THE TESTAMENT

ELAREN

The candle on the workbench did not flicker.

Ala stared at it for the fourteenth time that morning. She narrowed her eyes. She held her breath. She leaned so close that the flame bent away from her nose, which was not the same thing at all, with what she was trying to do .

"It is a candle, Ala," her father said from across the forge. "It does not respond to being glared at."

"Mira Tessen's candle flickers when she hums."

"Mira Tessen is nine and hums constantly. The candle is probably begging for mercy."

Ala sat back on her stool and let out a breath that made the flame flicker, which was cheating, so she pretended it hadn't happened. Behind her the forge breathed and dimmed, the great bellows sighing as her father worked them with his foot. The air smelled of coal and hot metal and the sour tang of quenching oil. the smell of her whole life.

Davin did not look up. He stood at the anvil with a bar of iron resting in his bare hand. No tongs. No gloves. The metal glowed orange where his fingers touched it, then dull red, then softened, folding slowly over his palm like warm wax. He pinched it into the shape of a hinge like a man shaping bread dough.

That was his gift. He could melt iron. In the whole of Elaren, it was the one of the finest gifts anyone had, and in the great cities of the seven nations they would have laughed at it.

Ala had watched him do it ten thousand times. She had never once been bored. Not because it was impressive, but because it was his. A Gift that belonged to a person and only to them.

Her father was the only iron smith in their Village. So , he was always busy making iron tools, and Ala was always busy delivering them too.

"Eleven days," she said.

The bellows stopped for half a beat. Then they resumed.

"I know how many days there are."

“Well, you haven’t said anything about it. Shouldn’t you be giving me the talk?. "

"I've been very busy." He set the finished hinge on the cooling rack and picked up a new bar. "People still need nails, Ala. Even in a season of great events. And there’s no such thing as the Talk Ala ."

"It isn't a great event. It's just my birthday."

"Then it can wait for the nails."

She knew that tone. it meant she had been dismissed . She wanted to prob him further but decided against it . She picked up the little bronze cup from the bench, cupped both hands around it, and tried to warm the water inside.

She concentrated until her ears rang. She thought about warmth, about sunlight on a stone wall, about the heat of her father's forge on her face. She thought, a little desperately, about nothing at all.

She dipped a finger in. The water was cold. It was exactly as cold as it had been that morning, If not colder.

She sighed.

Warming a cup of water was the smallest Urger gift there was. Children learned it by their second birthday and forgot it was special by their third. Half the village could do it without noticing, while talking to their neighbors or minding goats. Ala had been trying for seventeen years.

"You're doing it again," Davin said quietly.

"Doing what?"

“Losing yourself to endless thoughts."

"Well, I have to " she said, before she could stop herself.

That made him look at her. He had a broad, weathered face, creased around the eyes from squinting at fire, with iron-grey threading through his dark hair.

"Ala," he said. "Whatever happens in eleven days, you are my daughter. That is not a gift that can be awakened or withheld."

It was a kind thing to say. She knew her father, he was probably worried too, but wore a strong face . Mostly to comfort her.

"That's what you'd say if I never awaken," she said.

He was silent for a moment too long.

"That's what I'd say either way," he replied, and went back to work.

She escaped the forge by noon, carrying a basket of finished hinges to deliver to the carpenter's yard. Elaren was warm and busy in the midday light. It sat in a shallow valley between two ridges, a sprawl of low stone houses with slate roofs, crossed by a stream the villagers called the Thread because nobody had ever bothered to give it a grander name. Smoke rose from a dozen chimneys. A goat was standing on the roof of the baker's shed for reasons nobody had ever explained.

Everyone she passed was doing something small and extraordinary.

Old Tobe, sitting outside the cobbler's with his pipe, glanced up and said, "Rain by evening," without looking at the sky. He could smell it. He was never wrong. Two doors down, a woman folding laundry paused with her head tilted, listening to footsteps that was probably a kilometer. A boy dashed across her with light speed, almost making her trip. Only stopping to yell a hurried “sorry”.

Nobody saw any of it as remarkable. That was the strange part. They had been born into it like the way fish were born into water.

"You're doing your face again," said a voice behind her.

Maren fell into step beside her. She was two months older than Ala and a hand shorter, with a sharp, freckled face, unruly hair tied back in a cord, and fingers permanently roughened from work. She carried a spool of thread in each pocket and one tucked behind her ear. she was fairly beautiful and quite a jolly girl, who said few words.

Everyone in Elaren said Maren had been born holding a needle, which was impossible, but hard to disprove.

"I don't have a face."

"You have a very specific face. It's the one where you look an angry carved stone . Which hinge is that for?"

"Carpenter's yard. The Halvorsens' new barn."

"Ah. Hinges. A thrilling life." Maren plucked the thread from behind her ear and held it up. It was thin and pale, no thicker than a hair. She wrapped it twice around her fist, pulled, and the strand held without so much as a quiver, though two grown men could have snapped it a moment earlier. "Mine are even more thrilling. Look. A string that doesn't break."

"I've seen that string."

"You haven't seen it with a flourish."

Ala laughed .That was the thing about Maren. She was a Jolly girl . Ala had spent seventeen years being grateful for it, and she suspected she had spent about as long, in quiet moments she didn't examine, being a little jealous of it too. Maren had her gift and her sense of humor and a younger brother who adored her.

"How is Tomas?" she asked.

Maren's grin flickered,.

"Annoying. He set the curtains on fire again."

"Again?"

"Twice this week. Once by accident and once because he wanted to see if it would work a second time." She tried to say it lightly, but her Expression were tighter. "Mother says it's a phase. Father says nothing, which means he's worried."

Ala stopped walking.

Tomas Oduya was six years old. He was a round-faced, serious boy who followed his sister everywhere and collected interesting rocks. And he had begun, over the past month, to do something that no one in Elaren could do. Small flames, at first. Sparks between his fingers when he was angry, a warmth in his hands that was nothing like an Urger's little fire trick, especially not for a boy his Age. The village had pretended not to notice, but the gossip was everywhere.

"Has anyone from outside seen him?"

"Not yet." Maren's voice dropped. "The Ignivar envoys come through the valley each season to check the registers. If he does it in front of one of them…"

She didn't finish. She didn't need to.

If an Urger child manifested the power of one of the great nations, the child was taken. Not stolen, not by law. Honored, the envoys said. The families got a letter of acknowledgment and a small payment. The child got a new life in a distant capital and a new name for the power inside them. Parents sometimes visited once a year, if the distance allowed.

Most never saw their children again. Ala had never met anyone who had.

"He's six," Maren said. "He still sleeps with a cotton blanket "

"Then we'll keep the blanket out of sight," said Ala, which was a stupid thing to say, and Maren's laugh was wet and brief and grateful anyway.

They walked on in silence for a while. Ala felt the old, ugly knot tighten in her chest, the one she never admitted to anyone. Because as she walked beside her best friend and tried to be sympathetic, a small, traitorous voice in her head said: At least he has something.

She hated that voice. She hated that it never went quiet.

The carpenter's yard sat at the edge of town where the valley road curved toward the ridge. Ala dropped the basket of hinges with a grumpy man named Halvorsen, who counted them twice and grunted. By the time she turned to leave, the sky had darkened to pewter, and the first cold drops were already falling.

Old Tobe, she thought sourly, was never wrong.

Maren had wandered off to deliver thread. Ala stood under the carpenter's awning and watched the rain turn the dusty road dark. Then she noticed something at the far end of the valley, where the road disappeared between the ridges.

Dust. A thin pale plume of it, rising despite the rain.

Then, beneath it, a glint of red.

Horsemen. Six of them, riding in a tight column, their cloaks the deep ember red of the Ignivar. They rode without hurry.

Ala's stomach dropped.

She thought of Tomas ,and how he had burned the curtains twice. She thought of how very small a six-year-old looks beside a horse.

Then she was running.