want to devour them and keep them in you forever because you know this is your one chance. Ten years ago, I walked and talked and stared like you. When I told you I see myself in you, I didn’t mean the midnight arts. I meant you. Whoever you are. I know the important parts of you, and I didn’t need to know your name to know you.”
I looked at her. “No one else has noticed.”
“No one else knows our hunger,” she said. “No one else has ever seen us, not truly, so they can’t see you now.” She touched my arm, voice soft and rough and sad. “I had no one when I was your age. No teacher, no family, no friends. So no, I’m not turning you in. You are my student, and that is a responsibility to protect and teach you that I will gladly take.”
I could feel myself crying. Slowly. Quietly. No one ever wanted me.
“My name is Annette Boucher,” I said. “I’m from Vaser.”
Estrel smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, Annette.”
And I knew she wasn’t lying.
* * *
Two days later, wrapped in the same warm quilt and sitting on the floor of Estrel’s laboratory, moonlight streaming across the floor in silver streaks, I filled a bowl with ice-cold water and divined my brother. I held my memories of Macé in my heart—the sound of him snoring, the way his hand felt in mine when I walked three-year-old him around Vaser, the way he slurped his water from the cup and how horrible it sounded but how it was him, horrible or not. The water shuddered—a soot-streaked hand gathered magic over a steel chest plate.
The image rippled and ended.
Estrel leaned over me. “You’re nervous. It’s upsetting your art. Breathe and try again.”
I nodded, and I let the chill of the bowl seep into my hands.
Macé, gaunt and sunburned, the clothes he was wearing a touch too big, and the frown he carried far too deep for his young face, paced along the outside of a tent gilded with gold ribbon.
“He’s alive,” I said. “He’s alive.”
“You divining doesn’t make bad things happen.” Estrel sat next to me. “Now, do it again.”
* * *
“I have an idea on how to divine Gabriel,” I told Isabelle early one afternoon after we’d woken up.
“Anything,” she said. “I get nothing when I try. I’ll take anything.”
“I’m not great at it still,” I said, but Isabelle cut me off.
“Don’t do that.” She didn’t roll her eyes, but I knew she wanted to. “You’re better than us. We know. You don’t have to pretend you’re not.”
“It’s because you are spectacular.” Coline threw her head back and gestured as she said it, a perfect mimicry of Estrel’s excited style of talking. “She thinks you’re the next her. New her? How old is she again?”
“Twenty-four and waxing,” I said. Her birthday was three months away, and I’d no clue what I could give her. “I can’t be her anything since she’s doing it still.”
Coline dismissed me with a wave of her hand and nasally hum. “She finally has an apprentice, and she’s delighted that someone knows what she’s talking about when she teaches. She and Laurence du Montimer were at university around the same time, and they were the only people who understood the other’s research. I heard he threw a chair at her once during a debate on the validity of the division between the noonday and midnight arts.”
And I was back to not liking him again, except she agreed with him now. There was no difference. Same power, different amounts.
“You’re being nice.” Isabelle drifted into the room, arms full of paints but no brushes, and sat on the stool before Coline’s window. “I’ve never heard you be nice on purpose before.”
Coline pulled a locket from beneath her dress. “It was accidental, I assure you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll let you live it down eventually.”
She opened the locket and shook her head. On the inside of the necklace was one small mirror with the sheen of a scrying surface and a lock of black hair knotted with a ragged leather strip. A lover’s token.
“I store power in this sometimes,” said Coline. “We could start storing it up and that might lessen how worn out the scrying makes you?”
“No.” I shook my head and helped Isabelle with the tie to her painter’s apron. “It’ll wear down whatever it’s in eventually, and we don’t have time to store enough power to matter.”
“We could pretend to be