The physicians’ red coats. The soldiers’ red blood. Alaine’s red hair still haunting me when I tried to divine. Red hands under white ice.
“At least yours are specific.” Perenelle, one of the older students who studied the midnight arts, gestured to the array of portents on the table before them—the fall of ash, the curls of smoke, and the fresh splatter of a hare’s blood on its white coat. “This makes me feel poorly read.”
I laughed into my hands. Reading portents was a gentle terror. We knew terrible things would come to pass. We knew we could only wait and see if we helped avert them.
We laughed at everything and anything now, and my mind clung desperately to the sound.
The portents beneath Perenelle’s hands were good at least. Estrel looked over their work and wiped their hands clean.
I stayed with her after every session. From dusk to three in the morning, Estrel taught me everything. We read through books and journals, her explaining terms I’d never heard and me flipping through pages till I got what she was saying. I wore her spectacles constantly, the headaches worse now, as if every future were knocking at my mind to be let in, and she let me drink tea and sit at her desk while I made list after list of questions. Some were silly, I knew, but she never laughed.
“When you’re divining for the king and the chevaliers, do you see their hacks?” I asked as I was leaving. Our schedules were backward now. We slept for most of the day and were up for most of the night, so that the midnight arts were at their full power. My flickers of the futures were narrow. I only ever saw a single person, even now. They were clearer, though. “Do you see the whole scene?”
Do you see a boy too young to be there with hair like mine and hazel eyes? He’s scared of mice and never been away from home, I wanted to ask.
Macé’s future was tied to Chevalier du Ferrant’s, and my divining was always unsteady.
“Sometimes.” She looked up at me from her spot behind her desk. Estrel slept less than all of us, working during the day too. I didn’t know where she channeled her power from in the early afternoons when all of Mistress Moon was gone. Estrel’s powers seemed endless. “Why?”
“Do you warn them?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Darling, of course I warn them. The crown may have first rights to my skills, but I haven’t forgotten who I am, and I’m certainly not one of them.” She pointed to the great tapestry of Lord Sun and Mistress Moon on the wall of her office. “Why is the sun a lord but the moon his mistress?”
I shook my head. “Because they are.”
“But why did we separate magic by them?” she asked. “There’s no need. It’s all magic. All power, only different levels upon a spectrum of power. Why do they divide people?”
“Because we’re easier to kill when we’re alone.”
“Yes, but we are not alone.”
* * *
On the fifth day, Physician Allard was on the name of every Thornish soldier I scryed, and I wrote each one down in excruciating detail so he could avoid them all. Two days later, I learned he lived. A Thornish house had burned, and due to my warning, he hadn’t entered it to save the soldiers. I didn’t scry that day.
I sat in the kitchen and helped Yvonne make all sorts of inks and tonics and drinks for the people at the front. She said it wasn’t my fault.
“Have you heard from Laurel?” I sliced vegetables and chopped herbs, kneaded bread for tomorrow, and did all sorts of things Annette Boucher used to do. We had a system, Yvonne and I, and it worked.
She shook her head and rubbed her cheek, smearing charcoal across her face. “They had to leave. Henric can still get some news to them, but I think it’s over for now. It had just caught on, and there wasn’t enough wood to keep the fire burning.”
“Do you think Henric could get letters to common soldiers?” I wiped the charcoal from her cheek, and she scooped the diced onions from my board. The soldier who guarded the gate and had introduced me to Laurel, Henric, had been on edge of late. “Not only the ones working with Laurel?”
We had orders—who to scry for, who to divine for, what sorts of illusions we needed to work on in case they were needed—and they didn’t include all the kids from our homes who’d gotten called up to fight or the hacks at death’s door next to the chevaliers.
“Maybe,” she said. “Why?”
“They deserve to have someone look out for them too.”
* * *
Time passed a blur of working nights and sleepless days. Vivienne tried to keep the rest of our lives as ordinary as possible, as if some of us weren’t waiting for letters with news of the dead. There were two girls here with fathers and brothers who were chevaliers. They’d taken to staying up with the scryers and diviners while we worked. Like at breakfast, they helped us hide our use of the midnight arts.
I ripped myself from a scrying—hands red and blue and trembling before me as the spear came down—and gasped.
“You’re done for tonight,” Gisèle said. She shoved a wadded-up cloth into my left nostril and gagged. “I can’t fix nose bleeds with paints.”
Gisèle was an excellent painter, and her cosmetics covered my dark circles and worn-out skin better than any 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 through clenched teeth, and I laughed, trying to make her feel better. I liked when she forgot who I was.
“I really didn’t mean that how it sounded.” She turned slowly. A smear of powdered cherries lined one cheek like a soft blush, and the skirts of her dress, ruched so they cascaded round her knees and left her free to dart from counter to pantry, twirled up a foggy puff. She’d shoved a whole tin of fruit breads into the oven before switching back to alchemistry. “You’re not just good enough. I meant the world.”
“You don’t have to make me feel better,” I said. “If me being here makes you tense, I can drop the letters off and leave.”
“Don’t you dare. I need someone who can see the midnight arts to help me.” She held out a new crate of unorganized vials.
I smiled and took it. “I can do that.”
* * *
Dawns later, I clung to the last rays of moonlight and channeled them into a still pond. I had stayed outside after visiting Yvonne, the garden a quiet calm. Estrel’s spectacles were inside on my desk, and a flicker of red had darted through the water as I passed. I forced the magic into the water, fingers shaking—bloody hands picking apart a bloody arm. Someone shrieked. My concentration shattered. The image vanished.
I stood, glanced round, and waited. A sob, high-pitched and crackling with snot, broke through the silence. I followed the sound toward the main building. The familiarity of the voice bothered me. Coline or Isabelle.
Another sob. They blew their nose.
Coline would never cry where someone could hear. But Isabelle never cried or panicked. She got nervous, twitchy sometimes, and she cared a lot, but she was an unchanging pine thriving through passing seasons. I’d have thought her a quiet crier.
I pushed through the dark gray of a blackthorn. Curled up in the gnarled roots of an old, rotting juniper with bees thrumming in its empty trunk, Isabelle muffled her cries in the skirts bunched at her knees. A silver bowl meant for scrying sat before her. Would she even want me to see this?
It had to be Gabriel, but every time I tried to divine him, all I saw was death, and I hadn’t figured out how to stop it yet. Every future, every attempt to change his fate, was smeared in blood.
“Isabelle?”
She tensed and looked, snot shining on her upper lip. “Why are you here?”
“Heard you and got worried,” I said. “Want me to go?”
She dropped her face into her hands.
I sat next to her, not close enough to touch, and pulled the bowl into my lap. He was already dying. I’d only scry him for a moment, and nothing bad would happen. It took familiarity to scry, though, and all I had was Isabelle. So I thought of Emilie. I could still picture her, wide-eyed, passionate, and trying not to panic when she approached me in Bosquet. She had smelled of rosewater and money. All good intentions bundled up in bad history.
An image boiled to the top of the bowl. A jagged bone stained red and spotted with holes.
I dumped the water into the grass and set the bowl next to Isabelle. Vivienne had taught me well.
“It’ll be fine,” I said, hands shaking, though my voice wasn’t. She couldn’t see. “We’ll find a way to help him.”
Every future ended the same—with death. There were no warnings I could give. At least with divining, people knew it may not come to pass, but the blood in my mouth was the last gasp of a dying man.
“I’m a midnight artist,” Isabelle said into her hands. “I’m supposed to know when death comes.”
“Sometimes, the worst times, things happen and there’s no reason to it at all, and all our little plans and artistries leave us with nothing but a pyre full of ash and head full of memories blowing away in the wind.”
Ice. Cracking.
“If your brother’s dead, we can’t undo it.” I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t die in someone’s head. I couldn’t swallow back the blood or water or ash of their death that scrying gifted me. “But he’s not dead yet, so don’t make ghosts where there are none.”
“I would do anything to save him,” she whispered. “I can’t stand being able to do nothing.”
Isabelle was a good sister.
She deserved a good friend.
* * *
I rapped on Estrel’s door. She answered, red hair in a fuzzy braid and silk robe hanging off her crookedly. The lurking death in me, the knowledge of it, the weight of it in my skin, was an ache so deep that even her spectacles couldn’t keep it at bay. I kept them on anyway, and she led me to the cushioned chair. I pressed my fingers to the bridge of the spectacles, scared she’d take them off. I had nothing. Not really.
Families were supposed to love one another no matter what. That’s what everyone always said. Mine didn’t, not anymore, so what did that say about me?
“I divined my sister dying,” I said quickly. “I was five and she was fifteen, and Maman wouldn’t let me go ice skating with her because I’d gotten in trouble for hiding a broken cup instead of coming clean, so I filled her favorite bowl with water. Alaine was real good at scrying, and I’d seen her do it plenty of times. I wanted to watch her skate, but I didn’t know the difference between scrying and divining.”
I’ll be back soon. I promise.
She’d flown, quick and poised, inky hair streaming out behind her and breathing a trail of fog in the winter bite. She’d always been so free. Untouchable.
“She fell through the ice. She was so cold, the water I was using froze over too, and I could feel her in me, all that panic and water and hope, but the creek was deep and the current fast, and her nails scraped against the bottom of the ice where she’d been skating. She held her breath for a long time. Long enough to tear her nails clean off.” I closed my eyes and ducked my head. Water pooled in the curve beneath my nose and bottom of my chin. I covered my mouth with my hands. “I felt everything, and then there was nothing.”
Estrel’s hands curled around my wrists. Soft. Warm.
“The bowl broke,” I whispered. “My hands were bleeding, and I coughed up water. I got scared. I hid the bowl under the house, and I didn’t tell anyone, but they found Alaine when she didn’t come home, and Maman found the bowl, and I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t think it was real. It felt real, but like h
ow nightmares feel real when you wake up.”
All that time. Trapped under the ice. Alone.
And I could’ve saved her.
“I didn’t tell anyone she was going to die. I didn’t save her.”
I sobbed for a long, long time till my face was hot and sticky, and Estrel left and brought back a damp cloth. She gently pulled the spectacles from my face and held the cloth to my eyes. I curled up, knees to my chest. I wanted to live in the dark behind my eyes. Estrel sighed.
“Thank you for trusting me with that,” she said softly.
The bells of the observatory chimed midnight, and I ran my hand along the chair Alaine would never see in the school she would never attend.
“She should’ve been here,” I said. “She was so good.”
“Don’t punish yourself for surviving.” Estrel’s voice cracked. What necklace had she kept so close, it wore her voice away? “It’s not your fault.”
If it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, and I couldn’t bear that world.
“You’re good, you know.” Estrel touched my shoulder then my cheek, like Papa sometimes did when I was little and too sick to know who was there. She brushed my hair from my face and wiped the tears from my cheeks. “I’ve said it before, but your mind’s twisting it into an insult every time. You’re allowed to excel. There is such power in you that you could make Demeine tremble, and you shouldn’t feel ashamed of that. You are not the people who love you or the people you’ve lost. They’re parts of you. You are so much more than you’ve been led to believe, and you could be better than me. Don’t limit yourself. Please.”
“I can’t be better than you,” I muttered, unsure of what to do with all her words. “You’re the best.”
Estrel laughed. “Fine, but let’s make you second best, agreed?”
I nodded.
“People are going to underestimate you,” she said. “When they do, teach them not to do so again. They will not give you respect. Take it. Make them regret disregarding you.”
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