“That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?”
Max sat cross-legged among the tall, rippling grass, watching my silver butterflies rise into the sky.
“‘That’s it?’” I echoed. “I mean — that’s it?”
It was impossible not to be insulted by this reaction. “Not only these,” I said, gesturing to the butterflies. “There was also fire and—”
“Sparks, honestly. It’s just all very…performative.” “I know thoughts also,” I offered.
“Right. No need to demonstrate that, I saw that one first hand.” His teeth clamped down on the end of his pen, looking down at the stack of papers he had brought with him. “And when you do that — what do you typically do, exactly?”
“What do I do?”
“Do you speak, or just listen?”
I stared blankly at him. His eyes flicked up at me from the parchments.
“What I mean is, how closely can you understand what people are thinking? Words, or just feelings? And how much do you control them?”
“Control?” It came out like a gasp. Could Valtain do
that?
Max let out a humorless chuckle. “Ascended, you really are new to Ara, aren’t you? This is why you need to be careful here.”
I shook my head, putting aside that line of questioning for later. “I hear what they feel,” I said. “Not words. Just…” I couldn’t decide how to explain it in Aran, so I placed my hand over my heart. “Big things here.”
He nodded, as if he understood this perfectly.
My thoughts shot to Esmaris, the way his mind felt withering and suffocating beneath my own, the look on his face as he fell to the ground. But I said nothing about that.
“Fine. Good.” Max placed the pile of papers on the ground, staring down at them. I was fairly certain that he did not sleep last night. When I went to bed, he was scribbling frantically at the table, not bothering to so much as look at me as he bid me goodnight. And he was in exactly that same place when I got up again in the morning, except surrounded by substantially more paper and with eyes bracketed by darkness. Still, he was exceptionally energetic when he greeted me and almost immediately whisked me outside to begin.
No objections from me. In fact, this was the most encouraged I’d felt in weeks.
“No one taught me. I learned what I must. To—” The word eluded me. I settled on, “To dance.”
“Dance?”
“Yes.” I snapped my fingers as the word I was searching for came to me. “Perform. In Threll.”
It took a moment for understanding to flood across Max’s features, dimming some of his enthusiasm with a shade I couldn’t quite identify. “I see. It makes sense that you would be self-taught.”
He grunted as he pushed himself to his feet. I did the same, if only because I didn’t like the idea of him staring down at me.
“More than anything,” he said, “The Orders care about control. That was why they were founded to begin with, to make sure that Wielders weren’t going to accidentally wreak destruction simply because they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. And to the Orders’ credit, they fulfill that role very well. When Wielders wreak destruction, it’s usually because they want to. Unless we’re talking about Moth and my roses.” Max glowered at the scalded flowers for just a moment before turning back to me.
“You seem to like conjuring, so let’s start there. And, there’s potential with that. That thing you do, turning the butterflies into glass? That’s impressive for a Valtain. They struggle with physical things like that.”
I must have looked pleased with myself, because he raised a finger.
“Don’t get too full of yourself. Your accuracy is still a mess.” He picked up a flower — a little yellow one with layers and layers of tiny, long petals. “Let’s start with this. I want you to make me a copy of this flower.”
Easy. I began to smile, but again, he raised that finger.
“No. Get that cocky smirk off your face. I’m not asking for what you think this flower looks like. This exact flower. Every little detail the same.”
I looked from Max, to his raised hand, to the little yellow flower — all of those layers and layers of petals. I was sure I could do it. But was it really any more impressive than my own tricks? People liked performances. They liked to be dazzled. And I would certainly need to dazzle the Orders to accelerate myself.
“This will really help me impress in tests?” I said, skeptical.
“Are you implying that I’m leading you astray?”
The look on my face must have betrayed that I knew almost none of those words.
Max let out a breath through his teeth. “Listen. Many people believe that Fragmented Valtain are less capable.
The idea being that Valtain magic bleaches hair and skin, so by that logic, someone like you…”
Someone like me would be inherently less powerful. I nodded, glancing down at my hand and my two tan fingers. Those patches of gold had hurt my value as a slave, and now they hurt my value as a Valtain, too.
“It’s not proven. The point is, many people, especially full Valtain, will be expecting you to fail. They’ll be looking for reason to prove that you’re not capable of doing this. We’ll make sure that you knock their moon-obsessed robes off, absolutely. But when you do it, you need to be technically perfect.”
We’ll make sure. Apparently, there was a “we” now.
I had to admit, I was pleasantly surprised — if somewhat perplexed — by how quickly Max had gone from trying to drive me away to being so deeply invested in my success.
“I will be,” I said.
“You’d better. I have other things I could be doing. Make it worth it.” Max handed me the flower. “Remember. Exact.”
 |
IT TURNED out that my little assignment was harder than I thought it would be.
My first flower came easily, hovering, silver and translucent, between my hands. But Max took one look at it and shook his head.
“What did I tell you? That’s not this flower. It’s a flower. Or worse, what you think a flower looks like. There’s nothing real about that.”
It took only one more long look at what I had created to realize that he was right. My creation was too perfect, formed in rows of tear-shaped, identical petals that looked
real from a distance but revealed themselves to be eerily fake up close.
I nodded, letting the flower dissolve into the air. Then tried again.
And again.
And.
Again.
Too big. Too small. Too perfect. Too symmetrical. “You’re duplicating petals,” Max pointed out.
“I know,” I muttered. I didn’t mean to duplicate, but it was so hard not to. My mind felt too thick and clumsy to create all of that detail. My head pounded. But I offered no objection, no complaint.
Hours passed. My conjurings began to take longer and longer, flickering and writhing in the air like smoke. Soon Max and I both had to squint into blinding sunset light.
“We can stop for the day,” Max said, rising to his feet. “Even experienced Wielders would struggle with this. You don’t have to get it tonight.”
But I didn’t look away from my translucent flower as I replied, “No.”
“What?”
“No. We do not stop.”
He paused mid-step, looking perplexed. “This isn’t typically the context in which I’d like to hear that. But my answer is the same nonetheless” He turned back around, slumping back to the ground, quirking one eyebrow at me in a skeptical challenge. “If you can do it, I can do it.”
Oh, I could do it.
So, we resumed — me creating flower after flower and Max telling me all the ways in which it was wrong. By this point, I knew before he opened his mouth exactly how it was lacking, and I was already letting it dissolve by the time the words left his lips. By then, all final dregs of sunlight had long ago disappeared beneath the horizon, leaving us in darkness. Max opened fire in his palms and
placed it on the ground, where it hovered in an eerie, self-contained ball.
“Could I do that?” I asked, without looking away from five-trillionth flower.
“I don’t know. Can you?”
I flicked me eyes to the fire ball. Fire had always been difficult for me, like it was speaking a language I didn’t quite understand. Sparks, really, Max had called it. He wasn’t wrong.
But I said, casually, “I’m sure yes,” as if it were nothing. He chuckled.
Flowers and flowers evaporated into the night. Max’s responses grew slower and less enthusiastic. Eventually, he stood up and stretched. “Alright. I’m done. Sleep.” He said it as if he couldn’t conjure the energy to create more complete sentences.
“You go. I will stay.”
A brief, surprised pause. “Are you sure?’ “Yes.”
“Ramming your head against the wall will probably get less effective over time.”
“I don’t know what that’s meaning.”
“It means, don’t kill yourself. But then again, I’m in no position to judge, I suppose.” I heard the door open, even as my eyes were unwaveringly focused on the petal I sculpted. “Good luck.”
A bitter smile twisted the edges of my mouth. “I do this so I don’t need luck.”
“I can’t decide if that response is charming or terrifying.”
And with that, he closed the door, leaving me in silence, singularly focused on my work.
It was comforting in a way to have something to fight for, to push myself beyond the shadow of talent and forge my success out of something stronger. There was a certain meditative quality about throwing myself against a stone
wall again and again, chipping away at it. I could feel it cracking beneath my fingers, even as I felt it cracking me. At the end, one of us would be left standing. And I wasn’t about to let myself break.
I eventually began conjuring each petal individually, figuring out how to hold the others in my mind as I moved on to the next one and the next and the next. And then, after that, I forced myself a step further: figuring out how to turn it into glass without letting all of those separate petals slip through the grasp of my mind.
The sounds of the nighttime bugs and creatures faded. The sky turned purple. My vision blurred, my head grew leaden, throbbing behind my eyes, ears, temples.
Tisaanah.
It was Esmaris’s voice at first, accusing and pleading all at once.
“Tisaanah.” The murkiness dripped away, peeling back the memory of my former master’s face, his betrayal.
I opened my eyes to see a bright sky, tree branches and green leaves encroaching on the edges of my vision. And a pair of angular, bright blue eyes looking down at me from beneath perplexed brows.
I had fallen asleep.
“I told you that slamming your head against the wall wouldn’t work,” Max said.
My head sure felt like it had been slammed against something. It throbbed so intensely that the colors of my vision grew brighter and dimmer with every rhythmic beat of pain. I reached to my side, my fingers groping in the dirt, closing gently around something hard.
“It didn’t?” I smiled at him as I opened my fingers to reveal a glass flower — every petal different, perfectly imperfect, an exact replica.
I’d never tasted anything sweeter than the quiet, muted surprise on Max’s face as he took the flower from me, turning it around in his fingers.
“Good,” he said, finally. There was a hint of a question mark at the end, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
I let my throbbing head fall back into the grass, allowing the flowers to hide my grin. Gods, I forgot how wonderful it felt to exceed expectations.
