It didn’t take me long to realize the reason why the goddess’s first boon had been relatively easy to obtain after the cohort and I found the colored stones. Mastering it was not simple.

I pushed myself up off the ground, spitting out the taste of grass, and glared at the pine tree whose branches I was sitting under. Behind me I could hear the others getting instruction from the older Sprouts and Saplings that had been sent along to instruct them on the training grounds. The shadows in the Seedling Palace were apparently too strong and too many for beginners to easily practice in and not get lost or overwhelmed or appear from the underside of a branch.

So now we were here, across First Shore Lake, in a circle of pines that didn’t have branches hundreds of feet off the ground but that were still goddess grown so that their shadows stood out from the regular trees. I could feel the difference in them now that I had the boon. The shadows of the goddess grown pines felt like light weight door coverings, easily brushed aside and stepped into. The shadows of the other pines that I could sense in my very limited range felt more barred depending on how deep or the light the shadow was, how big they were. I doubted I had much of a chance of stepping into a medium or light shadow right now. Or even a small dark shadow. Too many layers of coverings knotted close, to keep with the comparison, and I didn’t have the precision to undo them.

As was proven by the fact that I kept ending up sprawled out under my tree. I gritted my teeth.

In theory, the exercise was simple. Step into the shadow paths and step back out close to where you entered. In theory, shadow walking was simple. Step into the shadow paths, find the shadow you wanted to exit from, focus on it, reach it, and step out again.

That was without adding in all the storming variables.

After we had been pulled out of the space where we had drunk shadow and placed back on the covered stairs, Mishtaw had found me. She didn’t have long before she had to go on some new mission, but she spent an hour trying to explain and demonstrate shadow walking to me. I had been dazed from gaining the boon and…overwhelmed, but I committed everything she had said into a special spot in my memory tent.

Now, two months later, I was the only one who still bit the grass or occasionally fell from the bottom of a branch when stepping out of shadow. Even Ulo was regularly stepping out of the shadowed trunk of her tree or ground now. I wanted to glower at her but instead I kept my eyes firmly on my own tree. Better not to acknowledge her.

Prevna tried to help, but she was still learning too even if she was near the top of the cohort when it came to how quickly she was taking to the boon. Her and Dera and Loclen. Apparently, there was some similarities between how the shadows felt to them and different aspects of their boons. Prevna said that stepping into the shadows felt a little like when she drew in poison, but she was the poison now.

I got all the way up and drew in a long, calming breath of warm air. They had mentors, even if they weren’t full whisper women. I didn’t. I would prove that I could do this in spite of that.

The tree’s shadow underneath me felt full of possibility. A gateway just waiting to be opened. I focused my intent, pictured stepping into the shadow paths, and brought my heel down against the ground. It broke through the shadow and then I was falling. Disorientation pulled at me, but it wasn’t as bad as when I tried to leave the shadow paths so I managed to land in a crouch.

Swirling smoke surrounded me in various shades from deep black to ash gray to bright silver and the ground was a highly reflective and slick surface, like dark oil, but it wasn’t wet. I didn’t like coming into the shadow paths alone; not that I could bring anyone else along. One of the warnings Mishtaw had kept repeating was the danger of getting lost in the mist. That if you went alone only you could get yourself out again and if you brought in someone without a boon and got separated from them, they weren’t getting out again.

The shadow paths weren’t a physical enough space that they could be mapped out and searched. Mishtaw had me enter the shadows of the Seedling Palace, just once, on my own. She entered the same shadow as me at the same time. I didn’t see her in the shadow paths, didn’t sense her presence. The pull of the mass of shadows around me however…I had kicked my way out as fast as I could and ended up way on the other end of the shadow from where I started.

This time I focused on sensing the shadow I had come through and pushing my awareness of the shadows in the circle aside. It was a deep black shadow, strong in the stark sunlight and with the barest, tiniest smidgen of the goddess’s power. A gateway that was easy enough to walk through.

I stepped to the side in the direction I remembered the trunk of the tree being. I pictured stepping out of the shadow there with my foot landing solidly on the ground. As easy as stepping through a tent flap.

I brought my heel down on the reflective floor and focused on my intent to step through. The ground cracked and then I was falling again, falling up, before I felt my leg break through the shadow. I tried to step down on the ground that should be there, but there was only air. Squashing down panic, I reached forward with a growl and pulled myself the rest of the way through.

Out of the end of shadowed ground furthest from the trunk of the tree.

I cursed.

I never ended up where I wanted to be. The only good thing about exiting out of the same shadow I entered was that I didn’t have to worry about appearing out of some random shadow. I always ended up somewhere in the borders of the tree’s shadow even if it was nowhere near where I intended. Which was why the exercise I was still attempting was the absolute first step of beginner training. The Sprouts and Saplings didn’t want to have to search out the nearby forest for errant trainees.

The trouble the Sprouts had when they brought us to the game of Hunter’s Quarry also made a lot more sense now. Between the long, deep shadows of the Seedling Palace and the difficulty I was having with even one shadow, I got irritated just thinking about how difficult that relatively straightforward passage must have been, especially with hanger ons. I didn’t even have the range for it yet.

Rather than make another fruitless attempt at shadow walking so soon after the last one, I focused my attention on the others and tried to figure out what I was missing based on their attempts.

Prevna, Dera, and Loclen were to the point where their mentors were having them get used to stepping vertically. Or that was the goal at least. They only managed to step out onto an upper branch of their respective trees a third of the time and on the correct side.

Dera screamed as she appeared out of the bottom of a shadowed branch and had to catch herself on the branch below her. Old instincts urged me to run over and check that her arms were properly in their sockets, treat the inevitable bruising, but I ruthlessly pushed them down. That wasn’t an option anymore.

Her mentor helped her down before she started to lecture her on what went wrong. I wished I was close enough to hear, but walking halfway across the ring of trees wouldn’t be subtle and the older seedlings all got quiet when they noticed I was near. No one wanted to accidentally break the ruling that said I wasn’t allowed to have a mentor other than Mishtaw.

The others in the cohort were all doing fairly well, though Ento and Ulo were doing barely better than me. They didn’t end up flat on their backs or belly, but I could tell they weren’t appearing where their mentors were instructing them to. Neither seemed to be taking it well, though Ento held in her frustration better than the other.

My gaze was drawn over to where Chirp was twittering at Wren a few trees down. She was leaning up against her tree, taking a break, while she talked to the bird. The black lips fit her best. On the rest of us I thought they looked a little wrong. Like we hadn’t grown into them yet, but her easy confidence made the new coloring fit as if she had gained something that was always meant to be there.

Wren caught me looking and raised her eyebrows. Cursing internally, I quickly looked away and focused my attention on Prevna instead. I didn’t need a fluttering stomach as another distraction.

By the time the training session was over the sun was high in the sky and the fire starters in the near by camp had delicious smells floating by on the wind. I got up from my latest attempt at shadow walking as the others began to head towards the midday meal. It only took a handful of steps before Prevna had settled into her customary place near my side. Sometimes it caught me off guard how used I had gotten to her being in my space that I flinched from that, rather than her actual proximity.

Prevna gave me a side long look. “Any better today?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “You’ll get there. Do you want to practice again tonight?”

I nodded sharply.

After the midday meal the others still had their regular training to do. Endurance and weapons practice, writing and reading, strategy and teamwork and tactics. I did my own training too, but I couldn’t do it with the others, so I generally had to fit what I was doing around their schedule or find a random spot on the other side of the camp. I liked to use the actual training equipment when I could, however, so I generally moved to the fighting grounds once they were done and had moved onto the other lessons.

I couldn’t train on everything they did, of course; teamwork was a little difficult to train on my own even if I was glad I wasn’t forced into it anymore. Still, Juniper and her group and Breck still came to spar and practice with me sometimes in the evening when I wasn’t trying to perfect the first shadow walking lesson.

We ate and then I watched the others head for the targets on the far side of the small tent camp before I turned and began my own routine. I refused to fall behind even if I didn’t have a mentor.