Page 107

“Is it my fault you're broadcasting your intentions?”

“I'm not broadcasting—“ He stopped. Reconsidered. “Am I?”

“Loudly,” I confirmed.

Beatrice made a sound that might have been a laugh, though she disguised it as a cough.

“Very well,” August said. His expression shifted, focused, competitive. “Let us see if you can keep up.”

What followed was controlled chaos.

August severed bindings in rapid succession, left, right, high, low, never the same pattern twice. And I chased him through it, restoration magic rising to meet each cut, golden threads spinning faster than I'd known I could work.

The bond made it possible. His awareness became mine. My power rose to meet his. We weren't working separately. We were working as one mind with two different gifts. Complementary.

“There,” Beatrice said finally, and we both stopped, breathing hard.

The practice threads lay on the crate, severed and restored a dozen times over, frayed at the edges but fundamentally intact.

“That,” Beatrice said with satisfaction, “is what makes you dangerous together. He breaks. You mend. He creates the opening. You ensure nothing is lost in the process.” She looked between us. “Your father fears you separately, August. But together? You are something he has never encountered and cannot plan for.”

August's hand found mine across the crate. Through the bond, pride. Not in himself, but in us. In what we could do together.

“Again?” I asked.

His smile was quick and warm. “Again.”

Before we could continue, the barn door creaked open, and a shaft of afternoon light cut across the floor.

It was a girl, the sixteen-year-old who had arrived with Esther the other morning. She hovered in the doorway, uncertain, her dark hair escaping from a hastily pinned braid. Her eyes moved around the barn with a strange, unfocused quality, as though she were seeing something none of us could perceive.

“Ruth,” Esther said, rising from her seat on a hay bale. “You should be resting.”

“I couldn't,” the girl said. Her voice was thin. “There's too much. Too many threads moving.”

Esther's expression tightened with something between concern and resignation.

“Ruth is a Seer,” she explained to the room. “Newly manifested. She is still learning to . . . manage what she sees.”

A Seer. Like Syra had been.

The girl's gaze drifted across the barn, past Beatrice, past August, past Esther, and settled on me.

Something flickered in her expression. Recognition. Or perhaps fear.

She opened her mouth as if to speak but closed it again. Her hands twisted in her skirts.

Then she turned and fled back through the door, leaving only the creak of hinges and a rectangle of light slowly swinging closed.

Esther sighed. “Forgive her. The gift came on suddenly, and she has not yet learned to separate her own thoughts from what the threads show her. She sees fragments. Possibilities. Most of it means nothing.”

“Most of it,” I repeated quietly.

Esther did not meet my eyes. “I'll speak with her later. I'm sure it was nothing.”

August's unease settled into my chest through the bond. He'd noticed something wrong too, and that made it real.

I sent reassurance back through our connection. It's nothing. Newly manifested Seers see all kinds of things.