Kess sat on a box in the manor warehouse and continued to glare at Rowan as she leaned back against the stack, arms crossed. They’d returned a few hours ago, covered in filth, and Arlette had read them both the riot act—but particularly Kess. She was foolish, she was rash, she was impulsive, the odds of surviving in the Pits were—well, regardless, Kess wasn’t Arlette’s prisoner. She wouldn’t give the woman the satisfaction of an apology.

  Rowan stood in front of her—shirtless, the cloudspawned man—holding her gaze like he was waiting for something.

  Kess scowled at him.

  Rowan stared back.

  After several moments of this, Rowan sighed finally, throwing a towel over his shoulders.

  “This is such a waste of time,” he said.

  “I’ll say.”

  “You could just do as I ask instead of being difficult,” he said. Something about his tone dug into Kess like a barb.

  “I’m not touching right now,” she said, voice tight. “In case you’ve forgotten, I just crawled out of a sewer after drinking half my weight in sub-par ale and being chased through several tiers of Downhill by Forgebrand’s finest.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  Rowan moved to stand, and Kess looked away—she didn’t need his figure distracting her from her stubbornness. Still, heat crept into her cheeks. If he was trying to make her uncomfortable, it was working. Rowan toweled his sweaty face.

  “If you’re so eager to leave the manor and fight,” he continued, “we might as well let you fight your Fulminancy.” He and Eamon had spent the better half of the evening sparring, as they always did. It was an odd sort of dance to watch—nothing like ring fights. Kess longed to join them, swords or not, but she was relegated to this box like a toddler, presumably to practice her Fulminancy. It was going about as well as a wedding during a Floodstorm.

  “Do you think people haven’t tried this with me?” Kess asked, leaning her head back against the box. “Do you think the Uphill minders didn’t exhaust every resource they had trying to do the same thing? Schools, teachers, private lessons, cajoling, begging, threatening—they’ve done it all, Rowan. I don’t see how you’ll fare any better.” She clenched her jaw, fighting against the memories. She’d been no better than an animal to them, and the way it had ended—she scrunched her eyes shut against the memory, then turned to watch Rowan instead. “Do you think it’s as simple as a switch?”

  “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be,” he said simply. “You worked on it the other night. Work on it now.” Rowan’s outlook obviously wasn’t the only simple thing about him. Kess laughed humorlessly.

  “Of course, why not?” she said, voice rising. “You found me during one of the most tumultuous periods of time in the last several years of my life, see me tap into my powers with disastrous consequences—“

  “You were fine the other night,” Rowan interrupted. “You just need to learn to use less of that power at once—which is what I’m trying to teach you.”

  “It’s still not something I can just turn on and off at will.”

  The other night had given her a tiny spark of hope, but it hadn’t taken away her fear. If anything, she now spent her days wondering if that success had been a fluke. She didn’t want to find out the hard way that it had been.

  Kess moved from the box, blood pounding in her ears and throbbing in her injured leg. Her Fulminancy thrashed inside like a wild animal, caged and vicious. She’d always kept it at bay through a combination of willpower and exhausting fights. Without the latter, it gnashed at her, unchained and yawning, a pit which she didn’t dare touch, for fear that it would consume her. A single tendril wormed its way down her arm as she paced the room, and Kess shook her arm, trying to will it away.

  She felt Rowan’s eyes on her, met his, and saw a strange expression there. Fear she was used to identifying. It was mild, though, and on top of it, almost a longing—an eagerness. This man is stormsick, she reminded herself, and continued her pacing.

  “Just focus on that tendril,” Rowan said, watching her. “It’s tame enough.”

  “I can’t control it,” she snapped, stopping at the barrel of practice swords towards the side of the warehouse. “It just comes out when I’m…agitated,” she finished, unsure. It didn’t actually seem to have any bearing on her mood, though it certainly coincided with times in her life when she felt a sense of unease.

  “It seems to me,” Rowan said, approaching the barrel, “that if it’s right there on the surface, you should be able to use it.”

  Kess snatched a well-worn wooden sword from the barrel and hefted it. It was unfamiliar in her hands, its length awkward and unbalanced.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “That a Dud probably doesn’t know very much about channeling Fulminancy.”

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  Rowan pressed his lips together, but otherwise kept his face straight. He took a sword from the barrel and twirled it in expert hands, nodding towards her in a ready stance.

  “Seriously?”

  “Why not?” he asked, shrugging. “If you’re not going to train with your Fulminancy, you might as well learn something.”

  Kess sensed the trap, but couldn’t turn down the idea of a challenge—even one that would likely end with a lot of bruises and her on the floor. She held her sword in front of her in something approximating Rowan’s stance, and nodded.

  Rowan charged.

  His speed was something Kess would have envied had she been in the ring with him. Combined with his fluid use of the sword, Kess was hard pressed to stop him. She clumsily knocked away a few of his blows—tempered, she knew, to keep her from being too badly injured. Somehow, the knowledge that he was holding back bothered her more, and she gritted her teeth, using her next block to swipe at Rowan’s side. He laughed—actually laughed, damn him—and danced away.

  Kess’s footwork wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t meant for the sword, and the weapon itself was awkward in her hands. Rowan wielded the sword like it was one of his own limbs as he danced around Kess, barely breaking a sweat. Kess’s clumsy blocks did little to actually block Rowan, and each miss left her with a tiny smart or bruise that would remind her in the days to come of her foolishness.

  Sweating, frustrated, and exhausted, Kess tried another tactic. She’d already lost—in a real sword fight, she’d be long dead—but her pride as a fighter demanded that she find a fitting way to end the fight.

  Rowan was fast and talented, so she would just have to be unexpected. His strikes, she’d noticed, were uniform and perfect—designed to meet certain strikes that anyone using a sword would naturally go to. Kess blinked sweat from her eyes and tried something extremely foolish.

  She swung at Rowan’s head, expecting his block and follow up strike. He blocked with a grunt, and Kess launched herself into a roll to Rowan’s left. Rowan’s sword whooshed through the air where she’d been, and Kess thwacked her own wooden sword into Rowan’s bare chest with a satisfying thud.

  They stood there for a moment, Kess’s legs shaking beneath her, her own breathing heavy in her ears, Rowan’s much calmer. Finally, he burst out laughing.

  “I’d be impressed if I hadn’t removed most of your limbs before that.”

  “Well, your mistake was not actually removing them,” Kess said, smiling sweetly.

  “Don’t expect that to work in an actual fight,” Rowan said, running a hand through his curls. “Though I suppose that when faced with someone much more experienced, doing something wild like that is probably your best bet.”

  “Rings have rules too, Rowan,” Kess said, trying to keep her eyes on the sword in her hands instead of on Rowan and his somehow perfectly messy hair. “But rules are meant to be broken when your life is on the line.” Kess held the sword distastefully. “Why would you want to learn this thing?” she asked. “Seems like an unnecessary extra step to me.”

  Rowan rolled his eyes and returned his sword to the barrel, holding out a hand for Kess’s. She tossed him the sword, fighting the heat that crept into her cheeks. Fanas was cruel for making someone like Rowan just as handsome as he was irritating.

  “An extra step means an extra length of steel between me and a man trying to kill me. It’s worth the extra training,” he said, stowing the swords. “Besides, there’s an art to it—done correctly, it’s like a dance. There are correct responses to different sets of moves. It’s part art, part science.” He shook his head as he found his towel again. “It’s not the bloodbath that fist fighting is.” Kess frowned at that.

  “Fist fighting is the same way,” she argued. “Do you really think we just go in there and slug it out until someone drops?” Rowan raised his eyebrows.

  “Don’t you?”

  “It seems impersonal to me,” Kess said, ignoring the comment. “Fighting in a ring is…immediate, I suppose. Your pain and theirs, the good snap of a kick or punch, and that instant feedback. Your techniques against theirs, only there’s no metal to keep you apart.”

  Rowan snorted. “That sounds almost as unpleasant as my trip to the Pits. You almost sound like you enjoy your fights.”

  “Enjoyment isn’t quite the same as feeling comfortable, lad.” Kess jumped at the voice. She’d been so focused on Rowan she’d forgotten that Eamon lurked nearby, sitting amiably on a box in the corner. The man was affable to a fault, an odd contrast to Rowan’s seriousness. He smiled at Kess, and she felt some of her frustration melt away. It was hard to be mad around Eamon. “She’s comfortable there the same way you’re comfortable around your books, research, and swords,” he continued, dark eyes on her.

  Rowan had returned to picking up the warehouse. “Why would anyone feel comfortable being cuffed half to death?”

  “Don’t like fighting your battles personally?” Kess asked, watching him distastefully. Rowan paused, expression confused as he straightened from picking up a stray towel.

  “How is fighting with a sword not personal?”

  “You don’t feel them crumple as the light goes out of their eyes.”

  “No,” Rowan admitted, his eyes gone cold. “But you do feel the life leaving their bodies as they die.”

  “The two of you need something to eat,” Eamon said, standing with a few cracks and a wince. “This dark warehouse isn’t lifting anyone’s spirits—not with you two filling it with nonsense.”

  “It’s better than the sewers,” Kess muttered, and Eamon laughed. Still, he shooed them both towards the door, and Kess was grateful to go. She shared a glance with Rowan near the exit, who, far from looking annoyed, simply seemed contemplative.

  Has he really killed someone before? She wondered. Ever since that night, she’d refused to hurt anyone in such an impersonal sort of way—it was one of the many reasons she’d gotten involved in fighting rings in the first place. If she ever had to defend herself again, she’d be sure to do it without Fulminant powers to shield herself from the sensation.

  She’d failed miserably in that.

  Kess’s scattered thoughts almost made her ignore the commotion at the front entrance to the manor. It was distant, the noise faint as it bounced towards the distant warehouse, but Kess paused, Rowan at her side—thankfully, with a shirt pulled on again.

  Voices erupted from the entry hall, though Kess couldn’t see it from her vantage point. One of them was young, high, and clearly upset.

  “What do you suppose that’s about?” Rowan murmured.

  Kess said nothing and decided to find out.

  Her entrance into the main hall sent the commotion into overdrive. Several guards held a young boy back—a boy Kess was shocked to recognize.

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