A tree stump spurts through the air, straight at me.
“Crudding hell,” I mutter. I’ll never get to it fast enough.
There’s always a back-up plan.
My twin blades whistle as they shoot toward that flying stump.
My right hand tightens on my sword’s hilt.
A gust of wind screams past me. It and the flats of my swords slam into the stump.
The stump veers to the side, intact but well away from me.
B-b-b-boomf! It crashes to the ground and tumbles through this patch of woodland.
“No, Penny,” my master scolds, “you know better. No deflections. Deflections could—”
“Harm the princess and my fellow bodyguards. I’m sorry.”
“Back to the beginning. Be ready this time. Remember, swords first, magic second.”
I sink into my favorite defensive position, my knees bent, my swords loose at my sides. I bounce on the balls of my feet.
With a flick of his hand, my master cleaves a tangle of wildflowers from their stems.
He flings them at me.
They split into five different targets.
So much for going back to easy.
With my favored hand—my right hand, so unusual for my world—I slash through them in a neat arc, separating each blossom.
To my master’s left, a heap of ground cover tears itself out of the earth. It spreads out and flies toward me in the shape of a V.
It flies toward my left sword.
I slash down, then up. The ground cover scatters on the back of my wind.
Two saplings rise fifty feet into the air, one on either side of my master.
They shoot down at me.
I watch, analyzing their arcs. High or low, high or low?
Low!
I dip and blast my blades through them.
“Good, Pens.” My master’s fingers twitch.
I hold my breath. This next one’s going to be big.
His fingers curl.
Two branches rip themselves from their trees, twice the size of the saplings. My master slings them at me.
And tears more branches off the dense trees of the forest.
I slash and sever, dodge and duck. My blades whirl around me, catching the branches and destroying them so they fall to my feet, nothing.
My heart hammers at my ribs, and my wind swirls around me like the world’s smallest tornado. The creek behind my master bubbles and babbles. My fingers burn. A spark leaps off my right hand and onto my sword.
Calm down, Penny. My wild magic, the magic of all the elements, surges within me. It’s the hardest of all magics to control, and it is mine to learn to control.
It’s why I was chosen for this life.
It’s why I was kidnapped for this life.
“Focus!” my master shouts.
The biggest branch yet hurtles toward me. It’s the size of a small tree. My master spreads his arms wide.
The bough splits in two.
My swords move toward it.
The two halves flip directions.
“Thorns and burrs,” I swear. With all the speed I’ve gained through a decade of training, I whip the blades across each other.
My fire coats them.
Like hot knives through butter, my swords slice through wood and bark alike.
More forest detritus shoots at me. Lost in my deadly dance, I slash and swipe, I twist and twirl. Were the other bodyguards here, they would gawk and gape.
But my master only throws more and more at me, and the precious princess only lays by the creek, reading a book when she’s supposed to practice her own untamed magic.
Across from me, my master frowns. He raises his arms. They tremble.
I dip lower. I do not blink.
A maple tree several feet behind him shakes.
I dip lower yet.
With his magic, he rips it out of the ground. Like one of this world’s baseball pitchers, he hurls it at me.
Three.
Two.
One.
With all the power of my thunderous thighs, I leap into the air. My wind pushes me higher and higher.
Flames scurry over my blades, and they greet the falling tree.
They carve through it.
My wind splits. It shoves every part of the former tree away from me and the imaginary princess standing behind me, using me to guard her from any attack.
And away from the real princess lying beside the creek reading her book, not paying any attention to the danger.
Good thing it’s me practicing and not her.
I land in a crouch, my blades drawn and my head up, ready. Dirt and detritus hop up around my boots.
Sweat beading over his forehead, my master drops his arms. “Excellent, Penny. And excellent control of your magic.”
“Thank you, Master.” I almost beam at him. While I don’t love the world that kidnapped me nor my role in it, I love doing a good job.
And I love swords and magic, neither of which would I have found in this, my home world.
My master turns toward the creek and the princess behind him. With my magic tucked away again, the creek only trickles. “Princess, how does your training proceed with your fire? Do you have anything new to show me?”
The princess, with her wavy brown hair and round eyes, is nearly a carbon copy of myself.
Most likely, though, she’ll be taller and thinner in a year or two. I’m two years older, and already the princess matches my height. I’ve also been filling out around my hips and chest—and have been put on a diet for it. I must continue to pass for the princess for as long as possible. I’ll be useless to her once I can’t pass for her.
What I’ll do then, I have no idea. But freedom doesn’t sound so bad.
Not bad at all, in fact. Even if I can never live in my home world.
The princess scrambles to her feet, wearing the same sensible brown trousers and tunic as I do. She slips an e-reader from this world into a cloth sack that any of our merchants’ daughters could own. “I was working on it, but then I got distracted. So, no, there’s nothing new to show you. Not today.”
I smother an eye roll. The princess’s control of her fire is near nonexistent. I have to suppress her fire whenever it rears its ugly head, either with my own fire or with my water, wind, and earth. But the princess—our future queen—cannot control a magic that’s half as wild as my own.
Not that fire magic is tame.
Even so, the princess chooses to read a book from a world that is not her own, rather than master a talent that could kill us all, especially at the rate it’s been strengthening over the past year.
For now, I can control the princess’s fire as needed, but her fire will likely outstrip my own one day. Hopefully, it will never outstrip all my magic.
My master cocks his head at the princess. His dark gaze lands on her bag. “Princess, you know that you must practice to control your fire.”
“But this is the only place where I can get new books. They call to me, you know that they do.”
He flattens his lips. “Still. You may not always have Penny to help you.”
The princess narrows her eyes at me. She hates me for who I am, for all that I am.
But she doesn’t say a word against my master. She knows she’ll only get scolded if she does, either by my master himself or by the queens, her mothers.
My master sighs. “Tomorrow, we’ll work on your magic first, with Penny to help. It wouldn’t hurt Penny to practice tired anyway.” He lifts his arms into the air.
All the destruction I created stitches itself back together. Branches rejoin trees. Ground cover replants itself. Wildflowers jump back on their stems. Even the tree I sliced apart glues itself back together and sinks into the ground.
Someday, I may be able to harness my own earth magic to do the same.
But we never practice that healing type of magic. No, my magic is for death and destruction only.
Together, we make our way out of this patch of woods in a large town or a small city, I can never remember which. The laughter of children pulls us through the forest. At the edge, my master glances at me. He gestures to my weapons, to our clothes. “Glamours, please, Penny.”
I grit my teeth. Spell-casting is my least favorite of all the magics. The elementals come to me naturally—if anything, they come too strong—but casting spells? Not so natural. No, they require a ton of effort and focus, which is always difficult at the end of training.
I close my eyes, summoning that elusive wispy magic to my fingertips.
“Uh-uh-uh, Penny. That’s cheating.”
Like my master cheated when he moved his hands to hurl things at me?
But I obey and open my eyes. Without closing them again, I envision us in the clothes of this world, in jeans and T-shirts, nondescript. The swords crossed over my back disappear.
“Excellent.” My master strides through the thinning trees to the playground outside the nearby elementary school.
No child looks at us twice as we weave through them.
Except for one little girl, with dark eyes and darker hair. She looks at us in wonder. She eyes my blades.
“Grrawh!” I lunge at her with a silly smile and my hands up in fake claws.
She laughs and runs away to her friends.
I leave the smile on my face for her. No need to scare her just yet. As long as none of the upper crust of our country look like her, she’ll be safe here.
But my master noticed her noticing us, a sign of latent magic that could bloom in our world. He’s memorized her features as a potential bodyguard, and he’ll compare it to the children of the upper class. The fact that he didn’t snatch her up now—or turn to me to make plans to snatch her tonight—means that none of the city dwellers match her.
A child of the rural upper class could match her, though. Even if it’s only close enough to be a sister, she’ll be whisked away from here.
As I was ten years ago.
Magic or no magic, swords or no swords, I don’t wish that fate on anyone.