Bernicia slipped out of the palace through the passage that connected it directly to the Mother’s Temple, built for her mother years ago, and then made her way out through the crowd in the courtyard. So many refugees, she thought; could even the temple feed them all? Her hair was covered and she was wrapped in a drab shawl, so most likely nobody would recognize her. She tried to erase any sense of herself as Viscount’s sister. She was just an ordinary woman on an ordinary errand, not someone anyone should look at twice.

  From the temple she made her way down the steep seaward side of Palace Hill into the narrow streets of what was once the quarter of scholars and their students. Now whatever scholars remained had taken their few students elsewhere, and half these houses were empty. Not even refugees wanted to live on these desolate streets hard by the wall.

  But her teacher did. She found his house at the end of Scholars’ Street, right up against the wall where it sealed off this street, protecting them from what lay beyond. The barrier was about twenty feet tall, haphazardly built of rubble, timber, and fear. She turned away and entered Malamphoro’s empty-looking shop, passing through the disused lower floor and up the stairs to his chamber. Most of the space was taken up by a small brick furnace and two tables covered with alchemical gear: glass bottles and vials, small stone crucibles, pieces of paper and parchment. Ceramic jars were labeled sulfur, antimony, mercury, shark liver, serpent venom. On one wall was a shelf crammed with books and more jars. There was a small bed shoved into one corner, but, too, was strewn with papers and seemed scarcely used. It was hard to see how anyone lived here.

  Even though she knew Malamphoro had to be there, and the room was not large, it still took her several seconds to spot him standing at his lectern, reading a large book. “Was it you?” she said.

  “If you mean, was it I who did magic at the harbor where anyone might see, I assure you not.”

  “Then who?”

  He shrugged. “I know not. I suspect it was someone untrained, someone with a gift who does not even know he or she has it.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Yes, very much so. It was one way the Mages recruited their members, by hunting down children who had done such acts. It is, after all, how I found you.”

  “But I only did tiny things.”

  “The power of magic is that it may be applied at exactly the right moment, at the precise point where a tiny force could move a mountain. Perhaps in such a way a tiny force could change the path of a thrown bottle.”

  Bernicia sighed and sat in her usual chair. “But it never worked like that for me. And the harder I try, the less I do. I could do more as a small child than after five years of study.”

  “That I suspect is more my fault than yours. I also can do very little, and I have no knowledge of how Mages were trained. That was one of their most closely held secrets. Those taken away were never seen again.”

  “Where do you suppose they went?”

  “To the City, or perhaps some other spot on their island. Anywhere else and someone would have seen.”

  “How many were taken?”

  “Hundreds.”

  “But there were so few Mage Lords.”

  Malamphoro nodded. “They cannot all have risen so high. What happened to the others we do not know, but I fear it was not pleasant.”

  Bernicia saw that Malamphoro had been working with his alchemical equipment and pointed to it. “Did you analyze the poison?”

  “Yes, a very dangerous one. Your brother was lucky.”

  “Could you tell whence it came?”

  “No, but it need not have been from far away. Sea fish and mountain plants, all things one could get here.”

  “Or in Malovana.”

  Malamphoro nodded but said nothing.

  “Have you made any progress in your other work?”

  “No,” said the alchemist. ‘It still will not come. I fear I have mistranslated one of the ingredients, that it names some plant I cannot get. Dragon weed, I have heard, is a name applied to different plants in different places, so perhaps it is that. But it could be any of the others as well.”

  “So you will continue to fade.”

  He nodded. “I went to the festival and I believe only two or three people knew me.”

  Bernicia shuddered.

  Malamphoro continued, saying, “And that means that you had best not practice at all. We cannot be led by a woman nobody can see.”

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  Bernicia nodded. It was another way they were blocked, another thing they could do nothing about. Their magic was pathetically weak, and when they tried to use it they began slowly to fade from the world. The Mage Lords, they knew, had encountered this problem and overcome it, but the way they had done this was lost with all their other secrets, and the potion Malamphoro had read of with such high hopes two years ago would not work for him. Alchemy was all secrets and vagueness, its books written by people who wanted both to share their knowledge and conceal it. Or perhaps to boast of their knowledge without sharing it. Or to pretend to knowledge they did not have.

  Bernicia said, “What do you know of Malovana?”

  “Today it is a small place,” said Malamphoro. “Before the wave it was much bigger, but much of it was on a low, sandy peninsula. All swept away, everyone killed. Now the site is water and marsh, and of the old town there are not even scattered stones. What is now the town was once a fortress that guarded the harbor mouth.”

  “If the fort stood by the sea, why was it not destroyed as our citadel was?”

  Malamphoro shook his head. “The Wave was not like other waves. It did not flow as water does, for it was not simply water. It was as much a demon as it was a thing of nature. It sought out some places and ignored others. Part of our citadel was as high as the palace, but the wave climbed the stairs and broke into the highest chambers. Our fishing port was little damaged, even though it is on the water. There are stories from other places of how the wave climbed hills miles from the sea, of how it roared up the Iserion River for a day and a night to reach Cataractae, as if determined to attack all the cities of the empire. But there are small islands that were scarcely touched.”

  Bernicia was silent for a moment, then said. “It is so hard to believe. How could such a thing be real? I see the ruin it left all around me, and I have even dreamed of it, but sometimes I think the old people must be telling us stories, trying to convince us the world was so much grander before we were born.”

  “I saw it, and I cannot believe it myself. Who can imagine such a catastrophe? All around the Middle Sea, every city and town wrecked, hundreds of them swept into nothingness. Millions killed in a few hours. Carancatellum, the greatest city of our time, so shattered that a generation later it is still a monster-haunted ruin where no man dares to venture. How can they have had such power? They were but men and women, a dozen or perhaps twenty. We do not know how many there were. We do not know any of their names. They used strange titles that meant nothing to outsiders, Sand Reckoner and Majestic Vole and Apostate Delirium. They lived on their island and did whatever it was they did, mostly ignoring us. But if they did come to a city everyone bowed down before them, because they could kill with a glance and tear down walls with a wave of their hands.

  “But then, somehow, they spent all the power they had stored up in one great storm that blasted our world to ruins. We do not know why. We do not know how. We know only that they are gone, and that we are left to pick up the pieces.”

  “Where did they come from? Five hundred years ago, when they founded their empire; who were they?”

  “That, too, is mostly hidden. Only one man dared to write a book about their rise, and they burned the book and sent him into exile. But just from looking at them we knew they came from here, from around the Middle Sea. They had our faces and spoke our language. The powers they used were the same ones you and I have glimmerings of, or so I believe. But they learned some secret way to use them. It was the greatest of all secrets, and the only one ever kept for five hundred years. But everyone who knew it is dead, and all their books were destroyed with their city.”

  “What of the College? I thought they preserved the lore of the Mages.”

  “If so, they have not shared it. But I doubt that they ever knew the great secret. Perhaps, though, if we could work with them we could unravel some small things, like this problem of fading. But I wrote to them of this and they sent no answer.”

  “What if I wrote to them? Their land is part of our county, even if they have some ancient charter granting them self-rule. They can hardly ignore a letter from their lord.”

  “You are right that they must send some answer, but that does not mean it will be a helpful one.”

  Bernicia sat on a wooden chair. Frustration boiled up inside her. As a child, she had seen things, things behind walls, sometimes things farther away, sometimes what she thought was the past or the future. But she could never make it happen, and she still could not. She did not know if it was just aging, or because she had tried to study magic, but now it hardly happened at all. For her, for everyone in her world, magic was something they sometimes caught a glimpse of, something that appeared for a moment when you did not expect it. It was like a poet’s line about first seeing the face of his beloved, like a dream about flying, a feeling that overwhelmed when it came but could never be made to happen and might come only once, or not at all. But they, the great Mages, they could summon it at will. Whenever they wanted, they could reach out and grasp it, could hold in their hands what was always just beyond her reach. What was that like, she wondered? To live like that, with that power always at hand, always surrounded by beauty and glory? Was it wonderful beyond imagining? Did they walk about in a daze of pleasure, thrilling to what they could see and do? Or did even that path of glory grow tiresome over time? Or did it in the end make them mad, so mad that they destroyed the whole amazing world they had made and most who lived in it?

  Some of the priests said it was for the best. They said the powers of the Mages were things no human should control, a curse that we were all better off without. Some said the gods had forbidden it, so they had sent the ruin that brought the Mages down as punishment for their sins. But that did not make sense to Bernicia. If humans were not meant to have such power, how had they ever acquired it? Was it some sort of mistake, some divine oversight or little crack in the fabric of the universe that clever men had found and used? No, she thought, this is part of the world, a very deep part, so deep that few ever get more than a tiny glimpse of it.

  And if the Mages were cursed, why had their reign been so long and peaceful? With their power they had united all the lands around the Middle Sea. They had put an end to wars between cities and chased all the barbarians far into the mountains or far out onto the steppes. They could be arbitrary and harsh, but mostly they did not care, and what was a bit of harshness compared to 500 years of peace and plenty?

  But I, she thought, I am useless, with no knowledge and no powers, just a daughter, a sister, an extra person who dresses up and shows herself to the people at festivals and says things in council that all the men ignore, who dreams of somehow reaching beyond all of this and grasping that thing that she could sometimes sense but never see and never understand. If only, she sometimes thought, if only I had never seen anything, had never received those glimpses of the other world, then maybe I could be happy. But I did see them, and I will spend the rest of my life yearning for what I cannot have, wishing for what cannot be, always hearing stories about the great men and women who did have it and used it to remake the world.