Rowan's POV
The training ground was a flat, cleared area at the edge of the village, flanked by towering pines. The snow here was trampled and hard.
Rowan stood in the center, feeling utterly exposed. Kira and a few others watched from a respectful distance, not crowding, but present. Thorne stood before her, arms crossed.
"The power is part of you," he began, his tone that of a practical instructor. "Like your breath, or your heartbeat. You can't fight it without fighting yourself. The goal isn't to lock it away. It's to make it obey."
"Obey," Rowan repeated, the word tasting bitter. Obedience had been Marcus's demand.
"Wrong word," Thorne corrected, as if reading her thoughts. "Direct. You learn to direct it. Right now, it's a flood with no banks. We're going to build the banks."
He pointed to a young, healthy pine at the edge of the clearing. "I want you to walk over to that tree and put your hand on it."
That was all. No grand feat of magic. Just… touch a tree.
Warily, she walked over. The snow crunched under her boots. She could feel the latent cold inside her, a pool of icy energy sitting in her core, stirring with her anxiety. She stopped before the pine, its bark rough and dark.
She glanced back at Thorne. He gave a single, slow nod.
Hesitantly, she reached out and pressed her bare palm flat against the tree trunk.
The bark was rough and cold. For a second, nothing happened. Then, she felt it a subtle pull, a connection. The life within the tree, the slow, patient sap, the deep-rooted warmth of its stored summer. Her own cold reacted instinctively, reaching for that warmth to balance itself.
A wave of frost shot from her palm, racing up the trunk with a sound like cracking glass. Needles turned white and brittle. The bark she touched became sheathed in a solid inch of clear, hard ice. The spread stopped about three feet up and out, leaving a glittering, frozen scar on the pine.
She yanked her hand back, horrified. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to"
"I didn't ask you to not freeze it," Thorne said, walking over. He examined the ice with a critical eye. "I asked you to touch it. And you did. The freezing was automatic. A reflex. Like flinching from a flame." He turned to her. "Now, I want you to do it again. But this time, as you touch it, I want you to breathe. And in your mind, picture the cold stopping at your skin. Not going into the tree. Just… staying with you."
It sounded impossible. The cold felt like a living thing, desperate to escape.
But she placed her hand on the frozen patch again. The ice was so cold it almost burned. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the audience, and focused on her breathing. In. Out. She pictured the pool of cold inside her. She imagined a wall around it, containing it.
For a few seconds, it worked. She felt the cold bubbling against this imaginary wall, but not escaping.
Then a sharp memory flashed Marcus's smiling face turning cruel, the bite of the silver chains. Fear and anger, hot and sudden, spiked through her.
The imaginary wall shattered.
A much more violent surge of cold exploded from her palm. There was a deafening CRACK as the ice already on the tree thickened explosively. But it didn't stop there. The frost shot up the entire trunk, engulfing branches, turning every needle into a glassy spike. It reached the tree's crown and kept going, flash-freezing the very air around the upper branches into a shower of tiny ice crystals that fell like diamond dust.
In the space of a terrified heartbeat, the entire twenty-foot pine tree had been transformed into a perfect, lifeless sculpture of ice. It stood there, glittering grotesquely in the midday sun, a monument to her lack of control.
Silence hung over the clearing.
Rowan stared, numb with despair. She'd done the opposite of what he asked. She'd made it worse. She was a disaster.
She expected disappointment. A reprimand.
Thorne let out a low whistle. "Well," he said, a note of awe in his rough voice. He circled the frozen tree. "That's… impressive."
She blinked. "What? No, it's I destroyed it! I lost control!"
"Of course you did," he said, stopping in front of her. His expression wasn't angry. It was focused, analytical. "You got scared. The memory triggered you. The power reacted. That's how it works right now. The point wasn't to succeed. The point was to try. And to see what happens when you fail."
He gestured to the ice tree. "This isn't bad, Rowan. This is power. Raw, untamed, incredible power. Marcus would burn a thousand villages for a fraction of this." His stormy eyes pinned her. "Your power isn't bad. It just is. It's a weapon that currently fires every time you sneeze. We need to teach you how to aim. How to put the safety on."
He placed his own hand on the frozen trunk, unaffected by the cold that would have given another wolf frostbite in seconds. "Control will come. With time. With practice. With learning that your emotions are the trigger, and your mind is the safety." He looked at her, and a faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his scarred mouth. "The first step isn't mastering the storm. It's admitting you're standing in the middle of it."
Rowan looked from Thorne's steady face to the beautiful, terrible ice tree she had created. It was destruction. It was also, undeniably, power. Her power. Not Marcus's. Not something stolen.
It had saved her life. It had made her a monster.
But as she looked at Kira, who gave her an encouraging thumbs-up, and at the other exiles who watched with understanding, not fear, she wondered for the first time…
Maybe it could also make her something else.
Something new.
She took a deep, steadying breath, watching the air fog before her. The pool of cold inside her settled, just a little.
"Okay," she said, her voice still small, but firm. "What's the next step?"