I stopped dreaming three months ago.

  Not the regur kind of stopped — where you just don't remember them. I mean I close my eyes, I sleep, and there is nothing. Bck nothing. Eight hours of the most complete silence I've ever experienced.

  You'd think that'd be restful.

  It isn't.

  The night it changed, I was in the school's back room grading practice exercises — which sounds mundane until you understand that "practice exercises" for my students means controlled burns in fireproof boxes. I'd been at it for two hours. Twelve boxes. Twelve different results ranging from "impressive" to "we need to have a serious talk about directional control."

  I was tired. I fell asleep at the desk.

  And for the first time in three months, I dreamed.

  I was standing in Ash-Mordhen.

  Not how it looks now — five years of slow recovery, moss reciming the stone, birds nesting again in the western quarter. I mean how it looked when we were there. The grey stillness. The ash on every surface. The specific silence of a pce that had been drained of everything alive.

  And she was sitting on the fountain.

  Same as before. Grey from head to toe. Hands in her p.

  Except this time she looked up at me and she said:

  "You kept more than you meant to."

  I woke up with my right hand on fire.

  Not metaphorically. My actual hand was actually on fire, fme running up my wrist and halfway up my forearm, and for one horrible second I couldn't put it out because I was still half-asleep and my brain wasn't connected to anything useful yet.

  I got it out. Obviously. I've been doing this for eight years, five of them with actual training. I got it out in about four seconds and then I sat in the dark office and stared at my wrist for a long time.

  The mark was different.

  I've been looking at this mark every morning for eight years. I know what it looks like. Eight rays, eight short secondary rays, two thin circles, central dot, silver-grey on the inner wrist. Always a faint warm glow. Mine.

  It was still all those things.

  But there was a ninth ray. New. Growing from the central dot at an angle that had no right to be there.

  Thin. Barely visible. Like the first crack in ice.

  I pulled my sleeve down and sat there for a while longer.

  Then I wrote a letter to Lyra.

  ,I tried to make it sound casual. I think I failed.

  ? ? ?

  The response came eleven days ter, which is fast for Orenvast.

  It was not reassuring.

  Lyra's handwriting is normally meticulous — the handwriting of someone who spent years taking research notes in cramped archive basements with no margin for error. Every letter formed deliberately. Every word exactly the word she meant.

  This letter had a crossed-out section in the middle. She never crosses things out.

  She'd written: "I need you to describe exactly what the new ray looks like" — and then crossed it out and written: "Actually come here. Come to Orenvast. Bring the Sealstone."

  I hadn't touched the Sealstone in three years.

  It lived on my bedroom windowsill. Inert. Grey. Done with its work.

  I went to pick it up the morning I was leaving, and it was warm.

  Not room-temperature warm. Warm like something living. Warm like it had been held recently.

  I stood there with it in my hand for a long moment.

  "Huh," I said, to nobody.

  Tam appeared in the doorway with both our packs already shouldered.

  "Ready?" he said.

  "When did you pack for both of us?"

  "About an hour ago, when you got that look on your face." He tilted his head. "The stone doing something weird?"

  "It's warm."

  "That's bad."

  "Probably."

  He took a breath. "Okay. East road. We've done it before." He paused. "The school will be fine for two weeks without you. Mirca will fill in."

  I almost ughed. Mirca, who had spent thirty years making it clear that uncontrolled fire magic was exactly as dangerous as she'd always said, filling in for a css of students learning to control uncontrolled fire magic.

  "She's going to hate it," I said.

  "She's going to be incredible at it and hate it," Tam corrected. "Come on."

  I put the stone in my coat pocket.

  It pulsed once, warm and specific, like a second heartbeat.

  I ignored that.

  We left before dawn.