"You're about to do something foolish," Sera said.Kael had been trying to summon the fire for the better part of an hour — standing at the centre of a small clearing while Sera sat on a fallen trunk and ate dried flatbread and watched him fail with an expression of patient, clinical disapproval."I need to know how to use it," he said."You need to know how to not use it. There's a hierarchy of survival. First: don't burn yourself. Second: don't burn me. Third: don't burn the forest and bring the empire directly to our position." She tore a piece of flatbread. "Summoning fire in the Greywood, where the old Aeth-lines run close to the surface, is the equivalent of shouting your location to anyone within a day's travel who knows how to read Aeth-signatures.""So how do I learn?""Restraint before expression. That's the first principle of any Aeth-training." She pointed at his wrist. "What you have is a fire-bond. It came without any of the years of discipline that normally accompany it.

"You're burning through it too fast," Sera said. "Stop."They had been moving for two hours since the encounter with Daven Mira, pushing east through the deepening Greywood, when Kael had stumbled and caught himself against a tree and left a handprint of scorch-marks in the bark. The fire-Aeth had flared without his choosing it — a reflexive response to sudden fear — and now the copper lines on his arms were bright and feverish, pulsing with a rhythm that felt wrong."It's not — I'm not doing it deliberately," he said, examining his hands. The skin of his palms was dry and tight, the way it felt after holding a flame too close for too long. "It's coming on its own.""Aeth-bleed." Sera pulled him away from the tree. The scorch-marks were already fading, absorbed by the strange Greywood bark. "When you have power without the conditioning to manage it, the Aeth finds its own releases. Stress triggers. Fear. Strong emotion." She looked at his hands with that clinical expression. "Does it h

"You were expelled," Kael said. "From the Greave House. That's what 'disgraced' means in Draeven terms."They had been walking for three hours without speaking — a comfortable silence, which surprised him, given that they had known each other for less than a day. But the question had been accumulating, and the east path was long, and the light in the Greywood had turned the quality of late afternoon, amber and deliberate.Sera walked another twenty paces before answering."Discharged is more accurate," she said. "The Greave House doesn't expel. They discharge — strip the licensed marks and leave the bond-work intact. A reminder." She touched the irregular tattoos along her jaw. "Every Draeven shadow-mage in Aethoria will look at these and know what they mean.""What did you do?""I read something I wasn't supposed to read." She said it without drama, without the cadence of someone building to a more interesting answer. "The Greave House maintains an archive — the record of the licensed

"The last Mirror," said the Chronicler, "destroyed an empire. You should probably know that before we begin."She said it the way she said everything — with the directness of a person for whom words were too valuable to decorate. Her name was Lysse. She had been called the Chronicler for forty years, which was how long she had been collecting the histories the empire burned, and she wore that name with the same practical ownership she applied to everything else in her small, dense, archive-crowded home."Vael the Unmade," Kael said. "Sera told me.""Sera told you the broad shape." Lysse set three cups of something hot on the table between them — it smelled like woodsmoke and dried berries — and sat. "I'll tell you the mechanics." She looked at him. "The First Kingdom War ended three hundred years ago because a Mirror named Vael absorbed the Aeths of eleven senior Solmere commanders in the course of a single battle. When Vael's void was full — when there was no more empty space in them

"We have sixty-three fighters," said the man called Drest. He was broad and grey-bearded, with a stone-bond scar along his left forearm from some old conflict, and he looked at Kael across the Ashenveil war table the way soldiers look at things they have been asked to believe are important and haven't yet decided about. "We have wardwork on the gates, water-bond reserves for the inner wards, and enough dried provisions for three months if we're careful." He paused. "We also have one seventeen-year-old with a borrowed fire-bond and no training. I'm trying to understand how that changes our strategic position.""It changes our strategic position considerably," Sera said, from across the table."Does it?""Drest." Lysse's voice was patient, which was what her voice sounded like when she was also being firm. "Kael is not a soldier. He is not here to be deployed. He is here because here is the only place in Veldrath where he can survive long enough to learn what he is.""And when he's learn