The fire, Bryn realized. Maybe the point of the fire wasn’t to warm her.It was to make ash.
As she felt her whole body going numb, she put all her remaining energy into dipping her fingers into the hot coals. If her fingers got burned, she didn’t know—she’d long ago lost her sense of feeling in them. But they came away with fresh ashes, and she shakily touched her own face.
Her eyes met Mage Marna’s before she whispered, “Ana somna mortinya.”
She didn’t see the mage’s reaction.
After that, she didn’t see anything at all.
* * *
Bryn dreamedshe was following Rangar through a snowy forest.
He rode Legend, and she was atop Fable. He clutched the knife that had killed Trei as he silently pursued a dark shadow moving through the trees ahead. Bryn tried to call out to him, but he couldn’t hear her. Suddenly, the shadowy figure stopped. Was it Broderick? But as soon as it seemed to be the shape of a man, it shifted into something more animal-like.
A berserkir wolf.
Bryn tried to call out to warn Rangar, but the shadow changed again. It spread like dark smoke in a circle around Rangar and Legend, and before Bryn could spur Fable to reach him, it had swallowed him whole.
She woke with a gasp, sweat running down her temples. It took her a moment to place where she was. Thick steam filled the air just like the smoke from her dream. However, it came out of a simple small copper boiler filled with scented water. She was in her chamber in the mage quarters, dressed in clean, warm apprentice robes.
Throwing off the blanket, she hurried to examine her fingers and toes to see if she’d lost any to frostbite. To her relief, they were all intact.
“Healed by magic,” a voice said. Ren was bent over the boiler, stirring the bubbling concoction within. “Frostbite can be cured with a maple sap salve and warming hex,” he continued, wafting the steam toward her bed. He nodded at her torso. “That, however, has to heal on its own.”
Her eyes widened to find a bandage around her ribs. Worried, she felt along her skin.
“It’s on your back,” Ren explained. “The amplifier hex. Mage Marna carved it on you in your sleep.”
Bryn continued to feel along her back until she noted the raised bumps of a scar beneath the bandage. “Mage Marna brought me back here?”
Ren nodded. “Every apprentice undergoes a test of their initial abilities at the commencement of training. They need to be pushed to the limit to see what they’re capable of.”
“Youonce froze in that stump, too?”
Ren gave her a puzzled look. “Stump?Inearly drowned in a fishing net. I was twelve and had to use the finding spell to locate a sharp shell to cut my way out.”
Bryn hugged her arms across her chest, still shivering despite the steam pumping into the room from the boilers. “Does the test always have to be so violent?”
“Magic isn’t a game.”
She took a deep breath, testing her lungs, and then felt again at her back. “And the amplifier hex?”
“Every Baer citizen gets it at eighteen as a rite of passage. A symbol that they’re an adult member of a community. We rely on one another. It’s one of a handful of basic hexes everyone receives.”
“So, the finding spell, the spark spell, and the amplifier spell,” Bryn said. “Those are the basic hexes. I guess now I’m caught up to most of your children,” she groaned.
Ren took out a hunk of cheese and strip of dried venison wrapped in wax paper from his pocket and handed it to her with a wry smile. “You passed the initiation, and you aren’t even Baer. You grew up without magic. I’d say that’s something.”
She gave him a grateful smile.
He said, “Mage Marna asked me to teach you the amplifier spell wording. We can get started whenever you’re ready, but first, I thought you’d want to know that word has come from Rangar.”
Bryn scrambled out of bed so fast that her whole body ached, reminding her that she’d very nearly died. “What does he say?” she asked breathlessly. “Is he all right?”
Ren pulled a folded scroll from his robes and extended it to her. “This was delivered this morning, sealed, with instructions to give it only to you.”
Bryn snatched the letter and ripped open the seal, anxious for Rangar’s news.
