The second cut green-gold through the edge of my teeth.
Marsh.
The third found me.
Rain-dark. Certain. A line laid across distance as if distance were another rule it could break.
My line. And my Mark answered.
The sleeve over my forearm heated, then brightened.
I pressed the stave against the rack and held my arm still.
Stillness was the first lie suppression taught.
If the body stayed motionless, people assumed nothing in it was fighting.
Above me, somewhere in the south attunement room, a basin had shown too much.
It had shown her to the room, and the room would know less than it thought it did.
I knew more.
I had known since the first tour, when she stood beside a forbidden door and looked at the cut mark in the frame as if the wood had spoken in a language her wrist already understood.
Untethered was the school’s word.
The older word in my family was less polite.
Star-Marked.
My uncle Alistair had loved a Star-Marked woman.
The Hales were not permitted to tell that version in public.
In public, Alistair Hale had suffered a failed Calling. His Mark had drifted, his judgment had degraded, and the Council had intervened with regrettable necessity.
In the version my grandmother told me after the funeral, when she found me hiding under the sideboard because every room in the house had too many adults in it, Alistair had bonded against Council order.
He had been told to suppress.
He had answered instead.
Three weeks later, he was dead.
So was the woman whose name my grandmother refused to say aloud, even in our own house, even with the curtains drawn.
I was nine.
Old enough to understand that adults lied, and my grandmother wasn’t the one doing the lying.
Young enough to believe a body could survive the truth if it learned the right way to stand to hide it.
The next year, an Oracle read the first line of my Calling.
Even a dimmed Mark will answer the Star-Marked.
My father closed his eyes.
