On the fourth day, we nearly walked into a patrol.

  Six riders in black coats with no insignia. The Obsidian Court. They were moving fast at the crossroads where the main highway split east toward the Crestfell mountains — clearly looking for something specific.

  Dren had us off the road and behind a stone wall before I'd processed what was happening. The man moved like someone who'd spent his whole life avoiding things that wanted to kill him, which I suppose he had.

  "Don't move," he breathed.

  We didn't move.

  The horses went past close enough that I could hear the creak of saddle leather and the breathing of the animals. One of the riders slowed at the crossroads, stood up in the stirrups, looked around.

  My right hand did its thing. The gathering heat. The pressure building up.

  Not today, I told it, very firmly. Coin-sized. Smaller, actually. Nothing.

  The rider moved on. They disappeared south.

  Lyra exhaled. "They're going to Cresswick. Following my trail."

  "They'll know you went east when they find the inn," Dren said. He was already calculating. "We move faster. Get to the pass before they can cut us off."

  We moved faster.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Day five and six were hard walking — farmland giving way to scrub forest and rocky hills, the ground rising toward the grey teeth of the Crestfell range. The sky went flat and featureless in the way that meant weather was coming.

  On the sixth evening, I was doing my coin-flame practice when Lyra sat beside me.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Probably."

  "Have you ever felt the power going the other direction?" She was watching the flame in my palm. "Inward instead of outward. Something coming into you rather than out."

  I thought about it. Really thought about it.

  "The granary," I said slowly. "When I pulled the fire back — yeah. There was a pulling feeling. Like the fire wanted to come home."

  Her eyes lit up. She reached for her notebook.

  "That's the absorption. That's the Ashborn ability — the actual unique ability, not the fire generation, which any fire mage can do. You absorbed your own fire back into yourself." She was writing fast. "Most fire mages don't do that. They can't. The fire goes out and that's it. You called it back because it was part of you."

  I closed my hand. The flame went out.

  "So when it comes to Seraphine," I said slowly.

  "You pull her destructive force in. Through the Sealstone, which focuses and channels it. You absorb it and the stone redirects it into the binding." She paused. "It will hurt. I'm telling you upfront. The historical accounts are clear about that."

  "Survive-level hurt or not-survive-level hurt?"

  "Survive," she said firmly. "Orvaine — the mage who did the first binding — lived for another thirty years afterward. But she was — there's no better word than 'significantly wounded.'"

  "Great."

  "The key," she said, "is not fighting it. If you try to resist the force coming in, you fight it on its own terms and it tears you apart. If you accept it, transmute it, let it pass through you into the stone—" She looked at me. "I think of it like catching a wave versus being hit by one. Same wave. Two very different outcomes depending on whether you swim or brace."

  I thought about that.

  "I've been bracing against everything for three years," I said.

  "I know," she said. "Practice not doing that."

  Easier said than done. But I wrote it down in my head anyway.