Tesali didn’t like the items in that case. They had no threads, but the air around them wasn’t empty: a thin rim of shadow surrounded each object, the opposite of the haloes that formed around the lanterns at night. Once, and only once, she’d opened the cabinet, reached in to touch them—not the objects themselves, but the darkness that fuzzed the space to every side.
At the time, she’d felt nothing. But it was a bad kind of nothing, a wrong kind of nothing, and she found herself rubbing her hands together for hours after, unable to get them warm.
Her father claimed they weren’t forbidden, these objects, that they were pieces of history, and history had worth—and yet, he never sold them. Never even showed them. She wondered if he forgot they were there, buried in the maze of the shop. She tried to forget, but she always seemed to find the darkened case. She turned her back on it now, and focused on finding the glorious bird.
It had been in the shop as long as she could remember.
Once it had been as large as Tesali, but then she kept growing and it did not, and now, she was the larger. Still, it was magnificent, too big to fit in any of the cabinets, and so it perched on top, watching over the precious contents of her father’s shop.
It was, according to him, extinct. The last of its kind, and so, the perfect emblem for On Ir Ales.
But it wasn’t the bird itself that captivated her.
It was the way it moved.
As she stepped into its line of sight, the bird ruffled its feathers and stretched its wings. Its head twitched, eyes craning down at her, its beak clicking softly. It moved through these small, predestined motions, guided by a delicate network of magic that wove through the air above its wings, around its feathered body, between its taloned toes.
It had disappointed her once, to learn it was only imitating life. But that was before she could see the threads that animated it. Now, Tesali marveled at the sheer complexity of the magic. She reached up and plucked one of the glowing strings that coiled in the air, as if it were an instrument, and the bird answered by lifting slightly, as if about to lurch into flight. This was not one of its set motions. This was something only she could make it do.
“Tesali!”
Her father’s voice should have gotten tangled in the maze, bent around the cabinets and cases in the way, but it didn’t. It had a way of cutting straight through space.
Her hand dropped from the bird, and she remembered her errand. She crouched, opening the cabinet that formed its perch, and pulled out the coin chest, hurrying back to the front of the shop. The maze never seemed to catch her on the way out, the way it did on the way in, and in moments, she was there.
Her father stood waiting with his customer, an older man, his silver hair pulled back in an elegant braid. They were talking about London—everyone was—and the tide of cursed magic that had spilled through the streets the week before. Some thought it was a spell gone wrong, others, an assault. After all, the king and queen were dead. But that wasn’t what her father cared about.
“… will soon have one of Maxim Maresh’s swords,” he was saying, “and Kisimyr’s tournament mask. I have a collector in the city.”
She knew he meant Serival.
Tesali’s attention went to the counter between the two men, where something thin and sharp-edged waited beneath a sheet. She tried to guess at what it was as her father plucked the coin box from her hands.
“My youngest,” he said to the customer. “She has a way of getting lost inside her head.”
The other man offered her a smile. “The world needs dreamers.”
“Does it?” asked her father dryly, his eyes landing on her as the bird’s had, shrewd and dark and searching.
“Indeed,” continued the customer. “You have dreamers to thank for half the wonders in your shop.” Her father smiled tightly, but as he began counting out coins, she knew what he was thinking: What use was a dreamer without magic?
Tesali retreated to the table where she’d been when the customer came in. She climbed back onto the stool, and stared down at the element set that sat open, waiting, as it did every day, because every day, her father ordered her to practice.
The night before, she had heard him talking with her mother.
Powerless, he’d called his youngest daughter, spat the word like a curse.
Her mother had soothed him and said that the new king had no magic, reminded him that he had been blessed three times already with powerful children, and that the world sought balance. As if Tesali were a tithe to be paid, the cost of other blessings.