Page 127 of Daughter of the Drowned Empire
“I think I might. Even after my revelation, my father used to bind me.” His voice was quiet.
“Gods.” My stomach knotted as I remembered the feel of the ropes Tristan had conjured. The burning, the humiliation, the pain…having to train while bound sounded unbearable.
Rhyan folded his arms across his chest. “He’d send his mages to bind me before the morning run. I entered fives the same way.” His eyes darkened. “I was just like you in the beginning. Last in the run, tripping and doubling over with cramps. I was trampled and bullied. My father personally whipped me until I was sick all over myself. I threw up every day that first week after the run, making myself ill trying to catch up.”
I reached out and rested my hand on his arm again. I’d been so angry at Rhyan and frustrated and scared the last month that I’d overlooked the fact that he was actually a really good teacher for me. All of his advice…it seemed like the advice he’d needed to hear himself.
He flinched, tensing, but this time he relaxed beneath my touch.
“It took a while, a long while. But I caught up, outrunning them, beating them at fives even with my hands tied.”
“How?” I asked.
A shy look suddenly spread across his features. “Have you ever seen a gryphon before? A real one?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve never been far enough North.”
“I grew up with gryphons,” Rhyan said. “Literally. Even used to help our Master of the Horse train them. In Glemaria, they do the patrol instead of ashvan, riding in circles every hour around the border. And we also use them for transport instead of seraphim.” He paused, the edges of his lips quirking up. “They’re…amazing. Beautiful and powerful. So strong and…just giant. Much larger than your seraphim. Tougher, too. I loved them as a boy.” He smiled shyly. “I wanted to be one in a way. They seemed so free. Able to escape…or they looked like they could. Well. I’d mostly wanted one as a pet. My father, of course, said no. A gryphon would quickly grow too enormous to fit in my room, so….”
Something in my chest warmed, imagining a small Rhyan with wild, curly, dark hair and overly large green eyes just wanting to cuddle with a gryphon at night. He admired them because they looked free, but I could also sense what he’d left unsaid. He’d been lonely. Someone who acted as cold as he did, someone whose aura could freeze was alone. He hadn’t just wanted a pet. He’d needed a friend.
“What would you have named him?” I asked. “If you did get a pet gryphon?”
He closed his eyes, smiling wide. “Aidan. He was my favorite hero in one of my mom’s stories. Luckily, when I started school, I met one of my best friends. Also named Aidan. So don’t feel too sorry for me never having gotten Aidan the gryphon. Aidan the human’s a fine runner-up and kind of looks like a gryphon, actually.” He chuckled. “Huge muscles, big beaky nose.”
I laughed, too, and shifted closer to him.
“So little me was fascinated by gryphons and awed by their strength. To give you an idea, an akadim has the strength of five soturi, the gryphon has the strength of around twenty. And keep in mind, these are sky creatures—they just want to fly. But to keep them from flying off to the mountains, we tie a rope around their legs, somewhat thin so their movements aren’t restricted, long enough for them to fly around but not escape.
“As a boy, I thought the ropes were magic, bound with some powerful spell. But when I asked my father’s Second, he told me it was just plain old rope.”
“Plain rope can keep a gryphon from escaping?”
He nodded. “See, when the gryphons are babies, they’re so small and helpless, they have no strength at all. And when we tie them down, they kick and struggle to break free, but they can’t escape. Because the rope is too strong—for a baby. Eventually, they stop trying. Then they grow up to be massive, powerful beasts. But no one ever tells the gryphons they’ve grown stronger than the rope. They learned the rope was stronger. So they don’t even try, even though they could break free without any effort at all.” Rhyan swallowed, staring intently at me.
His meaning began to sink in.
“One day,” he continued, “I was watching the gryphons just allowing themselves to be tied down by such a puny piece of rope, all because they had no idea they’d outgrown it, no idea they’d changed and were stronger. Had no sense of the power inside of them. And I thought…why not me? What if I’m stronger now? Stronger than my father, stronger than everything he had used to try to hold me down, to take away my power.” He gave a small smile. “Turned out I was right. I grew up terrified of my father. The day I decided to fight back, I found out very quickly that I was stronger, that I could defeat him. In a physical fight at least.” He closed his mouth abruptly, a distant look clouding his eyes before he refocused on me. “You have power inside of you. Maybe not the power you were expecting, but it is a force you can wield, and when you stop feeling guilty for everything you couldn’t do, stop blaming yourself for the past, you can tap into it. I decided this when I couldn’t touch mine. I decided I had power inside of me that my father couldn’t take, couldn’t bind, couldn’t strip away.”
Rhyan’s green eyes were blazing now. “You choose. You can let what the others think about you be right, you can let your guilt and shame hold you down, or you can decide your fate, assert the strength you do have, become stronger than ever before. But you have to claim it. And when you do, you can be freer than a seraphim. Stronger than a gryphon. No ropes can hold you. No cage can trap you.”
I sucked in a breath, letting his words sink in. I was starting to believe him, believe he was right, believe I really could do this, and see that maybe I had been letting my guilt over Jules hold me back. Maybe in the two years since I’d lost her, I’d been too ready to help my sisters as if that would make things up to Jules. Maybe I’d been sacrificing myself to them since Jules had been sacrificed. And maybe, just maybe, I was punishing myself with Tristan, torturing myself for that perfect image I’d cultivated—the one I’d mastered when I’d watched her being taken away. The way I’d let him speak ill of her and hold me and kiss my hand.
Something in my heart untwisted. It was sore and raw. But I knew Rhyan had opened something inside of me, healed some part of me without even knowing it.
Swallowing, I asked, “Is that why you have the torn rope in your tattoo?”
He nodded. “If a gryphon just tried to tear that rope, they’d be free in seconds, but they don’t do it because they don’t know this. I wanted to remind myself. Every time I thought I couldn’t do something, a task felt too big, an enemy too scary, I imagined they were nothing more than a thin, puny rope. And no rope can hold me. Every time you think you can’t do something, imagine a rope in your mind. And tear that rope apart.”
“So it is really possible to train without magic,” I said, breathlessly.
He nodded. “That’s why Aemon’s pushing for you to stay, why I’ve always said you could do this and meant it. And you have been doing it. You’ve trained for over a month. You’re stronger than when you first stepped foot in here. Last night, you were tired and injured. But the fighting you did—it wasn’t all me. It was you. Lyr, true strength has nothing to do with magic. Any soturion who relies on magic alone will always lose in the end. The ones you see out there tearing up the track—most of them are relying on magic stores, not pulling it from deep within. There’s a very big difference between a soturion who gains muscle at the Revelation and one who builds it themselves. The strongest, they find their power inside.”
“Show me,” I said. “I want to learn. I want to find that strength, that power.” And surprisingly, I knew I meant it. Not just as a means to an end, as a way to protect my sisters, as a way to secure my status, or engagement to Tristan. I wanted to be strong—just for me.
He swallowed hard, his jaw clenched. “It’s not that simple, what you’ll need, what I have to show you. I’m obligated to continue training you according to the Academy’s program. But outside of training hours….”
I could see him mentally sketching out the terms of what he was proposing.
