She heard the shop bell chime as the customer left, but she didn’t look up. She squinted at the pieces, and moved her lips, and pretended to have no power over any of them, even though that wasn’t strictly true. As far as she could tell, she had no elemental magic. She couldn’t make something from nothing, couldn’t conjure flame from the bead of oil, or whip up wind to move the pile of sand, or control the bit of bone. But if someone had lit the oil, she could have pulled the burning drop into any shape, transformed it into a raging fire, or a delicate ribbon of flame. She could have turned the water to ice by tugging on its threads, or shaped the earth into a ring. She could have pulled on the strings of the wooden box itself, and turned it into a bracelet, a mug, a sapling. She could see the very fabric of the world, and all the magic in it, and touch each and every string, unravel the patterns, and remake them, and—
“You’re not even trying,” scolded her father.
Tesali bristled, and in that moment she wanted to tell him everything, to show him just what she could do. Maybe then he would look at her the way he did Serival, or Rosana, or Mirin. With pride instead of expectation. But every time she felt the urge well up, she remembered the fear in her mother’s face, remembered that her sisters were all gone, that if she told the truth, her father would not love her.
He would sell her.
“Come here,” he ordered, and Tesali abandoned the set and the stool and returned to the counter as her father pulled the sheet from the newest piece of his collection.
It was a mirror.
Of course, it was not an ordinary mirror. Her father did not bother with ordinary things, and she could see the magic twining around the frame, tracing a second pattern over the silver edging. But before she could read the meaning in it, he told her.
“Some mirrors show the future,” he said. “Some mirrors show the past. Some can show you what you want, others what you fear. A few will even show your death.”
Tesali shivered, and hoped this was not one of those.
“But this mirror,” he went on, running a hand down the silver side. “This mirror reveals what you are capable of. It shows your true potential.”
Tesali saw her eyes widen in the glass, and her father mistook her expression for eagerness, and smiled. He did not often smile, and it looked wrong, unnatural.
“Now, my little dreamer,” he said, “what are you worth?”
It was a question he posed to every item in his shop, to each piece as it joined his collection. A question he asked softly, almost reverently, speaking not to the seller but to the object itself as he took it in hand, and set it on his shelf.
What are you worth?
Fear prickled across Tesali’s skin as he took her wrist and dragged her closer to the glass.
Fear—but also relief. She was tired of hiding who she was, what she could do. Now, she had no choice. The mirror would expose her, and he would know the truth, and it would not be her fault.
Her father pressed her hand to the surface of the glass.
It was cold to the touch, steam instantly forming around her small fingertips, but as she watched, the steam grew and spread, fogging over the entire pane of glass, erasing the shop, and her father, but not her.
Tesali stood there, in the center of the silver frame. And then the frame disappeared, and she stood alone, no longer in her father’s shop but on a street she didn’t know, in a bustling city. She tried to look around, but before she could take it in, the street and the buildings around her began to unravel, became a thousand threads. She moved, and the threads moved in answer, rippling away, and then drawing in.
She reached out and ran a hand along them, as if they were harp strings. And they did sing. They sang in color. They sang in light. She could feel the power in each and every one of them. The potential. She flexed her fingers, and they splayed, pulled and they came, gathering between her hands. She looked down and in the space between her outstretched palms, the threads coiled, faster and tighter until they became shapes.
There, between her hands, a box, a bird, a blade. There a house, a tower, a palace, a road. There a city crumbled, dissolving like a castle made of sand. There a dead man rose, like a puppet, drawn back to life. There a river of light overflowed its banks, and drowned a world. After this last, the threads spilled out, past the bounds of her hands, arced around her, until she was standing in another frame. No, not a frame. A doorway.
And then the threads turned black.
They recoiled, turned back on her like a wave, cresting up over her head. She held her breath as they came crashing down over her, into her, coiling around her limbs, her body, her face, until they swallowed her up, and she was gone.