powerless, with only a thin sliver of earth magic.
It’s clear that Trystan is going to be a powerful Mage, the precocious two-year-old already able to sound out spells and access water magic. But he’s no Great Mage. He has none of the crazy, overwhelming power of his grandmother, his water magery testing at Level Five but not beyond. Also, he’s a sensitive, quiet child, disinclined to violence.
And then there’s Elloren.
As Edwin walks into the woods with gentle Elloren, her small hand clasped trustingly in his, he sends up a prayer.
Ancient One, please let this child be free of power.
She’s so untroubled, skipping alongside him. So at ease in the woods. Like all powerless Gardnerians.
But it’s disturbed Edwin for some time now, how drawn Elloren is to wood—gathering small pieces of it, her collections stuffed into drawers, filling her pockets, hidden under her bed.
Edwin glances down at Elloren and forces a smile that’s returned a thousandfold.
She’s got Vale’s stark features, he muses. So angular and sharp for such a kind, sunny child. But then his thoughts shift.
She’s got her grandmother’s exact features.
Edwin pushes the frightening thought from his mind. Vale himself looked just like their powerful mother, and he was powerful, but he was no Great Mage. And Elloren might be drawn to wood, but Edwin himself can barely keep his hands off it, spending hours each day carving and creating violins. And he’s only a Level One Mage.
No, Elloren will be powerless, he reassures himself. Just like I am.
Edwin stops in a small clearing, rays of sun streaking down, birds twittering. Little Elloren giggles and spins around like a whirring maple seed, her smile to the sun. She stops, teetering from the spinning, and grins at her uncle.
“Here, Elloren,” Edwin says as he slides his hand into his cloak’s pocket, anxiety mounting inside him. “I have something for you.” He draws out the wand and hands it to his niece.
“What’s that for?” she asks, taking the wand into her small hands with a look of curiosity.
“It’s a game,” Edwin says as he sets a candle on a nearby stump before returning to her, his finger flicking toward the wand. “And that’s a magic stick, but I’ll have to show you how to use it.” He gets down on one knee and guides her wand hand into the proper position around the wand’s hilt, his hands trembling around her small one with apprehension. “Hold the stick like this, Elloren.”
Elloren looks up at him with obvious concern, clearly noting his trembling, but Edwin forces another smile and she smiles back, looking heartened, as her fingers slide into position.
“That’s it, Elloren,” Edwin says as he releases his hands from hers and rises. “Now I’m going to ask you to say some funny words. Can you do that?”
Elloren’s smile brightens and she bobs her head up and down.
Edwin’s gut tenses. She’s such a compliant child. So eager to please.
So easy to wield.
Edwin sounds out the words to the candle-lighting spell several times, words in the Ancient Tongue—foreign words, with subtle inflections, not easily made.
“Do you think you can remember that?” he asks his niece.
Elloren nods as she points the wand out straight and true with determined focus, and Edwin repeats the words a few more times so that she can remember.
“Go ahead, then,” he gently prods as the apprehension tightens his throat, his heart hammering with both breathless hope and jagged fear.
Elloren sounds out the spell, clear and correct, her arm taking on a slight tremor, her body stiffening.
And then her head jerks backward.
A violent stream of fire bursts from the wand’s tip and explodes past the stump, blasting clear through a large tree and several more behind it. Edwin stumbles backward and Elloren screams as the woods explode into a crackling, roaring monster of flame.
Edwin wrests the wand from Elloren’s hand, thrusts it aside, grabs her up, and runs, racing through the woods as the forest falls apart behind them.
* * *
Edwin spends the next year trying to get Elloren to forget.
He insists, when Elloren wakes screaming from fiery nightmares, that what she remembers was a storm. A fierce, freakish storm—an inferno of fire caused by unusually violent lightning.
He insists on it again and again and again.
In time, she believes. And her true memory fades and is buried.
* * *
But the forest remembers.
The trees send out word in their creeping way, slow as sap traveling through tangled roots, one tree after another after another. And gradually, relentlessly, the message is carried toward the