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.