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But these children were not like me, and they were all in the Runturin to learn how to control that power for the first time.
Each section of this courtyard was partitioned off for different levels of training; the Tyro, the first levels who were still learning their connection. The Dillynth, who were mastering wielding skills. The Cedrian, who were learning to fight. The Plythe, the fighters that were perfecting all that training before they served their time in the Ramal’s army, the powerful force none of the surrounding kingdoms dared to face.
Shouts and explosions and grunts of magic echoed from everywhere as I watched them fight.
I had watched them all for years, but I had always missed the first day of the newly magic-bonded pairs. When that magic would first spark and they would discover what their gifts truly were and learn how to use them. Mother had always found something for me to do on these days, some task, or darning, or garden walk.
But not today.
Today, I could watch magic ignite for the first time.
Something panged in my gut, that loss that always hit me at the weirdest times showing its ugly face. It wasn’t like I needed the reminder that I could never do this.
My Catalyst, Toblin, had died of a fever in the night only weeks before we were to complete the oath of the bond and begin training, leaving the magic inside me dead.
It was so long ago that I could barely remember the way that warm buzz would ripple over my skin and how Toblin would make that buzz feel like a firestorm. Sometimes, I swear I could feel it, like now, watching the young bonded begin to find their places in the yard; but it was nothing more than a phantom.
That power was long gone.
“Come to! Come to!” Marc’s familiar boom echoed up to me and I darted behind the stone as the Boy's gloved hand touched my ankle in that soft way he always did when he was worried.
“Stop worrying about me, you big baby,” I teased, giving him a wink before I lifted back up to see the courtyard and Marc moving between the pairs as he placed them apart from each other.
Marc, the magics trainer, was a burly man with a beard as long as his shoulders were broad. He moved with a shuffle as he placed the children one in front of the other. His Catalyst, a wiry woman half his size, was not far behind, the red cloak that marked her status rippling behind her.
“Today we will truly invite your magic to rise for the first time,” Marc began once he finished placing the pairs and began wandering between them, staring down the smaller ones until they shook.
I would have called down and told him to knock it off if giving my presence away wouldn’t have ended in a lashing. Marc just liked to taunt the younger students. He was really a teddy bear. Even his Catalyst rolled her eyes.
“Your bonding has already taken place. A drop of blood has been shared between you. Now all that is left is to complete the connection of a Catalyst to their Requisite, to create the loop that will fuse your magic permanently and allow it to ignite.”
The children shuffled around at Marc’s words, the Requisites shifting before their Catalysts even as some of them moved back a step.
It made sense. The power of the Requisite was restrained to the royal lines. I even recognized a few of the children down there as distant cousins or the children of lords and ladies from the realm that Father ruled over. They were all raised to wield their magic, raised to know what was coming.
Catalysts, however, were often found on Qits or in the villages below the manor houses and estates in the realms. They were not raised for magic, many would not even feel the power before they were brought to the Runturin for The Matching, when Requisites and Catalysts were placed together, dozens of children wandering around a large hall until they felt their power ignite. Then they were brought there for training and given their Catalyst garb and a new life.
I envied even them. I would even wear the red cloak of a Catalyst if it meant I could be down there.
Settling onto my stomach, I rested my chin on my hands, watching as Marc and his Catalyst passed out what looked to be torn brown ribbons, showing each pair how to hold the long strand between them so as to let the magic pass between them.
“These are made from the hair of the Fae.”
My stomach dropped as though I was touching the vile things myself. I hadn’t expected that. Anything from the Fae was strictly outlawed. Anything that was found from those monsters was destroyed, and any of the beasts killed. Not that any of them were left.
Why was he giving these children the beasts’ hair?
“It was because of those monsters that our magic was restrained for so long, the bastards keeping the power for themselves. It was only after the war, when the Goddess Leilan extinguished the scourge from our lands, that the power was released and we realized just how much those child-eating monsters had taken from us.”
I shivered again. Growing up, my nurse had told me the stories of the monstrous Fae who treated us as little more than slaves, the creatures who took our children and drank our blood. They were dangerous, wicked creatures. But there he was, handing out bits of their hair like they were precious scraps of silk.
“This hair, however, is a powerful conduit and will help you master this power before you can wield the magic with nothing but air between you,” Marc continued, pulling me out of my shiver as he lifted his hand, producing a perfect ball of fire on his palm and letting it linger there before extinguishing it in a puff of smoke. The children grinned, shrieked, jumped, and gasped as if on cue.
By the Goddess! It was beautiful. I had seen his power hundreds of times before, but it still hit me with all the awe as it did the first time. I couldn’t look away from his palm and the smoke that lingered there, the perfect ring of black rising to the sky.
“Fíra,” Marc said, igniting the flame once more, accentuating the power that made him the most valuable in the army. “Fíra magic may be the most common, but it can yield some of our most skilled, some of the most deadly.”
Marc moved his hand around, letting the flame dance between his fingers before he bounced it on his palm and then up as though it were the balls I had seen some of the servants' children play with behind the stables.
