a moment, like something that had happened to someone else.

  Warren's blade was a steady blue. He looked at mine and said nothing, but something moved across his face that I filed away carefully without examining.

  Morvin looked at my blade for a long moment.

  "Ready you are," he said quietly. And then, almost to himself: "Careful, also, you must be."

  I did not ask him what he meant. I followed the others into the dark of the cave and held my white blade before me and tried to believe that the light in my hands was only ever going to be this.