Magic breathed in this world the way wind breathes in a forest everywhere, unthinking, endless. I knew it before I had words for it. It pricked my skin and pressed against my lungs as if the air were woven from lightning.
And then it went out.
A dozen robed figures staggered back, their eyes wide above their veils.
"She's a curse," someone hissed. "Null-born."
"Don't let her touch you and keep the circle intact!"
It was too late for that. The circle was ink and hope and I was the end of both.
I didn't remember my name at first. I remembered heat and pressure, a storm of voices, a body that did not feel like mine. I remembered the taste of metal in my mouth and how the floor hummed, as if the stone itself had a heartbeat I could hear.
I pressed a palm to my forehead as a dull ache seeped at the clamoring voices.
Endure. A voice whispered. We were made to hold.
I stood.
The nearest magus raised his staff and spat a word that tried to be thunder. The spell cracked from crystal to crystal and a sheet of pale lightning formed in front of his staff as the spell ended. It hit my skin and died between one heartbeat and the next. Sparks fizzled. The magus blinked, mouth hanging open.
"I wouldn't," I said, though my voice trembled. "You'll only embarrass yourself."
Another spell hurtled toward me. I slapped it. It vanished like dew in the shade.
I was barefoot. The new body moved like river water awkward one step, sure the next. I skirted the dead runes, crossed the white ash of the circle, and the nearest warded door coughed out a line of sparks before opening itself in fear. Mana-lamps along the corridor snapped dark as I passed, their glass chiming to silence.
"Stop her!" a voice commanded. "She devours the true law!"
True law. That told me what I needed. In this place, magic wasn't a tool. It was an assumption. I was a contradiction in a city of axioms.
I ran.
Feet drummed stone. Breath burned my lungs. The fortress was a spine of narrow halls and arrow-slit windows, every hinge enchanted, every latch hum-proud with defensive charm until my hand brushed it. Then it was a latch like any other.
A trio of armored figures spilled around a corner, mage-knights as I recognized by the cut of their coats and the swords hanging by their hips. One thrust a hand and wind gathered in a coil in front of my face. I stepped into it before it could unfurl, letting the knot brush my cheek. It died on contact, air returning to air.
His eyes went very wide.
"Steel only," he snapped to his companions, voice breaking.
Good advice. Bad timing.
I slid under a clumsy swing and let my shoulder check another knight into the wall. Not hard. Just enough that her own weight finished the argument. As she toppled, my fingers found her sash and yanked. She fell into her friend, and both went down in a tangle of bravado and leather, armor clattering like dropped pots. I didn't fight fair. I didn't need to.
Another corridor. Another stair. I wanted to go up to find a way out. It felt like the only solution. A high doorway gave way to a stone terrace washed with night. The city below was a bowl of lanterns, every street stitched with lines of spell-light that braided and unbraided as carriages moved and warded signs breathed. Above, the sky was black silk pricked with needles.
A shout behind me. I turned in time to see the arrow.
It wore a sleeve of pale flame, a focus-fire trick meant to bite deeper through wards. I ducked. The arrow skimmed my hair, entered the aura of my body, and its sleeve went out like a bad candle. Wood and feather thudded harmlessly into the doorframe. Down on the training green, an archer swore.
I smiled without humor. "Take away the magic, and what's left?"
A new presence crossed the threshold. I felt him before I saw him. The air thundered at his aura not with spell-pressure but with a shaped discipline, the kind that comes from doing the right thing the hard way until your bones remember. He moved lightly, a sword belted but sheathed, a long coat sweeping rain-black around his boots. His hair was the color of midnight seen through frost. His eyes were level and resembled a calm sea.
He didn't speak a word. He didn't flinch when the terrace lamps dimmed to nothing as I faced him.
"You shouldn't be here," I said.
"It appears neither of us should," he replied.
His voice was cool iron in winter. The guards fanned to either side, uncertain, watching him for cues they didn't know they were taking.
"Name?" he asked me, like we were meeting at a quiet garden and not at the edge of a panic.
Something old rose to the surface of me and I answered instinctively. "Mireille," I said, the syllables soft and round in a mouth that had spoken harder names. Who is that? "I think."
He took that in with the smallest tilt of his head. "Nicholas Veyron."
The name meant nothing to me then. Later I would learn it meant House, and House meant power, and power meant lines that wrapped this city like a net. In that moment it was only a shape on his tongue and a steady light in his eyes.
"You erase what the rest of us are built on," he said, neither accusing, nor awed. Simply true. "That terrifies them."
"It should," I said, because that was simpler than saying it terrifies me too.
"Do you cast?" he asked.
I lifted my empty hands. "I don't make anything. I end it."
A muscle moved in his cheek, I couldn't define if it was amusement or something else. He glanced at the archers on the green.
"Stand down," he told the nearest archer without raising his voice.
"S-sir, she—"
"Stand. Down." The words were ordinary. They carried the weight of habit obeyed.
The archer lowered his bow.
Nicholas stepped closer. He raised a hand, palm out, slowly, so I could see there was no spell cupped there. "May I test a hypothesis?" he asked, like a scholar petitioning a library.
"Gentlemen usually ask to hold my hand before causing a scene," I said, because my mouth is a traitor when I'm frightened.
Something like the idea of a smile touched his eyes. "Then consider this a very public courtship of disaster."
His hand hovered a finger's breadth from mine. I could feel the whisper of his body heat. I could feel the boundary where my null touched the world and made it plain. He didn't push through it. He simply held there, measuring the shape of absence.
"Interesting," he murmured.
"Disappointed?" I asked.
"Relieved." He lowered his hand. "You are not a void. You are a solvent."
"She is a curse," Someone snarled from the far end of the terrace. A senior magus had arrived, his staff in gold crackling with thunder and his face twisted in anger as he saw Veyron make no effort to capture me. "You mock us with parlor tricks, Veyron. Step aside."
Nicholas did not move. "You'll only make her stronger if you insist on spectacle."
"Stronger?" the magus spat. "She unthreads the True Weave."
"I don't thread at all," I said. "I pull."
The magus slammed his staff to stone. The terrace woke in lines of light, forming a net, a cage, a beautiful trap that breathed lightening. It was the kind of magic that depended on everyone agreeing the world should behave. I stepped into it and watched its logic go soft. The cage became lines and the lines became smoke.
A dozen people inhaled at once. It sounded like the sea pulling back before a larger wave.
"Run," Nicholas said softly, without looking at me.
"Why?" I asked, because there are always reasons to run and reasons not to, and I wanted to know which he was giving.
"Because I can only argue with fools for so long before they make me one," he said. "North stair. Third gate. The ward there was applied badly. Even you won't need to touch it."
Even you. Not even the curse. Even you.
"And if I don't run?"
"Then you'll have to learn the politics of this city in the next thirty seconds," he said, and his eyes softened, just a little. "Please don't."
I went.
Not because he asked but because the stone under my bare feet hummed endure, and the night whispered me to move, and somewhere below a river said we are patient, child. I passed the warded arch and felt the shimmer fail before my skin reached it. I took the north stair two at a time, the third gate drawing closer with each step.
Shouts chased me. So did memory. Mireille, I thought, tasting the name again, making it mine. The city opened beneath me like a map I had not learned to read yet. Its lights were nerves. Its magic was breath. I was the hand that could stop it.
I was small. I was barefoot. I was shaking. I was smiling.
Behind me, high on the terrace, a man with winter in his eyes refused to step aside. In front of me, the world waited and a future that would not fit inside anyone's prophecy.
They would name me curse and monster and paradox. Perhaps I would be all three.
But when power reached for me, I would take its hand and let it find there not emptiness, but choice.
And if destiny insisted on an embrace, I would teach it mine.