Here's the thing I've never told anyone:

  I didn't just burn the granary. I pulled the fire back.

  Most of it, anyway.

  That's the part I spent three years not thinking about.

  The night before we left Cresswick, lying awake on the world's least comfortable mattress, I finally let myself think about it properly. The whole thing. Start to finish.

  I was fourteen. My mom had been dead for two years. Elder Mirca — the woman who ran Harrow's End with the warmth of an unfinished floorboard — had assigned me to haul grain again instead of letting me apprentice with the blacksmith, which is what my mom wanted before she died. I'd been furious about it for weeks. Silently, stupidly furious, the way you get when you're fourteen and grieving and the world keeps refusing to cooperate.

  I stormed into the granary to tell Mirca exactly what I thought of her.

  And then something happened.

  I don't know how to explain it except that all the heat inside me found an outside. One second I was shouting, the next the eastern wall was on fire. Not a small fire. A real one, with ambitions.

  Here's the part I always gloss over, even in my own head: I called it back.

  I don't know how I knew to do it. Some instinct. The fire was mine — it had come from me — and something in me just reached back out and pulled. Like taking a breath back in. The wall burned. Two storage rooms were damaged. Two people got minor burns.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  But it could've been the whole building. The whole block.

  It wasn't, because I pulled it back.

  I just... never thought of that as something I'd done. I always focused on the fire going out, not on the reason it went out.

  There was a knock at my door.

  I opened it. Lyra, sitting cross-legged in the hallway with her notebook, looked up.

  "Can't sleep either?" she said.

  "Thinking too loud."

  "I looked up Harrow's End in the College records." She said it carefully, watching my face. "The notation about the fire. Two minor injuries, both healed within two weeks. Grain stores reduced — but the harvest that year was already poor due to drought."

  I hadn't known that last part. Mirca had never mentioned drought.

  "She let people blame you for a hard winter that was partly already coming," Lyra said. Not angry on my behalf — just stating facts, the way she always did. "That wasn't fair."

  "I still caused the fire."

  "You did. And you put most of it back." She looked at me steadily. "Do you know how rare that is? Untrained mages who cause accidental fires don't pull them back. The fire just burns until something stops it from outside. You called it back in the middle of a panic, at fourteen, with zero training." She paused. "That's not the story of someone who can't be controlled. That's the story of someone with enormous instinctive control who doesn't know they have it."

  I opened my mouth. Closed it.

  "I'm not saying what happened was okay," she said quickly. "It wasn't. People were hurt. That matters, and you should carry it. But there's a difference between carrying something and being crushed by it." She stood up, tucking the notebook under her arm. "Get some sleep. We've got a long walk ahead."

  She went back to her room.

  I lay down and stared at the ceiling and thought about the difference between carrying something and being crushed by it.

  I'd been treating those as the same thing for three years.

  Maybe they weren't.