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.
A man sat on a crate behind the table, whittling something with a blade the size of his thumb. He had dark skin, and black hair twisted into ropes, each one ornamented by a bit of silver, and a thin tendril of blue magic that twined in the air around his shoulders.
As she watched, he cut a notch too deep, and the piece of wood split in his hand.
“Never been good at whittling,” he muttered, tossing the stick into the surf. And yet, he took up another bit of wood, and started again, cut three slices before he looked up, and saw her studying the wares.
“Something you want?” he asked, his voice full of salt.
The table was cluttered, but she nodded, picking up one of the orbs. He had three for winter and two each for fall and spring, but the one she chose was a summer glass.
“How much?” she asked, then held her breath. She only had six lin, and a working seasons-glass would have cost twice that, and even if it wasn’t the kind of thing her father would put in his shop, he was always complaining of the cold, and she thought he’d like it. This palmful of warmth.
“Two,” said the sailor, and she had to bite down to hide the smile. Her father was always saying she should never let her feelings reach her face. She reached in her pocket, pulling out two lin.
“Just so you know,” he added, “it’s broken.”
That was very honest of him, she thought, when most of the sailors would tell you a plank of wood was a golden sword if it would make you buy the block.
She put the two coins on the table and said, “I know.” She did not say that she could see the exact spot the threads had frayed. It wouldn’t be hard to fix.
As she was slipping the broken orb gingerly into her satchel, the sailor did a series of odd things. First, he finished whittling the bit of wood into a tiny pipe. Then he produced the small, articulated skeleton of an owl from somewhere around his feet, set it on top of the table, and put the pipe in its beak. The sailor smiled, amused. Tesali stared in wonder.
“How much for that?” she asked.
“The pipe?”
“The owl.”
He glanced up, studying her. “S’not magic,” he said. And it wasn’t. There were no threads of spellwork, broken or whole, no signs of any craft running through the little bird, only silver wire, holding the bundle of bones together.
He gave the owl a long, appraising look. “Five,” he said.
“Four,” countered Tesali, but he must have seen the want in her eyes, and shook his head. Her heart sank. “I don’t have five.”
He shrugged, as if that wasn’t his problem. She chewed her lip, searching her pockets, as if the coins might multiply. Then her hands went to her hair. It was pulled up, as it always was, wrangled and pinned with a clasp. She freed the clasp, and her hair with it, a cloud of brown curls spilling down around her shoulders. The clasp itself was nothing much, but there was a silver bauble on it. She pried it free, and added it to the four coins in her palm.
The sailor considered. She held her breath.
Then he reached for the little bird, and plucked the wooden stick from its beak.
“That will buy you the owl,” he said. “But no pipe.”
She could have thrown her arms around the sailor then, but she didn’t. Instead she handed him the payment, and swept up the dead little bird into her arms before he changed his mind. She watched him pocket the coins and slip the bit of silver into his own hair.
And then she turned and ran all the way home.
* * *
For the first time in years, there were no empty chairs at dinner.