Mia

And a window comes into the room.
Not through. Into — the whole of it, frame and all, the tall south-side casement nearest the fireplace, glass and lead and eighty years of paint arriving across the flagstones in a spray, and something comes in with it low and fast and hits the floor already moving.
"DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH THEM."

Here's the thing about Mia.
I worked out in six weeks that she stood wrong. I worked out that she had two knives on her thighs and that somebody had a dress made for her, and I felt her concealment from eleven feet away in an open courtyard on my first afternoon in this house, and I was very pleased with myself about all of it.
I never once worked out what she was for.
She goes across that hall in under a second.
Not running. There's a thing wind magic does when it's put through something that's already fast, and she's got it low, at the ankles, air coming off the flagstones behind her in two hard cracks — and her ears are flat and her lips are back and the pleasant fourteen-year-old who pours the tea is nowhere in that room at all.
She goes for Halvard.
He has time to get his coat off his arm and not much else. She comes in under his hands and the knife takes him across the forearm and up, and the only reason it isn't his throat is that he throws himself backwards over a chair like a man falling off a wall, and she is already turning, she's not watching him land, she's gone.
Perrivale is eight feet away with both hands up holding a five-circle creature on a chalk collar.
He sees her coming and he has to make a choice.
And he makes the wrong one, because he's a man of fifty in a robe and he has never in his life had somebody try to kill him from four feet, and instead of dropping his hands and running he stands there and keeps working, because the spell is the important thing, because the spell is always the important thing —
She gets him in the shoulder.
He screams. Actually screams, high and undignified, and the fingers stop.
And the whole room lurches.

The thing in the chalk shudders.
Not towards Verena. Towards nothing, in every direction at once, like a dog that's felt the lead go slack, and for half a second the air in that hall goes so wrong that I can taste it.
"Hold it—" Halvard, up off the floor, blood coming through his shirt sleeve, and for the first time since he walked into this house he is not comfortable, he is not pleasant, he is a man who has understood that he is standing eleven feet from something he does not own. "Perrivale. Hold it."
"I'm holding—"
"HOLD IT."
"Then get her off me!"
And Perrivale gets one hand back up, and he does the only thing he can do, and he puts the thing in the circle between himself and her.
That's the moment it stops being a murder and becomes a fight.

She fights it for eleven seconds.
I've counted a lot of things in my life. Eleven seconds against a five-circle summon with a hand-and-a-half of steel and one circle of wind.
She goes through it twice. That's the part I'll never get out of my head — she doesn't know, nobody's told her, she comes in on the left with the knife and the whole arm passes through the thing's chest and out the other side and she stumbles from the lack of resistance and has to turn it into a roll. And she gets up, and looks at her own hand, and you can see her adjust.
Then she starts going for the circle instead.
Clever girl. Clever, clever girl. She's worked it out in under four seconds: you can't hit the creature, so hit the floor, break a line of chalk and the whole thing comes down. She goes wide, she goes low, she goes for the outer ring at the southern edge on her hands and knees with a knife reversed to scrape —
And the thing arrives before the part of it that moves.
I've watched that twice now and I still can't see it coming.
It catches her across the body. Not a blow. There's no impact, there's nothing to make an impact with. It's more like the space she was in stops being available, and Mia goes backwards thirty feet and lands badly, on stone, and rolls, and stops about a yard from me and Verena.
The knife goes away across the floor.

She gets up.
She gets up. There's blood coming out of her nose and her mouth, and one of her arms isn't doing what she wants, and she has just been swatted the length of a reception hall by something that lives on the other side of a wall.
She gets onto one knee, and then her feet, and she puts herself between the two of us and the circle.
Empty hands. She has no idea where her knives are. She's fourteen years old and about five foot nothing and she puts herself in front of a five-circle summon with her arms out.
"Mia."
"Sir."
"You pressed it."
"I pressed it." Her voice is wet. She doesn't turn around. "Down past the drain path, over the field line, felt the click, pressed it twice, and then I came back."
"I told you—"
"You've told me not to come back twice now, sir," Mia says, "and I've never once agreed to it out loud."
She has, actually. Both times. Word for word, looking right at me.
Third promise she's broken in six weeks. All three of them to me. All three of them because she has exactly one job and she has never for one single second been confused about what it is.
The thing in the circle turns its head. Part of it.
Mia's whole body braces.

"Look at her."
She's beside me.
Not on a shelf, not on a desk, not on a windowsill or a gatehouse roof. Right beside me, on her knees in the chalk, close enough to touch, and she has never once been this close in three years.
"Look at her, Iori. Look at what she's doing. She's got no weapon and one arm and she's standing in front of you."
I know.
"You don't know. You're sitting on the floor agreeing with a murderer." And her voice is not teasing, it is not light, it is not the thing that has lived behind my left ear since I was seventeen. She is furious. "Get up."
"He's right."
"He is not right, he is a man who wanted a mountain—"
"He's right that it started with me."
"THEN FINISH IT."

She's shouting. I have never heard her shout. In three years of every unbearable hour, she has needled and teased and picked and sat on things swinging her heels, and she has never once raised her voice at me, and she is screaming in my face.
"Is this it? Is this what you've been doing? Three years on a wet rock and a bowl of stew, and this is the plan?" She's got her hands out. "You think this is atonement? You think sitting in the dark and being sad is atonement? Is that what you've been calling it?"
"I didn't—"
"You think she'd want this?"
The room goes very small.
"Say it. Go on. You've read her name in the paper twice and you've never once said it out loud in three years. You think a girl in a chair in a palace four hundred miles away would look at this floor and think, oh good, he's finally being punished properly?"
"Don't."
"She'd be sick," she says. "She would be sick, Iori, and you know it, and that is why you've never once let yourself think about what she'd actually want, because it is not this."
Verena's blood is drying on my hand.
"And what gives you the right?" She's crouched right down in front of me now, in the chalk, between me and the creature. "Answer that one. What gives you the right? Two girls. Fourteen. One of them can't stand up and one of them can't feel her left arm and neither of them has done a single thing except be glad you came, and you've decided that the correct response is to sit on the floor and let it happen, because a man told you a true thing and it felt good to hear it."
"I ruined—"
"You've ruined nothing yet! She's breathing! Put your hand on her chest, she is breathing, it isn't done—"
"And her father?"
That stops her.
"What about her father?" My voice comes out wrong. "He's twelve hours away and he's coming back to this. And her brother. There's a boy on a road somewhere who thinks he got out of this family cleanly and he's going to come home to a—"
"Then stand up and make it not that."

The thing moves.
Mia makes a noise and doesn't move an inch.
"Iori."
I can't.
"You can. You've had it for three years and you've never once—"
"I said I wouldn't."
"You promised her something else too."
The whole world stops.
"Do you remember?" And her voice has gone quiet now, quieter than the room, quieter than anything. "On the roof. Before. You said it to her face and she said yes, and then it all went wrong and you took it back the moment she closed her eyes, and you have been taking it back every single day for three years. Do you remember what you promised her?"
I remember.
"Say it."
I remember.
"And what about what you promised me?"

I look up at her.
Three years. Three years of a voice behind my left ear that has never once been kind to me, that has needled me on a cliff in the rain and sat on a cart while I was sick in front of the Royal Mage Guard and called me a coward at a campfire and told me, four hours ago, in a study, that she was wrong.
I have called her a symptom. I have called her guilt. I threw a dead woman's ledger at a wall rather than look at her, and I have spent three years being absolutely certain about exactly one thing, which is that she is not real and does not know what the real one would want.
She is crouched in a chalk circle with her bare feet on the floor of a burning house shouting at me to get up.
"You're not her," I say.
"No," she says. "I'm not. I've never once said I was."
And she puts her hand out, palm up, the way you do to a horse.
"But I was there," she says. "I'm the only thing in this world that was there, and I have never lied to you, not once, not in three years, and I am telling you now: this is not it. This is not the way. Get up."

Mia's knees give slightly, and she locks them, and stays standing.
Verena's chest goes up and down under my hand.
Somewhere over on the far side of the room a man is telling his mage to hold the collar, and a mage with a knife wound in his shoulder is saying I'm trying, and four dead men are on the floor, and a village at the west end of this domain has been going out for three winters, forty-odd souls, and nobody was ever going to miss them.
I put Verena's head down as gently as I can manage.
Then I get my feet under me, and I stand up.
There's nothing in my hands. My coat's torn at the shoulder and there's plaster dust in my hair and I have four circles turning and two that haven't worked since I was seventeen, and I am the only thing standing between two fourteen-year-old girls and something that cannot be touched.
"Mia."
"Sir."
"Step back, please."
"No, sir."
"Mia."
"No, sir."
And I look at the back of that girl's head, one arm hanging, blood down her chin, refusing a direct order for the third time in six weeks, and something goes through me that I have not felt since I was a boy on a wall in the rain being shouted at by a very large man who was proud of me.
"I've been a pathetic excuse for a teacher, haven't I," I say.
Mia turns her head.
"Sir?"
"Yes," says the thing beside me, with enormous satisfaction. "You have. Awful. Go on, then."