She was certain that if she reached out, she could catch one. So she did, forgetting that it was a trick of the eye, that the light only looked like threads, that it was in fact still fire. Her hand went into the flame, and a searing heat tore through her fingers. Tesali yelped, and pulled back, and for the first time that night, she had her parents’ attention.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said quickly, clutching her burned fingers. “I was reaching for the salt.” Her father shook his head, but her mother only stared, an odd expression on her face. She’d seen Tesali do it, knew she hadn’t reached past the taper, but straight into it.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Tesali recoiled from the glass, and as she did, the visions dissolved, and she was back in the shop, heart pounding in her chest as the mirror became a mirror again. Her father stood behind her, gripping her shoulders, and she could feel the greed in his touch.

  But then he said, “What did you see?” and Tesali realized that the reflection had been hers, and hers alone. Her secret was her secret, still. To share, or to keep. But how could she tell him what she had seen? What had she seen? What did it mean?

  “Well?” he pressed, and so she told him.

  “I see myself here,” she said, “with you.”

  It was the truth—a kind of truth, at least. After all, it was what she saw right then. She mustered a smile as she said it. As if she would be happy with that future. As if either of them would. Her father let go of her shoulders. He took up the sheet, and cast it back over the mirror, but she was still looking at the glass, so she saw the disappointment scrawled across his face right before the cloth came down.

  III

  THREE YEARS AGO

  Tesali ran, cursing the slippers as they slipped and skidded on the pebbled road.

  Her mother made her wear them, since she insisted on acting like a chicken out of its pen and not a girl of twelve. She thought the cursed shoes would discourage her from running.

  They didn’t.

  Whenever her parents sent her on an errand, she ran, getting to the butcher or the baker or the bank in half the time, just so she could cut through the dock market on her way home.

  Tesali lived for the dock market, the makeshift stalls that popped up overnight like mushroom caps along the port, tables made of crates, tents conjured out of tarp, manned by sailors who came to sell whatever wares and trinkets they’d come by on their travels. Not the meat of their work, but the trimmings. Of course, her father scorned the market, insisted there was nothing there of any worth, but she marveled at the array, gathered from the far corners of the empire, and sometimes even farther. It was easy to forget how large the world really was, living in Hanas.

  She had only been outside the port city once, a half-day’s trip by carriage south to see Rosana perform, the youngest member of her troupe, and so clearly destined for great things. A future victor of the Essen Tasch, her father used to preen, before the Veskan prince killed the Arnesian queen, carving a trench in the treaty between the three empires, and ending the tournament for good.

  Most days Tesali just came to look at the wares, and imagine the places from which they came. But today, as she surveyed the stalls, a large roast in the satchel slung over her arm (the purpose of her trip) and a month’s petty change in her pocket, she was on the hunt for a prize.

  A gift.

  It was her father’s birthday, and though he was by no means a sentimental man, he had decided that fifty years was a number worth marking, and her mother saw it as a chance to call her daughters home. Mirin and Rosana were already there, unpacking their gifts, and Serival was bound to arrive any minute—Tesali gave a quick, nervous scan of the docks, unsure if she would come by land or sea—and would no doubt bring something grand. She always did. It was the nature of her work, to find precious things.

  And Tesali was determined to find something, too.

  She moved along the line of stalls, eyes skimming here, grazing there, unsure what she was looking for but sure that she would find it. And then she did.

  Most of the stalls had at least one bit of faulty magic among their wares, the spellwork fraying, or fractured in ways they couldn’t see. But on one table, everything seemed to be broken. From the glass balls, which should have been able to capture a season, to the heating stones, which should have boiled the water they were sitting in, to the ship prisms, which would have turned colors to warn of coming weather, if they had worked at all.