Seeing Nura like this made the hair prickle on the back of my neck. There was a cruel humor to it. A decade ago, I would have treasured such intimacy. Now it was being offered to me years later, not out of any semblance of love but out of… what? Fear?
She cleared her throat. “Well? Do you want to stand around asking more questions, or do you want answers?”
I wasn’t sure if I did want these answers.
But I slipped my fingers into the cold liquid anyway. Tisaanah did the same. And finally, Nura did too, pressing her palms to the bottom of the bowl.
She closed her eyes, and her magic rolled over us like a crashing wave.
And with it came the past.
Chapter Seventy-One
Nura
Nura is ten years old. She is at a party thrown by one of her grandmother’s business partners. She has never seen a home like this before. It feels more like a city than a house. There are so many people here, and yet it all manages to be so horrifically dull. Nura is very, very bored.
Eventually, she stomps off to go pout in the corner, only to find that someone else is already pouting there. The boy is about her age, with dark hair and dark eyes and a general aura of displeasure at having to suffer through this event. He snaps his fingers, and weak puffs of flame burst between them.
That gets her attention.
A Wielder. Like her.
She sits beside him.
“What’s your name?”
“Maxantarius,” the boy says.
Nura makes a face. Where she came from, people are named things like “Jon” or “Erik.”
The boy looks away. “I know it’s a stupid name.”
“It is,” she says.
His only response is to snap his fingers and release another little spark of flame. When he does, she sends her own magic to meet it, a puff of air to blow it out like lips to a candle. For the first time, she earns his attention — a look that is part startled, part insulted, part intrigued.
She likes that look, she decides.
“I’m Nura,” she says. And then adds, after a moment of thought, “I’ll just call you Max.”
Nura is twelve years old. The years have passed fast. She and Max have done nothing but train, driven to endless pursuit of perfection by Brayan. She has never been so exhausted. And yet, it is easy to commit herself so completely when it means she can be with the Farliones — Max’s gentle mother, his friendly father, his siblings who welcome her into their affectionate squabbling, Brayan who treats her as if she actually has potential. And of course, Max, the best friend she has ever had.
Now, the two of them stand at the doorstep of the Towers. Max is stubborn-jawed and wary-eyed, masking secret uncertainty. She is uncertain, too, even if she will not admit it.
“The military is going to be better than getting stuck by ourselves in some countryside apprenticeship,” he says.
The key words are, “By ourselves.”
She is a Valtain, and he is a Solarie. In apprenticeships, they will be alone. At least here, they will be together.
Besides, what other choice is there? For Max, there is none. He will join the military, as his brother and his father and his grandfather have before him, and he will excel, because that is what Farlione men do.
Nura will be excellent, too, she decides. Just as good.
Better, even.
Her name is the first one on the enlistment papers.
Nura is fifteen years old. She has learned how to master her magic, Wielding light and water and air and the thoughts of others, but above all she has a gift for Wielding fear. This, she thinks, makes sense — she has spent her life controlling her own fear. Small wonder she would be so adept at controlling it in others.
Max has gotten good, too. He speaks to flames as if they are another part of him, and his combat skills earn impressed whispers among the instructors. This makes Nura’s skin prickle with jealousy. She wonders what it would be like to be the subject of such tittering.
But then they say, Well, of course. He is a Farlione.
Of course. He is a Farlione, a member of a military dynasty, and she is an orphaned girl who has spent her life clinging to their coattails.
But Max does not seem to hear the pleased murmurs. Always, they are drowned out by his brother’s dissatisfaction. He still throws himself into training like someone who has everything to prove.
Secretly, Nura is grateful for it, because she is certain that once he believes everything that everyone says about him, he will leave her behind. And when they fall to the ground after their fifth or tenth or seventeenth round of sparring, and he cracks some joke or gives her the right kind of sidelong glance, something she can not identify flutters in her stomach.
And in that moment, the idea of being left behind by him is the most terrible thing she can imagine.
Nura is eighteen years old. There are whispers of war rising in the north, among the Ryvenai territories.
“Do you think it will happen?” she asks Max.
“I doubt it.” He does not look up from his book.
A knot forms in Nura’s stomach. She has spent years studying war, learning the most effective strategies in death and victory. But nothing she could read in books or play out in sparring would be the same as the real thing.
“If it does,” she says, quietly, “we can prove ourselves.”
Max’s emotions flicker across his face — they always do, he never hides them. Uncertainty, fear. Temptation by all it promises.
“Maybe,” he says, at last. “We shall see.”
“We shall see.”
But it is only days later that Nura is on a patrol that quickly turns violent. The Ryvenai crowd is angry, the kind of angry that moves people to pick up steel and magic rather than shouts. A Wielder woman lunges at
