55

ALBA PRODUCED A SMALL LEATHER NOTEBOOK AND A GRAPHITE stick. She made a few hasty marks, concentration tightening the furrow between her eyes. “There. I’ve calculated the percentage of my house’s coffers that we can put, immediately, toward infrastructure in Fen. I daresay we’ll have little difficulty finding at least one foundry, perhaps two, able to turn these funds into cannons within months, and woolen and linen mills who will make contracts with us when they see what we’re able to invest.”

“Months.” I shook my head. “It seems a long time.”

“But it’s worth it to establish our own supply line.” Alba watched me carefully. “And you believe we can imbue those supplies with additional… fortification?”

“That’s a puzzle I’m still working out,” I hedged. “I certainly can’t sew all the garments myself. I couldn’t even sew cockades for a quarter of their hats. I’m not sure that there’s any other method I could use.” I met Theodor’s eyes—the one method I did have was his violin, and we both knew that he couldn’t come with me, fiddling at a factory to charm the fibers of the flax and wool they wove. “Worst case, I can… I don’t know. Sew a few buttons on as many coats as I can… or make pieces for elite forces.” This felt pitifully inadequate, but everyone was kind enough not to say so.

“I’ll write to Annette and Viola,” Theodor said. “I’m sure they’ll be willing to put some money toward supplies. So don’t finalize those calculations quite yet,” he said to Alba.

“I won’t.” She looked at me again. “It seems to me that investing in wool and linen is only worthwhile if they can be charmed. So that, shall we say, puzzle must be solved rather quickly.”

I nodded soberly and began to pace the deck. The sea reflected the sun in its rich, ever-varying blue. Watching the gentle swell and dip of the waves calmed my racing thoughts, so I stared into the depths and took a few breaths.

I stopped. Did I need the violin to cast directly? Surely, I had learned by now that the casting methodology was only the way a practitioner reached to the light and drew it out. The method was either literal and crude, like the folk practice of carving tablets, or utilized someone’s talents, like my sewing or Theodor’s violin playing.

But what if I could draw it from the ether itself, without the aid of a sewing needle or music?

I had always begun with sewing, starting with the needle and thread until the light appeared around my action. I struggled to even put myself in the right frame of mind—of being, really—to see past the visible and into the place where the charms and curses came from. Without my needle in hand, it felt impossible. I threw myself back in memory, to first drawing the light as a child under my mother’s tutelage. Had it been easy, hard? Had she guided me? The first lessons blurred in memory, wrapped up with the scent of simmering spinach and the feel of our dusty packed-dirt floor beneath my bare toes.

I couldn’t remember, and the invocation of the light was so tied with the action of sewing. I fished out my housewife from my pocket and began to sew, trying to locate within myself the moment where I sensed the light, the moment I could grasp it and draw it into my work. It was like staring into a bright candle flame—the closer I looked, the less I could see. The intrusion of thought over rote practice drove the light away and swiftly built a headache out of the tension in my temples.

I returned to my cabin. I tried mimicking sewing, then stopping the motions; I tried imagining music; I tried closing my eyes and slipping into a half daydream. Nothing worked, except pretending to sew, which only worked as long as I kept up the motions, and even then the trail of light was thin and recalcitrant, trying to follow the motions of an imaginary needle rather than my wishes for it.

I threw myself on the bed and stared at the pale wood of the cabin’s ceiling, the water reflections playing on the slats above me. Not so unlike the charm light. The thirati, Corvin had said they were called. As real as matter and space, as real as heat and cold.

Real. Of course—I was trying to pull the magic from the air in order to see it. I had to reverse my tactic. My gift wasn’t solely for manipulating the thirati—it was for seeing it to begin with. If I could see it, perhaps I could work with it. But how to sense something beyond my sight, feel something hidden behind the screen that cuts the invisible world off from the visible? It was like asking to see love, or grief, or joy, I thought with a pang of defeat.

Except it was, in fact, very much like seeing an emotion. I felt a certain kind of contentment while I cast charms, and a dark heaviness when I cast curses; I had always assumed this was an effect of the casting. But what if it was tied to its source, what if I was “seeing” the magic with my intuition? I tried to find that emotion in myself, that feeling of unshakable comfort, of patient joy that accompanied strong charm casting. It was elusive, like trying to force a smile from a stubborn child, but the stirrings of it blossomed in my chest, warmed my limbs, tingled in my fingers as I pressed my thoughts toward the greenhouse with Theodor mere weeks earlier, or splitting a sticky nut roll with my mother, long ago. I traced the chain on my wrist and freed the unbound imaginings of future happiness.

Finally, I saw as well as felt the magic—a thin golden stream of light, distinct from the sunlight and the reflection of the water. I pulled the strand of gold from the air, twining it into a thin circle. It hung suspended in the air before me, a perfect golden ring. What to do with it now? I wondered, toying with it, moving it between my fingers, letting it bounce between my hands. I laid it on the bedspread and imagined it a part of the fibers, embedding it into the fabric. A little golden ring, now as much a part of the woven wool as if I had embroidered it with needle and thread.

I played at it for another hour or more, feeling lighter, feeling more joyful as I worked. I pulled light and twisted it, spread it, manipulated it like fibers and like clay, let it dance and swell and pulse in its own state, held but unchanged by me. I could work the light into cloth easily, into wood with some difficulty, even, awkwardly, etched into glass. I laughed, imagining the owner of this ship never knowing about the invaluable, invisible decorations in one of his cabins. I was still clumsy, and slow, but confidence welled in me—I could do this. I could charm cloth on the looms or shot in the molds.

Reticently, I allowed the light to fade away, slipping back into the ether. I swallowed—I had to know if I could, if it was possible, so I sought and finally found the heavy feeling of curse casting, buried deep yet too willing to rise to the surface. I drew the glittering black from the ether like a thick stroke of ink from a pen, wrapping it into a delicate spiral. I could manipulate it, move it, hold it just as the charm thread, though when I brought it too close to the golden ring in the coverlet it seemed to pull away, repelled by the presence of its opposite. I didn’t want to embed it here, but letting it sink back into the air didn’t prove anything to me about whether I could manipulate it as I could the charms. Eventually, I hovered it over the bowl of water with the floating lilies, and submerged the ring. Imagining it dissolving, I pressed it into the water.

The water took on a faint murkiness, still clear but now a dim, transparent gray. The thought unsettled me—what, precisely, had I done? Could I draw the curse from the water as I knew I could from fabric? Or would it linger here forever?

I lay down, closing my eyes. I felt the familiar exhaustion of casting, intensified without the crutch of sewing. I didn’t mean to, but I fell asleep, rocked by the boat. When I woke, I heard the bustle of feet and clank of chains that told me the decks were busy with the sailors’ work.

I glanced at the bowl of lilies, and my stomach clenched.

The lilies had withered. Their green leaves and stems were brown and brittle, and the petals aged to crackling parchment. Even the scent, a luminous, heady perfume before, had decomposed and become curdled, thick.

I scooped the flowers out with shaking hands and threw them away in a rusted waste bin, then turned back to the water. The distortions I had caused caught the light and glittered faintly, darkly. My questions were suddenly urgent instead of hypothetical, and I suppressed my panic and began to pull the curse from the water. Painfully, the disintegrated sparkle coalesced, first into a blot of dark in the bowl, and then pulled like stormy taffy into a thick thread. I drew it into the air, then dispersed it, pushing it back into the ether.

I sat shaking. This was far beyond the influence of curse or charm. This was life and death in a thin thread of dark sparkle, and no one could know that I could control it.

Theodor found me staring at the water in the otherwise empty vase. “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked. “It’s nearly supper and you skipped the midday meal.”

I shook my head—hunger was the furthest thing from my mind, even though casting usually left me more than ready for a meal. I explained what I’d done, and Theodor’s pride over my achievement shifted as swiftly as mine had when I described the effect of pure curse magic on the flowers. We agreed that experimenting further was not only unwise but impractical. After all, I wasn’t going to try to soak a living person, or even creature, in curse magic.

“Don’t tell the others about it,” I almost begged. “The charm casting, of course, I’ll tell them first thing tomorrow, but the curse…” I swallowed. “They might want it used, and I can’t even begin to think how I’d control it. If I even wanted to.”

“No, of course not. When we began to try out more methods and uses for casting, I confess even I hadn’t thought of that.” He sighed, creases between his eyebrows deepening.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “At least… at least we know the Serafans can’t do this, right? Or they probably would have tried on me.” I tried for a joke and mostly failed.

“Are you sure you aren’t hungry? I could bring a tray, or—”

“I’m really not. I’d rather go to bed,” I said, holding out an arm to him, beckoning. He understood. With the weight of wielding death on my shoulders, I craved closeness, warmth, life. He slipped into the narrow bed beside me and pulled me close, his lips tracing the curve of my ear, the hollow of my cheek. My hands explored all the familiar lines of his body, his narrow shoulders, arms still lined with dexterous muscle from pulling weeds and digging in the dirt. Fingers tipped with callouses from his violin. All of him, expressed in the subtleties of his skin.

It was still light when we curled against one another and slipped into sleep.