No one in the field seemed quite sure what to do with beauty when it arrived in the wrong form.

  The petals went on drifting for several breaths after the instructor spoke, soft and luminous and entirely unconcerned with the fact that they had no business existing at all. They turned in the noon light and vanished one by one before they touched the grass, leaving behind no ash, no scent, no scorch marks, no reasonable explanation.

  The children stared.

  Elira held both hands clasped beneath her chin as if the sight might spill if she did not hold herself together tightly enough. Tomas had forgotten to look smug. Joren, who had burned his own boot less than ten minutes earlier and taken the injury with good humor, looked suddenly as though he regretted ever having believed the world predictable.

  Rose stood in the middle of it all with her hand still half raised and the last warmth of a vanished petal fading from her fingertips.

  She could not see the woman anymore.

  The edge of the field beyond the crooked tree lay empty beneath the spring light. The grass there leaned one way, then another, and gave no sign that anyone extraordinary had crossed it.

  But the words remained.

  Magic responds to kindness.

  The instructor found his voice first.

  “Everyone else,” he said, and then had to stop and begin again, because the voice he had chosen for ordinary classroom authority would not quite fit around what had just happened. “Back to your places.”

  No one moved.

  He drew in a slow breath through his nose.

  “Now.”

  That worked.

  The children scattered reluctantly, though their eyes stayed with Rose as long as bodies allowed. Elira gave Rose one last wide, wondering look before retreating to the line. Tomas walked backward three full paces before common sense recalled him to the direction his feet were meant to face.

  Only Rose remained where she was.

  The instructor came toward her in measured steps, neither hurried nor slow, as if speed itself might imply he had already decided what this was.

  Rose looked once more toward the place the woman had gone.

  Nothing.

  The instructor stopped a few feet away. The distance was kind enough to suggest he did not mean to loom over a crying child, but not so kind that she could mistake his purpose.

  “Rose,” he said.

  She looked at him.

  The expression on his face belonged to no lesson she had ever known. Not praise. Not concern exactly. Certainly not delight. It was the look of a man who had set out to teach children how to ask a spark for its smallest courtesy and had instead found one of the old stories sitting down in his field uninvited.

  “What did you do?”

  Rose glanced down at her hand.

  A tiny spark hovered there, uncertain and warm.

  She cupped it instinctively, not to hide it from him exactly, but to shelter it, the way one protected a candle from wind.

  “I asked,” she said.

  The instructor blinked once. “Asked what?”

  Rose opened and closed her fingers helplessly over the little light.

  “I don’t know.”

  That sounded stupid even to her.

  His gaze lowered to the spark in her palm and sharpened. “Can you make it happen again?”

  Rose thought of the woman beneath the tree, of the plain calm of her face, of the way she had turned slightly aside and said That isn’t very kind into what looked like empty air. She thought of the petals drifting between them. Of the strange shy nearness that had stood just beyond the reach of her eyes and, after all that refusing, finally answered.

  The school posture felt impossible now. The clean lifted chin, the set shoulders, the hand thrust forward as if the world might be won by sufficient confidence. Rose knew, without understanding how she knew, that if she did that she would be lying.

  She drew her hand nearer to herself, cupping it over her mouth the way children did when telling secrets not meant for whole rooms.

  “Would you?” she whispered.

  The spark brightened at once.

  Not much. Just enough.

  The instructor’s mouth tightened.

  “Not like that,” he said.

  Rose looked up.

  “That’s how it works.”

  “For whom?”

  She glanced toward the empty air beside her, then back to him.

  “I don’t know.”

  That answer seemed to offend him more deeply than if she had refused altogether.

  He held out his hand.

  “Rose. Properly.”

  She almost did it out of habit. Out of the ordinary panic one felt when adults asked in that tone and had not yet learned there were ways in which obedience could become its own kind of falsehood.

  Then she remembered the woman’s voice.

  She cannot command you. That is no fault of hers.

  Rose lowered her hand instead.

  “It doesn’t like that.”

  The instructor stared at her.

  There came a silence so complete Rose could hear the children beyond them pretending not to listen.

  The little spark in her palm trembled and, as if sensing the room’s unhappiness and wishing to offer some private consolation for it, loosened at the edges and became, for one breath, three pale petals before dissolving into nothing.

  The instructor made a sound under his breath that might have been a prayer if it had not been so offended.

  “Back to the schoolhouse,” he said abruptly. “All of you. Lesson is over.”

  That produced a more vigorous sort of confusion from the children, but even confusion could be moved by the tone of an adult who had no interest in being argued with. They went.

  The instructor did not look away from Rose until the last of them had disappeared up the path.

  Then he said, “Was there someone with you beneath the tree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  Rose hesitated.

  The woman had looked so ordinary.

  That was part of what made answering feel absurd.

  “I don’t know.”

  His brow drew down. “You don’t know her name?”

  Rose flushed.

  “No.”

  “And yet you spoke with her.”

  Rose lifted her chin despite the heat in her face.

  “She spoke with me.”

  That, at least, was true.

  The instructor was silent for a moment. Then he said, not unkindly but with the strained patience of a man trying to remain inside the bounds of his training while the world insisted on stepping elsewhere, “Come with me.”

  He did not take her to the schoolhouse.

  He took her home.

  Her father opened the door with his reading spectacles still in one hand and concern already on his face before the instructor had spoken a word.

  That told Rose everything she needed to know about how she looked.

  They entered the kitchen. The room smelled faintly of herbs and woodsmoke and the last of the noon meal. Light fell in warm squares across the table. It was an ordinary room. A reliable room. The sort of room in which people ought to be told only ordinary things.

  The instructor removed his hat and stood awkwardly just inside the door as if uncertain whether he had come to deliver news or to seek shelter from it.

  Her father looked from one to the other.

  “What happened?”

  No one answered at once.

  Rose found herself absurdly, fiercely grateful that he had asked what happened rather than what did you do.

  The instructor cleared his throat. “There was... an occurrence.”

  Her father’s eyes shifted to Rose.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  That was the easiest answer she had all day.

  He set the spectacles down on the table and came closer. His hand hovered briefly near her shoulder before settling there, light and brief, as if he feared she might still be carrying some charge from the field and did not wish to startle it.

  “You’ve been crying.”

  Rose looked away.

  The instructor, to his credit, did not rescue her from the shame of it by pretending not to hear.

  “She was unable to produce the spark,” he said. “As before. Then she left the line. Sat beneath the old tree. A few minutes later, she was...” He stopped.

  The pause that followed was long enough for Rose to recognize, with a little spark of private satisfaction, that he could not find a respectable word for covered in flowers made of light.

  “Something happened,” he finished stiffly. “Not a spark. Not anything I have ever taught, or seen taught.”

  Her father looked from the instructor to Rose.

  “Rose?”

  She took a breath.

  “There was a lady,” she said.

  The instructor’s face shifted in immediate irritation, not because he thought her lying, Rose realized, but because he had already hoped to avoid this part.

  Her father did not dismiss it.

  “What sort of lady?”

  Rose almost said plain and found, at the last instant, that the word felt wrong.

  “A quiet one,” she said instead. “She looked... normal.”

  The instructor made another tiny sound under his breath.

  Rose ignored him.

  “She said I have no magical channels.”

  The room went still.

  Her father frowned. “No what?”

  Rose had known that would happen. The woman had spoken the phrase as though naming something obvious. Rose had held onto it because it mattered, because the woman had said it with sorrow rather than disappointment, because those words had somehow made all the shame in the field feel less like failure and more like a fact too old to blame on anyone.

  “I don’t know,” Rose admitted. “She said she could see it.”

  The instructor folded both hands behind his back with the rigid dignity of a man determined not to scoff in a child’s kitchen.

  “And yet,” he said carefully, “this woman also appears to have informed you that it no longer matters.”

  Rose turned to him at once.

  “She didn’t say that.”

  He blinked.

  “She said it wasn’t my fault,” Rose said, and heard, too late, how fiercely she had spoken. The room seemed to shrink around the words. She looked down. “And that magic responds to kindness.”

  Something changed in her father’s face at that. Not understanding. He did not know what channels were and had no reason to believe magic cared one way or another how anyone addressed it. But there was recognition there all the same, of the sort that came when one heard a sentence strange enough to be nonsense and yet somehow too shaped, too exact, too painful in the right places to dismiss entirely.

  Rose swallowed.

  “And I can do this now.”

  The instructor looked pained. Her father looked wary.

  Rose held out her hand.

  The urge to stand as she had in the field—to set her shoulders, fix her posture, pronounce the word in proper schoolroom form—came and went in the same moment. That way belonged to the others. To lines of children in sunny fields and teachers with chalk on their sleeves. It was not hers. It had never been hers.

  So she drew her hand close instead, cupping it over her mouth, hunching around it the way children did with secrets they feared might dissolve if exposed too quickly to grown-up air.

  “Would you?” she whispered.

  The spark appeared at once.

  It was very small.

  Not weak.

  Shy.

  It hovered above her palm with a wavering little brightness, as though it had come only halfway into the room and wished to make absolutely certain it was wanted before committing further.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Her father’s eyebrow rose.

  The instructor pointed before he remembered himself and withdrew the gesture so sharply it became almost theatrical.

  “Do you see that?” he demanded of no one in particular. “Do you see how it—”

  He stopped, because perhaps there was no proper term for a spark that looked as though it were peeking around a doorway.

  Rose smiled before she could stop herself.

  It did not feel like smiling at magic.

  It felt like smiling at someone.

  “I can’t keep calling you magic,” she murmured.

  Both men looked at her.

  The spark brightened.

  Rose’s smile deepened.

  “That sounds like a label,” she said softly. “Not a name.”

  Her father had gone very still.

  The instructor lowered his hand as though uncertain what it might do if left unattended in such a room.

  Rose considered the little light hovering above her skin.

  The name came to her the way breath came to tired lungs—simply, without argument.

  “Aeri,” she said. “Would that suit you?”

  Joy split the world open.

  Wind rushed through the kitchen though every window was shut. The fire in the hearth leapt high without heat. The shy spark burst apart into a spinning cloud of luminous petals so sudden and so bright that the instructor stumbled backward into the wall and her father threw an arm over his face on instinct before realizing there was nothing there to shield against except beauty and far too much of it.

  Rose laughed aloud.

  The petals filled the room.

  They poured through the kitchen in a blizzard of pale shining color, brushing table and rafters and floorboards and hair and skin. Everywhere they touched, small sufferings eased.

  Her father lowered his arm slowly and flexed the fingers of the hand that had ached every winter since the harvest accident five years before. Confusion crossed his face. Then alarm at the absence of pain.

  From the next room came old Mara’s startled cough—a deep, stubborn cough she had carried for as long as Rose had known her—followed by a silence so complete Rose knew something had been lifted from it.

  The instructor, one hand braced against the wall, touched his own temple with two fingers and then stared at the gesture as if he had expected to find the headache there and had not.

  The petals thickened.

  They rose in bright currents toward the ceiling beams, spun in the windowlight, drifted into corners and under chairs and through the open doorway toward the hall. The kitchen began to feel too small, not because there was danger in it but because delight, in sufficient quantity, behaved very much like weather.

  Rose’s laughter faltered.

  “Aeri,” she said.

  The petals whirled harder.

  One cup skated an inch across the table. The fire leaned sideways in the hearth. The whole room seemed one heartbeat away from becoming spring entirely and forgetting how to be a room.

  Rose stood.

  “No, I like it,” she said quickly, because that seemed important. “I do. It’s a good name.”

  The storm of petals continued in delighted disarray.

  “Aeri,” she said again, and cupped both hands near her mouth as if speaking into the ear of something much larger than herself. “You don’t have to do all of it at once.”

  That landed.

  The blizzard faltered.

  Rose dragged in a breath and softened her voice.

  “Really,” she said. “I know you like it. I do too. But this is too much.”

  The petals slowed.

  Then, by degrees, they gentled into a softer drift, coming down in bright, impossible spirals that dissolved before touching the floor.

  Silence followed.

  Not empty silence.

  The sort that arrives after music too large for the room in which it was played.

  Her father was looking at her as though she had invited a miracle to sit at the kitchen table and expected him to ask whether it took honey in its tea.

  The instructor’s face had gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a lifetime spent trusting the rules of the world.

  “That,” he said hoarsely, “was no spark.”

  Rose smiled despite the wetness still on her face.

  “No,” she said. “It was Aeri.”

  By evening the village had split cleanly in two.

  There were those who had not seen anything and were therefore certain they knew exactly what had happened.

  And there were those who had seen enough to wish they had not.

  Old Mara, who by rights ought to have been miserable with her cough in the dusk chill, crossed their yard with a loaf of bread she claimed she had baked that afternoon but had clearly been too curious to leave at home. She sat in their kitchen and said three times that the girl was blessed before lowering her voice to ask whether blessings often tore through rafters like spring storms and left old women breathing like they were twenty years younger.

  By supper’s end, two neighbors had come to ask after Rose, one to ask after the petals, and one merely to stand in the doorway pretending she had dropped by to return a dish.

  Rose’s father answered all of them with the same restrained patience he used on stubborn weather and mildly venomous animals.

  The instructor did not stay for supper.

  He left while there were still a few petals clinging to the window latch like the memory of an event that had not happened in a room meant for practical things.

  At the door, before going, he turned once to Rose and said, “Do not perform for anyone.”

  Rose, who would not have known how, nodded anyway.

  Her father closed the door behind him and stood with one hand still on the latch a moment longer than necessary.

  When he turned back to the kitchen, the tiredness in his face was of a kind Rose had not seen before.

  “What did the woman look like?” he asked.

  Rose tried to tell him.

  But how did one describe ordinary when ordinary had felt like being looked after for the first time in one’s life?

  “She was just...” Rose stopped. “Plain.”

  Her father’s mouth thinned in a way that suggested the word had failed to satisfy him for reasons he could not prove.

  “And she told you to call it kindness,” he said.

  Rose nodded.

  “Magic responds to kindness.”

  He looked down at the table for a long moment.

  Then, very quietly, “A sage can spend a lifetime persuading the world to answer. I’ve never heard of anyone being answered back.”

  Rose did not know what to do with that.

  So she asked the only thing she could.

  “Are you angry?”

  His head came up at once.

  “No.”

  The force of it made her flinch slightly anyway.

  Her father saw and sat down hard in the nearest chair as though the day had at last caught up with him.

  “No,” he said again, softer. “No, Rose. I’m not angry.”

  He rubbed one hand across his mouth.

  “I’m afraid,” he admitted.

  That was worse.

  Rose looked at her own hands.

  “Aeri isn’t bad.”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  He gave a tired, humorless little laugh.

  “Because if what came through this house meant harm, we would not be sitting here discussing it over cold stew.”

  That was true enough.

  Rose glanced toward the corner where the last of the light had faded from the room.

  “Aeri,” she said under her breath, not asking for anything, only testing the name again.

  A warm little breeze moved over the back of her neck and was gone.

  Her father saw it.

  Of course he did.

  He closed his eyes briefly.

  “You are not to speak of this outside the house any more than you must,” he said. “Do you understand me?”

  Rose hesitated. “People already know.”

  “Then let them know less.”

  That, too, was fair.

  She nodded.

  Her father looked at her a long moment, and in that look there was pride and helplessness and the grief of a man who had hoped to guide his daughter along some path he understood and found himself instead watching her step onto one he could neither name nor follow.

  “What does it feel like?” he asked at last.

  Rose thought.

  “Like...” She stopped. Tried again. “Like standing near someone who’s trying very hard not to stand too close.”

  Something in his face softened painfully.

  “Well,” he said after a moment. “If it’s going to stay, perhaps that’s as good a beginning as any.”

  Aeri did stay.

  Not loudly.

  That was what surprised Rose first.

  After the kitchen and the petals and the impossible warmth that had left half the village sleeping better than they had in years, she had expected perhaps a constant shimmer at the edge of everything, or sparks darting behind doors, or at least the sort of sustained spectacle that would justify the trouble of being frightened.

  Instead Aeri became near in quieter ways.

  A stir of air in rooms where the shutters were latched.

  A low warmth at Rose’s shoulder when she woke from bad dreams.

  The sensation, while walking to the well or the garden or the fence line, that something just beyond sight was taking the road with her and pretending not to.

  Once, trying to braid her own hair and failing, Rose muttered, “You could help, you know.”

  The ribbons on the table lifted of their own accord and tied themselves into a knot so elaborate she had to laugh and undo it by hand.

  That became the pattern of things.

  Aeri was shy until named. Extra when pleased. Deeply uninterested in sensible proportions.

  And because Rose was twelve and had found the first being in the world who answered her when spoken to kindly, she loved it with immediate and unreasonable loyalty.

  She learned quickly that asking in front of strangers made Aeri cautious. Asking softly, with her hands near her mouth, like confiding in a friend, worked better. She learned that gratitude made the petals warmer. That frustration made Aeri go still. That once, in a fit of temper over dropping a plate and cutting her hand, she snapped, “Just do it,” and spent the next hour being ignored with such perfect offense she ended up apologizing to an empty room while pressing a cloth to her bleeding palm.

  The petals returned only after that.

  When they did, they wrapped briefly around her wrist like forgiveness.

  Her father noticed more than he said. The village noticed far more than was comfortable. The instructor came twice in the following weeks and left each time with fresh reasons to distrust his profession.

  Then the summer moved on.

  Word moved faster.

  And by the time the barley in the southern fields had gone from green to gold, the ruler’s daughter came to visit.

  Her arrival was announced first by horses.

  Not many. Four riders and a fifth pack animal on the road by the east gate, sunlight flashing on polished tack and the sort of well-kept boots no one in Rose’s village wore unless standing in a wedding.

  By the time the little procession reached the square, every head in the village seemed to have found some urgent business nearby.

  Rose was carrying a basket of washed herbs in from the yard when her father looked up from the table and said, very quietly, “Stay behind me.”

  That, more than the sound of horses, made her pulse quicken.

  The woman who dismounted in front of their house looked perhaps sixteen or seventeen, old enough to have learned poise and young enough to wear it a little too deliberately. Her riding habit was dark blue. Her gloves were cream. Her hair, pinned neatly beneath a traveling hat, had taken no visible damage from the road, which made Rose distrust her almost instantly.

  She was accompanied by one older woman with a face like shut doors and one man who had clearly spent his life teaching people how not to stand while armed.

  The village reeve all but tripped over himself attempting to greet them.

  The young woman thanked him with polished grace and then looked directly past him to Rose’s father.

  “Master Halden,” she said. “I am Lady Mirelle.”

  So not the ruler’s daughter then, Rose thought—and then corrected herself at once when she saw the reeve nearly bow twice. If this was not the ruler’s daughter, she was near enough to the family to borrow some of their gravity.

  Her father inclined his head.

  “My lady.”

  Lady Mirelle’s gaze moved to Rose.

  There was curiosity in it. Not warm. Not unkind. The sort one reserved for rare books, old relics, and strange weather.

  “You must be Rose.”

  Rose tightened her hold on the basket.

  “Yes.”

  Lady Mirelle smiled in the way the well-taught smiled when they wished to suggest friendliness without risking equality.

  “I’ve heard quite a great deal about you.”

  Rose doubted that was a good sign.

  The lady looked around the yard, the open door, the low fence, the herb garden, the washline, all with the easy survey of someone who had never expected any place in the world to be truly closed to her.

  “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion,” she said. “My father has a responsibility to the peace and well-being of all the villages under his protection. When stories of miracles begin to travel faster than tax reports, some attention becomes unavoidable.”

  Rose’s father said, “My daughter is no miracle.”

  Lady Mirelle’s eyes returned to Rose and, very briefly, sharpened.

  “We’re here to determine that.”

  That ought to have sounded rude. Instead it came out with enough court-softening that anyone less suspicious might have mistaken it for concern.

  Her father did not.

  “My daughter is a child,” he said.

  “Children become many things,” said Lady Mirelle.

  The older woman beside her had not yet spoken. Her silence felt arranged.

  Rose, who had no practice at all with nobility and therefore none of the useful fear that might have helped, said, “What sort of things?”

  That won her three separate adult looks: her father’s warning, the reeve’s horror, and Lady Mirelle’s faint amusement.

  “The sort,” Lady Mirelle said, “that can preserve kingdoms.”

  That sounded dreadful.

  She stepped into the shade of the doorway without waiting to be invited further and folded her gloves into one palm.

  “I would like to see what happened here,” she said.

  Her father’s jaw set.

  “No.”

  Lady Mirelle turned her head.

  “Master Halden.”

  “No,” he said again. “My daughter is not a fairground curiosity to be made to perform.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Lady Mirelle did something worse than anger.

  She became patient.

  “Your daughter filled a house with living light, eased sickness in half the western quarter, and apparently convinced a man who has spent thirty years teaching first workings that he has been standing knee-deep in myth without noticing. Curiosity does not enter into it.”

  She looked at Rose again.

  “Does it tire you?” she asked.

  Rose blinked.

  “What?”

  “This power.”

  Rose shifted the basket to her other hip.

  “It isn’t mine.”

  That made the older woman by the gate look up sharply for the first time.

  Lady Mirelle, to her credit, did not laugh.

  “How modest,” she said.

  Rose frowned.

  “I’m not being modest.”

  The faint smile on Lady Mirelle’s face did not survive contact with that sentence.

  She regarded Rose more carefully now, as one might regard an unexpectedly articulate bird.

  “Would you show me?” she asked.

  Rose thought of saying no and discovered, with some annoyance, that she did not know how to say no to people whose whole lives had apparently been arranged to make refusal sound childish.

  Before she could decide, her father said, “No.”

  Lady Mirelle’s head turned.

  “Again?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if the crown asks?”

  Her father’s voice did not rise.

  “The crown may ask.”

  Somewhere near Rose’s shoulder, the air tightened.

  Aeri did not like her.

  Rose knew that with the same instant certainty with which one knew when a dog had gone from wagging to watchful.

  Petals appeared at the cuff of her sleeve.

  Only three.

  Sharp little things this time, pale and cold-looking in the afternoon light before they vanished.

  Lady Mirelle saw them.

  So did the older woman by the gate.

  Something like hunger passed, quickly masked, across the older woman’s face.

  Rose put the basket down.

  “It doesn’t like you talking about it like that,” she said.

  The yard went quiet.

  Lady Mirelle looked at her for a long moment.

  “Like what?”

  “Like it belongs to someone.”

  The reeve made a noise in his throat that suggested impending death by protocol violation.

  Lady Mirelle removed one glove finger by finger, very calmly.

  “You are young,” she said. “So I will say this plainly and only once. Power that can heal, shield, or alter the order of things becomes the concern of rulers whether anyone likes that fact or not. Left to chance, such power ruins lives. Guided well, it preserves them.”

  Rose listened.

  At the beginning of the sentence it had sounded almost reasonable.

  By the end, she wanted very much for the woman to leave.

  “What would you do with me?” she asked.

  Lady Mirelle took this as victory and stepped further into the yard.

  “You would come to court,” she said. “You would be educated properly. Given tutors, conditions suitable to your development, and every possible advantage. In time—” and here, for the first time, genuine brightness entered her voice “—you could become the kingdom’s archmagi in training.”

  Rose looked at her blankly.

  Lady Mirelle continued.

  “A visible assurance to our allies. A clear warning to any who would test our borders. A presence so remarkable that neighboring lords would think twice before ever threatening the peace of this realm.”

  It was one of those speeches adults gave when they wished terrible things to sound useful.

  Rose stared at her.

  “You mean you want people to be afraid.”

  The older woman by the gate exhaled slowly.

  Lady Mirelle’s expression tightened so slightly that another adult might have missed it.

  “We would prefer,” she said, “that people be sensible.”

  Rose thought of the petals in the kitchen. The shy spark above her palm. The warm invisible nearness beside her shoulder. The way Aeri had quieted when spoken to gently and flared with ridiculous joy when given a name.

  Then she looked at Lady Mirelle and understood, with the clean instinctive revulsion children often reach before adults reason themselves out of it, that this woman was describing a life in which Aeri would be turned into a banner and hung where everyone could fear it from a safe distance.

  “That sounds lonely,” Rose said.

  The words fell into the yard like a dropped stone.

  Lady Mirelle blinked.

  Rose went on because she was already in trouble and did not see the use in doing it by halves.

  “You want me to become a threat.”

  “No,” Lady Mirelle said, with the brittle patience of someone trying to remain gentle while being contradicted by a child in front of witnesses. “I want you to become a safeguard.”

  Rose shook her head.

  “You want people to be frightened before they’ve done anything.”

  The petals returned.

  This time they came in a brief ring around Rose’s wrists and shoulders, hovering for the length of a breath before fading. Not warm. Alert.

  Her father took one slow step nearer her.

  Rose did not take her eyes off Lady Mirelle.

  “I won’t ask Aeri to do that,” she said.

  The name stopped the whole yard.

  Lady Mirelle looked, for the first time since arriving, not polished but genuinely startled.

  The older woman by the gate went perfectly still.

  “Aeri,” Lady Mirelle repeated.

  Rose nodded.

  “That’s its name.”

  No one spoke for a moment.

  Then Lady Mirelle said carefully, “You have named your gift.”

  “No,” said Rose. “I named Aeri.”

  The distinction hit no one but her father as anything more than nonsense. She saw that at once and felt suddenly, sharply tired.

  Lady Mirelle folded the glove back into her palm.

  “It appears,” she said, “that the village rumors omitted the extent of the strangeness.”

  Rose almost smiled.

  “They usually do.”

  That one landed badly enough that even the reeve had the sense to look away.

  Lady Mirelle drew herself up.

  “Master Halden,” she said. “I am not in the habit of arguing policy with children.”

  “Then don’t,” said Rose before her father could answer.

  Her father closed his eyes briefly, either in pain or prayer.

  Lady Mirelle looked at Rose as though noticing for the first time that there might be iron under all the childishness after all.

  “And if my father commands it?”

  Rose looked toward the empty air beside her shoulder.

  The answer came to her with complete, impossible simplicity.

  “Then I still won’t ask.”

  The breeze in the yard shifted.

  Warm this time.

  Approving.

  Lady Mirelle saw nothing and yet somehow knew the moment had turned against her.

  Not decisively. Not forever. But enough.

  She put her glove back on.

  “You are very young,” she said.

  Rose nodded.

  “Yes.”

  That, unlike so many other things spoken that day, was not in dispute.

  Lady Mirelle stepped backward into the sunlight.

  “When you are older,” she said, “you may understand duty differently.”

  Rose thought of the woman beneath the crooked tree. Of the quiet defense in her voice when she had spoken to empty air. Of the line that had crossed time from myth into shade and found its echo in a field.

  That isn’t very kind.

  Rose lifted her chin.

  “When I’m older,” she said, “I still won’t ask Aeri to do something it will regret later.”

  This time there was no mistaking the little violence done by the sentence.

  Lady Mirelle’s mouth flattened.

  Not fury. Worse.

  Recognition.

  She had met not ignorance but refusal.

  That seemed to trouble her much more.

  The older woman at the gate touched Lady Mirelle’s sleeve once. A signal. A caution. Enough had been seen; more would not improve matters.

  Lady Mirelle inclined her head to Rose’s father with the brittle correctness of the disappointed noble.

  “For now,” she said.

  Then she turned, gathered her party, and left the yard with every inch of her posture proclaiming that this conversation had not ended, only become inconvenient.

  The reeve nearly trotted after them.

  The horses went first. Dust lifted from the road. The village exhaled in doorways.

  Only when they had disappeared beyond the square did Rose realize she was shaking.

  Her father looked at her for a long time.

  Then, very quietly, “Inside.”

  That evening the house felt smaller than it had before the visit, as if the kingdom had managed to reach its fingers through the shutters and left them there.

  Rose sat on the back steps with her knees drawn up, watching the last of the light fade from the herb beds. The air smelled of thyme and damp earth. Somewhere in the lane, children who had not spent the afternoon being politely invited to become weapons shouted over a game and then forgot to be heard.

  Aeri stayed close.

  Not visible.

  Never that.

  But the nearness had texture now. A hush in the air at Rose’s shoulder. A warmth when the evening breeze moved cold. The private sense of a large animal lying down nearby and pretending not to watch.

  Rose cupped one hand near her mouth.

  “I didn’t like her either,” she whispered.

  A single petal landed in her palm.

  Warm.

  She smiled.

  “They want things from you already.”

  Another petal. Then a tiny spark that appeared and vanished before she could decide whether to laugh.

  Rose rested her chin on her knees.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted.

  The breeze touched the side of her face and moved on.

  “That isn’t the same as yes,” she told the air.

  No answer came.

  Only presence.

  Only the steady impossible companionship of something that could have ignored her forever and, for reasons Rose still did not understand, had chosen not to.

  She looked up at the first evening star.

  “Aeri,” she said softly. “If they keep asking, I’ll keep saying no.”

  The air stirred once, all around her this time, as if some vast unseen creature had settled more comfortably beside her.

  Rose smiled into the darkening yard.

  Then, because she was twelve and had already had enough of greatness and kingdoms and adults trying to decide what legends were good for, she bent over her hands and whispered one last secret into them before going inside.

  “Please don’t explode any more kitchens.”

  The answer came as a brief swirl of petals around her feet and the unmistakable feeling of being laughed at by something with all the power in the world and just enough decency to do it gently.