“Leave that to Sasenroche,” he’d say. No. He was a curator, one who specialized in the precious and the rare.
Now and then, Tesali’s father would give her an appraising look, the same one he leveled at a piece brought in to be sold. She knew he was waiting to see what she was worth.
To find her value, and make use of it, as he had done for his other daughters.
Her sisters.
There was Mirin, made rare by her beauty. The Diamond of Hanas, they called her. Eighteen, and so striking, men came from all three empires to bid for her hand. Carried off by an Arnesian old enough to have grey hair, and installed in a manor up north.
Then Rosana, made rare by her powers. By ten, she could wield not only fire, but ice. By fourteen, she was gone, the star of a performing troupe, though Tesali knew she dreamed of winning the Essen Tasch.
And Serival, the oldest, made rare by her cunning. Not sold off, but sent away, all the same, to be her father’s eyes out in the world, and find new things for his collection.
Three sisters gone.
Three chairs sitting empty at the table.
Her parents talked as if there were already four, and Tesali thought she might die of boredom. Her plate was clean, but she couldn’t leave, not until she was excused. A taper burned in front of her, and as her parents spoke, she let her vision slip, gaze sliding in and out of focus until the little flame seemed to peel itself apart, dividing into strands as thin as hairs.
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.