Her mother put her knife down, and rose. “Come,” she said briskly. “Let’s put some salve on that.” She took Tesali by her unburned hand and marched her into the kitchen. She didn’t say anything else, not as she found the pot of salve, not as she sat Tesali down, not as she rubbed some of the cold mixture into Tesali’s fingers. But when it was done, she caught Tesali’s eyes—they had the same eyes, the brown flecked with bits of green and gold—and asked, “Why did you do that?”
Tesali chewed her cheek. “I thought I could touch it.”
“The fire?”
She shook her head. “The threads.”
Confusion traced itself across her mother’s face. “What threads?”
Tesali nodded at the hearth, the fire there shot through with strands of light, though the truth was, she’d seen them in the surface of the table, too. And in the basin of water. And in the pot of salve.
“Don’t you see them?” she asked, and when her mother shook her head, Tesali felt a small triumphant flare—at last, she had something of worth. At last, she would matter.
But the look in her mother’s eyes wasn’t pride. It was fear. And that’s when Tesali realized: whatever was happening with her eyes, it wasn’t a common ability, an ordinary gift. It was rare, just like the things her father traded in, and Tesali knew he didn’t keep the best things for himself.
He sold them off to the highest bidder.
Her mother knelt before her and grabbed her hands hard, ignoring the burns.
“When?” she demanded. “When did this start?”
Tesali shook her head. She didn’t know. It was less like a fire being lit, and more like the sun coming up, a brightening so gradual that she hadn’t noticed, not at first. And then, one day, she couldn’t not, because every object seemed to have an aura, a faint glow, like the lanterns on the docks when the fog hug low at night. Only it wasn’t night, and it wasn’t just the lanterns that glowed. It was everything.
And then, of course, she hadn’t realized it was strange. After all, how was she supposed to know what others saw? But the look in her mother’s eyes said enough, and the fear in her voice said the rest.
“You mustn’t tell,” she whispered, her face so close their foreheads almost touched. And then Tesali’s mother dragged her to her feet, and marched her back into the dining room, with its empty chairs.
“Silly girl,” she said, smiling at Tesali’s father. “Always dreaming.”
Tesali took her seat, and said nothing.
But that night in her room, she sat on the floor, legs crossed, and studied the taper she’d brought with her to bed. Watched as tendrils pulled away from the fire, and twisted through the air.
The pain in her fingers had cooled, but now she reached out again, felt the warning heat against her palm as she grazed the flame, careful not to touch it. Instead, she waited for the thread to waver and ripple, bend away from the fire, and when it did, she caught it. It pulsed, hot, between her finger and her thumb, but didn’t burn.
She pulled, just a little, expecting resistance. Instead, the flame unraveled, and went out. For a moment, the thread lingered, glowing like an ember in her hand, and then dissolved.
She smiled in the dark.
Then relit the candle.
And tried again.
II
SEVEN YEARS AGO
Her father’s shop was full of wonders.
Books so old, she couldn’t read the spines. A letter to a king in another world. A head sculpted in marble from an artisan in Vesk. A painting made of a hundred separate panes of layered glass. A map to the Ferase Stras. A scrying bowl, its polished surface spelled to show not the future but the past. A frosted glass orb that could hold a person’s voice.
It was a maze of cabinets, a winding corridor of glass cases and wooden chests, easy to get turned around when you couldn’t see over the tops, but whenever Tes got lost, she stood on her toes—or on a table—and searched for the glorious bird.
The bird sat on a pedestal at the heart of the shop, like the center of a compass, its vivid green feathers catching the light, gold crown visible over the chests and shelves. Tes found it, and hopped down, heading in the right direction.
On her way, she passed a narrow chest, its contents shrouded despite the angle of the nearest light. But Tesali had memorized the contents: a scrap of paper written in the true language of magic; the broken hand of a small sculpture; a piece of stone that once made up the gate between worlds, when the doors were open. Relics from Black London.