The Renewal Institute published "Ashborn: A Practical and Historical Study" in its fourth year of operation, and it went into a second printing within eight months, which Lyra found mildly annoying because it meant she had to write a revised edition.

  The practical chapter—the one she'd written with input from an irritatingly hands-on primary source—became the most referenced section. Schors who'd never believed Ashborn mages still existed started sending inquiries. Two of them arrived in Orenvast within a year, having found their way there through a combination of Lyra's published research and the kind of desperate searching that happens when you've spent years not understanding what you are.

  Kael was there for both arrivals.

  By then he'd been working with Lyra and Hendrim for two years — not the two-or-three months she'd originally proposed, but longer, because the work kept expanding and because he was, it turned out, genuinely good at this. At expining things. At sitting across from a terrified seventeen-year-old who'd accidentally destroyed something and was convinced they were a monster and saying: you're not. Here's what you are. Here's a stone. Twenty times, same size.

  He split his time between Orenvast and Harrow's End. The Renewal Institute in the east, and home.

  Both. That was allowed. He'd figured that out somewhere around year two.

  The small school that opened in Harrow's End in the fifth year of Seraphine's rebinding was technically a colborative project between the Institute and Elder Mirca, which was a sentence nobody in Harrow's End had expected to be able to say, and which represented some kind of miracle of adult cooperation that Kael chose not to examine too closely in case looking at it directly made it disappear.

  It occupied the building adjacent to the granary.

  Kael taught there when he was home. Practical Control: What It Means and How It Works. Mostly attended by young people who'd had an event they couldn't expin, who'd been told or were afraid that something was wrong with them.

  He told them: the mark is a description, not a sentence. It means something happened to you. Something hard, probably. But you're still here, and still being here is the first thing.

  He told them: your power doesn't disappear because you ignore it. It gets more dangerous. The only way out is through.

  He told them: you are not the worst thing you've ever done.

  He'd said that to himself so many times over so many years that by now he believed it, and the fact of believing it — actually, in his bones, believing it — was maybe the strangest and best thing that had happened to him.

  That, and Lyra's letters, which arrived reliably every two weeks and were always too long and never dull.

  And Tam, who had set up a trading operation between Harrow's End and Cresswick and had not technically moved but was also not not-moved, somewhere in that ambiguous zone where people end up when they've built a life in a pce without quite deciding to.

  And Dren, who sent one letter a year, exactly, which contained precisely as many words as were needed and no more, and who had apparently retired to a farm somewhere in the southern province and was growing vegetables with the same contained intensity he brought to everything else.

  And the mark on his wrist, always there. Warm. Steady. His.

  And the small fire in the mornings — always small, always controlled, always a choice rather than a test. Fme on. Fme off. The practice that had always been practice even when it felt like punishment.

  And the granary wall, same color as everything around it now, unremarkable, holding up its share of the roof without drama.

  The ash of the world — all the old damage, all the things that had burned and broken — was always turning into something else. That was just what ash did, given time.

  Given time.

  He had it now.