Page 55 of Court of Lies and Deceit

She stares back at me, looking confused. Then she heaves an endless sigh. “Malachi’s balls, you don’t know how to share emotions, do you?”

“No.”

“Alright, it works like this. You take an emotion that you’re feeling, and then you reach out with it towards?—”

“What do you meanreach out?”

She ponders for a second. “Visualize it like you’re stretching the emotion.”

“Alright.”

“And then you attach it to the other person. Once it’s attached, that person will feel half of that emotion while you feelthe other half of it. So it decreases the feeling for you but makes them feel it too.”

I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “It decreases the feeling for me and they feel the other half?”

“Yes.”

“That’s cool,” I begin hesitantly. “But also kind of… useless. What am I supposed to use it for?”

“I’ve mainly used it while being tortured.”

I stare at her. The casual way she said it makes me wonder if I actually heard her correctly. “Tortured?”

“Yeah. If they inflict pain on me, they feel half of it too. Great way to make them reluctant to do it.”

That had not been what I was asking at all, so this time, I spell it out. “You’ve been tortured a lot?”

“Well, yeah, of course.” She looks at me as if that should’ve been obvious. “Everyone in the Unseelie Court has been trained in how to withstand torture.”

And just when I thought our courts might not be so different after all, she hits me with something like this.

“Uhm… right. Of course.” I clear my throat, trying to focus on the task at hand again. “Alright, stretch the emotion and attach it.”

She nods encouragingly.

I know that I am frustrated. We’ve been training every waking hour of the day, for three days now, and I still haven’t been able to create emotions from nothing like Jocasta does. Which is why we switched to other techniques today. But I am apparently bad at those too.

Frustration burns inside me, eating at my soul and making me feel like a failure. I know it. I can feel it. But how do I take that emotion and stretch it out to attach it to someone else?

When I reach out with my magic to manipulate someone else’s emotions, I just cast it towards them. So I try doing the same to my own chest.

It doesn’t work.

A snarl slips from my lips. Clenching my jaw, I flex my hand in annoyance and then try again. I have no idea how to even connect the magic to my own emotions.

“I can’t even see them!” I snap.

Jocasta, entirely unfazed by my outburst, just raises her eyebrows in question. “See what?”

“My emotions.”

“Hmm.” She taps her chin, considering in silence for a few seconds.

Across the sand, Draven, Lyra, and Galen are working in perfect synchronization as they try to advance across the room and make it past Isera and Alistair. The two fae, however, look to still be having massive issues working together. They’re stopping the dragon shifters’ advance separately instead of trying to coordinate their attacks.

Embers flutter through the air as Draven forces Alistair’s flames away with a blast of wind. Outside the windows, soft white clouds drift across the heavens and temporarily block the midday sun. It makes the light inside our training room dim and brighten at irregular intervals.

“What do they look like?” Jocasta finally asks. “When you see the emotions in other people’s chests, what do they look like?”

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