illusion I could’ve created. I’d an eye to see where they’d been used but no skill at the art of creation.
“Worth it.” I cleared my throat, voice raw. My bones hurt from how much magic I’d been channeling. “Soldier with Chevalier du Ferrant. I need to add him to the list of warnings.”
Knowing it might not happen eased the ache in my chest. I could suffer through any number of futures with disemboweled soldiers and dead physicians so long as I knew they weren’t set. Those futures could be changed. The people could live.
* * *
The next night, I was a Thornish soldier, her heart beating fast as the hooves of her horse, her black shirt plastered to her skin with sweat. Green lands I’d never seen sped past. Her fingers tightened on the reins. Steam rose from the horse in clouds.
A spear, transformed by the noonday arts and dripping with Chevalier du Ferrant’s magic, tore through her shoulder and knocked her off her horse. Chevalier du Ferrant stood over her corpse and pulled the tag decorated with cornflowers from her chest. He set her aflame. They wouldn’t be able to identify her.
“I don’t want to scry for Chevalier du Ferrant anymore,” I told Estrel as she packaged up all our letters.
She stared at me over the edge of her spectacles, bright brown eyes gold in the candlelight. “All right.”
I could not live my brother’s death. I could not live another loved one’s death.
So I didn’t. I never scryed Macé, I never tried to scry him, and my self-loathing shook my hands until my letter to Emilie was nearly illegible. He deserved someone better looking out for him.
* * *
A hack, black coat torn, bleeding out in the grass of Segance.
I ripped myself from my scrying and dry heaved the water that wasn’t in my throat. I could feel it, seeping, but there was nothing there.
“Take a break.” Germaine rubbed stinging, green balm into my worn-out hands, the power I’d been channeling the last few days finally taking its toll in a visible way, and she pulled the divining bowl away from me. “Do something that’s not magic.”
I was tucked into a corner of her and Perenelle’s room. They’d pulled the quilts off the beds and covered the floor so that everyone could sit together. Perenelle, exhausted from storing the midnight arts in case we needed them during the day, was snoring softly in their bed above me. Coline, too, was asleep but jerking awake every few seconds and pretending she was fine. I coughed and nodded.
“You got the letters?” I tried to stand, and Germaine had to help me to my feet. “Thank you.”
“Don’t pass out,” she said, leaning until she was even with my face, and tweaked my nose. “Here.”
Germaine was the best calligrapher in all the school, but even better, she knew all the ways to make ink disappear without magic. We didn’t want soldiers to get in trouble for distracting us.
I made my stumbling way to the kitchens and dropped a small letter on the table near the door. “More letters if you can get them out.”
Yvonne hummed an acknowledgment. She was bent over the table, measuring the dip of liquid in a cylinder. The liquid was viscous, not like water, and she’d gone off a few days ago about how precision for such small things mattered, how whether the top of the liquid curved up or down mattered. She was too busy to talk now, but watching her work was soothing. She was so sure of herself.
“Why don’t you divine the hack?” she asked after about thirty minutes of wonderfully comfortable silence.
“Bad things happen when I divine.” My Stareater was dead, probably, but there were new ones. They fluttered around the windows like dawn gone wandering, red wings beating against the glass, and I had not seen the white wings of one in days. Two lapped at the softly bleeding skin of my fingers. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Divining only helps if you’re near enough to tell them in time.”
I shuddered, suddenly cold, and organized the little bottles of wound salve and fever tea into their crates. “Why do you sell water instead of these?”
“People trust hawkers selling drinks. You can’t go wrong with water, but things can go so wrong with a coughing tonic,” she said. “These aren’t perfect. They’re for soldiers and civilians. People like me have to be perfect when you lot only have to be good enough.”
She sucked in a breath