A Paradox of Lies

The vats had been temperamental for weeks, then worse. The indigo gave a fugitive tint that washed out to nothing, and the madder never took. Alia stood over the largest basin until the steam watered her eyes, stirring with the paddle until her forearms ached. The cloth in her hands felt rough and stubborn. The flax from the northern fields had lost its softness. Every length came up dull.

Her father had stopped coming out to watch. He said his knee hurt in the damp. He didn’t need to see the color bleed away again. Her mother folded the finished bolts with careful hands, not commenting on the way her fingertips stayed clean. No stain to hide behind.

Neighbors slipped in and out. They spoke in quiet voices that tried to be cheerful. Jory the weaver picked up his order and tried not to look at the vat too long. “Any better?” he asked, already shaking his head.

“It holds for a day,” Alia said.

He grimaced. “The council says the water will settle. We wait.”

She nodded and watched him leave with the cloth, his shoulder stooped. She turned back to the dye. She added more alum, then hesitated. The crystals had an odd shine, not the good shine she trusted. The supplier had run short and started stretching the measure. Everyone was stretching something. She measured with her hand instead.

A girl from the tannery came for offcuts. She had a scarf wrapped over her hair and a smile that twitched and didn’t stay. “My mother says the new vat looks strong.”

“It looks strong,” Alia said.

They stood a moment, listening to the wet sound of cloth being lifted and squeezed. The girl cleared her throat. “They’re talking about rationing. For real this time.”

“I heard.” The word sat on her tongue with a weight she didn’t want to carry. The girl left quickly, relieved at having said it to someone else.

Alia worked until her shoulders burned. The rhythm of dipping and wringing kept her upright. She tried to draw more heat from the hearth under the vat. The flames licked the copper with a noise she usually liked. Today the sound scraped.

At midday she stepped outside. The courtyard held the familiar piles of kindling, stacked jars, rain barrels half full. Beyond the wall the fields opened, not fatty with grain but thin and patchy. The wind carried a sour, metallic edge. People moved through the lane with a muttered calm that made her jaw clench. Women with baskets shook out the same news. Someone’s cow had gone to bone. There had been a brown froth on the well at dawn. The elders had decided to light candles. The elders were lighting a lot of candles.

Across the yard, her mother met her eyes. The expression on her face read caution. Don’t make a scene. Don’t say the thing that can’t be taken back. Alia tipped her chin and went to the rain barrel to wet her hands. The water smelled off. It didn’t slam her with rot, but the wrongness felt present. It got into the cloth, the skin, the lungs. It made her want to claw at something.

She thought about Paulina’s lessons. Patience. Craft. Attention. She heard the clipped cadence in her head, the way her mentor’s fingers clicked together when she counted. The words had steadied her for years. Today they didn’t land.

In the back room the shelves sagged under bundles of dried plant and skeins of thread. There were jars that had belonged to her grandmother. Alia liked the work because it made sense. You boiled bark for hours, and you knew what would come of it. You prepared the mordant, and the color took. But the rules were sliding. The book of household recipes with its cramped hand had an answer for every season. It had no answer for this.

When she lifted the next bolt, a drop splashed onto her wrist, pale and watery. She rubbed it in out of habit, waiting for a stain. Her skin stayed bare. She pressed her thumb against the pulse and held it there. Something in her leaned forward. The sensation was familiar now. It had come to her first in the winter when she’d stayed up reading at Paulina’s table long after the candles should have been pinched. Not the primer on herbs. Not the charmwork with safe lines and tidy knots. The other texts, the ones with ink that clung to the page and refused to fade.

There were diagrams of circles. The notes insisted on precision. There were accounts of bargains that sounded more like arguments than prayers. An exchange. A rule that never moved. She had run her finger over a line that said the truth could be binding in a way a lock could not. She hadn’t told Paulina she’d found it. She had told herself she was only curious. The memory of that sentence sat under her tongue now with a heat that had nothing to do with the vat.

The blight spread in silence. The priest spoke each morning with his hands lifted. The baker sold bread that broke in hard crumbs. The council met and adjourned and met again. No one asked for the thing that had teeth. The thing she had only read about. She imagined a presence that watched for openings. She imagined her own name spoken back to her in a voice that knew every hinge in her. The thought made her stomach tighten in a way that wasn’t fear. It was focus, and it was hunger. She loosened her grip on the paddle to stop herself from breaking it.

A thread of steam curled up and caught on her face. She breathed through her mouth. Her skin prickled. The workshop smelled of wet fiber and ash. A moth ticked against the window and fell into the clay dish on the sill. She tilted the dish and let the moth slide free; it didn’t move. She eased the bolt onto the line and watched droplets fall in a slow pattern.

If the dye refused to hold because the water had turned, the answer wasn’t strength. It wasn’t more heat, more alum, more pressure. It was something else. She felt that opening in her thought again, small and bright, dangerous. She pictured the shape of a circle on the floor. She pictured her own blood as a measure. She pictured a conversation, not pleading, not anger, but a trade. The thought settled in her bones and did not leave.

From the doorway she could see over the wall to the fields. Leaves lay flat against dry stalks. The wind moved through without sound. Alia wiped her hands on her apron and walked out into the yard, drawn to the low gate that opened toward the ditch and the first row of withered beans. She leaned on the top rail and stared until her eyes watered. She didn’t blink. She waited for something to shift.

She didn’t hear Paulina come through the side gate. The boards gave a little creak and something shifted in the air, a coolness at the back of her neck. Alia didn’t turn.

“You’ll wear a groove with your staring,” Paulina said.

Alia kept her hands on the top rail. The wood felt dry and rough. “If I stare hard enough, something might give.”

Paulina came to stand beside her, not leaning on the gate. She stood straight, as if keeping weight off an old bruise. The skin across her knuckles showed the faint, dull shine of old threadwork. In certain light you could see fine lines running under the skin, the residue of spells layered over years. She folded her hands anyway, as if the shine needed covering.

“The beans didn’t do this because no one looked at them,” she said. “The land is tired. It needs time we don’t like giving.”

“And in the meantime?” Alia said. “We pretend to be patient and drink bad water.”

Paulina’s mouth tightened. “In the meantime we keep our hands busy and our heads cool.”

Alia glanced at her. Paulina’s hair had slipped from its knot and lay in a few straight strands against her jaw. She had a hawk’s nose, a feature everyone said in softer times, with fondness. Today it cut the space between them.

“I can’t do the same motions and expect a different result,” Alia said. “It feels like lying.”

“Work isn’t a performance for your feelings,” Paulina said, mild in tone, sharp at the edges. “You know that.”

Alia looked back at the fields. The leaves had a grey tinge. A crow moved along the fenceposts like it had a purpose. “You taught me the rules because the rules work,” she said. “I’m trying to work.”

“By standing at a fence and thinking about everything you shouldn’t touch,” Paulina said.

Alia flushed in a way she hated, heat under the skin, unhelpful. “I did the vats. I measured. I checked the alum. I emptied the barrels that stank. I am thinking about what’s next.”

“Next,” Paulina said, “is also work. There’s a list on your mother’s shelf. We can check it together. It’s noon. Eat first.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

It was a small joke, one Paulina reached for when she wanted to soften a point. Alia didn’t take it.

Paulina released a slow breath. She looked at the beans. For a moment her expression eased into something like grief. Then it was gone. “Impulsive magic feels good in the hand,” she said. “It tastes of speed. It eats everything around it and leaves you hollow. Do you hear me?”

Alia’s fingers tightened on the rail until the pad of her thumb went white. The sentence sounded rehearsed. Maybe Paulina had said it to other apprentices, years ago. One size fits all.

“I hear you,” Alia said. “I’m listening. I just don’t know why we’re pretending certain doors don’t exist when everyone is suffocating.”

“That is not what we are pretending,” Paulina said. “We acknowledge doors and choose not to open them. We don’t make ourselves brave by walking through any threshold we see.”

“I’m not trying to be brave.” The words came out too fast. “I’m trying to be useful.”

“You don’t get to be useful at any cost,” Paulina said. “That isn’t usefulness. That’s vanity in a different coat.”

Alia felt the old vertigo of being corrected and seen at once. It made her want to argue in a way that led nowhere. She focused on detail: a bit of sap dried on the rail, her own fingernail rimmed with blue from the vat. Small things she could scrape away.

“You broke the latch on my study two nights ago,” Paulina said, without raising her voice.

Alia swallowed. Her throat felt tight. “You should get a better latch.”

“Don't insult me by doubling down,” Paulina said. “If you took a book, return it. If you read things you cannot unread, we address it now. Not later, when the consequences walk themselves through our doors.”

“I looked,” Alia said. “Everyone is looking at me to fix this and I’m not allowed to look.”

“No one asked you to fix it alone,” Paulina said. “They asked you to do your part and to remember you are part of something. I am telling you as your teacher: some words pull. They don’t care if your intentions are tidy. They don’t care if you mean well. They answer the letter, not the spirit, and then they keep asking.”

An image rose, unbidden: a circle chalked onto flagstone, a little smear of blood drying to brown. The exactness of it had felt clean in her mind. The way Paulina described it now, it felt like a hook.

“If the door is closed,” Alia said carefully, “why do you keep the key in your house.”

“Because I live in a world where closed doors must be guarded,” Paulina said. “Not because I intend to open them. I don’t keep knives so children can cut bread without learning where the blade goes.”

Alia pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and tasted ash. “You don’t think I can be careful.”

“I think you want to move faster than you can be careful,” Paulina said. “That is a habit I’ve seen in you since you were twelve and furious about the dye that didn’t take. It is not a moral failing. It is a habit. But if you feed it with the wrong kind of work, it will turn into something that owns you.”

A cart rattled past on the lane. A boy called to a dog and the dog did not come. Ordinary sounds kept going while they stood there and the gap between ordinary and this quiet stayed wide.

Alia pushed at the gate. It gave a centimeter and stopped against a stone. “If there’s a way to help,” she said, low, “and you keep me from it, how do I live with that.”

Paulina’s face softened for the first time. Not pity. Recognition. “By understanding that there is help that saves and help that burns a hole. We use what we can pay for. We don’t borrow from a lender who never forgets.”

“You make it sound like I’m already in debt,” Alia said.

Paulina turned to look at her fully now. The shine at her knuckles caught the light and went dull again. “You’re young and bright and angry. That is a kind of wealth. It attracts attention. I’m asking you to spend it where I can see the ledger.”

Alia almost laughed. The phrasing felt like a trap and an invitation at once. “And if I say no.”

“Then I will put stronger wards on my door,” Paulina said. “And I will keep you busy until you’re too tired to be clever. And I will tell your parents to watch your hands.”

It sounded practical, not dramatic. It also sounded like it would work.

Alia glanced at her mother through the workshop window, bent over cloth. She had a way of smoothing her palm along each length that always calmed Alia as a child. The sight made her throat tighten again, in a different way.

Paulina followed her look. “Come in,” she said. “Eat. After we eat, we go to the well. I want to test the draw with a different line. We will do what we can. We will not go looking for a voice to answer our worst questions.”

Alia didn’t move. She let the words sit and grow heavy. Paulina waited, not reaching for her. Waiting was one of the things Paulina did that could feel like pressure.

“Fine,” Alia said. She pushed the gate back into its latch. Her palm left a faint blue smear on the wood.

Paulina nodded once. “Good.”

They walked toward the back door together, not touching. The room smelled of boiled fiber and smoke. Paulina set a bowl and a heel of bread on the table and sat as if the act of sitting was an agreement they were both making. Alia sat across from her, hands in her lap, and fixed her eyes on the way the light fell across the table, holding herself very still.

The market sounded thinner than usual. The stallholders spoke in low tones, counting small piles of coins twice. Fish lay on a board, dull-eyed, the smell turned. A woman had a crate of turnips that still held grit, and no one haggled. A bucket sat under the well-spout with a ribbon of water in the bottom. People glanced at it and then away, as if looking would make it less.

Alia moved through it with her basket against her hip. The handles had worn smooth at the curve of her hand. Strips of dyed cloth she and her mother had finished hung limp on a line over the smith’s doorway, colours that should have been bright dulled to a stubborn, uncertain shade. She didn’t look at them again.

She stopped at Old Varrin’s stall and paid for bread. The loaf had a flat top and smelled faintly of smoke. Varrin’s fingers shook when he weighed it. “Never seen a summer like this,” he said. Everyone said that.

Across the square a small crowd gathered near the pipe-seller’s cart. A sound lifted from them, a brief arc of cheers. Alia kept her face still and tilted her head enough to see.

Quentin stood by the cart with his sleeves rolled neat to the elbow. He had the height and easy posture that suggested he never carried anything heavy for long. His boots were clean. The pipe-seller, a man whose hands always looked burned, held a clay pipe between his teeth and grinned around it.

“Show them again,” someone called. “Go on.”

Quentin smiled in a way that softened his jaw. He lifted his hand and turned it, palm up. The gesture was casual. Heat gathered in the air around his fingers, a subtle warp. A curl of flame rose straight and steady from his skin, no flicker, no smoke, a small, obedient thing. The pipe-seller leaned in and touched the bowl to it. The tobacco caught. The man drew in and exhaled, eyes half-closed. The crowd reacted the way they always did. A laugh. A few claps. Someone made a wish under their breath, like this meant something larger.

“Simple can be reliable,” Quentin said, not loud, but the square carried it. “You keep your tools oiled, they keep working.”

A girl at the front stared at his hand. “Does it hurt?” she said.

“Not at all,” he said. He closed his fingers and the flame went out. People made a sound of appreciation again, softer this time, the second wave.

Alia put the bread into her basket and adjusted the cloth over it. She didn’t need to go closer. She also didn’t turn away. Watching him do it gave the back of her throat an ache, not envy exactly, something with a harder edge. She knew this was nothing. It was a trick they taught young, repeating motions until the heat came without effort. It looked good in public. It formed a story about competence that people could rest their weight on.

“Your father would be proud,” an older man said, clapping Quentin on the shoulder.

Quentin inclined his head. He had a face made for attention. Not handsome in a way that stopped anyone, but arranged in a way that drew eyes. When he laughed, it stayed on the surface. Alia could see the calculation sit behind it, not slowing anything down, just present.

He lifted his gaze across the heads in front of him and saw her. It was quick and then fixed. The look held. He didn’t raise his chin. He didn’t need to. The expression he used for her was not angry. It held a small softness at the corners of his mouth and flatter eyes. It was worse than anger. It said he understood something about her and had decided to be generous.

Alia made herself not flinch. She moved one coin from her palm to her fingers and then back. Her hand left a faint print of flour on the basket handle. The coin was warm. Her palm felt damp. She pressed it into her other hand until the edge marked a line.

Paulina’s voice from earlier arranged itself in her head without invitation. We use what we can pay for. We don’t borrow from a lender who never forgets. Alia pushed the words away and they slid back.

Quentin said something to a woman at his side. The woman laughed and touched her own throat, pleased. He reached past her to hand the pipe-seller a twist of paper. The move closed the distance between where he stood and where Alia had stopped. He came within three paces. The heat off him had the clean note of tended magic. He didn’t look at her again while he finished with the man and the flame, but he didn’t forget she was there. She felt the care he put into being seen.

“Let him light yours,” the pipe-seller said to a younger man, grinning. “Burns better than kindling.”

Around them, people’s faces loosened as they joked. It took nothing to put this gloss on an afternoon. Alia felt trapped in the wash of it. She rubbed the cuticle of her thumb with her forefinger until pain pricked up. She thought of chalk lines and the cold pull she’d felt reading words she wasn’t meant to see. She could draw the circle in her mind without trying now. It arrived when she was still.

Quentin moved past her, finally, with the easy assurance of someone used to space opening in front of him. His sleeve brushed the edge of her basket. He didn’t touch her. He did not need to. The scent he carried was soap and a hint of ash. He stopped two steps beyond and half-turned his head. The look came again. An acknowledgment without warmth. Pity that made room for itself in the line of his mouth, just enough to be noticed. It wasn’t even dramatic. He believed he was being kind.

Alia held his gaze for one beat and then looked down at her hand. Her fingers had curled tight around the handle. The wood pressed into the skin and the bones showed pale under the surface. She made herself breathe and didn’t loosen her grip.

She lay awake and listened to her parents breathe. The whole house made tired sounds. The rafters settled. The basin in the corner dripped once and then stopped. She turned her face into the straw and then away. Sleep stayed just out of reach. When she closed her eyes she saw Quentin’s hand with the flame cupped neat and steady. When she opened them she saw the seam of the wall and the pale streak where smoke had stained it.

She got up when the last embers in the hearth went to a low red. She moved slowly so the boards wouldn’t talk. Her mother had left the basket by the door with a folded cloth in it. Alia didn’t touch it. She put on her shoes and her cloak without tying it. She took the small knife she used on rough threads. The handle had a dark groove where her thumb rested. She eased the latch. It lifted without sound.

Outside the air had a sour edge off the river. The lane was black and flat. No lamps. A dog turned in its sleep under a wagon, huffed, settled again. The path to Paulina’s cottage was in her feet from years of going there. She didn’t have to think about where to step. She kept her head down and her hands inside her sleeves. The hedges had dried out and scratched at her cloak.

Paulina’s shutters were closed. The curtain behind the front window had a thin line where light sometimes showed. It held dark. Alia stood there a long breath and listened. The village at night had a thinner sound. She heard nothing inside. She tested the door she wasn’t meant to enter. The latch held firm. The study was at the back anyway. The kitchen window had a catch she had watched Paulina set a hundred times. She pushed gently. It stuck and then gave. Her arm fit through and found the bar. The wood was cold enough to bite. She worked it up. The window raised on a stiff hinge.

She climbed in, careful with the sill. The kitchen smelled of old smoke and dried sage. A cup sat upside down by the basin. The rhythm of this room pressed at her. She stopped letting it in and looked for the study door.

The lock was simple and mean. A small iron loop through a hasp and a turn to keep it from sliding. Paulina had made it from scrap. It would not give to picking. Alia set the tip of her knife in the seam and leaned her weight. The wood split a little around the screws. She worked the blade under and lifted. The hasp creaked once, loud, and then tore free in her hand. She held still, breath held, until the room felt still again. She eased the door open.

The study kept cold even in summer. Shelves along the walls. A table in the centre with a ledger and a stick of charcoal. Bundles of herbs strung along a line near the ceiling. The window was shuttered here as well. She didn’t light a candle. She let the grey from the kitchen wash enough of the room. Dust on the table traced the arc of a hand where Paulina had done the last work and gone.

Alia went to the shelves. The spines under her fingers felt worn smooth, cracked in places. She read the titles by tracing the letters with her thumb. Elements and their quarrels. Binding charms for common pests. A calendar of moons and plantings with notes pressed small in the margins. She pulled one at random and opened it and saw diagrams of ward stones and the angles to set them. Safe books. She put it back.

She moved along the wall and the titles changed only a little. She knew Paulina’s order. Everyday tools first. Then rarer ones. Nothing that hinted at the other kind of work. Nothing about true names. She kept her hands moving anyway. Looking for a slip.

She paused at the far end where the shelf didn’t meet the wall clean. The floorboard there had a different grain. Newer wood in the middle of old. Someone had sanded the surface but the colour was wrong. She pressed the board with her palm. No give. She pressed again and felt a tiny shift under her fingers, not in the board but underneath. Her heart climbed and then held still.

She got on her knees. The knife tip found the seam. She worked it under and levered hard. The nail at the corner gave with a dry pop. She slid her fingers in and lifted the board out of its channel. The gap breathed cold.

In the dark under the floor sat a wrapped shape. It rested heavy, not large. She reached in and felt iron through linen. The chill of it reached her skin through the cloth. She drew it out and set it on the table with both hands. The weight went down solid and the table answered with a faint sound.

She unwrapped it. The linen stuck to a corner where sap or wax had held and then peeled away. Metal bands crossed the cover and ran to a clasp that had no keyhole she could see. The leather under the bands was scarred. The place where a title might have been had gone black. No letters remained. The edges of the pages showed thin and tight under the straps.

Her hand hovered above it and came down. The iron bled cold into her skin. There was a faint pressure under her palm, not movement. A thrum that wasn’t sound. It went up her arm and into her chest, faint and even, steady enough to count if she wanted. She didn’t pull away.

She thought of Paulina saying doors closed for a reason. She thought of the ribbon of water in the bucket at the well that morning. She thought of Quentin’s soft mouth and the pity in his eyes and the way the crowd’s faces had opened. Her fingers tightened on the edge of the book until the band bit her skin.

She took a breath and the air tasted of iron and old dust. She slid her thumb under the strap where it met the clasp and felt for a catch. The metal lay smooth and then shifted at a point so small she could barely find it twice. The cold thrummed again, deeper now, settled in her wrists. She set the book square in front of her and leaned over it. The room around her fell to a thinner outline. She put both hands on the cover.

The clasp released when she pressed in and down at the hidden point. A thin sound came off the metal and then silence. She lifted the band. The leather gave under her hands with a dry flex. The first page stuck a little to the second and then let go.

The script did not belong to any alphabet she had learned. The letters were tall and angled, knotted at their middles, the lines too fine to have been written with a brush. Ink the colour of dried tea had seeped a little into the fibres. There were numbers too, written in columns, with marks between them that weren’t arithmetic. Across the margin ran a second hand, smaller, with corrections and answers. Someone had argued with the page and then recorded both sides.

She leaned closer. The cold coming off the book raised the tiny hairs along her wrist. She breathed on the paper and watched nothing change.

The first chapter read like a set of instructions and a warning pretending to be instructions. It named the intelligences from beyond the edge of things without naming them. It called them functions. It called them reasons. It said: they do not understand mercy. It said: they cannot lie once a word is bound. It said: the letter is a chain. It said: you are not an exception.

A diagram took up half a page. A circle, but not smooth. Thirteen small indentations along the inner edge. A line through two of them. At the top, a point like a tooth. In small notes: river clay, braided thrice; salt unbroken by iron; blood measured to the line. A column on the right listed alternatives in a tight hand. Goat’s milk instead of salt if the moon failed. The notes were blunt and practical. No adornment. Do this. Now this.

Alia rested her fingertips on the corner to keep the page flat. The steadiness of the book under her hand comforted and alarmed at once. Her mouth had gone dry. She swallowed. The motion felt loud in the room.

She turned the page. A chart of names that were not names, built from sounds and orders. It explained that a true name was not a word but a structure. A way of pinning an axis through a thing so it could not turn. The text did not say how to find one. It listed the qualities of one when you had it. Four points aligned. A hidden syllable written only in the breath. A kind of heat in the hand when it was right.

She ran her thumb along the space where a name might go and felt nothing. A small relief and anger at once, because the book wouldn’t hand it to her.

She heard Paulina saying, in the field, in daylight: We are not the first to be hungry. The door is closed because someone burned for opening it. You think you are different. You are not. Alia had said, then, very low so no one else would hear: And if they were wrong? Paulina had looked at her a long time without anger and said: If I am wrong, I will live with it. If you are wrong, you will not get to live with anything.

She turned another page. The diagrams grew more particular. Circles within circles. A triangle touching the inner line at three places with numbers written beside each point. The notes counted heartbeats. Five breaths held. The last one released only when the names met. There was a list of things offered and taken. The book used the word exchange. It favoured secrets. Secrets given, secrets taken. It warned against offering first memories, last words, the names of the dead. It said that the intelligences liked flesh but fed best on the shape of thought. They held the shape and wore it out.

A passage described arbitration. How to keep the upper hand when the thing in the circle tried to set terms. The rules were simple and sharp. Do not accept the first price. Do not accept the second price. Give a riddle and take a riddle in return. Count the words. Count your breaths. Speak only into the circle, not across it. Do not meet its eyes when offering the seal. If a bargain is struck, the bargain is the only law that holds.

She felt her mind start to slot the pages into a workable order. She saw where the book’s logic could be turned. She surprised herself by thinking: I can do this.

Paulina again, from months ago, not a scold that time but a quiet thing while they shelled beans: Cleverness is not the same as safety. Being right is not the same as being alive. Alia had laughed and asked, Do you think I want to die? Paulina had said nothing. She had tilted the bowl and let the light catch the purple skins and looked as if she did not want to answer the question out loud.

Alia turned another page and saw a crest stamped in ink that had dried to black. It spiralled across the paper, small lines feeding into a larger curve, a centre that seemed to recede when she stared too long. Beside it, the hand in the margin had written only: Do not write this one. The script around the crest was denser, tighter, like someone had kept erasing and writing over the same sentences. The title above had been scorched, a scar making a black plate where the words had been. The urge to trace the spiral with a finger came and she moved her hand to the side of the page instead.

She read a section on procedure. Where to stand. How to break a circle if you had to. It described the effect of the wind on a flame when the boundary held. It made a note about how quiet the room might get when the door opened. She checked the kitchen and the dark of the shuttered window without moving. Her shoulder ached from the angle she held over the table. She didn’t change it.

A paragraph near the bottom named the currencies again. Not coin. Not blood alone. It said: Tell me something no one else knows. It said: Tell me a thing you have never thought before and think it now. It said: Burn the path you did not take and feed me the smoke. She felt her chest tighten, not in fear but in recognition, and had to take a slow breath.

She turned one more page. The ink here had pooled at the ends of lines, as if the writer’s hand had hesitated and then pushed on. The opening line said, in that unadorned tone: To summon, you must first admit you are calling. The denial is itself a call. Bind your purpose. Bind your price. Speak without tremor.

She heard Paulina then, very near, a memory so recent it had heat in it: True magic requires discipline. Doors are closed for a reason. Alia stared at the words on the page until they doubled. She blinked the room back into one. Her hands had left sweat on the leather at the edges of the book. She lifted them and wiped them against her skirt, and then set them back down to keep reading.