TELL ME,” Carin said again. Ryd had wandered away from the fire, and Carin felt the heat of the embers within her chest, each passing second of silence like a pump of the bellows.

Lyah’s face showed a helplessness Carin had never seen before, but her words before, spoken with such certainty, had driven a wedge deep into Carin’s heart. Across the fire, Lyah was both familiar and alien. Carin knew her messy braid, which even now came undone over one shoulder. She knew Lyah’s hand shook like that when she was embarrassed or uncomfortable, and though a part of Carin’s soul cried out in protest that she was the cause of that trembling, Carin could not shake the churning in her belly. It was like the day she’d eaten iceberries in the moon of Harvest when they were still pale on the vine. Carin’s stomach had felt mushed, like potter Ahntin’s clay when sy pushed hys hand into it. It felt like that now, looking at Lyah’s face across the dancing flames.

Her oldest friend knew things she didn’t, and those things were tied to a terrible past. Her people had taken lives, lives of people who trusted them to lead them to freedom, spilled them upon a rock, and with that power doomed an entire land to starvation and death. Carin wanted to cry, to flee the circle of harsh light into the safety of the surrounding dark, where her eyes could not see the faces of her friends. Did they not feel this thing? Did they not bear this weight?

Could Lyah have known?

Dyava knew.

The very thought made Carin’s breath suck in to her lungs, sharp and harsh.

Dyava knew.

“Magic is energy,” Lyah said after a long moment, ignoring the sound Carin’s unconscious gasp had made. Her voice sounded wan and lost, but even in its weakness it made Carin focus her attention. “I don’t know much; Merin told me she would teach me more when I returned from my Journeying.”

“Tell me what you know.” Carin met Lyah’s eyes, knowing that the fierce yearning in her core would translate only as pleading. She had to know, to try and understand this thing. How her people had made the land do their bidding. “Please.”

Lyah picked a blade of grass.

“Energy,” Lyah said. “It makes us live, grows the grasses and trees, makes the fire burn.” She let the grass fall to the ground. “It makes things fall. It’s in the wind and the rushing of the rivers. The heat of the sun.”

Picking up the grass again, she set it on her knee. Carin watched as Lyah added a pebble to her other knee.

“Imagine that the pebble is a seed. In that seed is the entire life of a living thing, a plant that will grow leaves, bear fruit, turn to seeds of its own, and someday die. It may grow to be chopped up and burned on our hearths. It may be eaten by a passing saiga or goat or clucker. We don’t know what that seed will be, what it will nourish, what its life will accomplish. That is potential energy.” Lyah moved her leg and both the blade of grass and the pebble fell to the ground. “Those things fell and made a change in the ground; their potential to do that was always within them.”

Irritation rose in Carin. She had heard these things on the village green, but not about magic, simply about life and the nature of things. “That isn’t magic. That’s the mooncycle. From Renewal through Reflection, by means of Bide and Toil, Harvest and Foresight, and all those between.”

“It is magic,” Lyah insisted. “It is the hearthstone upon which the fire of magic burns.”

Carin had been ready to object, but Lyah’s words stopped her. “Then how does one kindle that fire?”

Lyah raised her hands, but not in a gesture of one about to perform a deed. She simply held them up and gestured outward before folding them in her lap. “I don’t know.”

“You do.”

“I know the theory, that is all.”

“Then tell me the theory.” Carin pushed.

With a sigh, Lyah looked around as if she were expecting Merin to step out of the cave behind them and yank her by the ear to drag her away for a scolding.

“There are five branches of magic. Life, var. That is the blood in your veins and the bud opening to the sun. It’s the trout flopping on the bank.”

Carin felt a ghost of a smile try to touch her lips before fading away. Trust that Lyah would mention fish. She waited expectantly.

“Will, ryh. It is your determination and your mind. The intention that shapes the blades in your mother’s forge. The way you bend a wood to form the shape of your choosing. Grounding, pey. This is the force that pulls the leaf to the ground instead of allowing it to float like a mote of dust in a beam of sunlight. It is what holds you together. Potential, dyupahsy. How the seed becomes something new throughout its life. How a child grows to build a bridge or a boat. How this pebble can dent the dirt.”

Lyah recited all these things with the air of one who had learned them from a scroll. Carin thought that it was likely Merin’s explanations too had found their way into Lyah’s speech.

“You said there were five. That is four. What is the last?”

“Energy itself. Abas. The lightning or the river that turns the millstones. The wind in the grasses. The fire that warms you.” Lyah stretched her legs out in front of her, looking over her shoulder for Ryd, who had not yet returned.

“You’ve given me five bricks but no mortar,” Carin said.

“The mortar is what I don’t yet understand. Merin said magic requires a catalyst and that it is different for everyone. The salt that makes the water come to a faster boil. Something to change the person who means to use it.”

Carin thought of her ancestors and how their backs bent beneath the coils of leather that licked at them, leaving broken flesh and harsh red lines across the brown of their skin. Could that be such a catalyst? “Can you do it?”

“No.” Lyah watched Carin as if she expected her to react in disbelief.

Carin pitied her in that moment, and guilt chewed at her belly. She repeated the words Lyah had spoken in her head, determined to remember them. Var, ryh, pey, dyupahsy, abas. And the catalyst that would make them spark.

“How does it work?”

Lyah shrugged, her eyes helpless. “Merin said one day I would know, that those strands could be woven together or drawn upon separately. She said it’s like wiggling your ears; once you can do it, you always know how.”

Though Lyah had answered her questions—and Carin knew the answers had cost them more closeness, driven them apart all the more—there were so many things left unsaid. How their ancestors had known what to do, why the blood on their hands had made their magic work, how they convinced a stone to suck life from the earth that made it.