With a twist of her wrist, she reached for a patch of loam beside the stones. The soil bulged, then parted. A shoot emerged, green and wild, uncurling in a spiral of impossible speed. Within seconds it became a stem, then a bud, then a bloom of white petals flushed with indigo at the edges. The flower turned toward Tamsin, shivering as if from delight.
She let her hand fall. The bloom withered, slow and graceful, collapsing back into the earth.
Tamsin turned, her face unreadable. “Now you.”
Alina stared at the spot. She tried to recall the feeling from when she had watched the Gifted train. How her body had tingled even when she hadn’t wanted to admit it. She remembered the wind girl and imagined how she must have felt. She reached, palm out, for the soil.
Nothing. No twitch, no stir, not even a ripple in the mist. Her cheeks burned with shame.
“Close your eyes,” Tamsin commanded.
Alina obeyed, shutting out the colorless sky, the shrouded trees, even the stony presence of her teacher. She inhaled, filling her lungs with the sharp green of the clearing, the earthy rot beneath, the distant sweetness of decaying pine. She imagined the web that ran beneath her feet—roots and stones and bones, all interlaced, all humming with ancient memory.
She exhaled, willing that breath down into the ground.
A single blade of grass shivered. That was all. And that may have been from the breath she had loosed. Her hope collapsed at the nothing she’d accomplished. Her amulet emitted a pulse of warmth.
Tamsin’s mouth moved, but she did not speak the thought aloud. Instead, she walked to a nearby boulder, settled onto it, and gestured for Alina to try again.
So she did. Again. And again. Each time, she failed: sometimes she tried to will the earth to move, and nothing; sometimes she tried to let go, only to grow colder. Her hands began to shake, then her arms, then her entire body. Sweat pooled at the base of her neck, freezing instantly in the dawn air. The amulet was warm again, unpleasantly so. Alina pulled it out from under her tunic, so it didn’t touch her skin. Better.
After what felt like hours, Alina’s patience snapped like a brittle twig.
“This is pointless,” she spat, voice sharper than intended. “I'm not like you.”
Tamsin didn't even bother looking up. “That's true,” she said flatly. “You're worse. Not taking this seriously.”
Alina’s temper flared. “Not taking this—I've been standing here freezing my toes off for hours! Maybe if you gave actual instructions instead of cryptic nonsense like ‘feel the web’ whilewatching me flail around like a drunk puppeteer, we'd get somewhere! I've never—”
Tamsin cut her off, voice cold as the morning frost. “You've never failed at anything that mattered. Not once. Until now. And now you’re whining like a petulant little child because it isn’t easy.”
The words hit with precision, leaving Alina speechless. Her hands curled into fists. Anger and frustration welled up in her in a huge tidal wave and erupted from her flung-out arms. The power hit a blue little wildflower near where Tamsin was sitting. Delicate and perfect, its petals quivered in the breeze. The bloom instantly withered, all color gone, petals curling in on themselves as if scorched from the inside. The stem blackened, then snapped. A crackle—soft, like sugar breaking—was clearly audible in the otherwise perfect silence. The scent of decay, sweet and unmistakable, rose and vanished.
Alina recoiled as if struck. She stumbled backward, boots skidding on the frozen earth, and landed on her knees.
The silence that followed was worse than any reprimand.
She stared at her hands, the fingers splayed and trembling. For a moment, she feared the blackness would creep up her arms, would stain her like it did the flower.
But her flesh remained her own. Only her insides felt ruined.
Tamsin waited, unmoving, eyes fixed on the spot where the flower had died. At last, she rose, approaching with measured steps.
Alina did not meet her gaze. She wanted to sink into the soil, to join the little corpse she’d made.
Tamsin’s voice was soft, but not gentle. “It always starts with death. The Gift wants balance. The more you push, the more it pushes back.”
Alina shivered, unable to answer. The frost began to melt around her knees, wetness seeping through her pants.
She closed her eyes and saw, again, the Gifted in the training ring. She wondered how many of them had once failed as she had. How many had killed by accident? How many had learned too late that every power was also a wound?
Tamsin let the silence stretch, the way a hunter lets an animal tire itself before the gentle mercy. “I burned my mother’s garden,” she offered, matter-of-fact. “The year I turned thirteen. She was fond of foxgloves—spent whole weeks tending to them. One night I lost my temper, and by morning every stem had blackened, every petal a scrap of ash. She never said a word, but she cut them down before sunrise. After that, I ran. Lived by the river for a season. Thought if I starved myself of company, the Gift would shrivel and die.”
Alina listened, part of her desperate to be comforted, another part recoiling from the intimacy of the confession. She risked a glance at Tamsin’s face and saw no pity there, only a reflective, clinical sadness. An old scar, long since closed over.
“I don’t want this,” Alina managed, the words as thin as spider-silk.
Tamsin didn’t offer any contradiction. “No one does. Not at first. But you learn it’s better to hold the blade than to be cut by it.” She gestured, not unkindly, at the dead flower. “You controlled it, in the end. It obeyed. That’s more than most manage.”
