Legends of Astræa: Cupid's Arrow Book 1 (Legends of Astræa Series) Read online

  “I trust you had a good night rest?” he asked me humorously. In his hands he carried a perfectly folded square of clothes like his—for me. Crap.

  “A little jet-lagged,” I said, realizing I was still yawning and that I had probably spent most of the night in Demyan Greco’s dream. He nodded as if understanding. I felt guilty for keeping the secret. I think I was mostly embarrassed to tell him I was meeting Demyan Greco in my dreams. What harm could it be?

  “Here, change into these. I’ll be waiting for you outside your room. You have two minutes.”

  He left me, watching the square of black, neatly folded garments in my hands. I snorted as I closed the door. He was funny.

  I brushed my teeth and changed into those loose black pajamas. Gavril hadn’t come back yet from wherever he’d gone to.

  “Ten minutes?” He tapped his watch, annoyed by my tardiness as I stepped outside my room.

  “Geez. Good morning to you too.” My sarcasm never ceased to surprise me. “You know that ten minutes would be a Guinness record for Tiffany Miller,” I said.

  He hmphed as I followed him into what it seemed to have been a humongous, remodeled, and empty room with perfectly polished wooden floors. There was no furniture to speak about, only wall panels that displayed numerous weapons, some in glass cases like they did in museums. I strode around, admiring each wall. In the far-right corner, I recognized the standing armor I had seen him wearing in Demyan’s memories. It was fascinating.

  “This is our training dojo.” Francis interrupted my perusing.

  I followed Francis onto the large, bamboo-woven mat in the center of the room. Gavril then made his grand entrance into the room and sat by me.

  Where have you been? I asked him.

  Francis’s jaw tensed, and his finger tapped softly over his mouth as if he was determining to say anything about Gavril’s presence or not. He didn’t. Instead, he took a wide stance, crossed his arms, and hid his hands inside the wide black sleeves of his tunic. He looked at me with a cocky grin.

  “Discipline is the first thing you must learn. You will give me five push-ups for every extra minute you took before training. You took ten minutes, that leaves eight minutes times five.” He wanted me to do forty push-ups for being late?

  “You must be kidding me?” No, he wasn’t. Francis’s wide grin was insultingly confident. Crap. I stood there not moving one finger, but he was also unhurried. It was a game of who was more resilient or stubborn.

  “And for every push-up you don’t give me, you will do five more the next day. We also have to speak about neutering your mutt and giving him a healthy diet of dry food instead of those juicy Kobe steaks you have been feeding him,” he warned me.

  Crap. I hadn’t fed him anything. My glance turned to Gavril who had turned toward the opposite wall to avoid my stare. Francis’s glance was suspiciously amused. He had cornered me. But not quite.

  “I will only accept training with you if you take me to Father Dominique.” Or I was walking out of his life.

  Uh—is this the part where we leave and start touring French castles and palaces? Gavril suggested. My mind had no space to think about anything else but those forty push-ups Francis was demanding from me.

  “You have my word,” Francis said.

  Fucking great. I can deal with temporarily turning into an Alpo-breath vegetarian, but he better not even think of… Hum—you know, a few push-ups cannot hurt, buttercup, while we figure out things here, Gavril said. Right.

  Don’t you have a tree to bark at outside? I huffed as I dropped on the floor and pushed my first one.

  Gavril whimpered.

  “Remember, strength is vital to your survival,” Francis said as my arms collapsed after the nineteenth. “Take your time.” He waited patiently as I attempted then next five.

  Which I couldn’t even finish. I knew then that fighting Ash was going to take a lot more conditioning and a whole lot more smarts. And as much as I hated to admit, I needed Francis to train me.

  We jogged every morning. First day, I could barely do two miles without feeling I was dying. Apparently, my hearts needed double the air a human person does, or at least it felt like it did. It took me a couple weeks before I could build up to ten miles before lessons. He also had a climbing wall about four stories high by the hidden garden, where we trained. I was beginning to miss St. Mary’s at this point.

  “Ten-K will help you survive in any situation,” he said.

  Yeah, like being lost in a forest. No thank you. Been there, done that. But training was the only thing that took me from thinking of Demyan during the day. He’d never shown up that night, or the following, or the next. Although, every night I crashed in my bed, I was exhausted. Every morning, I tortured myself wondering why he hadn’t visited me again as he said he would. At first, I worried about him, but unlike me, he was a master and could handle a whole army on his own. As time went by, I understood he had stood me up without an explanation. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t lovable—never was. Not even my mother loved me.

  Then there was humming that had been getting out of control ever since we first arrived to Paris. Every day I’d felt that nagging pull, like I needed to go find something. It had been especially strong last weekend when I was jogging close to the polo fields in the Bois de Boulogne park with Francis.

  Frankly, I didn’t know what to do when the humming kept jolting my hearts and making me feel fussy inside every time. I hated feeling so weird. I blamed it all on the blasted golden arrow.

  Oh, come on. That’s nothing, Gavril said, making fun of me as I massaged my tired calves. My silver signum reacted, expanding and swirling. I felt my muscles enjoying the relief, and they healed on their own faster than they ever had before—right in front of my own eyes.

  The day before, it had been small scratches on my knees and hands, as I’d run carelessly and lost my balance over the uneven path. Within minutes after I brushed my hands and continued our jog, the burning had ceased. However, it became evident when we arrived at Francis’s Mansion that he’d wanted to disinfect the small lesions.

  “They’re gone. You are already healed,” Francis said, throwing the dirty cloth in the wastebasket. Neither my hands nor my knee had scratches, not even an indication of a cut under the caked blood that Francis had cleaned up.

  “Is that a Strzyga thing?” I asked him.

  “No. We heal the same as a human would, except that after the immortality ritual our bodies become stronger. I believe you are more special than you give yourself credit,” he said. He stood and tapped his lips with his index finger and his mind ran on a wheel. Ever since my sixteenth birthday, my body had somehow been empowered with my healing gift.

  Despite Francis’s surprise, he understood the value of this gift. So much so, that my training suddenly became strenuous and had evolved rapidly from a short four-hour session into a daily six-hour session followed by classroom studies.

  “Oomph.” I folded in pain. Francis had just taken all the air out of my lungs. Tears glinted without my permission.

  Does he have to hurt you? Gavril snarled at Francis.

  “Infantile, girlish theatrics will not save your life,” Francis continued, ignoring Gavril’s snarls and my passing pain. He was right. Ash didn’t hesitate to kill Mother Clarisse, even when I begged him, and he didn’t touch his heart to hurt me when he left me to the mercy of those sucking shadows.

  Shush. I will heal soon, I reminded Gavril.

  I stood up and nodded back at Francis, somewhat grateful he wouldn’t let me divert my mind. I wiped my dumb tears and made a midair back kick and used my elbow, but Francis expertly avoided both as he stepped back. I screamed with frustration as I fell on the floor, after he made me turn over him.

  “Arrgh.”

  “Focus. Every part of your body is a weapon.” He attacked me again and again.

  This is only practice, I kept repeating inside my head. I got up as many times as I hit the ground. In a matter of we
eks, I became well-versed in all manner of fighting and self-defense using, fists, fingers, knees, feet, elbows, forehead, and, yes very grossly, even my teeth.

  He needs help. The man is loco in the head. Gavril snarled, grunted, ranted, and complained every time Francis put me on the floor. We should be going to the palace instead, he said. That word again. He had been bringing brochures of castles and palaces in southern France into my room. Also, he had been insisting that we take off on a train ride.

  What palace? What are you babbling about?

  Hum, you know, the palace? Where, you know… hum, the prince might know about this Father Dominique? Gavril had a point. I needed to find Father Dominique, and so far, my efforts had been without result. No one in Saint Émilion resided, lived, or worked as a priest with that name. Mother Clarisse hadn’t left me a last name or an address. He was an elusive and even more fictitious person than I was, I came to think.

  “Move swift as the Wind and closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain.”

  I rolled my eyes after he quoted more Sun-Tzu every time I was thrown onto the floor. It didn’t matter I could heal faster, my entire being still hurt—a lot. Even my eyelashes hurt after misjudging or misusing technical defense moves. Sigh.

  “Please tell me that isn’t the only book we have,” I complained as I dragged myself from the floor with a limp. He had a great library in the house. But the truth was that we had been reading Sun-Tzu every day. According to Francis, the book was required reading to pass the tests needed for imperial appointment to military positions in ancient China and was also the foundations of orthodox military theory in early modern China. He knew I had memorized it.

  “You are not ready yet for others. You must understand it first.” He stepped into position. Crap. My training was straightforward, backbreaking, and intrinsic, yet unpredictably, I had begun to accept this new life.

  “Why? I know it by memory,” I whined.

  This sucks. You should be learning how to be a princess and not showing your teeth every time you are threatened. Leave that to me…

  So do you think training is wrong then?

  Huh, maybe. No, well… I think we are wasting time. You need to meet with the prince. Gavril insisted on meeting the prince every night we debated. The main point was, would the prince know about Father Dominique? We didn’t know that, and the risk of him finding out why I was looking for Father Dominique, or worse who I really was, was too risky.

  Gavril, the prince is the worst candidate to look into this matter. You know that.

  Gavril ignored my stare.

  “‘The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.’ You possess the power, and I don’t mean the one in your hands. You don’t need tricks or weapons or armies. All you need is your intelligence. Do you understand?” Nope.

  I was grateful for Francis’s interruption though. Having Gavril’s conversations going inside my head was giving me another migraine. “Right. So why are we training for battle then?”

  “Every skill we master can be used as a weapon. Your mind, your body, intelligence, photographic memory, a pen or a sword, money, anything can be a weapon, but in the words of my master, ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’”

  “Sun Tzu was your master?” I asked, rather shocked.

  “Sun-Zi is also my friend,” Francis revealed. How old were they?

  It says here he was born in five hundred fifty-four before Christ, Gavril read from the book cover on the floor mat.

  Holy crap. Sun-Zi, Francis’s friend, was really ancient. Francis was very old. It gave to the concept of immortality a whole new color.

  “So do you understand, or do you need further explanations?” Francis asked me.

  “Uh, let’s see. Avoid fighting—check. Be smart—check. Got it,” I said with a marked tone of sarcasm. Sure, easy as pie. Right? Like I could reason with someone as evil as Ash. Swords were my answer for now. Vanquish Demon first, ask questions later. That was my theory.

  “Kenjutsu can be used in combination with Taijutsu, Ninjutsu, Fūinjutsu, chakra flow, and even Genjutsu in order to achieve more devastating techniques.” He wrapped my hands with layers of bandages to protect them.

  “So how long will it take me to start with swords?” I asked him, feeling somewhat put off because we used sticks instead of swords to prevent any accidents while we trained.

  At this rate, perhaps next year you may be ready for your first lesson of Taijutsu,” he said.

  I needed to practice with a sword pronto, but that was out of the question for now. How else was I going to vanquish Ash?

  Later that week, I learned that Francis favored swords like the Meibutsu katana sword. Meibutsu was a special designation given to sword masterpieces, like his from the Kamakura period of the late fourteenth century. Or his Kodachi, a shorter blade that accompanied his katana in the traditional samurai daishō pairing of swords. Both had been forged and signed in gold inlay specifically for Francis by the master maker Masamune, which meant that Francis had been considered a noble, Elite Samurai. I made a mental note to have him tell me that story some other time.

  “Let’s not forget you are still a beginner,” Francis reminded me, repeatedly.

  I covered my face in defeat.

  “Now, Samurai are warriors who defend a kingdom or a higher purpose, and Shinobi are usually spies, traitors, and mercenaries who don’t usually care about ethics.” His body movements were like a rhythmical slow dance over the floor. Samurai believed that swords contained within the spirit of the warrior. I wondered if this was the reason he wouldn’t let me touch his.

  So I was stuck with sticks and theory—at least until I found the elusive Father Dominique. In the meantime, Francis and Enit instructed me about state affairs, political science, royal genealogy, and family trees and history. For in Francis’s point of view, the kingdom’s survival depended as much on the world’s politics as it did on our bloodlines. Every early evening after training in the dojo, Francis sat with me at the library.

  “When are we going to shoot one of these?” I held an arrow in my hand that had been inside a glass display at the library. I looked at it closely. It had to be a very old one, but the feather was still in good condition. I had become fascinated with different types of bows, particularly with crossbows and yes—arrows.

  “Tomorrow. Theory first.” He took the arrow from my hand and opened a secret panel hidden on the bookcase behind me. A room with glass and fine cherrywood drawers and shelves displayed a grand collection of firearms. All sizes and shapes of them hung over blue felt. A tall, fixed table that looked like a smaller version of his cooking island in his kitchen stood in the center of the room. A large metallic chest lay on the floor to my immediate right, and high on a shelf, two pistols inside a wooden box with the most amazing engraving in gold on the handles drew my attention.

  “Manceaux dueling pistols, given to me by the king of France in 1843,” he said, picking four different guns out of the wall panel above. He left them on the rubber tabletop that protected the wood.

  “This one is a multi-barrel pistol. Napoleon’s three-chamber box-lock pistol. He didn’t know my fingers were deadlier at close range than this tinker-priceless-toy.” Frances showed me the smallest gun of the four. It had three barrels, each decorated with a ring of gold leaves. The wooden handle also had gold inlays. “This one I used during the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. It is a Remington Army Percussion Revolver, .44 caliber with an eight-inch barrel, six-shot.” Francis opened the empty cylinder and disarmed the revolver in pieces. “This is the hammer. This other is called the trigger. You can see how the mechanism operates with this spring.”

  I nodded. The third handgun was like one of those one would see in spy movies—a SIG Sauer. It’s rate of fire was 1,200 per minute with a range of 295 feet. Francis taught me the basics on how to use every imaginable weapon—ancient, modern, and high tech. He showed me the distinc
tion of signature guns, favorites among Mafia, drug lords, military, spies, mercenaries, and royalty.

  “Tell me the four basic military tactics,” Francis asked me, when he entered the library the following day.

  “It is called the four Fs—find, fix, flank, and finish—and there are also strategies to recognize an ambush. Linear Ambush, L Ambush, and Area Ambush…”

  “If you keep this extraordinary pace, by next week we shall put into practice some of the theory,” Francis promised, somewhat proud.

  Of course, he meant we were going to construct real bombs or make poisons, and if lucky enough, perhaps even shoot targets with a real gun. We had been practicing with three different types of bows. I happened to like the small crossbow he put in my hands the most.

  But not all lessons were interesting. In fact, some of them ranged into the realms of utterly and absolutely boring. It was worse than sitting in chemistry with Sister Bernice. No mystical hooey or juicy gossip. I studied and memorized various poisonous herbs, their chemical composition, and the different techniques to making poisons, biochemical weapons, gases, where to find products—from under a simple kitchen sink to hard–to-make ones—and the possible lethal mixes in theory. What would Sister Bernice say about Francis Chemistry 101?

  I told my suspicions to Gavril one afternoon when we were alone. I think Francis is planning to turn me into a terrorist.

  I think that a knife can carve the most beautiful things, can help you survive hunger, make shelter, and can save your life from a predator one day. It isn’t the knife that makes you a terrorist but who holds it, Gavril said.

  I think Sun Tzu is quickly rubbing on you. I covered my face. Ugh—I just couldn’t take more of that.

  No, boy scouts, he said gratefully.

  “Belladonna has been used to make poison-tip arrows. The berries and foliage are extremely toxic causing delirium, hallucinations, and death. The antidote is another poison, physostigmine, found in the Calabar bean originally from Africa.” Francis worked his chalk over the board, drawing the chemical composition. St. Mary’s was beginning to sound not so bad—nuh.