Free Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 by Terah Edun Page B

she had before encountered. Besides, the sound was coming too fast. Much too fast.
    “Hear...that?” Ezekiel asked, his breath coming out in a wheeze. It was getting harder for him to talk and breathe simultaneously. Sara knew the paralysis was spreading to the right side of his body and his throat. She also knew that before he fully succumbed to the paralysis and eventually died from asphyxiation, it would be a slow and harsh descent while his brain tried to cope with the lack of oxygen by slowly shutting down until he fell unconscious. It wouldn’t be painful so much as excruciating to know what was happening and be unable to do anything about it. Before his last few minutes of life, Ezekiel could also expect the muscles in his throat to restrict so tightly that the pathway of air to his lungs would be cut off. Sara knew from experience what it would feel like. That is, she knew what it felt like to slowly suffocate. The spotty vision. The gasping breaths. The darkness just at the edge of your mind, coming forward like a cloak of shadows as you fell back into its grasp.
    It had been unintentional for her. It was a part of her training. Sara thought it would be similar to her time in the training grounds when a particularly overzealous sparring partner had pulled her into a grappling hold. He had outweighed her by sixty pounds and it had been hand-to-hand combat. When he had grabbed her from behind while wrapping his arms around her throat in a bruising hold, nothing she had been able to do could force him to loosen his grip. Not kicking him in the shins and knees with all of her might. Not slamming her fists down on his muscled arms or clawing at his wrists. Nothing forced him to release her. As it had dawned on her that she was losing this fight and dark spots began to grow in her vision, she had looked to her left. Her father stood there with a thunderous expression on his face and his own muscled arms folded in front of him.
    Her last thought before she lost consciousness was ‘Father, save me.’
    When she woke several hours later, she had looked straight up into her father’s disapproving face. He had said one thing, “Rest. You’re going to need it.”
    Her throat feeling like a living bruise, Sara had slipped back into slumber with the touch of a healer’s hand. The next morning, her father had taken her out to the training fields and drilled her again and again with a practice dummy about what she had done wrong. The most important lesson, though, hadn’t been what fighting tactics she should have used to break her training partner’s hold. Instead, the lesson that he wanted drilled into her mind was that she shouldn’t have tried to rely on anyone else to save her life.
    “Faith like that, kitling , will get you killed,” her father had said tautly.
    “But father...” Sara remembered protesting.
    He had cut her off before she could finish the sentence.
    “But nothing. Rely on your strengths, know your weaknesses, and do what you have to do. But do not think that I, or anyone else, will be coming to save you.”
    Sara had nodded obediently, though it hadn’t soaked in right away. Later, when she was on the training field, again and again and her father had stood back with a troubled face but unwavering stance as he watched her take a beating from bigger and faster soldiers, mages and non-magic people alike. Around the third or fourth fight, she had transitioned. Transitioned from a girl trainee to a young woman warrior who knew one thing—that she couldn’t rely on her father to save her. That in battle she must save herself. He was her protector, her mentor and her father, but he would not always be there. That is what he wanted her to learn. Independence. She first needed to be able to depend on herself before she leaned on others. So she had.
    Now, glancing over at Ezekiel, Sara knew that all of those techniques she had learned—how to break a grapple hold, how to disable an attacker, how to