turned out that they weren’t just responsible for shoveling horse dung. Oh, no—they were responsible for cleaning the pens of all the four-legged livestock in the fortress, a task that took them from breakfast until noon. At least they did it in the morning, before the afternoon heat really made the smell atrocious.
Another benefit was that they didn’t have to go running. Though after four hours of shoveling animal droppings, Celaena would have begged to take the six-mile run instead.
Anxious as she was to be out of the stables, she couldn’t contain her growing trepidation as the sun arced across the sky, heading toward sunset. She didn’t know what to expect; even Ansel had no idea what the Master might have in mind. They spent the afternoon sparring as usual—with each other, and with whatever assassins wandered into the shade of the open-air training courtyard. And when the sun finally hovered near the horizon, Ansel gave Celaena squeeze on the shoulder and sent her to the Master’s hall.
But the Master wasn’t in his receiving hall, and when she ran into Ilias, he just gave her his usual smile and pointed toward the roof. After taking a few staircases and then climbing a wooden ladder and squeezing through a hatch in the ceiling, she found herself in the open air high atop the fortress.
The Master stood by the parapet, gazing across the desert. She cleared her throat, but he remained with his back to her.
The roof couldn’t have been more than twenty square feet, and the only thing on it was a covered reed basket placed in the center. Torches burned, illuminating the rooftop.
Celaena cleared her throat again, and the Master finally turned. She bowed, which, strangely, was something she felt he actually deserved, rather than something she ought to do. He gave her a nod and pointed to the reed basket, beckoning her to open the lid. Doing her best not to look skeptical, hoping there was a beautiful new weapon inside, she approached. She stopped when she heard the hissing.
Unpleasant, don’t-come-closer hissing. From inside the basket.
She turned to the Master, who hopped onto one of the merlons, his bare feet dangling in the gap between one block of stone and the next, and beckoned her again. Palms sweating, Celaena took a deep breath and snatched back the lid.
A black asp curled into itself, head drawn back low as it hissed.
Celaena leapt away a yard, making for the parapet wall, but the Master let out a low click of his tongue.
His hands moved, flowing and winding through the air like a river—like a snake. Observe it, he seemed to tell her. Move with it.
She looked back at the basket in time to see the slender, black head of the asp slide over the rim, then down to the tiled roof.
Her heart thundered in her chest. It was poisonous, wasn’t it? It had to be. It looked poisonous.
The snake slithered across the roof, and Celaena inched back from it, not daring to look away for even a heartbeat. She reached for a dagger, but the Master again clicked his tongue. A glance in his direction was enough for her to understand the meaning of the sound.
Don’t kill it. Absorb.
The snake moved effortlessly, lazily, and tasted the evening air with its black tongue. With a deep, steadying breath, Celaena observed.
She spent every night that week on the roof with the asp, watching it, copying its movements, internalizing its rhythm and sounds until she could move like it moved, until they could face each other and she could anticipate how it would lunge; until she could strike like the asp, swift and unflinching.
After that, she spent three days dangling from the rafters of the fortress stables with the bats. It took her longer to figure out their strengths—how they became so silent that no one noticed they were there, how they could drown out the external noise and focus only on the sound of their prey. And after that, it was two nights spent with jackrabbits on the dunes, learning their stillness, absorbing how they used their speed and dexterity to evade talons and claws, how they slept above ground to better hear their enemies approaching. Night after night, the Master watched from nearby, never saying a word, never doing anything except occasionally pointing out how an animal moved.
As the remaining weeks passed, she saw Ansel only during meals and for the few hours they spent each morning shoveling manure. And after a