Mira

Cain walked hard after Harrowfield, putting miles under his boots while the afternoon was still light. The frost sat deep in the soil, and the ground rang underfoot like iron. He kept a pace meant to break anyone not used to long roads. For hours he did not look back, trusting speed and cold to finish the work for him.

Near dark he stopped at a crossroad and turned around.

The girl he saw before Harrowfield was thirty paces behind him, the heavy canvas bag digging a sharp line into her shoulder. Her face was pale with the effort of keeping up, but her jaw was set with the same stubborn weight he had seen in the frozen mud outside Harrowfield. She must have left the town soon after he did, and she had not stopped.

“The town is behind us,” Cain said.

She stopped, the bag pulling at her shoulder, but she did not put it down. “I’m not walking back to Harrowfield.”

“Then find another road.”

“I’m already on one.”

Cain looked at her and let his breath out white in the cold. “I sleep in ditches. I eat whatever I can trap or buy with copper. I don’t want any company.”

“I didn’t ask for your company,” she said, shifting the bag to her other shoulder. “You don’t own the road.”

He thought about drawing the iron knife and telling her to turn around, then left it where it was. She had spent herself on a dead man that morning, and a live boy with a knife was not going to frighten her off this road.

Cain turned his back and started walking again, pushing harder until his lungs burned. She did not fall behind. Her boots hit the hard earth a fraction of a second after his, a steady echo that stayed with him throughout.

The road narrowed between a thicket of dark thorn bushes and a frozen drainage ditch, a tight stretch where a man with a pike could finish a traveler before the next rise. Cain kept off it.

He left the packed road without looking back and cut a wide arc through the open field, his boots breaking the frost in a line anyone behind him could follow.

She almost stayed on the hard track by habit, then saw what he had already decided not to walk into. Two men waited in the thorn bushes, still as fence posts, watching that narrow stretch. She took his track through the field and said nothing, and neither did he.

By nightfall the cold sat heavy on the fields. They pulled off the road into a stand of bare pines, and Cain set to building a fire, because freezing to death over pride was stupid.

He gathered what deadwood he could find and struck for a spark. The wood was damp with frost, and the spark died immediately. He stripped a stick with his knife, tried again, and got nothing but a thin thread of smoke that went out in the wind.

Mira watched for a moment, then reached into her bag and pulled out a scrap of dry cloth and the clear stone.

“I can light it,” she said. “If you’ve got anything dry underneath.”

Cain hesitated, then pushed a pinch of scraped bark into the cloth and held it out. Mira touched the stone once, steady and small, and set her fingertip to the cloth. The tip went forge-orange for a while. She started casting Emberhand, nothing louder than a match. The cloth caught on fire, and she fed it into the scraped bark until the damp wood finally started burning.

Cain nursed it into a low flame while she put the stone away, and neither of them made much of it.

He sat on one side of the fire and she sat on the other.

In the firelight he finally got a proper look at her. She was his age, soft-faced enough that a stranger in a market would still read her as a girl before they read her as anything else. Her hair was a brownish red, pulled back for the road and dulled with frost dust at the ends.

The flame put a little warmth into her skin that had gone pale from the cold, and her eyes stayed dark enough that the light only found the edges of them.

She was slender for someone who had matched his pace all afternoon. The thin coat and heavy canvas bag still marked her as a person who walked for a living, not someone waiting to be protected.

She rummaged through her canvas bag. Inside were bandages and salves that smelled of sharp pine and bitter root, a small iron pot, and the clear stone she had just used. She rubbed it clean on the edge of her coat, and the firelight caught it, turning it the color of warm amber.

“You should have stopped with the dead man,” Cain said, watching the fire. It was the first real talk since the crossroad.

She kept her eyes on the stone. “He still had a pulse when I got there.”

“For how long?”

“Not long enough.” She rubbed a smudge off one face of the glass. “I held it anyway. I did the same thing in a war hospital in the north. I spent an hour casting a spell after a boy’s heart had already stopped. So, they sent me home for it. They said that I didn’t understand priorities.”

Cain watched her hands. “They’re not wrong for it.”

“I know.” Her voice stayed flat. “I didn’t leave because they were wrong. They just got tired of arguing with me about it.”

Cain leaned back against a pine. He had spent two years around people who lied about what they were, and the plain honesty across the fire was strange to sit with.

He had learned casting spells once, in old lessons he had not thought about in years. Most of it was gone now, forms and theory washed out by the docks and the road, but enough remained that her quiet work had snagged on what was left. That was why he kept asking.

“You cast quietly,” he said. “Even that light on the cloth barely made a sound. Dock mages sound like a forge.”

“That’s because they’re sloppy. Someone with deep reserves can afford to throw half of it away as heat and noise.” She glanced across the fire at him. “The truth is, I don’t have that much mana. That’s why the college offered me the expansion program when I was twelve. It goes by emptying your mana down to nothing, hollow out, refill, and that happens year after year.”

She turned the stone once in her hands, watching the fire run through it.

“Then I realized four years of that would buy me only about a cup more capacity,” she said. “So I spent the time on control instead, and went with the examination at sixteen.”

“So that’s why there’s no light when you work?”

“Yes. Light, heat, and noise are all waste.”

She turned the stone so the fire ran clean through the middle. “This one’s a clear cut.”

“Isn’t that made from sarrent?”

“Yes, under the cut.” She held the stone out a little so the fire showed through it. “Miners call it coldglass, because it never warms in your hand no matter how long you hold it. Most people think the magic lives in the glass, but it doesn’t. It’s just stone, yet somehow it’s the only thing mana will pass through. Nobody knows why.”

“So the cut of the stone, does it matter too?”

“Yes, and it matters a lot. You pull a blank sarrent out of the ground and it does almost nothing until somebody cuts it. The cutter makes the prism, and the prism is what turns a mana draw into a spell, because your body can’t do that on its own.” She turned it again. “A rough cut wastes most of what you put in. Clouded stones are like that. Clear ones keep enough for real work, just like mine. True ones barely waste anything, which is why they cost a house. This one cost me eighty crowns and two years of saving.”

Cain watched the light move in the glass. “And the name on it?”

“When they license you, they etch your name into the glass. That puts you on the Ministry Rolls. After that, the prism is how you prove you’re allowed to cast a spell, and it’s also how they stop you.”

She looked at his coat, the plain iron knife at his belt, and his empty hands. “You don’t carry one.”

“I’m not like you,” Cain said. “I fight with my hands and a blade. I don’t need a stone for that.”

“I see, but the roads are bad this year,” she said. “It isn’t only Wardens. There are monsters on the roads again, although I haven’t seen one yet. But the guild halls are posting monster infestation work, and people talk about guild raids going out in every market I came through.”

Cain looked at the fire. “Monsters? This far into the heartland?”

“Yes,” Mira said. “I know it sounds ridiculous if you grew up somewhere cleared, but the notices are real.”

She reached into her coat and pulled out a small brass token stamped with the Ministry’s seal. “My name is Mira Merewin. If Wardens ask, this covers us, and I’d rather we both look like we belong on the road.”

“I’m not your guard.”

“I’m not paying you either. But you won’t get locked up for vagrancy while you’re walking with me, and it’s much safer to travel considering the rumors about the monsters.”

Cain looked at the brass token. A vagrant with no papers was an easy target in the heartland. A guard attached to a licensed mender was easier to overlook.

She was offering him cover he actually needed, and the stubbornness on her face said she was not really negotiating. She was giving him an excuse to stop telling her to leave.

“Fine,” Cain said, and the word tasted like a mistake, but he said it anyway.

She nodded once, put the token away, and began packing her supplies. The silence settled back over the camp, broken only by the pine in the fire.

Cain watched the flames and thought about how he just turned seventeen. It was the first time in two years he had let someone stand inside his guard, and the weight of it sat strange in his chest.

“I forgot to ask, what’s your name?” she asked, dropping the question into the quiet without warning.

Cain did not look away from the fire. The truth was buried under two years of ash and salt water, and he did not reach for it.

“Kell,” he said.

Mira paused with a roll of bandage in her hands and looked at him through the smoke. Her face did not change, but something behind her eyes went still for a moment.

“All right, Kell,” she said, and the way she said it made clear it was a concession.